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 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.

This book presents multibiometric watermarking techniques for security of biometric data. This book also covers transform domain multibiometric watermarking techniques and their advantages and limitations. The authors have developed novel watermarking techniques with a combination of Compressive Sensing (CS) theory for the security of biometric data at the system database of the biometric system. The authors show how these techniques offer higher robustness, authenticity, better imperceptibility, increased payload capacity, and secure biometric watermarks. They show how to use the CS theory for the security of biometric watermarks before embedding into the host biometric data. The suggested methods may find potential applications in the security of biometric data at various banking applications, access control of laboratories, nuclear power stations, military base, and airports.

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 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.

This book presents a compilation of the most recent implementation of artificial intelligence methods for solving different problems generated by the COVID-19. The problems addressed came from different fields and not only from medicine. The information contained in the book explores different areas of machine and deep learning, advanced image processing, computational intelligence, IoT, robotics and automation, optimization, mathematical modeling, neural networks, information technology, big data, data processing, data mining, and likewise. Moreover, the chapters include the theory and methodologies used to provide an overview of applying these tools to the useful contribution to help to face the emerging disaster. The book is primarily intended for researchers, decision makers, practitioners, and readers interested in these subject matters. The book is useful also as rich case studies and project proposals for postgraduate courses in those specializations.

This volume presents the first part of the proceedings of the Mediterranean Conference on Information & Communication Technologies (MedICT 2015), which was held at Saidia, Morocco during 7-9 May, 2015. MedICT provides an excellent international forum to the researchers and practitioners from both academia as well as industry to meet and share cutting-edge development. The conference has also a special focus on enabling technologies for societal challenges, and seeks to address multidisciplinary challenges in Information & Communication Technologies such as health, demographic change, wellbeing, security and sustainability issues. The proceedings publish high quality papers which are closely related to the various theories, as well as emerging and practical applications of particular interest to the ICT community. This first volume provides a compact yet broad view of recent developments in devices, technologies and processing, and covers recent research areas in the field including Microwave Devices and Printed Antennas, Advances in Optical and RF Devices and Applications, Signal Processing and Information Theory, Wireless and Optical Technologies and Techniques, Computer Vision, Optimization and Modeling in Wireless Communication Systems, Modeling, Identification and Biomedical Signal Processing, Photovoltaic Cell & Systems, RF Devices and Antennas for Wireless Applications, RFID, Ad Hoc and Networks Issues.

While high quality library and information services continue to thrive and strengthen economic and social development, much of the knowledge that exists on user's needs and behaviours is fundamentally based on the results of users in English-speaking, western developed countries. Information Access and Library User Needs in Developing Countries highlights the struggles that developing countries face in terms of information gaps and information-seeking user behaviour. The publication highlights ways in which users in developing countries can benefit from properly implementing LIS services. Researchers, academics, and practitioners interested in the design and delivery of information services will benefit from this collection of research.

This book presents the latest research on the statistical analysis of functional, high-dimensional and other complex data, addressing methodological and computational aspects, as well as real-world applications. It covers topics like classification, confidence bands, density estimation, depth, diagnostic tests, dimension reduction, estimation on manifolds, high- and infinite-dimensional statistics, inference on functional data, networks, operatorial statistics, prediction, regression, robustness, sequential learning, small-ball probability, smoothing, spatial data, testing, and topological object data analysis, and includes applications in automobile engineering, criminology, drawing recognition, economics, environmetrics, medicine, mobile phone data, spectrometrics and urban environments. The book gathers selected, refereed contributions presented at the Fifth International Workshop on Functional and Operatorial Statistics (IWFOS) in Brno, Czech Republic. The workshop was originally to be held on June 24-26, 2020, but had to be postponed as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Initiated by the Working Group on Functional and Operatorial Statistics at the University of Toulouse in 2008, the IWFOS workshops provide a forum to discuss the latest trends and advances in functional statistics and related fields, and foster the exchange of ideas and international collaboration in the field.

This book intersects the distributed ledger technology (DLT) community with the international security community. Given the increasing application of blockchain technology in the fields of business and international development, there is a growing body of study on other use cases. For instance, can blockchain have a significant role in preserving and improving international security? This book explores this question in the context of preventing the proliferation of some of the most dangerous materials in the world-items that if not secured can lend to the development of weapons of mass destruction. It considers how blockchain can increase efficiencies in the global trade of nuclear and chemical materials and technology, thereby increasing assurances related to compliance with international nonproliferation and disarmament treaties.

Managers today are experiencing an increased focus on emergent collaborative technologies designed to enable virtual organization users to share resources and accomplish complex tasks better. Grid Technology for Maximizing Collaborative Decision Management and Support: Advancing Effective Virtual Organizations provides a state-of-the-art collection of opportunities and applicable practices of grid technology to sustain competitive advantage. Offering a collection of international research studies by leading experts, this book describes how grid technology can be applied to serve the purpose within interconnected organizations in an effective and efficient collaborative setting.

This volume presents the second part of the proceedings of the Mediterranean Conference on Information & Communication Technologies (MedICT 2015), which was held at Saidia, Morocco during 7-9 May, 2015. MedICT provides an excellent international forum to the researchers and practitioners from both academia as well as industry to meet and share cutting-edge development. The conference has also a special focus on enabling technologies for societal challenges, and seeks to address multidisciplinary challenges in Information & Communication Technologies such as health, demographic change, wellbeing, security and sustainability issues. The proceedings publish high quality papers which are closely related to the various theories, as well as emerging and practical applications of particular interest to the ICT community. This second volume provides a compact yet broad view of recent developments in Data, Systems, Services and Education, and covers recent research areas in the field including Control Systems, Software Engineering, Data Mining and Big Data, ICT for Education and Support Activities, Networking, Cloud Computing and Security, ICT Based Services and Applications, Mobile Agent Systems, Software Engineering, Data Mining and Big Data, Online Experimentation & Artificial Intelligence in Education, Networking, Cloud Computing and Security, ICT Based Education and Services ICT Challenges and Applications, Advances in ICT Modeling and Design ICT Developments.

This uniquely accessible book helps readers use CABology to solve real-world business problems and drive real competitive advantage. It provides reliable, concise information on the real benefits, usage and operationalization aspects of utilizing the "Trio Wave" of cloud, analytic and big data. Anyone who thinks that the game changing technology is slow paced needs to think again. This book opens readers' eyes to the fact that the dynamics of global technology and business are changing. Moreover, it argues that businesses must transform themselves in alignment with the Trio Wave if they want to survive and excel in the future. CABology focuses on the art and science of optimizing the business goals to deliver true value and benefits to the customer through cloud, analytic and big data. It offers business of all sizes a structured and comprehensive way of discovering the real benefits, usage and operationalization aspects of utilizing the Trio Wave.

This book provides an overview of the problems involved in engineering scalable, elastic, and cost-efficient cloud computing services and describes the CloudScale method - a description of rescuing tools and the required steps to exploit these tools. It allows readers to analyze the scalability problem in detail and identify scalability anti-patterns and bottlenecks within an application. With the CloudScale method, software architects can analyze both existing and planned IT services. The method allows readers to answer questions like: * With an increasing number of users, can my service still deliver acceptable quality of service? * What if each user uses the service more intensively? Can my service still handle it with acceptable quality of service? * What if the number of users suddenly increases? Will my service still be able to handle it? * Will my service be cost-efficient? First the book addresses the importance of scalability, elasticity, and cost-efficiency as vital quality-related attributes of modern cloud computing applications. Following a brief overview of CloudScale, cloud computing applications are then introduced in detail and the aspects that need to be captured in models of such applications are discussed. In CloudScale, these aspects are captured in instances of the ScaleDL modeling language. Subsequently, the book describes the forward engineering part of CloudScale, which is applicable when developing a new service. It also outlines the reverse and reengineering parts of CloudScale, which come into play when an existing (legacy) service is modified. Lastly, the book directly focuses on the needs of both business-oriented and technical managers by providing guidance on all steps of implementing CloudScale as well as making decisions during that implementation. The demonstrators and reference projects described serve as a valuable starting point for learning from experience. This book is meant for all stakeholders interested in delivering scalable, elastic, and cost-efficient cloud computing applications: managers, product owners, software architects and developers alike. With this book, they can both see the overall picture as well as dive into issues of particular interest.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th IFIP WG 2.13 International Conference on Open Source Systems, OSS 2018, held in Athens, Greece, in June 2018. The 14 revised full papers and 2 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics in the field of free/libre open source software (FLOSS) and are organized in the following thematic sections: organizational aspects of OSS projects, OSS projects validity, mining OSS data, OSS in public administration, OSS governance, and OSS reusability.

This two-volume set of IFIP AICT 617 and 618 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IFIP WG 8.6 International Working Conference "Re-imagining Diffusion and Adoption of Information Technology and Systems: A Continuing Conversation" on Transfer and Diffusion of IT, TDIT 2020, held in Tiruchirappalli, India, in December 2020.The 86 revised full papers and 36 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 224 submissions. The papers focus on the re-imagination of diffusion and adoption of emerging technologies. They are organized in the following parts: Part I: artificial intelligence and autonomous systems; big data and analytics; blockchain; diffusion and adoption technology; emerging technologies in e-Governance; emerging technologies in consumer decision making and choice; fin-tech applications; healthcare information technology; and Internet of Things Part II: information technology and disaster management; adoption of mobile and platform-based applications; smart cities and digital government; social media; and diffusion of information technology and systems

This handbook provides comprehensive knowledge and includes an overview of the current state-of-the-art of Big Data Privacy, with chapters written by international world leaders from academia and industry working in this field. The first part of this book offers a review of security challenges in critical infrastructure and offers methods that utilize acritical intelligence (AI) techniques to overcome those issues. It then focuses on big data security and privacy issues in relation to developments in the Industry 4.0. Internet of Things (IoT) devices are becoming a major source of security and privacy concern in big data platforms. Multiple solutions that leverage machine learning for addressing security and privacy issues in IoT environments are also discussed this handbook. The second part of this handbook is focused on privacy and security issues in different layers of big data systems. It discusses about methods for evaluating security and privacy of big data systems on network, application and physical layers. This handbook elaborates on existing methods to use data analytic and AI techniques at different layers of big data platforms to identify privacy and security attacks. The final part of this handbook is focused on analyzing cyber threats applicable to the big data environments. It offers an in-depth review of attacks applicable to big data platforms in smart grids, smart farming, FinTech, and health sectors. Multiple solutions are presented to detect, prevent and analyze cyber-attacks and assess the impact of malicious payloads to those environments. This handbook provides information for security and privacy experts in most areas of big data including; FinTech, Industry 4.0, Internet of Things, Smart Grids, Smart Farming and more. Experts working in big data, privacy, security, forensics, malware analysis, machine learning and data analysts will find this handbook useful as a reference. Researchers and advanced-level computer science students focused on computer systems, Internet of Things, Smart Grid, Smart Farming, Industry 4.0 and network analysts will also find this handbook useful as a reference.

This book presents the current trends, technologies, and challenges in Big Data in the diversified field of engineering and sciences. It covers the applications of Big Data ranging from conventional fields of mechanical engineering, civil engineering to electronics, electrical, and computer science to areas in pharmaceutical and biological sciences. This book consists of contributions from various authors from all sectors of academia and industries, demonstrating the imperative application of Big Data for the decision-making process in sectors where the volume, variety, and velocity of information keep increasing. The book is a useful reference for graduate students, researchers and scientists interested in exploring the potential of Big Data in the application of engineering areas.

This book explains the fundamentals of control theory for Internet of Things (IoT) systems and smart grids and its applications. It discusses the challenges imposed by large-scale systems, and describes the current and future trends and challenges in decision-making for IoT in detail, showing the ongoing industrial and academic research in the field of smart grid domain applications. It presents step-by-step design guidelines for the modeling, design, customisation and calibration of IoT systems applied to smart grids, in which the challenges increase with each system's increasing complexity. It also provides solutions and detailed examples to demonstrate how to use the techniques to overcome these challenges, as well as other problems related to decision-making for successful implementation. Further, it anaylses the features of decision-making, such as low-complexity and fault-tolerance, and uses open-source and publicly available software tools to show readers how they can design, implement and customise their own system control instantiations. This book is a valuable resource for power engineers and researchers, as it addresses the analysis and design of flexible decision-making mechanisms for smart grids. It is also of interest to students on courses related to control of large-scale systems, since it covers the use of state-of-the-art technology with examples and solutions in every chapter. And last but not least, it offers practical advice for professionals working with smart grids.

The aim of this book is to provide some useful methods to improve the spectrum sensing performance in a systematic way, and point out an effective method for the application of cognitive radio technology in wireless communications. The book gives a a state-of-the-art survey and proposes some new cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) methods attempting to achieve better performance. For each CSS, the main idea and corresponding algorithm design are elaborated in detail. This book covers the fundamental concepts and the core technologies of CSS, especially its latest developments. Each chapter is presented in a self-sufficient and independent way so that the reader can select the chapters interesting to them. The methodologies are described in detail so that the readers can repeat the corresponding experiments easily. It will be a useful book for researchers helping them to understand the classifications of CSS, inspiring new ideas about the novel CSS technology for CR, and learning new ideas from the current status of CSS. For engineers, it will be a good guidebook to develop practical applications for CSS.

Data science has been playing a vital role in almost all major fields. Many researchers are interested in the development of IT applications, which are user-driven with a focus on issues. This can be addressed using data science. User-driven research and data science have gained much attention from many private, public, and government organizations and research institutions. The Handbook of Research on Designing User Interfaces With a Data Science Approach promotes the inclusion of more diversified users for user-centered designs of applications across domains and analyzes user data with a data science approach for effective and user-friendly user interface designs. It introduces the foundations of advanced topics of human-computer interaction, particularly with user-centered designs and techniques. Covering topics such as artificial neural networks, natural dialog systems, and machine learning, this book is an essential resource for faculty, research scholars, industry professionals, students of higher education, mathematicians, data scientists, interaction designers, visual designers, software engineers, user experience researchers, accessibility engineers, cognitive system engineers, academicians, and libraries.

This textbook is the first of its kind to comprehensively describe the energy Internet, a vast network that efficiently supplies electricity to anyone anywhere and is an internet based wide area network for information and energy fusion. The chapters are organized into five parts: Architecture and Design, Energy Switching and Routing, Information and Communication, Energy Management Systems and Energy Market and Trading, and capture the spectrum of this exponential transformation, while also presenting the plethora of open problems that this transformation poses for researchers from mixed academic backgrounds. The scope includes key technologies on distributed energy sources, microgrids, energy storage, solar and wind energy, power grid, smart grid, power quality, power electronics, data centers, distributed computing and networking, cloud computing and big data, and software-defined networking. The book presents the basic principles of energy internet and emphasizes the current research trends in the field of energy Internet at an advanced level. It includes instructor materials, case-studies, and worked examples throughout. This is an ideal resource for students in advanced graduate-level courses and special topics in energy, information and control systems, and is a useful tool for utility engineers who seek an intuitive understanding of the emerging applications of energy Internet.

This book is used at the graduate or advanced undergraduate level and many others. Manned and unmanned ground, aerial and marine vehicles enable many promising and revolutionary civilian and military applications that will change our life in the near future. These applications include, but are not limited to, surveillance, search and rescue, environment monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, self-driving cars, contactless last-mile delivery vehicles, autonomous ships, precision agriculture and transmission line inspection to name just a few. These vehicles will benefit from advances of deep learning as a subfield of machine learning able to endow these vehicles with different capability such as perception, situation awareness, planning and intelligent control. Deep learning models also have the ability to generate actionable insights into the complex structures of large data sets. In recent years, deep learning research has received an increasing amount of attention from researchers in academia, government laboratories and industry. These research activities have borne some fruit in tackling some of the challenging problems of manned and unmanned ground, aerial and marine vehicles that are still open. Moreover, deep learning methods have been recently actively developed in other areas of machine learning, including reinforcement training and transfer/meta-learning, whereas standard, deep learning methods such as recent neural network (RNN) and coevolutionary neural networks (CNN). The book is primarily meant for researchers from academia and industry, who are working on in the research areas such as engineering, control engineering, robotics, mechatronics, biomedical engineering, mechanical engineering and computer science. The book chapters deal with the recent research problems in the areas of reinforcement learning-based control of UAVs and deep learning for unmanned aerial systems (UAS) The book chapters present various techniques of deep learning for robotic applications. The book chapters contain a good literature survey with a long list of references. The book chapters are well written with a good exposition of the research problem, methodology, block diagrams and mathematical techniques. The book chapters are lucidly illustrated with numerical examples and simulations. The book chapters discuss details of applications and future research areas.