As information availability pervades every aspect of life, new trends, technologies, and enhancements must be carefully researched, evaluated and implemented in order to fabricate successful computing applications. Designing Solutions-Based Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing: New Issues and Trends examines current practices and challenges faced by designers of Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing projects. Analyzing theoretical assumptions, empirical research, practical implementations, and case studies, this book intends to present a comprehensive yet concise overview of the recent progress in ubiquitous and pervasive computing applications, as well as discuss new methodologies, technologies and approaches currently practiced. Truly interdisciplinary, this publication serves as a valuable reference for researchers in the fields of electrical engineering and computer science, students, educators, and industrial trainers interested in network sensors, embedded systems, distributed systems, computer networks, and computer science.

Developments in industry in recent years have made employee learning a critical factor in organizations' success. The ever-faster pace of technological development and the variety of tasks that business professionals must perform mean that on-the-job learning is a constant, too quick and vital to be left to training departments. And yet, management knows too little about how workers learn on the job and does not give sufficient time and effort to understanding this process. As learning is largely left to chance, it is amazing that it happens at all, and well enough to enable workers to be productive and not to destroy each other's work. This book explores the daily work lives and learning experiences of programmers and other professionals in the computer-software industry. The book focuses on the staff of one small software firm, allowing workers to tell their own stories, describing their work and their use of all the resources available to them in learning the complex systems they are required to develop and maintain. Based in qualitative sociological method, it is an ethnography of a business setting as well as a study of learning.

After describing the professional world in which programmers work, the book introduces the company to be discussed and the backgrounds of the participants in the study. Then, proceeding from the environment to the systems to be learned, the author schematizes all of the resources professionals use on the job--their experiences and thought processes, documentation, their colleagues, the computer, and the software system itself--as learning tools. All of this material is then related to academic models of learning style, which are mostly found not to be very relevant, as they are not grounded in the life experiences of workers. The author advocates that professionals' learning be modeled in context, that training be developed from experience rather than from theory, and that management strive to build a workplace and an organizational culture as conducive as possible to employees' continual learning.

This book introduces readers to genetic algorithms (GAs) with an emphasis on making the concepts, algorithms, and applications discussed as easy to understand as possible. Further, it avoids a great deal of formalisms and thus opens the subject to a broader audience in comparison to manuscripts overloaded by notations and equations. The book is divided into three parts, the first of which provides an introduction to GAs, starting with basic concepts like evolutionary operators and continuing with an overview of strategies for tuning and controlling parameters. In turn, the second part focuses on solution space variants like multimodal, constrained, and multi-objective solution spaces. Lastly, the third part briefly introduces theoretical tools for GAs, the intersections and hybridizations with machine learning, and highlights selected promising applications.

The central theme of this book is focused on the analyses and the results which emerged from the international research project BRAHMATWINN sponsored by European Commission (EC) and conducted during 2006 - 2009. The book highlights the achievements of BRAHMATWINN to carry out a harmonised integrated water resources management (IWRM) approach as addressed by the European Water Initiative (EWI) in headwater river systems of alpine mountain massifs. The latter are already impacted from climate change, and the BRAHMATWINN project established transfer of professional IWRM expertise, approaches and tools based on case studies carried out in twinning European and Asian river basins. The project addresses all important IWRM issues in a balanced way, including conflict resolution in the trans- boundary Danube and Brahmaputra River Basins in Europe and South Asia respectively. This book will be useful to researchers, professionals, managers and decision makers associated with study and application of sustainable integrated land and water resources management (ILWRM) in the backdrop of climate change.

This book focuses on three core knowledge requirements for effective and thorough data analysis for solving business problems. These are a foundational understanding of: 1. statistical, econometric, and machine learning techniques; 2. data handling capabilities; 3. at least one programming language. Practical in orientation, the volume offers illustrative case studies throughout and examples using Python in the context of Jupyter notebooks. Covered topics include demand measurement and forecasting, predictive modeling, pricing analytics, customer satisfaction assessment, market and advertising research, and new product development and research. This volume will be useful to business data analysts, data scientists, and market research professionals, as well as aspiring practitioners in business data analytics. It can also be used in colleges and universities offering courses and certifications in business data analytics, data science, and market research.

Managing Complexity is the first book that clearly defines the concept of Complexity, explains how Complexity can be measured and tuned, and describes the seven key features of Complex Systems: 1. Connectivity 2. Autonomy 3. Emergency 4. Nonequilibrium 5. Non-linearity 6. Self-organisation 7. Co-evolution The thesis of the book is that complexity of the environment in which we work and live offers new opportunities and that the best strategy for surviving and prospering under conditions of complexity is to develop adaptability to perpetually changing conditions. An effective method for designing adaptability into business processes using multi-agent technology is presented and illustrated by several extensive examples, including adaptive, real-time scheduling of taxis, see-going tankers, road transport, supply chains, railway trains, production processes and swarms of small space satellites. Additional case studies include adaptive servicing of the International Space Station; adaptive processing of design changes of large structures such as wings of the largest airliner in the world; dynamic data mining, knowledge discovery and distributed semantic processing.Finally, the book provides a foretaste of the next generation of complex issues, notably, The Internet of Things, Smart Cities, Digital Enterprises and Smart Logistics.

Meshfree methods are a modern alternative to classical mesh-based discretization techniques such as finite differences or finite element methods. Especially in a time-dependent setting or in the treatment of problems with strongly singular solutions their independence of a mesh makes these methods highly attractive. This volume collects selected papers presented at the Sixth International Workshop on Meshfree Methods held in Bonn, Germany in October 2011. They address various aspects of this very active research field and cover topics from applied mathematics, physics and engineering.

MUSIC 2013 will be the most comprehensive text focused on the various aspects of Mobile, Ubiquitous and Intelligent computing. MUSIC 2013 provides an opportunity for academic and industry professionals to discuss the latest issues and progress in the area of intelligent technologies in mobile and ubiquitous computing environment. MUSIC 2013 is the next edition of the 3rd International Conference on Mobile, Ubiquitous, and Intelligent Computing (MUSIC-12, Vancouver, Canada, 2012) which was the next event in a series of highly successful International Workshop on Multimedia, Communication and Convergence technologies MCC-11 (Crete, Greece, June 2011), MCC-10 (Cebu, Philippines, August 2010).

The increasing complexity of telecommunication networks requires us to develop adequate mathematical models. We must find their characteristics, optimize them subject to chosen criteria, and develop the corresponding control algorithms. Multidimensional queueing models are used to design and optimize modern and next-generation networks (NGN). The central problem of the related mathematical theory is to apply multidimensional and large-size queueing models to improve efficiency. In this book new methods are successively developed and applied to solve related problems. The book is recommended for researchers engaged with the mathematical theory of telecommunications traffic.

From the reviews of the previous editions

..".. The book is a first class textbook and seems to be indispensable for everybody who has to teach combinatorial optimization. It is very helpful for students, teachers, and researchers in this area. The author finds a striking synthesis of nice and interesting mathematical results and practical applications. ... the author pays much attention to the inclusion of well-chosen exercises. The reader does not remain helpless; solutions or at least hints are given in the appendix. Except for some small basic mathematical and algorithmic knowledge the book is self-contained. ..." K.Engel, Mathematical Reviews 2002

The substantial development effort of this text, involving multiple editions and trailing in the context of various workshops, university courses and seminar series, clearly shows through in this new edition with its clear writing, good organisation, comprehensive coverage of essential theory, and well-chosen applications. The proofs of important results and the representation of key algorithms in a Pascal-like notation allow this book to be used in a high-level undergraduate or low-level graduate course on graph theory, combinatorial optimization or computer science algorithms. The well-worked solutions to exercises are a real bonus for self study by students. The book is highly recommended. P .B. Gibbons, Zentralblatt fur Mathematik 2005

Once again, the new edition has been thoroughly revised. In particular, some further material has been added: more on NP-completeness (especially on dominating sets), a section on the Gallai-Edmonds structure theory for matchings, and about a dozen additional exercises as always, with solutions. Moreover, the section on the 1-factor theorem has been completely rewritten: it now presents a short direct proof for the more general Berge-Tutte formula. Several recent research developments are discussed and quite a few references have been added."

This monograph describes the latest advances in discriminative learning methods for biometric recognition. Specifically, it focuses on three representative categories of methods: sparse representation-based classification, metric learning, and discriminative feature representation, together with their applications in palmprint authentication, face recognition and multi-biometrics. The ideas, algorithms, experimental evaluation and underlying rationales are also provided for a better understanding of these methods. Lastly, it discusses several promising research directions in the field of discriminative biometric recognition.

These are the proceedings of the 20th international conference on domain decomposition methods in science and engineering. Domain decomposition methods are iterative methods for solving the often very large linearor nonlinear systems of algebraic equations that arise when various problems in continuum mechanics are discretized using finite elements. They are designed for massively parallel computers and take the memory hierarchy of such systems in mind. This is essential for approaching peak floating point performance. There is an increasingly well developed theory whichis having a direct impact on the development and improvements of these algorithms.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the field of pattern mining with evolutionary algorithms. To do so, it covers formal definitions about patterns, patterns mining, type of patterns and the usefulness of patterns in the knowledge discovery process. As it is described within the book, the discovery process suffers from both high runtime and memory requirements, especially when high dimensional datasets are analyzed. To solve this issue, many pruning strategies have been developed. Nevertheless, with the growing interest in the storage of information, more and more datasets comprise such a dimensionality that the discovery of interesting patterns becomes a challenging process. In this regard, the use of evolutionary algorithms for mining pattern enables the computation capacity to be reduced, providing sufficiently good solutions. This book offers a survey on evolutionary computation with particular emphasis on genetic algorithms and genetic programming. Also included is an analysis of the set of quality measures most widely used in the field of pattern mining with evolutionary algorithms. This book serves as a review of the most important evolutionary algorithms for pattern mining. It considers the analysis of different algorithms for mining different type of patterns and relationships between patterns, such as frequent patterns, infrequent patterns, patterns defined in a continuous domain, or even positive and negative patterns. A completely new problem in the pattern mining field, mining of exceptional relationships between patterns, is discussed. In this problem the goal is to identify patterns which distribution is exceptionally different from the distribution in the complete set of data records. Finally, the book deals with the subgroup discovery task, a method to identify a subgroup of interesting patterns that is related to a dependent variable or target attribute. This subgroup of patterns satisfies two essential conditions: interpretability and interestingness.

As business paradigm shifts from a desktop-centric environment to a data-centric mobile environment, mobile services provide numerous new business opportunities, and in some cases, challenge some of the basic premises of existing business models.Strategy, Adoption, and Competitive Advantage of Mobile Services in the Global Economy seeks to foster a scientific understanding of mobile services, provide a timely publication of current research efforts, and forecast future trends in the mobile services industry. This book is an ideal resource for academics, researchers, government policymakers, as well as corporate managers looking to enhance their competitive edge in or understanding of mobile services.

This book provides a literature review of techniques used to pass from continuous to combinatorial space, before discussing a detailed example with individual steps of how cuckoo search (CS) can be adapted to solve combinatorial optimization problems. It demonstrates the application of CS to three different problems and describes their source code. The content is divided into five chapters, the first of which provides a technical description, together with examples of combinatorial search spaces. The second chapter summarizes a diverse range of methods used to solve combinatorial optimization problems. In turn, the third chapter presents a description of CS, its formulation and characteristics. In the fourth chapter, the application of discrete cuckoo search (DCS) to solve three POCs (the traveling salesman problem, quadratic assignment problem and job shop scheduling problem) is explained, focusing mainly on a reinterpretation of the terminology used in CS and its source of inspiration. In closing, the fifth chapter discusses random-key cuckoo search (RKCS) using random keys to represent positions found by cuckoo search in the TSP and QAP solution space.

High-speed, power-efficient analog integrated circuits can be used as standalone devices or to interface modern digital signal processors and micro-controllers in various applications, including multimedia, communication, instrumentation, and control systems. New architectures and low device geometry of complementary metaloxidesemiconductor (CMOS) technologies have accelerated the movement toward system on a chip design, which merges analog circuits with digital, and radio-frequency components.

This book presents selected peer-reviewed contributions from the International Work-Conference on Time Series, ITISE 2017, held in Granada, Spain, September 18-20, 2017. It discusses topics in time series analysis and forecasting, including advanced mathematical methodology, computational intelligence methods for time series, dimensionality reduction and similarity measures, econometric models, energy time series forecasting, forecasting in real problems, online learning in time series as well as high-dimensional and complex/big data time series. The series of ITISE conferences provides a forum for scientists, engineers, educators and students to discuss the latest ideas and implementations in the foundations, theory, models and applications in the field of time series analysis and forecasting. It focuses on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research encompassing computer science, mathematics, statistics and econometrics.

R is a powerful and free software system for data analysis and graphics, with over 5,000 add-on packages available. This book introduces R using SAS and SPSS terms with which you are already familiar. It demonstrates which of the add-on packages are most like SAS and SPSS and compares them to R's built-in functions. It steps through over 30 programs written in all three packages, comparing and contrasting the packages' differing approaches. The programs and practice datasets are available for download. The glossary defines over 50 R terms using SAS/SPSS jargon and again using R jargon. The table of contents and the index allow you to find equivalent R functions by looking up both SAS statements and SPSS commands. When finished, you will be able to import data, manage and transform it, create publication quality graphics, and perform basic statistical analyses. This new edition has updated programming, an expanded index, and even more statistical methods covered in over 25 new sections.

This volume of LNCSE is a collection of the papers from the proceedings of the third workshop on sparse grids and applications. Sparse grids are a popular approach for the numerical treatment of high-dimensional problems. Where classical numerical discretization schemes fail in more than three or four dimensions, sparse grids, in their different guises, are frequently the method of choice, be it spatially adaptive in the hierarchical basis or via the dimensionally adaptive combination technique. Demonstrating once again the importance of this numerical discretization scheme, the selected articles present recent advances on the numerical analysis of sparse grids as well as efficient data structures. The book also discusses a range of applications, including uncertainty quantification and plasma physics.

This book grew out of the Fourth Conference on Computers and the Writing process, held at the University of Sussex in March 1991. Fifteen refereed papers were selected from the conference and the authors were asked to develop them into chapters appropriate for this book, incorporating insights gained from their conference presentations. The book covers all aspects of computers and the writing process, including computer-based collaborative writing, hypertext, computers and writing education, computer and professional authors, evaluation of computer-based writing, computers and technical writing, and computer supported fiction. The resulting collection provides an up-to-date cross-section of this increasingly important interdisciplinary topic - with computer, cognitive and educational perspectives covered. The book will be of interest to workers and researchers in language, cognition and computer science; especially those interested in hypermedia, human - computer interaction and cooperative technologies.

Social insects such as ants and termites can be viewed as powerful problem-solving systems with sophisticated collective intelligence. Composed of simple interacting agents, this intelligence lies in the networks of interactions among individuals and between individuals and the environment. Social insects are also a powerful metaphor for artificial intelligence. The problems they solve - for instance, finding food, dividing labor among nestmates, building nests, and responding to external challenges - have important counterparts in engineering and computer science. This book provides a detailed look at models of social insect behaviour and how these can be applied in the design of complex systems. It draws upon a complementary blend of biology and computer science, including artificial intelligence, robotics, operations research, informationdisplay, and computer graphics. The book should appeal to a broadly interdisciplinary audience of modellers, engineers, neuroscientists, and computer scientists, as well as some biologists and ecologists.

The book covers various topics of computer algebra methods, algorithms and software applied to scientific computing. An important topic presented in the book, which may be of interest to researchers and engineers, is the application of computer algebra methods to the development of new efficient analytic and numerical solvers, both for ordinary and partial differential equations. A specific feature of the book is an intense use of advanced software systems such as Mathematica, Maple etc. for the solution of problems as outlined above and for the industrial application of computer algebra for simulation. The book will be useful for researchers and engineers who apply advanced computer algebra methods for the solution of their problems.

This book explores the two major elements of Hintikka's model of inquiry: underlying game theoretical motivations and the central role of questioning. The chapters build on the Hintikkan tradition extending Hintikka's model and present a wide variety of approaches to the philosophy of inquiry from different directions, ranging from erotetic logic to Lakatosian philosophy, from socio-epistemologic approaches to strategic reasoning and mathematical practice. Hintikka's theory of inquiry is a well-known example of a dynamic epistemic procedure. In an interrogative inquiry, the inquirer is given a theory and a question. He then tries to answer the question based on the theory by posing questions to nature or an oracle. The initial formulation of this procedure by Hintikka is rather broad and informal. This volume introduces a carefully selected responses to the issues discussed by Hintikka. The articles in the volume were contributed by various authors associated with a research project on Hintikka's interrogative theory of inquiry conducted in the Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (IHPST) of Paris, including those who visited to share their insight.

Pursuing an interdisciplinary approach, this book offers detailed insights into the empirical relationships between overall social key figures of states and cultures in the fields of information and communication technology (ICT) (digital divide/inequality), the economy, education and religion. Its goal is to bridge the 'cultural gap' between computer scientists, engineers, economists, social and political scientists by providing a mutual understanding of the essential challenges posed and opportunities offered by a global information and knowledge society. In a sense, the historically unprecedented technical advances in the field of ICT are shaping humanity at different levels and forming a hybrid (intelligent) human-technology system, a so-called global superorganism. The main innovation is the combined study of digitization and globalization in the context of growing social inequalities, collapse, and sustainable development, and how a convergence towards a kind of global culture could take place. Accordingly, the book discusses the spread of ICT, Internet Governance, the balance between the central concentration of power and the extent of decentralized power distribution, the inclusion or exclusion of people and states in global communication processes, and the capacity for global empathy or culture.