The book reports on the latest advances and challenges of soft computing. Itgathers original scientific contributions written by top scientists in the fieldand covering theories, methods and applications in a number of research areas related to soft-computing, such as decision-making, probabilistic reasoning, image processing, control, neural networks and data analysis."

"Change Management for Semantic Web Services" provides a thorough analysis of change management in the lifecycle of services for databases and workflows, including changes that occur at the individual service level or at the aggregate composed service level. This book describes taxonomy of changes that are expected in semantic service oriented environments. The process of change management consists of detecting, propagating, and reacting to changes.

"Change Management for Semantic Web Services" is one of the first books that discuss the development of a theoretical foundation for managing changes in atomic and long-term composed services. This book also proposes a formal model and a change language to provide sufficient semantics for change management; it devises an automatic process to react to, verify, and optimize changes. Case studies and examples are presented in the last section of this book.

Using the quantum properties of single photons to exchange binary keys between two partners for subsequent encryption of secret data is an absolutely novel technology. Only a few years ago quantum cryptography or better: quantum key distribution (QKD) was the domain of basic research laboratories at universities. But during the last few years things changed. QKD left the laboratories and was picked up by more practical oriented teams that worked hard to develop a practically applicable technology out of the astonishing results of basic research.

One major milestone towards a QKD technology was a large research and development project funded by the European Commission that aimed at combining quantum physics with complementary technologies that are necessary to create a technical solution: electronics, software, and network components were added within the project SECOQC (Development of a Global Network for Secure Communication based on Quantum Cryptography) that teamed up all expertise on European level to get a technology for future encryption.

The practical application of QKD in a standard optical fibre network was demonstrated October 2008 in Vienna, giving a glimpse of the future of secure communication. Although many steps have still to be done in order to achieve a real mature technology, the corner stone for future secure communication is already laid.

QKD will not be the Holy Grail of security, it will not be able to solve all problems for evermore. But QKD has the potential to replace one of the weakest parts of symmetric encryption: the exchange of the key. It can be proven that the key exchange process cannot be corrupted and that keys that are generated and exchanged quantum cryptographically will be secure for ever (as long as some additional conditions are kept).

This book will show the state of the art of Quantum Cryptography and it will sketch how it can be implemented in standard communication infrastructure. The growing vulnerability of sensitive data requires new concepts and QKD will be a possible solution to overcome some of today s limitations."

Developers and DBAs use Oracle SQL coding on a daily basis, whether for application development, finding problems, fine-tuning solutions to those problems, or other critical DBA tasks. Oracle SQL: Jumpstart with Examples is the fastest way to get started and to quickly locate answers to common (and uncommon) questions. It includes all the basic queries: filtering, sorting, operators, conditionals, pseudocolumns, single row functions, joins, grouping and summarizing, grouping functions, subqueries, composite queries, hierarchies, flashback queries, parallel queries, expressions and regular expressions, DML, datatypes (including collections), XML in Oracle, DDL for basic database objects such as tales, views and indexes, Oracle Partitioning, security, and finally PL/SQL.
* Each of the hundreds of SQL code examples was tested on a working Oracle 10g database
* Invaluable everyday tool that provides an absolute plethora of properly tested examples of Oracle SQL code
* Authors have four decades of commercial experience between them as developers and database administrators

Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithms and Applications provides comprehensive treatment on the design of multiobjective evolutionary algorithms and their applications in domains covering areas such as control and scheduling. Emphasizing both the theoretical developments and the practical implementation of multiobjective evolutionary algorithms, a profound mathematical knowledge is not required.

Written for a wide readership, engineers, researchers, senior undergraduates and graduate students interested in the field of evolutionary algorithms and multiobjective optimization with some basic knowledge of evolutionary computation will find this book a useful addition to their book case.

Handbook of Educational Data Mining (EDM) provides a thorough overview of the current state of knowledge in this area. The first part of the book includes nine surveys and tutorials on the principal data mining techniques that have been applied in education. The second part presents a set of 25 case studies that give a rich overview of the problems that EDM has addressed. Researchers at the Forefront of the Field Discuss Essential Topics and the Latest Advances With contributions by well-known researchers from a variety of fields, the book reflects the multidisciplinary nature of the EDM community. It brings the educational and data mining communities together, helping education experts understand what types of questions EDM can address and helping data miners understand what types of questions are important to educational design and educational decision making. Encouraging readers to integrate EDM into their research and practice, this timely handbook offers a broad, accessible treatment of essential EDM techniques and applications. It provides an excellent first step for newcomers to the EDM community and for active researchers to keep abreast of recent developments in the field.

Handbook of Database Security: Applications and Trends provides an up-to-date overview of data security models, techniques, and architectures in a variety of data management applications and settings. In addition to providing an overview of data security in different application settings, this book includes an outline for future research directions within the field. The book is designed for industry practitioners and researchers, and is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science.

This book addresses issues related to managing data across a distributed database system. It is unique because it covers traditional database theory and current research, explaining the difficulties in providing a unified user interface and global data dictionary. The book gives implementers guidance on hiding discrepancies across systems and creating the illusion of a single repository for users. It also includes three sample frameworks--implemented using J2SE with JMS, J2EE, and Microsoft .Net--that readers can use to learn how to implement a distributed database management system. IT and development groups and computer sciences/software engineering graduates will find this guide invaluable.

This book provides a new direction in the field of nano-optics and nanophotonics from information and computing-related sciences and technology. Entitled by "Information Physics and Computing in NanosScale Photonics and Materials", IPCN in short, the book aims to bring together recent progresses in the intersection of nano-scale photonics, information, and enabling technologies. The topic will include (1) an overview of information physics in nanophotonics, (2) DNA self-assembled nanophotonic systems, (3) Functional molecular sensing, (4) Smart fold computing, an architecture for nanophotonics, (5) semiconductor nanowire and its photonic applications, (6) single photoelectron manipulation in imaging sensors, (6) hierarchical nanophotonic systems, (8) photonic neuromorphic computing, and (9) SAT solver and decision making based on nanophotonics.

This volume is aiming at a wide range of readers and researchers in the area of Big Data by presenting the recent advances in the fields of Big Data Analysis, as well as the techniques and tools used to analyze it. The book includes 10 distinct chapters providing a concise introduction to Big Data Analysis and recent Techniques and Environments for Big Data Analysis. It gives insight into how the expensive fitness evaluation of evolutionary learning can play a vital role in big data analysis by adopting Parallel, Grid, and Cloud computing environments.

The world of text mining is simultaneously a minefield and a gold mine. It is an exciting application field and an area of scientific research that is currently under rapid development. It uses techniques from well-established scientific fields (e.g. data mining, machine learning, information retrieval, natural language processing, case based reasoning, statistics and knowledge management) in an effort to help people gain insight, understand and interpret large quantities of (usually) semi-structured and unstructured data. Despite the advances made during the last few years, many issues remain umesolved. Proper co-ordination activities, dissemination of current trends and standardisation of the procedures have been identified, as key needs. There are many questions still unanswered, especially to the potential users; what is the scope of Text Mining, who uses it and for what purpose, what constitutes the leading trends in the field of Text Mining -especially in relation to IT- and whether there still remain areas to be covered."

This edited volume presents the best chapters presented during the international conference on computer and applications ICCA'17 which was held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates in September 2017. Selected chapters present new advances in digital information, communications and multimedia. Authors from different countries show and discuss their findings, propose new approaches, compare them with the existing ones and include recommendations. They address all applications of computing including (but not limited to) connected health, information security, assistive technology, edutainment and serious games, education, grid computing, transportation, social computing, natural language processing, knowledge extraction and reasoning, Arabic apps, image and pattern processing, virtual reality, cloud computing, haptics, information security, robotics, networks algorithms, web engineering, big data analytics, ontology, constraints satisfaction, cryptography and steganography, Fuzzy logic, soft computing, neural networks, artificial intelligence, biometry and bio-informatics, embedded systems, computer graphics, algorithms and optimization, Internet of things and smart cities. The book can be used by researchers and practitioners to discover the recent trends in computer applications. It opens a new horizon for research discovery works locally and internationally.

This book provides a technical approach to a Business Resilience System with its Risk Atom and Processing Data Point based on fuzzy logic and cloud computation in real time. Its purpose and objectives define a clear set of expectations for Organizations and Enterprises so their network system and supply chain are totally resilient and protected against cyber-attacks, manmade threats, and natural disasters. These enterprises include financial, organizational, homeland security, and supply chain operations with multi-point manufacturing across the world. Market shares and marketing advantages are expected to result from the implementation of the system. The collected information and defined objectives form the basis to monitor and analyze the data through cloud computation, and will guarantee the success of their survivability's against any unexpected threats. This book will be useful for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the field of computer engineering, engineers that work for manufacturing companies, business analysts in retail and e-Commerce, and those working in the defense industry, Information Security, and Information Technology.

Database and Application Security XV provides a forum for original research results, practical experiences, and innovative ideas in database and application security. With the rapid growth of large databases and the application systems that manage them, security issues have become a primary concern in business, industry, government and society. These concerns are compounded by the expanding use of the Internet and wireless communication technologies.

This volume covers a wide variety of topics related to security and privacy of information in systems and applications, including:

• Access control models;
• Role and constraint-based access control;
• Distributed systems;
• Information warfare and intrusion detection;
• Relational databases;
• Implementation issues;
• Multilevel systems;
• New application areas including XML.

Database and Application Security XV contains papers, keynote addresses, and panel discussions from the Fifteenth Annual Working Conference on Database and Application Security, organized by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 11.3 and held July 15-18, 2001 in Niagara on the Lake, Ontario, Canada.

Constraints and Databases contains seven contributions on the rapidly evolving research area of constraints and databases. This collection of original research articles has been compiled as a tribute to Paris C. Kanellakis, one of the pioneers in the field. Constraints have long been used for maintaining the integrity of databases. More recently, constraint databases have emerged where databases store and manipulate data in the form of constraints. The generality of constraint databases makes them highly attractive for many applications. Constraints provide a uniform mechanism for describing heterogenous data, and advanced constraint solving methods can be used for efficient manipulation of constraint data. The articles included in this book cover the range of topics involving constraints and databases; join algorithms, evaluation methods, applications (e.g. data mining) and implementations of constraint databases, as well as more traditional topics such as integrity constraint maintenance. Constraints and Databases is an edited volume of original research comprising invited contributions by leading researchers.

As the global economy turns more and more service oriented, Information Technology-Enabled Services (ITeS) require greater understanding. Increasing numbers and varieties of services are provided through IT. Furthermore, IT enables the creation of new services in diverse fields previously untouched. Because of the catalyzing nature of internet technology, ITeS today has become more than "Outsourcing" of services. This book illustrates the enabling nature of ITeS with its entailment of IT, thus contributing to the betterment of humanity. The scope of this book is not only for academia but also for business persons, government practitioners and readers from daily lives. Authors from a variety of nations and regions with various backgrounds provide insightful theories, research, findings and practices in various fields such as commerce, finance, medical services, government and education. This book opens up a new horizon with the application of Internet-based practices in business, government and in daily lives. Information Technology-Enabled Services works as a navigator for those who sail to the new horizon of service oriented economies.

Databases and database systems in particular, are considered as kerneIs of any Information System (IS). The rapid growth of the web on the Internet has dramatically increased the use of semi-structured data and the need to store and retrieve such data in a database. The database community quickly reacted to these new requirements by providing models for semi-structured data and by integrating database research to XML web services and mobile computing. On the other hand, IS community who never than before faces problems of IS development is seeking for new approaches to IS design. Ontology based approaches are gaining popularity, because of a need for shared conceptualisation by different stakeholders of IS development teams. Many web-based IS would fail without domain ontologies to capture meaning of terms in their web interfaces. This volume contains revised versions of 24 best papers presented at the th 5 International Baltic Conference on Databases and Information Systems (BalticDB&IS'2002). The conference papers present original research results in the novel fields of IS and databases such as web IS, XML and databases, data mining and knowledge management, mobile agents and databases, and UML based IS development methodologies. The book's intended readers are researchers and practitioners who are interested in advanced topics on databases and IS."

Autonomous agents or multiagent systems are computational systems in which several computational agents interact or work together to perform some set of tasks. These systems may involve computational agents having common goals or distinct goals. Real-Time Search for Learning Autonomous Agents focuses on extending real-time search algorithms for autonomous agents and for a multiagent world. Although real-time search provides an attractive framework for resource-bounded problem solving, the behavior of the problem solver is not rational enough for autonomous agents. The problem solver always keeps the record of its moves and the problem solver cannot utilize and improve previous experiments. Other problems are that although the algorithms interleave planning and execution, they cannot be directly applied to a multiagent world. The problem solver cannot adapt to the dynamically changing goals and the problem solver cannot cooperatively solve problems with other problem solvers. This book deals with all these issues. Real-Time Search for Learning Autonomous Agents serves as an excellent resource for researchers and engineers interested in both practical references and some theoretical basis for agent/multiagent systems. The book can also be used as a text for advanced courses on the subject.

An Introduction to R and Python for Data Analysis helps teach students to code in both R and Python simultaneously. As both R and Python can be used in similar manners, it is useful and efficient to learn both at the same time, helping lecturers and students to teach and learn more, save time, whilst reinforcing the shared concepts and differences of the systems. This tandem learning is highly useful for students, helping them to become literate in both languages, and develop skills which will be handy after their studies. This book presumes no prior experience with computing, and is intended to be used by students from a variety of backgrounds. The side-by-side formatting of this book helps introductory graduate students quickly grasp the basics of R and Python, with the exercises providing helping them to teach themselves the skills they will need upon the completion of their course, as employers now ask for competency in both R and Python. Teachers and lecturers will also find this book useful in their teaching, providing a singular work to help ensure their students are well trained in both computer languages. All data for exercises can be found here: https://github.com/tbrown122387/r_and_python_book/tree/master/data. Key features: - Teaches R and Python in a "side-by-side" way. - Examples are tailored to aspiring data scientists and statisticians, not software engineers. - Designed for introductory graduate students. - Does not assume any mathematical background.

Web usage mining is defined as the application of data mining technologies to online usage patterns as a way to better understand and serve the needs of web-based applications. Because the internet has become a central component in information sharing and commerce, having the ability to analyze user behavior on the web has become a critical component to a variety of industries. Web Usage Mining Techniques and Applications Across Industries addresses the systems and methodologies that enable organizations to predict web user behavior as a way to support website design and personalization of web-based services and commerce. Featuring perspectives from a variety of sectors, this publication is designed for use by IT specialists, business professionals, researchers, and graduate-level students interested in learning more about the latest concepts related to web-based information retrieval and mining.

Hypertext/hypermedia systems and user-model-based adaptive systems in the areas of learning and information retrieval have for a long time been considered as two mutually exclusive approaches to information access. Adaptive systems tailor information to the user and may guide the user in the information space to present the most relevant material, taking into account a model of the user's goals, interests and preferences. Hypermedia systems, on the other hand, are `user neutral': they provide the user with the tools and the freedom to explore an information space by browsing through a complex network of information nodes. Adaptive hypertext and hypermedia systems attempt to bridge the gap between these two approaches. Adaptation of hypermedia systems to each individual user is increasingly needed. With the growing size, complexity and heterogeneity of current hypermedia systems, such as the World Wide Web, it becomes virtually impossible to impose guidelines on authors concerning the overall organization of hypermedia information. The networks therefore become so complex and unstructured that the existing navigational tools are no longer powerful enough to provide orientation on where to search for the needed information. It is also not possible to identify appropriate pre-defined paths or subnets for users with certain goals and knowledge backgrounds since the user community of hypermedia systems is usually quite inhomogeneous. This is particularly true for Web-based applications which are expected to be used by a much greater variety of users than any earlier standalone application. A possible remedy for the negative effects of the traditional `one-size-fits-all' approach in the development of hypermedia systems is to equip them with the ability to adapt to the needs of their individual users. A possible way of achieving adaptivity is by modeling the users and tailoring the system's interactions to their goals, tasks and interests. In this sense, the notion of adaptive hypertext/hypermedia comes naturally to denote a hypertext or hypermedia system which reflects some features of the user and/or characteristics of his system usage in a user model, and utilizes this model in order to adapt various behavioral aspects of the system to the user. This book is the first comprehensive publication on adaptive hypertext and hypermedia. It is oriented towards researchers and practitioners in the fields of hypertext and hypermedia, information systems, and personalized systems. It is also an important resource for the numerous developers of Web-based applications. The design decisions, adaptation methods, and experience presented in this book are a unique source of ideas and techniques for developing more usable and more intelligent Web-based systems suitable for a great variety of users. The practitioners will find it important that many of the adaptation techniques presented in this book have proved to be efficient and are ready to be used in various applications.

This book presents innovative work in Climate Informatics, a new field that reflects the application of data mining methods to climate science, and shows where this new and fast growing field is headed. Given its interdisciplinary nature, Climate Informatics offers insights, tools and methods that are increasingly needed in order to understand the climate system, an aspect which in turn has become crucial because of the threat of climate change. There has been a veritable explosion in the amount of data produced by satellites, environmental sensors and climate models that monitor, measure and forecast the earth system. In order to meaningfully pursue knowledge discovery on the basis of such voluminous and diverse datasets, it is necessary to apply machine learning methods, and Climate Informatics lies at the intersection of machine learning and climate science. This book grew out of the fourth workshop on Climate Informatics held in Boulder, Colorado in Sep. 2014.

This book represents the combined peer-reviewed proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing -- IDC~2012, of the International Workshop on Agents for Cloud -- A4C~2012 and of the Fourth International Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems Technology and Semantics -- MASTS~2012. All the events were held in Calabria, Italy during September 24-26, 2012. The 37 contributions published in this book address many topics related to theory and applications of intelligent distributed computing and multi-agent systems, including: adaptive and autonomous distributed systems, agent programming, ambient assisted living systems, business process modeling and verification, cloud computing, coalition formation, decision support systems, distributed optimization and constraint satisfaction, gesture recognition, intelligent energy management in WSNs, intelligent logistics, machine learning, mobile agents, parallel and distributed computational intelligence, parallel evolutionary computing, trust metrics and security, scheduling in distributed heterogenous computing environments, semantic Web service composition, social simulation, and software agents for WSNs.

The volume provides state-of-the-art in non-repudiation protocols and gives insight of its applicability to e-commerce applications. This professional book organizes the existing scant literature regarding non-repudiation protocols with multiple entities participation. It provides the reader with sufficient grounds to understand the non-repudiation property and its applicability to real applications. This book is essential for professional audiences with in-depth knowledge of information security and a basic knowledge of applied cryptography. The book is also suitable as an advanced-level text or reference book for students in computer science.