Clustering is an important unsupervised classification technique where data points are grouped such that points that are similar in some sense belong to the same cluster. Cluster analysis is a complex problem as a variety of similarity and dissimilarity measures exist in the literature. This is the first book focused on clustering with a particular emphasis on symmetry-based measures of similarity and metaheuristic approaches. The aim is to find a suitable grouping of the input data set so that some criteria are optimized, and using this the authors frame the clustering problem as an optimization one where the objectives to be optimized may represent different characteristics such as compactness, symmetrical compactness, separation between clusters, or connectivity within a cluster. They explain the techniques in detail and outline many detailed applications in data mining, remote sensing and brain imaging, gene expression data analysis, and face detection. The book will be useful to graduate students and researchers in computer science, electrical engineering, system science, and information technology, both as a text and as a reference book. It will also be useful to researchers and practitioners in industry working on pattern recognition, data mining, soft computing, metaheuristics, bioinformatics, remote sensing, and brain imaging.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th IFIP WG 5.5 Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises, PRO-VE 2014, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in October 2014. The 73 revised papers were carefully selected from 190 submissions. They provide a comprehensive overview of identified challenges and recent advances in various collaborative network (CN) domains and their applications, with a particular focus on the following areas in support of smart networked environments: behavior and coordination; product-service systems; service orientation in collaborative networks; engineering and implementation of collaborative networks; cyber-physical systems; business strategies alignment; innovation networks; sustainability and trust; reference and conceptual models; collaboration platforms; virtual reality and simulation; interoperability and integration; performance management frameworks; performance management systems; risk analysis; optimization in collaborative networks; knowledge management in networks; health and care networks; and mobility and logistics.

This book offers means to handle interference as a central problem of operating wireless networks. It investigates centralized and decentralized methods to avoid and handle interference as well as approaches that resolve interference constructively. The latter type of approach tries to solve the joint detection and estimation problem of several data streams that share a common medium. In fact, an exciting insight into the operation of networks is that it may be beneficial, in terms of an overall throughput, to actively create and manage interference. Thus, when handled properly, "mixing" of data in networks becomes a useful tool of operation rather than the nuisance as which it has been treated traditionally. With the development of mobile, robust, ubiquitous, reliable and instantaneous communication being a driving and enabling factor of an information centric economy, the understanding, mitigation and exploitation of interference in networks must be seen as a centrally important task.

""As organizations have become more sophisticated, pressure to provide information sharing across dissimilar platforms has mounted. In addition, advances in distributed computing and networking combined with the affordable high level of connectivity, are making information sharing across databases closer to being accomplished...With the advent of the internet, intranets, and affordable network connectivity, business reengineering has become a necessity for modern corporations to stay competitive in the global market...An end-user in a heterogeneous computing environment should be able to not only invoke multiple exiting software systems and hardware devices, but also coordinate their interactions.""--From the Introduction

Seventeen leaders in the field contributed chapters specifically for this unique book, together providing the most comprehensive resource on managing multidatabase systems involving heterogeneous and autonomous databases available today. The book covers virtually all fundamental issues, concepts, and major research topics.
* Presents implications of distribution, autonomy, and heterogeneity on system architectures and management techniques
* Discusses logical-level issues, including representation, semantics, schema integration, and languages
* Covers system-level issues, with an emphasis on data consistency, recovery, and transaction management

The present volume provides a collection of seven articles containing new and high quality research results demonstrating the significance of Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEA) for data mining tasks in Knowledge Discovery from Databases (KDD). These articles are written by leading experts around the world. It is shown how the different MOEAs can be utilized, both in individual and integrated manner, in various ways to efficiently mine data from large databases.

Multiprocessing: Trade-Offs in Computation and Communication presents an in-depth analysis of several commonly observed regular and irregular computations for multiprocessor systems. This book includes techniques which enable researchers and application developers to quantitatively determine the effects of algorithm data dependencies on execution time, on communication requirements, on processor utilization and on the speedups possible. Starting with simple, two-dimensional, diamond-shaped directed acyclic graphs, the analysis is extended to more complex and higher dimensional directed acyclic graphs. The analysis allows for the quantification of the computation and communication costs and their interdependencies. The practical significance of these results on the performance of various data distribution schemes is clearly explained. Using these results, the performance of the parallel computations are formulated in an architecture independent fashion. These formulations allow for the parameterization of the architecture specitific entities such as the computation and communication rates. This type of parameterized performance analysis can be used at compile time or at run-time so as to achieve the most optimal distribution of the computations. The material in Multiprocessing: Trade-Offs in Computation and Communication connects theory with practice, so that the inherent performance limitations in many computations can be understood, and practical methods can be devised that would assist in the development of software for scalable high performance systems.

This comprehensive book focuses on better big-data security for healthcare organizations. Following an extensive introduction to the Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare including challenging topics and scenarios, it offers an in-depth analysis of medical body area networks with the 5th generation of IoT communication technology along with its nanotechnology. It also describes a novel strategic framework and computationally intelligent model to measure possible security vulnerabilities in the context of e-health. Moreover, the book addresses healthcare systems that handle large volumes of data driven by patients' records and health/personal information, including big-data-based knowledge management systems to support clinical decisions. Several of the issues faced in storing/processing big data are presented along with the available tools, technologies and algorithms to deal with those problems as well as a case study in healthcare analytics. Addressing trust, privacy, and security issues as well as the IoT and big-data challenges, the book highlights the advances in the field to guide engineers developing different IoT devices and evaluating the performance of different IoT techniques. Additionally, it explores the impact of such technologies on public, private, community, and hybrid scenarios in healthcare. This book offers professionals, scientists and engineers the latest technologies, techniques, and strategies for IoT and big data.

Semantic Models for Multimedia Database Searching and Browsing begins with the introduction of multimedia information applications, the need for the development of the multimedia database management systems (MDBMSs), and the important issues and challenges of multimedia systems. The temporal relations, the spatial relations, the spatio-temporal relations, and several semantic models for multimedia information systems are also introduced. In addition, this book discusses recent advances in multimedia database searching and multimedia database browsing. More specifically, issues such as image/video segmentation, motion detection, object tracking, object recognition, knowledge-based event modeling, content-based retrieval, and key frame selections are presented for the first time in a single book. Two case studies consisting of two semantic models are included in the book to illustrate how to use semantic models to design multimedia information systems. Semantic Models for Multimedia Database Searching and Browsing is an excellent reference and can be used in advanced level courses for researchers, scientists, industry professionals, software engineers, students, and general readers who are interested in the issues, challenges, and ideas underlying the current practice of multimedia presentation, multimedia database searching, and multimedia browsing in multimedia information systems.

This book reports on the development and validation of a generic defeasible logic programming framework for carrying out argumentative reasoning in Semantic Web applications (GF@SWA). The proposed methodology is unique in providing a solution for representing incomplete and/or contradictory information coming from different sources, and reasoning with it. GF@SWA is able to represent this type of information, perform argumentation-driven hybrid reasoning to resolve conflicts, and generate graphical representations of the integrated information, thus assisting decision makers in decision making processes. GF@SWA represents the first argumentative reasoning engine for carrying out automated reasoning in the Semantic Web context and is expected to have a significant impact on future business applications. The book provides the readers with a detailed and clear exposition of different argumentation-based reasoning techniques, and of their importance and use in Semantic Web applications. It addresses both academics and professionals, and will be of primary interest to researchers, students and practitioners in the area of Web-based intelligent decision support systems and their application in various domains.

Since their invention in the late seventies, public key cryptosystems have become an indispensable asset in establishing private and secure electronic communication, and this need, given the tremendous growth of the Internet, is likely to continue growing. Elliptic curve cryptosystems represent the state of the art for such systems. Elliptic Curves and Their Applications to Cryptography: An Introduction provides a comprehensive and self-contained introduction to elliptic curves and how they are employed to secure public key cryptosystems. Even though the elegant mathematical theory underlying cryptosystems is considerably more involved than for other systems, this text requires the reader to have only an elementary knowledge of basic algebra. The text nevertheless leads to problems at the forefront of current research, featuring chapters on point counting algorithms and security issues. The Adopted unifying approach treats with equal care elliptic curves over fields of even characteristic, which are especially suited for hardware implementations, and curves over fields of odd characteristic, which have traditionally received more attention. Elliptic Curves and Their Applications: An Introduction has been used successfully for teaching advanced undergraduate courses. It will be of greatest interest to mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers who are curious about elliptic curve cryptography in practice, without losing the beauty of the underlying mathematics.

The present economic and social environment has given rise to new situations within which companies must operate. As a first example, the globalization of the economy and the need for performance has led companies to outsource and then to operate inside networks of enterprises such as supply chains or virtual enterprises. A second instance is related to environmental issues. The statement about the impact of ind- trial activities on the environment has led companies to revise processes, to save - ergy, to optimize transportation.... A last example relates to knowledge. Knowledge is considered today to be one of the main assets of a company. How to capitalize, to manage, to reuse it for the benefit of the company is an important current issue. The three examples above have no direct links. However, each of them constitutes a challenge that companies have to face today. This book brings together the opinions of several leading researchers from all around the world. Together they try to develop new approaches and find answers to those challenges. Through the individual ch- ters of this book, the authors present their understanding of the different challenges, the concepts on which they are working, the approaches they are developing and the tools they propose. The book is composed of six parts; each one focuses on a specific theme and is subdivided into subtopics.

Database Recovery presents an in-depth discussion on all aspects of database recovery. Firstly, it introduces the topic informally to set the intuitive understanding, and then presents a formal treatment of recovery mechanism. In the past, recovery has been treated merely as a mechanism which is implemented on an ad-hoc basis. This book elevates the recovery from a mechanism to a concept, and presents its essential properties. A book on recovery is incomplete if it does not present how recovery is practiced in commercial systems. This book, therefore, presents a detailed description of recovery mechanisms as implemented on Informix, OpenIngres, Oracle, and Sybase commercial database systems. Database Recovery is suitable as a textbook for a graduate-level course on database recovery, as a secondary text for a graduate-level course on database systems, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

Mining of Data with Complex Structures:

- Clarifies the type and nature of data with complex structure including sequences, trees and graphs

- Provides a detailed background of the state-of-the-art of sequence mining, tree mining and graph mining.

-Defines the essential aspects of the tree mining problem: subtree types, support definitions, constraints.

- Outlines the implementation issues one needs to consider when developing tree mining algorithms (enumeration strategies, data structures, etc.)

- Details the Tree Model Guided (TMG) approach for tree mining and provides the mathematical model for the worst case estimate of complexity of mining ordered induced and embedded subtrees.

- Explains the mechanism of the TMG framework for mining ordered/unordered induced/embedded and distance-constrained embedded subtrees.

- Provides a detailed comparison of the different tree mining approaches highlighting the characteristics and benefits of each approach.

- Overviews the implications and potential applications of tree mining in general knowledge management related tasks, and uses Web, health and bioinformatics related applications as case studies.

- Details the extension of the TMG framework for sequence mining

- Provides an overview of the future research direction with respect to technical extensions and application areas

The primary audience is 3rd year, 4th year undergraduate students, Masters and PhD students and academics. The book can be used for both teaching and research. The secondary audiences are practitioners in industry, business, commerce, government and consortiums, alliances and partnerships to learn how to introduce and efficiently make use of the techniques for mining of data with complex structures into their applications. The scope of the book is both theoretical and practical and as such it will reach a broad market both within academia and industry. In addition, its subject matter is a rapidly emerging field that is critical for efficient analysis of knowledge stored in various domains."

Security Education and Critical Infrastructures presents the most recent developments in research and practice on teaching information security, and covers topics including:

-Curriculum design;
-Laboratory systems and exercises;
-Security education program assessment;
-Distance learning and web-based teaching of security;
-Teaching computer forensics;
-Laboratory-based system defense games;
-Security education tools;
-Education in security policies, management and system certification;
-Case studies.

In our world of ever-increasing Internet connectivity, there is an on-going threat of intrusion, denial of service attacks, or countless other abuses of computer and network resources. In particular, these threats continue to persist due to the flaws of current commercial intrusion detection systems (IDSs). Intrusion Detection Systems is an edited volume by world class leaders in this field. This edited volume sheds new light on defense alert systems against computer and network intrusions. It also covers integrating intrusion alerts within security policy framework for intrusion response, related case studies and much more. This volume is presented in an easy-to-follow style while including a rigorous treatment of the issues, solutions, and technologies tied to the field. Intrusion Detection Systems is designed for a professional audience composed of researchers and practitioners within the computer network and information security industry. It is also suitable as a reference or secondary textbook for advanced-level students in computer science.

The Engineering of Complex Real-Time Computer Control Systems brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this important area. The Engineering of Complex Real-Time Computer Control Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most important research issues in the field.

The International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) series publishes state-of-the-art results in the sciences and technologies of information and communication. The IFIP series encourages education and the dissemination and exchange of information on all aspects of computing. This particular volume presents the most up-to-date research findings from leading experts from around the world on information security education.

Social media sites are constantly evolving with huge amounts of scattered data or big data, which makes it difficult for researchers to trace the information flow. It is a daunting task to extract a useful piece of information from the vast unstructured big data; the disorganized structure of social media contains data in various forms such as text and videos as well as huge real-time data on which traditional analytical methods like statistical approaches fail miserably. Due to this, there is a need for efficient data mining techniques that can overcome the shortcomings of the traditional approaches. Data Mining Approaches for Big Data and Sentiment Analysis in Social Media encourages researchers to explore the key concepts of data mining, such as how they can be utilized on online social media platforms, and provides advances on data mining for big data and sentiment analysis in online social media, as well as future research directions. Covering a range of concepts from machine learning methods to data mining for big data analytics, this book is ideal for graduate students, academicians, faculty members, scientists, researchers, data analysts, social media analysts, managers, and software developers who are seeking to learn and carry out research in the area of data mining for big data and sentiment.

Privacy requirements have an increasing impact on the realization of modern applications. Commercial and legal regulations demand that privacy guarantees be provided whenever sensitive information is stored, processed, or communicated to external parties. Current approaches encrypt sensitive data, thus reducing query execution efficiency and preventing selective information release.

Preserving Privacy in Data Outsourcing presents a comprehensive approach for protecting highly sensitive information when it is stored on systems that are not under the data owner's control. The approach illustrated combines access control and encryption, enforcing access control via structured encryption. This solution, coupled with efficient algorithms for key derivation and distribution, provides efficient and secure authorization management on outsourced data, allowing the data owner to outsource not only the data but the security policy itself. To reduce the amount of data to be encrypted the book also investigates data fragmentation as a possible way to protect privacy of data associations and provide fragmentation as a complementary means for protecting privacy: associations broken by fragmentation will be visible only to users authorized (by knowing the proper key) to join fragments. The book finally investigates the problem of executing queries over possible data distributed at different servers and which must be controlled to ensure sensitive information and sensitive associations be visible only to parties authorized for that. Case Studies are provided throughout the book.

Privacy, data mining, data protection, data outsourcing, electronic commerce, machine learning professionals and others working in these related fields will find this book a valuable asset, as well as primary associations such as ACM, IEEE and Management Science. This book is also suitable for advanced level students and researchers concentrating on computer science as a secondary text or reference book.

In the last ten years, a true explosion of investigations into fuzzy modeling and its applications in control, diagnostics, decision making, optimization, pattern recognition, robotics, etc. has been observed. The attraction of fuzzy modeling results from its intelligibility and the high effectiveness of the models obtained. Owing to this the modeling can be applied for the solution of problems which could not be solved till now with any known conventional methods. The book provides the reader with an advanced introduction to the problems of fuzzy modeling and to one of its most important applications: fuzzy control. It is based on the latest and most significant knowledge of the subject and can be used not only by control specialists but also by specialists working in any field requiring plant modeling, process modeling, and systems modeling, e.g. economics, business, medicine, agriculture,and meteorology.

A modern information retrieval system must have the capability to find, organize and present very different manifestations of information - such as text, pictures, videos or database records - any of which may be of relevance to the user. However, the concept of relevance, while seemingly intuitive, is actually hard to define, and it's even harder to model in a formal way.

Lavrenko does not attempt to bring forth a new definition of relevance, nor provide arguments as to why any particular definition might be theoretically superior or more complete. Instead, he takes a widely accepted, albeit somewhat conservative definition, makes several assumptions, and from them develops a new probabilistic model that explicitly captures that notion of relevance. With this book, he makes two major contributions to the field of information retrieval: first, a new way to look at topical relevance, complementing the two dominant models, i.e., the classical probabilistic model and the language modeling approach, and which explicitly combines documents, queries, and relevance in a single formalism; second, a new method for modeling exchangeable sequences of discrete random variables which does not make any structural assumptions about the data and which can also handle rare events.

Thus his book is of major interest to researchers and graduate students in information retrieval who specialize in relevance modeling, ranking algorithms, and language modeling.

The Semantic Web, which is intended to establish a machine-understandable Web, is currently changing from being an emerging trend to a technology used in complex real-world applications. A number of standards and techniques have been developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), e.g., the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which provides a general method for conceptual descriptions for Web resources, and SPARQL, an RDF querying language. Recent examples of large RDF data with billions of facts include the UniProt comprehensive catalog of protein sequence, function and annotation data, the RDF data extracted from Wikipedia, and Princeton University's WordNet. Clearly, querying performance has become a key issue for Semantic Web applications. In his book, Groppe details various aspects of high-performance Semantic Web data management and query processing. His presentation fills the gap between Semantic Web and database books, which either fail to take into account the performance issues of large-scale data management or fail to exploit the special properties of Semantic Web data models and queries. After a general introduction to the relevant Semantic Web standards, he presents specialized indexing and sorting algorithms, adapted approaches for logical and physical query optimization, optimization possibilities when using the parallel database technologies of today's multicore processors, and visual and embedded query languages. Groppe primarily targets researchers, students, and developers of large-scale Semantic Web applications. On the complementary book webpage readers will find additional material, such as an online demonstration of a query engine, and exercises, and their solutions, that challenge their comprehension of the topics presented.

Database System Concepts by Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan is now in its 7th edition and is one of the cornerstone texts of database education. It presents the fundamental concepts of database management in an intuitive manner geared toward allowing students to begin working with databases as quickly as possible. The text is designed for a first course in databases at the junior/senior undergraduate level or the first year graduate level. It also contains additional material that can be used as supplements or as introductory material for an advanced course. Because the authors present concepts as intuitive descriptions, a familiarity with basic data structures, computer organization, and a high-level programming language are the only prerequisites. Important theoretical results are covered, but formal proofs are omitted. In place of proofs, figures and examples are used to suggest why a result is true.

The increasing availability of data in our current, information overloaded society has led to the need for valid tools for its modelling and analysis. Data mining and applied statistical methods are the appropriate tools to extract knowledge from such data. This book provides an accessible introduction to data mining methods in a consistent and application oriented statistical framework, using case studies drawn from real industry projects and highlighting the use of data mining methods in a variety of business applications.

Introduces data mining methods and applications.Covers classical and Bayesian multivariate statistical methodology as well as machine learning and computational data mining methods.Includes many recent developments such as association and sequence rules, graphical Markov models, lifetime value modelling, credit risk, operational risk and web mining.Features detailed case studies based on applied projects within industry.Incorporates discussion of data mining software, with case studies analysed using R.Is accessible to anyone with a basic knowledge of statistics or data analysis.Includes an extensive bibliography and pointers to further reading within the text.

"Applied Data Mining for Business and Industry, 2nd edition" is aimed at advanced undergraduate and graduate students of data mining, applied statistics, database management, computer science and economics. The case studies will provide guidance to professionals working in industry on projects involving large volumes of data, such as customer relationship management, web design, risk management, marketing, economics and finance.

This book offers a unique review of how astronomical information handling (in the broad sense) evolved in the course of the 20th century, and especially during its second half. This volume is a natural complement to the book Information handling in astronomy published in the same series. The scope of these two volumes includes not only dealing with professional astronomical data from the collecting instruments (ground-based and space-borne) to the users/researchers, but also publishing, education and public outreach. In short, the information flow in astronomy is thus illustrated from sources (cosmic objects) to end (mankind's knowledge). The experts contributing to this book have done their best to write in a way understandable to readers not necessarily hyperspecialized in astronomy while providing specific detailed information, as well as plenty of pointers and bibliographic elements. Especially enlightening are some lessons learned' sections.