The amount of data shared and stored on the web and other document repositories is steadily on the rise. Unfortunately, this growth increases inefficiencies and difficulties when trying to find the most relevant and up-to-date information due to unstructured data. Advanced Metaheuristic Methods in Big Data Retrieval and Analytics examines metaheuristic techniques as an important alternative model for solving complex problems that are not treatable by deterministic methods. Recent studies suggest that IR and biomimicry can be used together for several application problems in big data and internet of things, especially when conventional methods would be too expensive or difficult to implement. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as ontology, plagiarism detection, and machine learning, this book is ideally designed for engineers, graduate students, IT professionals, and academicians seeking an overview of new trends in information retrieval in big data.

Ecologists and natural resource managers are charged with making complex management decisions in the face of a rapidly changing environment resulting from climate change, energy development, urban sprawl, invasive species and globalization. Advances in Geographic Information System (GIS) technology, digitization, online data availability, historic legacy datasets, remote sensors and the ability to collect data on animal movements via satellite and GPS have given rise to large, highly complex datasets. These datasets could be utilized for making critical management decisions, but are often "messy" and difficult to interpret. Basic artificial intelligence algorithms (i.e., machine learning) are powerful tools that are shaping the world and must be taken advantage of in the life sciences. In ecology, machine learning algorithms are critical to helping resource managers synthesize information to better understand complex ecological systems. Machine Learning has a wide variety of powerful applications, with three general uses that are of particular interest to ecologists: (1) data exploration to gain system knowledge and generate new hypotheses, (2) predicting ecological patterns in space and time, and (3) pattern recognition for ecological sampling. Machine learning can be used to make predictive assessments even when relationships between variables are poorly understood. When traditional techniques fail to capture the relationship between variables, effective use of machine learning can unearth and capture previously unattainable insights into an ecosystem's complexity. Currently, many ecologists do not utilize machine learning as a part of the scientific process. This volume highlights how machine learning techniques can complement the traditional methodologies currently applied in this field.

As information technology is rapidly progressing, an enormous amount of media can be easily exchanged through Internet and other communication networks. Increasing amounts of digital image, video, and music have created numerous information security issues and is now taken as one of the top research and development agendas for researchers, organizations, and governments worldwide. ""Multimedia Forensics and Security"" provides an in-depth treatment of advancements in the emerging field of multimedia forensics and security by tackling challenging issues such as digital watermarking for copyright protection, digital fingerprinting for transaction tracking, and digital camera source identification.

A secured system for Healthcare 4.0 is vital to all stakeholders, including patients and caregivers. Using the new Blockchain system of trusted ledgers would help guarantee authenticity in the multi-access system that is Healthcare 4.0. This is the first comprehensive book that explores how to achieve secure systems for Healthcare 4.0 using Blockchain, with emphasis on the key challenges of privacy and security. The book is organized into four sections. The first section is focused on 5G healthcare privacy and security concerns. The second section discusses healthcare architecture and emerging technologies. The third section covers the role of artificial intelligence for data security and privacy in 5G healthcare services. Finally, the last section systematically illustrates the adoption of blockchain in various applications of 5G healthcare. The book is essential reading for all involved in setting up, running, and maintaining healthcare information systems. Engineers, scientists, technologists, developers, designers, and researchers in healthcare technologies, health informatics, security, and information technology will find the content particularly useful.

The motivation of this edited book is to generate an understanding about information, related concepts and the roles they play in the modern, technology permeated world. In order to achieve our goal, we observe how information is understood in domains, such as cosmology, physics, biology, neuroscience, computer science, artificial intelligence, the Internet, big data, information society, or philosophy. Together, these observations form an integrated view so that readers can better understand this exciting building-block of modern-day society. On the surface, information is a relatively straightforward and intuitive concept. Underneath, however, information is a relatively versatile and mysterious entity. For instance, the way a physicist looks at information is not necessarily the same way as that of a biologist, a neuroscientist, a computer scientist, or a philosopher. Actually, when it comes to information, it is common that each field has its domain specific views, motivations, interpretations, definitions, methods, technologies, and challenges. With contributions by authors from a wide range of backgrounds, Understanding Information: From the Big Bang to Big Data will appeal to readers interested in the impact of 'information' on modern-day life from a variety of perspectives.

This book presents the latest research in the fields of computational intelligence, ubiquitous computing models, communication intelligence, communication security, machine learning, informatics, mobile computing, cloud computing and big data analytics. The best selected papers, presented at the International Conference on Innovative Data Communication Technologies and Application (ICIDCA 2020), are included in the book. The book focuses on the theory, design, analysis, implementation and applications of distributed systems and networks.

This book presents a comprehensive review for Knowledge Engineering tools and techniques that can be used in Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling. KE tools can be used to aid in the acquisition of knowledge and in the construction of domain models, which this book will illustrate. AI planning engines require a domain model which captures knowledge about how a particular domain works - e.g. the objects it contains and the available actions that can be used. However, encoding a planning domain model is not a straightforward task - a domain expert may be needed for their insight into the domain but this information must then be encoded in a suitable representation language. The development of such domain models is both time-consuming and error-prone. Due to these challenges, researchers have developed a number of automated tools and techniques to aid in the capture and representation of knowledge. This book targets researchers and professionals working in knowledge engineering, artificial intelligence and software engineering. Advanced-level students studying AI will also be interested in this book.

This book presents selected papers on Business Management and Technology, focusing on recent research in Business, Optimization, Technology, and Global Issues. Organized in four broad tracks, papers examine Management Challenges in Today's Industry, especially concerning changes in customer demands; Optimization Challenges in Today's Business, looking at efficiency and effectiveness in providing goods and services at affordable prices; Innovation in Hospitality and Tourism; and Technological Challenges in the Era of Globalization. The book covers both production systems and service systems, including the growing area of Information Technology, and also looks at the quality of work life in various sectors of business. It presents a balanced blend of theoretical and practical papers.

Online education and social interaction is on the rise. This new vehicle for human learning and communication opens the door for the latest exploration in emerging cyber fields.Evolving Psychological and Educational Perspectives on Cyber Behavior identifies learners' online behavior based on the theories in human psychology, defines online education phenomena as explained by the social and cognitive learning theories and principles, and interprets the complexity of cyber learning. This title offers a multi-disciplinary approach that incorporates the findings from brain research, biology, psychology, human cognition, developmental theory, sociology, motivation theory, and social behavior perfect for school teachers, counselors, researchers, and online designers.

This book explores internet applications in which a crucial role is played by classification, such as spam filtering, recommender systems, malware detection, intrusion detection and sentiment analysis. It explains how such classification problems can be solved using various statistical and machine learning methods, including K nearest neighbours, Bayesian classifiers, the logit method, discriminant analysis, several kinds of artificial neural networks, support vector machines, classification trees and other kinds of rule-based methods, as well as random forests and other kinds of classifier ensembles. The book covers a wide range of available classification methods and their variants, not only those that have already been used in the considered kinds of applications, but also those that have the potential to be used in them in the future. The book is a valuable resource for post-graduate students and professionals alike.

This book provides a deep analysis and wide coverage of the very strong trend in computer vision and visual indexing and retrieval, covering such topics as incorporation of models of Human Visual attention into analysis and retrieval tasks. It makes the bridge between psycho-visual modelling of Human Visual System and the classical and most recent models in visual content indexing and retrieval. The large spectrum of visual tasks, such as recognition of textures in static images, of actions in video content, image retrieval, different methods of visualization of images and multimedia content based on visual saliency are presented by the authors. Furthermore, the interest in visual content is modelled with the means of the latest classification models such as Deep Neural Networks is also covered in this book. This book is an exceptional resource as a secondary text for researchers and advanced level students, who are involved in the very wide research in computer vision, visual information indexing and retrieval. Professionals working in this field will also be interested in this book as a reference.

Cryptographic Boolean Functions and Applications, Second Edition is designed to be a comprehensive reference for the use of Boolean functions in modern cryptography. While the vast majority of research on cryptographic Boolean functions has been achieved since the 1970s, when cryptography began to be widely used in everyday transactions, in particular banking, relevant material is scattered over hundreds of journal articles, conference proceedings, books, reports and notes, some of them only available online. This book follows the previous edition in sifting through this compendium and gathering the most significant information in one concise reference book. The work therefore encompasses over 600 citations, covering every aspect of the applications of cryptographic Boolean functions. Since 2008, the subject has seen a very large number of new results, and in response, the authors have prepared a new chapter on special functions. The new edition brings 100 completely new references and an expansion of 50 new pages, along with heavy revision throughout the text.

A new framework for the digital society that merges the science of degrowth with a global analysis of the high-tech economy.

The world is racing toward an irreversible ecological catastrophe. Environmental science makes clear that humans must reduce total material resource use, requiring a radical redistribution of wealth within and between countries. Yet little attention has been paid to how the digital economy fits into this equation.

Michael Kwet is a Postdoctoral researcher of the Centre for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg and a leading expert on digital colonialism, and here presents a new framework for the digital society. Merging the science of degrowth with a global analysis of the high-tech economy, he argues that digital capitalism and colonialism must be abolished quickly.

In Digital Degrowth, Kwet maps out a path to a people's tech future. He calls for direct action against Silicon Valley, US imperialism and power elites everywhere in order to realise a radically egalitarian digital society that fosters equality in harmony with nature.

This volume is focused on the emerging concept of Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs). COINs are at the core of collaborative knowledge networks, distributed communities taking advantage of the wide connectivity and the support of communication technologies, spanning beyond the organizational perimeter of companies on a global scale. It includes the refereed conference papers from the 6th International Conference on COINs, June 8-11, 2016, in Rome, Italy. It includes papers for both application areas of COINs, (1) optimizing organizational creativity and performance, and (2) discovering and predicting new trends by identifying COINs on the Web through online social media analysis. Papers at COINs16 combine a wide range of interdisciplinary fields such as social network analysis, group dynamics, design and visualization, information systems and the psychology and sociality of collaboration, and intercultural analysis through the lens of online social media. They will cover most recent advances in areas from leadership and collaboration, trend prediction and data mining, to social competence and Internet communication.

This book collects selected papers from the 6th Conference on Signal and Information Processing, Networking and Computers, held in Guiyang, China, on August 13 - 16, 2019. Focusing on the latest advances in information theory, communication systems, computer science, aerospace technologies, big data and other related technologies, it offers a valuable resource for researchers and industrial practitioners alike.

This book presents the design of delay-efficient packet schedulers for heterogeneous M2M uplink traffic classified into several classes, based on packet delay requirements, payload size, arrival process, etc. Specifically, the authors use tools from queuing theory to determine the delay-optimal scheduling policy. The proposed packet schedulers are designed for a generic M2M architecture and thus equally applicable to any M2M application. Additionally, due to their low implementation complexity and excellent delay-performance, they authors show how they are also well-suited for practical M2M systems. The book pertains primarily to real-time process scheduler experts in industry/academia and graduate students whose research deals with designing Quality-of-Service-aware packet schedulers for M2M packet schedulers over existing and future cellular infrastructure. Presents queuing theoretic analysis and optimization techniques used to design proposed packet scheduling strategies; Provides utility functions to precisely model diverse delay requirements, which lends itself to formulation of utility-maximization problems for determining the delay- or utility-optimal packet scheduler; Includes detail on low implementation complexity of the proposed scheduler by using iterative and distributed optimization techniques.

This book contributes a basic framework for and specific insights into interdisciplinary connections between production, logistics, and traffic subsystems. The book is divided into two parts, the first of which presents an overview of interdisciplinarity in value-added networks and freight traffic. This includes an introduction to the topic and a description of an integrated framework of production, logistics, and traffic. Furthermore, it describes the barriers and challenges of interdisciplinary decision-making and project management. In turn, the second part presents domain-specific perspectives on interdisciplinary decision support, exploring domain-specific challenges of interdisciplinary interfaces and requirements for management methods and instruments from the standpoint of production management, logistics management, traffic management, and information technologies.

This book presents a comprehensive framework for IoT, including its architectures, security, privacy, network communications, and protocols. The book starts by providing an overview of the aforementioned research topics, future directions and open challenges that face the IoT development. The authors then discuss the main architectures in the field, which include Three- and Five-Layer Architectures, Cloud and Fog Based Architectures, a Social IoT Application Architecture. In the security chapter, the authors outline threats and attacks, privacy preservation, trust and authentication, IoT data security, and social awareness. The final chapter presents case studies including smart home, wearables, connected cars, industrial Internet, smart cities, IoT in agriculture, smart retail, energy engagement, IoT in healthcare, and IoT in poultry and farming. Discusses ongoing research into the connection of the physical and virtual worlds; Includes the architecture, security, privacy, communications, and protocols of IoT; Presents a variety of case studies in IoT including wearables, smart cities, and energy management.

Intelligent Computing for Interactive System Design provides a comprehensive resource on what has become the dominant paradigm in designing novel interaction methods, involving gestures, speech, text, touch and brain-controlled interaction, embedded in innovative and emerging human-computer interfaces. These interfaces support ubiquitous interaction with applications and services running on smartphones, wearables, in-vehicle systems, virtual and augmented reality, robotic systems, the Internet of Things (IoT), and many other domains that are now highly competitive, both in commercial and in research contexts. This book presents the crucial theoretical foundations needed by any student, researcher, or practitioner working on novel interface design, with chapters on statistical methods, digital signal processing (DSP), and machine learning (ML). These foundations are followed by chapters that discuss case studies on smart cities, brain-computer interfaces, probabilistic mobile text entry, secure gestures, personal context from mobile phones, adaptive touch interfaces, and automotive user interfaces. The case studies chapters also highlight an in-depth look at the practical application of DSP and ML methods used for processing of touch, gesture, biometric, or embedded sensor inputs. A common theme throughout the case studies is ubiquitous support for humans in their daily professional or personal activities. In addition, the book provides walk-through examples of different DSP and ML techniques and their use in interactive systems. Common terms are defined, and information on practical resources is provided (e.g., software tools, data resources) for hands-on project work to develop and evaluate multimodal and multi-sensor systems. In a series of in-chapter commentary boxes, an expert on the legal and ethical issues explores the emergent deep concerns of the professional community, on how DSP and ML should be adopted and used in socially appropriate ways, to most effectively advance human performance during ubiquitous interaction with omnipresent computers. This carefully edited collection is written by international experts and pioneers in the fields of DSP and ML. It provides a textbook for students and a reference and technology roadmap for developers and professionals working on interaction design on emerging platforms.

This book reviews IoT-centric vulnerabilities from a multidimensional perspective by elaborating on IoT attack vectors, their impacts on well-known security objectives, attacks which exploit such vulnerabilities, coupled with their corresponding remediation methodologies. This book further highlights the severity of the IoT problem at large, through disclosing incidents of Internet-scale IoT exploitations, while putting forward a preliminary prototype and associated results to aid in the IoT mitigation objective. Moreover, this book summarizes and discloses findings, inferences, and open challenges to inspire future research addressing theoretical and empirical aspects related to the imperative topic of IoT security. At least 20 billion devices will be connected to the Internet in the next few years. Many of these devices transmit critical and sensitive system and personal data in real-time. Collectively known as "the Internet of Things" (IoT), this market represents a $267 billion per year industry. As valuable as this market is, security spending on the sector barely breaks 1%. Indeed, while IoT vendors continue to push more IoT devices to market, the security of these devices has often fallen in priority, making them easier to exploit. This drastically threatens the privacy of the consumers and the safety of mission-critical systems. This book is intended for cybersecurity researchers and advanced-level students in computer science. Developers and operators working in this field, who are eager to comprehend the vulnerabilities of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm and understand the severity of accompanied security issues will also be interested in this book.

This book highlights research in linking and mining data from across varied data sources. The authors focus on recent advances in this burgeoning field of multi-source data fusion, with an emphasis on exploratory and unsupervised data analysis, an area of increasing significance with the pace of growth of data vastly outpacing any chance of labeling them manually. The book looks at the underlying algorithms and technologies that facilitate the area within big data analytics, it covers their applications across domains such as smarter transportation, social media, fake news detection and enterprise search among others. This book enables readers to understand a spectrum of advances in this emerging area, and it will hopefully empower them to leverage and develop methods in multi-source data fusion and analytics with applications to a variety of scenarios. Includes advances on unsupervised, semi-supervised and supervised approaches to heterogeneous data linkage and fusion; Covers use cases of analytics over multi-view and heterogeneous data from across a variety of domains such as fake news, smarter transportation and social media, among others; Provides a high-level overview of advances in this emerging field and empowers the reader to explore novel applications and methodologies that would enrich the field.

This book offers an overview of state-of-the-art econometric techniques, with a special emphasis on financial econometrics. There is a major need for such techniques, since the traditional way of designing mathematical models - based on researchers' insights - can no longer keep pace with the ever-increasing data flow. To catch up, many application areas have begun relying on data science, i.e., on techniques for extracting models from data, such as data mining, machine learning, and innovative statistics. In terms of capitalizing on data science, many application areas are way ahead of economics. To close this gap, the book provides examples of how data science techniques can be used in economics. Corresponding techniques range from almost traditional statistics to promising novel ideas such as quantum econometrics. Given its scope, the book will appeal to students and researchers interested in state-of-the-art developments, and to practitioners interested in using data science techniques.

This book offers a systematic introduction to an understanding-oriented approach to multimedia content analysis. It integrates the visual understanding and learning models into a unified framework, within which the visual understanding guides the model learning while the learned models improve the visual understanding. More specifically, it discusses multimedia content representations and analysis including feature selection, feature extraction, image tagging, user-oriented tag recommendation and understanding-oriented multimedia applications. The book was nominated by the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and China Computer Federation as an outstanding PhD thesis. By providing the fundamental technologies and state-of-the-art methods, it is a valuable resource for graduate students and researchers working in the field computer vision and machine learning.

This book offers a self-contained guide to the theory and main applications of soft sets. It introduces readers to the basic concepts, the algebraic and topological structures, as well as hybrid structures, such as fuzzy soft sets and intuitionistic fuzzy sets. The last part of the book explores a range of interesting applications in the fields of decision-making, pattern recognition, and data science. All in all, the book provides graduate students and researchers in mathematics and various applied science fields with a comprehensive and timely reference guide to soft sets.