Data analysis forms the basis of many modes of research ranging from scientific discoveries to governmental findings. With the advent of machine intelligence and neural networks, extracting and modeling, approaching data has been unimpeachably altered. These changes, seemingly small, affect the way societies organize themselves, deliver services, or interact with each other. Predictive Analysis on Large Data for Actionable Knowledge: Emerging Research and Opportunities provides emerging information on extraction and prediction patterns in data mining along with knowledge discovery. While highlighting the current issues in data extraction, readers will learn new methodologies comprising of different algorithms that automate the multidimensional schema that remove the manual processes. This book is a vital resource for researchers, academics, and those seeking new information on data mining techniques and trends.

This open access book is a step-by-step introduction on how shell scripting can help solve many of the data processing tasks that Health and Life specialists face everyday with minimal software dependencies. The examples presented in the book show how simple command line tools can be used and combined to retrieve data and text from web resources, to filter and mine literature, and to explore the semantics encoded in biomedical ontologies. To store data this book relies on open standard text file formats, such as TSV, CSV, XML, and OWL, that can be open by any text editor or spreadsheet application. The first two chapters, Introduction and Resources, provide a brief introduction to the shell scripting and describe popular data resources in Health and Life Sciences. The third chapter, Data Retrieval, starts by introducing a common data processing task that involves multiple data resources. Then, this chapter explains how to automate each step of that task by introducing the required commands line tools one by one. The fourth chapter, Text Processing, shows how to filter and analyze text by using simple string matching techniques and regular expressions. The last chapter, Semantic Processing, shows how XPath queries and shell scripting is able to process complex data, such as the graphs used to specify ontologies. Besides being almost immutable for more than four decades and being available in most of our personal computers, shell scripting is relatively easy to learn by Health and Life specialists as a sequence of independent commands. Comprehending them is like conducting a new laboratory protocol by testing and understanding its procedural steps and variables, and combining their intermediate results. Thus, this book is particularly relevant to Health and Life specialists or students that want to easily learn how to process data and text, and which in return may facilitate and inspire them to acquire deeper bioinformatics skills in the future.

This book presents the first paradigm of social multimedia computing completely from the user perspective. Different from traditional multimedia and web multimedia computing which are content-centric, social multimedia computing rises under the participatory Web2.0 and is essentially user-centric. The goal of this book is to emphasize the user factor in facilitating effective solutions towards both multimedia content analysis, user modeling and customized user services. Advanced topics like cross-network social multimedia computing are also introduced as extensions and potential directions along this research line.

This book presents the latest research ideas and topics on how to enhance current database systems, improve information storage, refine existing database models, and develop advanced applications. It provides insights into important developments in the field of database and database management. With emphasis on theoretical issues regarding databases and database management, the book describes the capabilities and features of new technologies and methodologies, and addresses the needs of database researchers and practitioners. *Note: This book is part of a new series entitled "Advanced Topics in Database Research." This book is Volume Three within this series (Vol. III, 2004).

This book is intended to spark a discourse on, and contribute to finding a clear consensus in, the debate between conceptualizing a knowledge strategy and planning a knowledge strategy. It explores the complex relationship between the notions of knowledge and strategy in the business context, one that is of practical importance to companies. After reviewing the extant literature, the book shows how the concept of knowledge strategies can be seen as a new perspective for exploring business strategies. It proposes a new approach that clarifies how planned and emergent knowledge strategies allow companies to make projections into the uncertain and unpredictable future that dominates today's economy.

The rapid increase in computing power and communication speed, coupled with computer storage facilities availability, has led to a new age of multimedia app- cations. Multimedia is practically everywhere and all around us we can feel its presence in almost all applications ranging from online video databases, IPTV, - teractive multimedia and more recently in multimedia based social interaction. These new growing applications require high-quality data storage, easy access to multimedia content and reliable delivery. Moving ever closer to commercial - ployment also aroused a higher awareness of security and intellectual property management issues. All the aforementioned requirements resulted in higher demands on various - eas of research (signal processing, image/video processing and analysis, com- nication protocols, content search, watermarking, etc.). This book covers the most prominent research issues in multimedia and is divided into four main sections: i) content based retrieval, ii) storage and remote access, iii) watermarking and co- right protection and iv) multimedia applications. Chapter 1 of the first section presents an analysis on how color is used and why is it crucial in nowadays multimedia applications. In chapter 2 the authors give an overview of the advances in video abstraction for fast content browsing, transm- sion, retrieval and skimming in large video databases and chapter 3 extends the discussion on video summarization even further. Content retrieval problem is tackled in chapter 4 by describing a novel method for producing meaningful s- ments suitable for MPEG-7 description based on binary partition trees (BPTs).

Grids, P2P and Services Computing, the 12th volume of the CoreGRID series, is based on the CoreGrid ERCIM Working Group Workshop on Grids, P2P and Service Computing in Conjunction with EuroPar 2009. The workshop will take place August 24th, 2009 in Delft, The Netherlands. Grids, P2P and Services Computing, an edited volume contributed by well-established researchers worldwide, will focus on solving research challenges for Grid and P2P technologies. Topics of interest include: Service Level Agreement, Data & Knowledge Management, Scheduling, Trust and Security, Network Monitoring and more. Grids are a crucial enabling technology for scientific and industrial development. This book also includes new challenges related to service-oriented infrastructures. Grids, P2P and Services Computing is designed for a professional audience composed of researchers and practitioners within the Grid community industry. This volume is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science.

This book explores a society currently being transformed by the influence of advanced information technology, and provides insights into the main technological and human issues and a holistic approach to inclusion, security, safety and, last but not least, privacy and freedom of expression. Its main aim is to bridge the gap between technological solutions, their successful implementation, and the fruitful utilization of the main set of e-Services offered by governments, private institutions, and commercial companies. Today, various parameters actively influence e-Services' success or failure: cultural aspects, organisational issues, bureaucracy and workflow, infrastructure and technology in general, user habits, literacy, capacity or merely interaction design. The purpose of this book is to help in outlining and understanding a realistic scenario of what we can term e-Citizenry. It identifies today's citizen, who is surrounded by an abundance of digital services, as an "e-Citizen" and explores the transition from their traditional role and behaviour to new ones. The respective chapters presented here will lay the foundation of the technological and social environment in which this societal transition takes place. With its balanced humanistic and technological approach, the book mainly targets public authorities, decision-makers, stakeholders, solution developers, and graduate students.

This book discusses the psychological traits associated with drug consumption through the statistical analysis of a new database with information on 1885 respondents and use of 18 drugs. After reviewing published works on the psychological profiles of drug users and describing the data mining and machine learning methods used, it demonstrates that the personality traits (five factor model, impulsivity, and sensation seeking) together with simple demographic data make it possible to predict the risk of consumption of individual drugs with a sensitivity and specificity above 70% for most drugs. It also analyzes the correlations of use of different substances and describes the groups of drugs with correlated use, identifying significant differences in personality profiles for users of different drugs. The book is intended for advanced undergraduates and first-year PhD students, as well as researchers and practitioners. Although no previous knowledge of machine learning, advanced data mining concepts or modern psychology of personality is assumed, familiarity with basic statistics and some experience in the use of probabilities would be helpful. For a more detailed introduction to statistical methods, the book provides recommendations for undergraduate textbooks.

Customers and products are the heart of any business, and corporations collect more data about them every year. However, just because you have data doesn t mean you can use it effectively. If not properly integrated, data can actually encourage false conclusions that result in bad decisions and lost opportunities. Entity Resolution (ER) is a powerful tool for transforming data into accurate, value-added information. Using entity resolution methods and techniques, you can identify equivalent records from multiple sources corresponding to the same real-world person, place, or thing.

This emerging area of data management is clearly explained throughout the book. It teaches you the process of locating and linking information about the same entity - eliminating duplications - and making crucial business decisions based on the results. This book is an authoritative, vendor-independent technical reference for researchers, graduate students and practitioners, including architects, technical analysts, and solution developers. In short, Entity Resolution and Information Quality gives you the applied level know-how you need to aggregate data from disparate sources and form accurate customer and product profiles that support effective marketing and sales. It is an invaluable guide for succeeding in today s info-centric environment.
First authoritative reference explaining entity resolution and how to use it effectivelyProvides practical system design advice to help you get a competitive advantage Includes a companion site with synthetic customer data for applicatory exercises, and access to a Java-based Entity Resolution program. "

This book presents recent machine learning paradigms and advances in learning analytics, an emerging research discipline concerned with the collection, advanced processing, and extraction of useful information from both educators' and learners' data with the goal of improving education and learning systems. In this context, internationally respected researchers present various aspects of learning analytics and selected application areas, including: * Using learning analytics to measure student engagement, to quantify the learning experience and to facilitate self-regulation; * Using learning analytics to predict student performance; * Using learning analytics to create learning materials and educational courses; and * Using learning analytics as a tool to support learners and educators in synchronous and asynchronous eLearning. The book offers a valuable asset for professors, researchers, scientists, engineers and students of all disciplines. Extensive bibliographies at the end of each chapter guide readers to probe further into their application areas of interest.

This book is the proceedings of the 3rd World Conference on Soft Computing (WCSC), which was held in San Antonio, TX, USA, on December 16-18, 2013. It presents start-of-the-art theory and applications of soft computing together with an in-depth discussion of current and future challenges in the field, providing readers with a 360 degree view on soft computing. Topics range from fuzzy sets, to fuzzy logic, fuzzy mathematics, neuro-fuzzy systems, fuzzy control, decision making in fuzzy environments, image processing and many more. The book is dedicated to Lotfi A. Zadeh, a renowned specialist in signal analysis and control systems research who proposed the idea of fuzzy sets, in which an element may have a partial membership, in the early 1960s, followed by the idea of fuzzy logic, in which a statement can be true only to a certain degree, with degrees described by numbers in the interval [0,1]. The performance of fuzzy systems can often be improved with the help of optimization techniques, e.g. evolutionary computation, and by endowing the corresponding system with the ability to learn, e.g. by combining fuzzy systems with neural networks. The resulting "consortium" of fuzzy, evolutionary, and neural techniques is known as soft computing and is the main focus of this book.

An ontology is a formal description of concepts and relationships that can exist for a community of human and/or machine agents. The notion of ontologies is crucial for the purpose of enabling knowledge sharing and reuse. The Handbook on Ontologies provides a comprehensive overview of the current status and future prospectives of the field of ontologies considering ontology languages, ontology engineering methods, example ontologies, infrastructures and technologies for ontologies, and how to bring this all into ontology-based infrastructures and applications that are among the best of their kind. The field of ontologies has tremendously developed and grown in the five years since the first edition of the "Handbook on Ontologies." Therefore, its revision includes 21 completely new chapters as well as a major re-working of 15 chapters transferred to this second edition.

This book offers an introduction to artificial adaptive systems and a general model of the relationships between the data and algorithms used to analyze them. It subsequently describes artificial neural networks as a subclass of artificial adaptive systems, and reports on the backpropagation algorithm, while also identifying an important connection between supervised and unsupervised artificial neural networks. The book's primary focus is on the auto contractive map, an unsupervised artificial neural network employing a fixed point method versus traditional energy minimization. This is a powerful tool for understanding, associating and transforming data, as demonstrated in the numerous examples presented here. A supervised version of the auto contracting map is also introduced as an outstanding method for recognizing digits and defects. In closing, the book walks the readers through the theory and examples of how the auto contracting map can be used in conjunction with another artificial neural network, the "spin-net," as a dynamic form of auto-associative memory.

This volume summarizes the author's work on social information seeking (SIS), and at the same time serves as an introduction to the topic. Sometimes also referred to as social search or social information retrieval, this is a relatively new area of study concerned with the seeking and acquiring of information from social spaces on the Internet. It involves studying situations, motivations, and methods involved in seeking and sharing of information in participatory online social sites, such as Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers, and Twitter, as well as building systems for supporting such activities. The first part of the book introduces various foundational concepts, including information seeking, social media, and social networking. As such it provides the necessary basis to then discuss how those aspects could intertwine in different ways to create methods, tools, and opportunities for supporting and leveraging SIS. Next, Part II discusses the social dimension and primarily examines the online question-answering activity. Part III then emphasizes the collaborative aspect of information seeking, and examines what happens when social and collaborative dimensions are considered together. Lastly, Part IV provides a synthesis by consolidating methods, systems, and evaluation techniques related to social and collaborative information seeking. The book is completed by a list of challenges and opportunities for both theoretical and practical SIS work. The book is intended mainly for researchers and graduate students looking for an introduction to this new field, as well as developers and system designers interested in building interactive information retrieval systems or social/community-driven interfaces.

This monograph provides a comprehensive research review of intelligent techniques for personalisation of e-learning systems. Special emphasis is given to intelligent tutoring systems as a particular class of e-learning systems, which support and improve the learning and teaching of domain-specific knowledge. A new approach to perform effective personalization based on Semantic web technologies achieved in a tutoring system is presented. This approach incorporates a recommender system based on collaborative tagging techniques that adapts to the interests and level of students' knowledge. These innovations are important contributions of this monograph. Theoretical models and techniques are illustrated on a real personalised tutoring system for teaching Java programming language. The monograph is directed to, students and researchers interested in the e-learning and personalization techniques.

This book deals with timing attacks on cryptographic ciphers. It describes and analyzes various unintended covert timing channels that are formed when ciphers are executed in microprocessors. The book considers modern superscalar microprocessors which are enabled with features such as multi-threaded, pipelined, parallel, speculative, and out-of order execution. Various timing attack algorithms are described and analyzed for both block ciphers as well as public-key ciphers. The interplay between the cipher implementation, the system architecture, and the attack's success is analyzed. Further hardware and software countermeasures are discussed with the aim of illustrating methods to build systems that can protect against these attacks.

Focuses on the process by which manually crafting interactive, hypertextual maps clarifies one's own understanding, communicates it to others, and enables collective intelligence. The authors see mapping software as visual tools for reading and writing in a networked age. In an information ocean, the challenge is to find meaningful patterns around which we can weave plausible narratives. Maps of concepts, discussions and arguments make the connections between ideas tangible - and critically, disputable. With 22 chapters from leading researchers and practitioners (5 of them new for this edition), the reader will find the current state-of-the-art in the field. Part 1 focuses on knowledge maps for learning and teaching in schools and universities, before Part 2 turns to knowledge maps for information analysis and knowledge management in professional communities, but with many cross-cutting themes: * reflective practitioners documenting the most effective ways to map * conceptual frameworks for evaluating representations * real world case studies showing added value for professionals * more experimental case studies from research and education * visual languages, many of which work on both paper and with software * knowledge cartography software, much of it freely available and open source * visit the companion website for extra resources: books.kmi.open.ac.uk/knowledge-cartography Knowledge Cartography will be of interest to learners, educators, and researchers in all disciplines, as well as policy analysts, scenario planners, knowledge managers and team facilitators. Practitioners will find new perspectives and tools to expand their repertoire, while researchers will find rich enough conceptual grounding for further scholarship.

Through interaction with other databases such as social media, geographic information systems have the ability to build and obtain not only statistics defined on the flows of people, things, and information but also on perceptions, impressions, and opinions about specific places, territories, and landscapes. It is thus necessary to systematize, integrate, and coordinate the various sources of data (especially open data) to allow more appropriate and complete analysis, descriptions, and elaborations. Spatial Planning in the Big Data Revolution is a critical scholarly resource that aims to bring together different methodologies that combine the potential of large data analysis with GIS applications in dedicated tools specifically for territorial, social, economic, environmental, transport, energy, real estate, and landscape evaluation. Additionally, the book addresses a number of fundamental objectives including the application of big data analysis in supporting territorial analysis, validating crowdsourcing and crowdmapping techniques, and disseminating information and community involvement. Urban planners, architects, researchers, academicians, professionals, and practitioners in such fields as computer science, data science, and business intelligence will benefit most from the research contained within this publication.

This book focuses on the development of a theory of info-dynamics to support the theory of info-statics in the general theory of information. It establishes the rational foundations of information dynamics and how these foundations relate to the general socio-natural dynamics from the primary to the derived categories in the universal existence and from the potential to the actual in the ontological space. It also shows how these foundations relate to the general socio-natural dynamics from the potential to the possible to give rise to the possibility space with possibilistic thinking; from the possible to the probable to give rise to possibility space with probabilistic thinking; and from the probable to the actual to give rise to the space of knowledge with paradigms of thought in the epistemological space. The theory is developed to explain the general dynamics through various transformations in quality-quantity space in relation to the nature of information flows at each variety transformation. The theory explains the past-present-future connectivity of the evolving information structure in a manner that illuminates the transformation problem and its solution in the never-ending information production within matter-energy space under socio-natural technologies to connect the theory of info-statics, which in turn presents explanations to the transformation problem and its solution. The theoretical framework is developed with analytical tools based on the principle of opposites, systems of actual-potential polarities, negative-positive dualities under different time-structures with the use of category theory, fuzzy paradigm of thought and game theory in the fuzzy-stochastic cost-benefit space. The rational foundations are enhanced with categorial analytics. The value of the theory of info-dynamics is demonstrated in the explanatory and prescriptive structures of the transformations of varieties and categorial varieties at each point of time and over time from parent-offspring sequences. It constitutes a general explanation of dynamics of information-knowledge production through info-processes and info-processors induced by a socio-natural infinite set of technologies in the construction-destruction space.

VoIP (voice over IP) networks are currently being deployed by enterprises, governments, and service providers around the globe and are used by millions of individuals each day. Today, the hottest topic with engineers in the field is how to secure these networks. "Understanding Voice over IP Security" offers this critical knowledge. The book teaches practitioners how to design a highly secure VoIP network, explains Internet security basics, such as attack types and methods, and details all the key security aspects of a VoIP system, including identity, authentication, signaling, and media encryption. What's more, the book presents techniques used to combat spam and covers the future problems of spim (spam over instant messaging) and spim (spam over internet telephony).

This book brings together scientists, researchers, practitioners, and students from academia and industry to present recent and ongoing research activities concerning the latest advances, techniques, and applications of natural language processing systems, and to promote the exchange of new ideas and lessons learned. Taken together, the chapters of this book provide a collection of high-quality research works that address broad challenges in both theoretical and applied aspects of intelligent natural language processing. The book presents the state-of-the-art in research on natural language processing, computational linguistics, applied Arabic linguistics and related areas. New trends in natural language processing systems are rapidly emerging - and finding application in various domains including education, travel and tourism, and healthcare, among others. Many issues encountered during the development of these applications can be resolved by incorporating language technology solutions. The topics covered by the book include: Character and Speech Recognition; Morphological, Syntactic, and Semantic Processing; Information Extraction; Information Retrieval and Question Answering; Text Classification and Text Mining; Text Summarization; Sentiment Analysis; Machine Translation Building and Evaluating Linguistic Resources; and Intelligent Language Tutoring Systems.

In this third edition of Vehicle Accident Analysis & Reconstruction Methods, Raymond M. Brach and R. Matthew Brach have expanded and updated their essential work for professionals in the field of accident reconstruction. Most accidents can be reconstructed effectively using of calculations and investigative and experimental data: the authors present the latest scientific, engineering, and mathematical reconstruction methods, providing a firm scientific foundation for practitioners. Accidents that cannot be reconstructed using the methods in this book are rare. In recent decades, the field of crash reconstruction has been transformed through the use of technology. The advent of event data records (EDRs) on vehicles signaled the era of modern crash reconstruction, which utilizes the same physical evidence that was previously available as well as electronic data that are measured/captured before, during, and after the collision. There is increased demand for more professional and accurate reconstruction as more crash data is available from vehicle sensors. The third edition of this essential work includes a new chapter on the use of EDRs as well as examples using EDR data in accident reconstruction. Early chapters feature foundational material that is necessary for the understanding of vehicle collisions and vehicle motion; later chapters present applications of the methods and include example reconstructions. As a result, Vehicle Accident Analysis & Reconstruction Methods remains the definitive resource in accident reconstruction.

This book will provide a comprehensive overview of business analytics, for those who have either a technical background (quantitative methods) or a practitioner business background. Business analytics, in the context of the 4th Industrial Revolution, is the "new normal" for businesses that operate in this digital age. This book provides a comprehensive primer and overview of the field (and related fields such as Business Intelligence and Data Science). It will discuss the field as it applies to financial institutions, with some minor departures to other industries. Readers will gain understanding and insight into the field of data science, including traditional as well as emerging techniques. Further, many chapters are dedicated to the establishment of a data-driven team - from executive buy-in and corporate governance to managing and quantifying the return of data-driven projects.

The general theme of this book is to present innovative psychometric modeling and methods. In particular, this book includes research and successful examples of modeling techniques for new data sources from digital assessments, such as eye-tracking data, hint uses, and process data from game-based assessments. In addition, innovative psychometric modeling approaches, such as graphical models, item tree models, network analysis, and cognitive diagnostic models, are included. Chapters 1, 2, 4 and 6 are about psychometric models and methods for learning analytics. The first two chapters focus on advanced cognitive diagnostic models for tracking learning and the improvement of attribute classification accuracy. Chapter 4 demonstrates the use of network analysis for learning analytics. Chapter 6 introduces the conjunctive root causes model for the understanding of prerequisite skills in learning. Chapters 3, 5, 8, 9 are about innovative psychometric techniques to model process data. Specifically, Chapters 3 and 5 illustrate the usage of generalized linear mixed effect models and item tree models to analyze eye-tracking data. Chapter 8 discusses the modeling approach of hint uses and response accuracy in learning environment. Chapter 9 demonstrates the identification of observable outcomes in the game-based assessments. Chapters 7 and 10 introduce innovative latent variable modeling approaches, including the graphical and generalized linear model approach and the dynamic modeling approach. In summary, the book includes theoretical, methodological, and applied research and practices that serve as the foundation for future development. These chapters provide illustrations of efforts to model and analyze multiple data sources from digital assessments. When computer-based assessments are emerging and evolving, it is important that researchers can expand and improve the methods for modeling and analyzing new data sources. This book provides a useful resource to researchers who are interested in the development of psychometric methods to solve issues in this digital assessment age.