This monograph deals with various visibility-based path and motion planning problems motivated by real-world applications such as exploration and mapping planetary surfaces, environmental surveillance using stationary or mobile robots, and imaging of global air/pollutant circulation. The formulation and solution of these problems call for concepts and methods from many areas of applied mathematics including computational geometry, set-covering, non-smooth optimization, combinatorial optimization and optimal control. Emphasis is placed on the formulation of new problems and methods of approach to these problems. Since geometry and visualization play important roles in the understanding of these problems, intuitive interpretations of the basic concepts are presented before detailed mathematical development. The development of a particular topic begins with simple cases illustrated by specific examples, and then progresses forward to more complex cases. The intended readers of this monograph are primarily students and researchers in engineering, computer science and applied mathematics. An understanding of the mathematical development of the main results requires only basic knowledge of mathematical analysis, control, and optimization theories. Some exercises with various degrees of difficulty are provided at the end of the main chapters. The material presented here may serve as a portion of an introductory course or seminar on visibility-based optimal path and motion planning problems with the objective of stimulating interest and further studies in this relatively new area.

This fascinating, colourful book offers in-depth insights and first-hand working experiences in the production of art works, using simple computational models with rich morphological behaviour, at the edge of mathematics, computer science, physics and biology. It organically combines ground breaking scientific discoveries in the theory of computation and complex systems with artistic representations of the research results. In this appealing book mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, and engineers brought together marvelous and esoteric patterns generated by cellular automata, which are arrays of simple machines with complex behavior. Configurations produced by cellular automata uncover mechanics of dynamic patterns formation, their propagation and interaction in natural systems: heart pacemaker, bacterial membrane proteins, chemical rectors, water permeation in soil, compressed gas, cell division, population dynamics, reaction-diffusion media and self-organisation. The book inspires artists to take on cellular automata as a tool of creativity and it persuades scientists to convert their research results into the works of art. The book is lavishly illustrated with visually attractive examples, presented in a lively and easily accessible manner.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Professor Zdzis{\l}aw Pawlak who passed away almost six year ago. He is the founder of the Polish school of Artificial Intelligence and one of the pioneers in Computer Engineering and Computer Science with worldwide influence. He was a truly great scientist, researcher, teacher and a human being. This book prepared in two volumes contains more than 50 chapters. This demonstrates that the scientific approaches discovered by of Professor Zdzis{\l}aw Pawlak, especially the rough set approach as a tool for dealing with imperfect knowledge, are vivid and intensively explored by many researchers in many places throughout the world. The submitted papers prove that interest in rough set research is growing and is possible to see many new excellent results both on theoretical foundations and applications of rough sets alone or in combination with other approaches. We are proud to offer the readers this book.

This volume introduces new approaches in intelligent control area from both the viewpoints of theory and application. It consists of eleven contributions by prominent authors from all over the world and an introductory chapter. This volume is strongly connected to another volume entitled "New Approaches in Intelligent Image Analysis" (Eds. Roumen Kountchev and Kazumi Nakamatsu). The chapters of this volume are self-contained and include summary, conclusion and future works. Some of the chapters introduce specific case studies of various intelligent control systems and others focus on intelligent theory based control techniques with applications. A remarkable specificity of this volume is that three chapters are dealing with intelligent control based on paraconsistent logics.

There isn't a facet of human life that has not been touched and influenced by robots and automation. What makes robots and machines versatile is their computational intelligence. While modern intelligent sensors and powerful hardware capabilities have given a huge fillip to the growth of intelligent machines, the progress in the development of algorithms for smart interaction, collaboration and pro-activeness will result in the next quantum jump.

This book deals with the recent advancements in design methodologies, algorithms and implementation techniques to incorporate intelligence in "robots and automation systems." Several articles deal with navigation, localization and mapping of mobile robots, a problem that engineers and researchers are grappling with all the time. Fuzzy logic, neural networks and neuro-fuzzy based techniques for real world applications have been detailed in a few articles.

This edited volume is targeted to present the latest state-of-the-art computational intelligence techniques in Robotics and Automation. It is a compilation of the extended versions of the very best papers selected from the many that were presented at the 5th International Conference on Automation, Robotics and Applications (ICARA 2011) which was held in Wellington, New Zealand from 6-8 December, 2011. Scientists and engineers who work with robots and automation systems will find this book very useful and stimulating.

This book is an authoritative handbook of current topics, technologies and methodological approaches that may be used for the study of scholarly impact. The included methods cover a range of fields such as statistical sciences, scientific visualization, network analysis, text mining, and information retrieval. The techniques and tools enable researchers to investigate metric phenomena and to assess scholarly impact in new ways. Each chapter offers an introduction to the selected topic and outlines how the topic, technology or methodological approach may be applied to metrics-related research. Comprehensive and up-to-date, Measuring Scholarly Impact: Methods and Practice is designed for researchers and scholars interested in informetrics, scientometrics, and text mining. The hands-on perspective is also beneficial to advanced-level students in fields from computer science and statistics to information science.

Complex Automated Negotiations represent an important, emerging area in the field of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. Automated negotiations can be complex, since there are a lot of factors that characterize such negotiations. These factors include the number of issues, dependencies between these issues, representation of utilities, the negotiation protocol, the number of parties in the negotiation (bilateral or multi-party), time constraints, etc. Software agents can support automation or simulation of such complex negotiations on the behalf of their owners, and can provide them with efficient bargaining strategies. To realize such a complex automated negotiation, we have to incorporate advanced Artificial Intelligence technologies includes search, CSP, graphical utility models, Bayes nets, auctions, utility graphs, predicting and learning methods. Applications could include e-commerce tools, decision-making support tools, negotiation support tools, collaboration tools, etc. This book aims to provide a description of the new trends in Agent-based, Complex Automated Negotiation, based on the papers from leading researchers. Moreover, it gives an overview of the latest scientific efforts in this field, such as the platform and strategies of automated negotiating techniques.

This book presents innovative and high-quality research regarding the implementation of Semantic Web technologies for knowledge representation and developing intelligent applications in various domains. Semantic Web technologies have inspired many people to create innovative technologies and applications for knowledge representation, Semantic Searches, NLP and Social Networks. The goal of this book is to collect and consolidate novel and high-quality research contributions on Semantic Web technologies and their theoretical and practical application to a range of different domains. In addition to researchers, the book offers a valuable resource for PhD students, master and undergraduate students in IT-related fields such as Computer Science and Information Systems.

This book examines recent methods for data-driven fault diagnosis of multimode continuous processes. It formalizes, generalizes, and systematically presents the main concepts, and approaches required to design fault diagnosis methods for multimode continuous processes. The book provides both theoretical and practical tools to help readers address the fault diagnosis problem by drawing data-driven methods from at least three different areas: statistics, unsupervised, and supervised learning.

The recommendation of products, content and services cannot be considered newly born, although its widespread application is still in full swing. While its growing success in numerous sectors, the progress of the Social Web has revolutionized the architecture of participation and relationship in the Web, making it necessary to restate recommendation and reconciling it with "Collaborative Tagging," as the popularization of authoring in the Web, and "Social Networking," as the translation of personal relationships to the Web. Precisely, the convergence of recommendation with the above "Social Web" pillars is what motivates this book, which has collected contributions from well-known experts in the academy and the industry to provide a broader view of the problems that "Social Recommenders" might face with. If recommender systems have proven their key role in facilitating the user access to resources on the Web, when sharing resources has become social, it is natural for recommendation strategies in the Social Web era take into account the users' point of view and the relationships among users to calculate their predictions. This book aims to help readers to discover and understand the interplay among legal issues such as privacy; technical aspects such as interoperability and scalability; and social aspects such as the influence of affinity, trust, reputation and likeness, when the goal is to offer recommendations that are truly useful to both the user and the provider."

This book develops a coherent and quite general theoretical approach to algorithm design for iterative learning control based on the use of operator representations and quadratic optimization concepts including the related ideas of inverse model control and gradient-based design. Using detailed examples taken from linear, discrete and continuous-time systems, the author gives the reader access to theories based on either signal or parameter optimization. Although the two approaches are shown to be related in a formal mathematical sense, the text presents them separately as their relevant algorithm design issues are distinct and give rise to different performance capabilities. Together with algorithm design, the text demonstrates the underlying robustness of the paradigm and also includes new control laws that are capable of incorporating input and output constraints, enable the algorithm to reconfigure systematically in order to meet the requirements of different reference and auxiliary signals and also to support new properties such as spectral annihilation. Iterative Learning Control will interest academics and graduate students working in control who will find it a useful reference to the current status of a powerful and increasingly popular method of control. The depth of background theory and links to practical systems will be of use to engineers responsible for precision repetitive processes.

This volume constitutes the refereed and revised post-conference proceedings of the 4th IFIP TC 5 DCITDRR International Conference on Information Technology in Disaster Risk Reduction, ITDRR 2019, in Kyiv, Ukraine, in October 2019. The 17 full papers and 2 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 53 submissions. The papers focus on various aspects and challenges of coping with disaster risk reduction. The main topics include areas such as natural disasters, big data, cloud computing, Internet of Things, mobile computing, emergency management, disaster information processing, and disaster risk assessment and management.

The rise of technology has led to rapid developments in robotic intelligence and its various applications. The success or failure of these systems is linked closely with effective perception and cognition models. Aligning Perceptual and Conceptual Information for Cognitive Contextual System Development: Emerging Research and Opportunities is an innovative source of academic content on approaches to cognitive and perceptual systems development in artificial intelligence. Including a range of relevant topics such as object processing, implicit symbols, and knowledge representation, this book is ideally designed for engineers, academics, practitioners, and students interested in perceptual and conceptual interpretation in artificial intelligence.

The need of video compression in the modern age of visual communication cannot be over-emphasized. This monograph will provide useful information to the postgraduate students and researchers who wish to work in the domain of VLSI design for video processing applications. In this book, one can find an in-depth discussion of several motion estimation algorithms and their VLSI implementation as conceived and developed by the authors. It records an account of research done involving fast three step search, successive elimination, one-bit transformation and its effective combination with diamond search and dynamic pixel truncation techniques. Two appendices provide a number of instances of proof of concept through Matlab and Verilog program segments. In this aspect, the book can be considered as first of its kind. The architectures have been developed with an eye to their applicability in everyday low-power handheld appliances including video camcorders and smartphones.

This book explores various renewal processes in the context of probability theory, uncertainty theory and chance theory. It also covers the applications of these renewal processes in maintenance models and insurance risk models. The methods used to derive the limit of the renewal rate, the reward rate, and the availability rate are of particular interest, as they can easily be extended to the derivation of other models. Its comprehensive and systematic treatment of renewal processes, renewal reward processes and the alternating renewal process is one of the book's major features, making it particularly valuable for readers who are interested in learning about renewal theory. Given its scope, the book will benefit researchers, engineers, and graduate students in the fields of mathematics, information science, operations research, industrial engineering, etc.

This book introduces three key issues: (i) development of a gradient-free method to enable multi-objective self-optimization; (ii) development of a reinforcement learning strategy to carry out self-learning and finally, (iii) experimental evaluation and validation in two micromachining processes (i.e., micro-milling and micro-drilling). The computational architecture (modular, network and reconfigurable for real-time monitoring and control) takes into account the analysis of different types of sensors, processing strategies and methodologies for extracting behavior patterns from representative process' signals. The reconfiguration capability and portability of this architecture are supported by two major levels: the cognitive level (core) and the executive level (direct data exchange with the process). At the same time, the architecture includes different operating modes that interact with the process to be monitored and/or controlled. The cognitive level includes three fundamental modes such as modeling, optimization and learning, which are necessary for decision-making (in the form of control signals) and for the real-time experimental characterization of complex processes. In the specific case of the micromachining processes, a series of models based on linear regression, nonlinear regression and artificial intelligence techniques were obtained. On the other hand, the executive level has a constant interaction with the process to be monitored and/or controlled. This level receives the configuration and parameterization from the cognitive level to perform the desired monitoring and control tasks.

The book reports on the latest advances and applications of nonlinear control systems. It consists of 30 contributed chapters by subject experts who are specialized in the various topics addressed in this book. The special chapters have been brought out in the broad areas of nonlinear control systems such as robotics, nonlinear circuits, power systems, memristors, underwater vehicles, chemical processes, observer design, output regulation, backstepping control, sliding mode control, time-delayed control, variables structure control, robust adaptive control, fuzzy logic control, chaos, hyperchaos, jerk systems, hyperjerk systems, chaos control, chaos synchronization, etc. Special importance was given to chapters offering practical solutions, modeling and novel control methods for the recent research problems in nonlinear control systems. This book will serve as a reference book for graduate students and researchers with a basic knowledge of electrical and control systems engineering. The resulting design procedures on the nonlinear control systems are emphasized using MATLAB software.

This volume contains a contemporary, integrated description of the processes of language. These range from fast scales (fractions of a second) to slow ones (over a million years). The contributors, all experts in their fields, address language in the brain, production of sentences and dialogues, language learning, transmission and evolutionary processes that happen over centuries or millenia, the relation between language and genes, the origins of language, self-organization, and language competition and death. The book as a whole will help to show how processes at different scales affect each other, thus presenting language as a dynamic, complex and profoundly human phenomenon.

This book focuses on crisis management in software development which includes forecasting, responding and adaptive engineering models, methods, patterns and practices. It helps the stakeholders in understanding and identifying the key technology, business and human factors that may result in a software production crisis. These factors are particularly important for the enterprise-scale applications, typically considered very complex in managerial and technological aspects and therefore, specifically addressed by the discipline of software engineering. Therefore, this book throws light on the crisis responsive, resilient methodologies and practices; therewith, it also focuses on their evolutionary changes and the resulting benefits.

In the mid 1990s, Tim Berners-Lee had the idea of developing the World Wide Web into a "Semantic Web", a web of information that could be interpreted by machines in order to allow the automatic exploitation of data, which until then had to be done by humans manually. One of the first people to research topics related to the Semantic Web was Professor Rudi Studer. From the beginning, Rudi drove projects like ONTOBROKER and On-to-Knowledge, which later resulted in W3C standards such as RDF and OWL. By the late 1990s, Rudi had established a research group at the University of Karlsruhe, which later became the nucleus and breeding ground for Semantic Web research, and many of today's well-known research groups were either founded by his disciples or benefited from close cooperation with this think tank. In this book, published in celebration of Rudi's 60th birthday, many of his colleagues look back on the main research results achieved during the last 20 years. Under the editorship of Dieter Fensel, once one of Rudi's early PhD students, an impressive list of contributors and contributions has been collected, covering areas like Knowledge Management, Ontology Engineering, Service Management, and Semantic Search. Overall, this book provides an excellent overview of the state of the art in Semantic Web research, by combining historical roots with the latest results, which may finally make the dream of a "Web of knowledge, software and services" come true.

Recent advancements in the field of telecommunications, medical imaging and signal processing deal with signals that are inherently time varying, nonlinear and complex-valued. The time varying, nonlinear characteristics of these signals can be effectively analyzed using artificial neural networks. Furthermore, to efficiently preserve the physical characteristics of these complex-valued signals, it is important to develop complex-valued neural networks and derive their learning algorithms to represent these signals at every step of the learning process. This monograph comprises a collection of new supervised learning algorithms along with novel architectures for complex-valued neural networks. The concepts of meta-cognition equipped with a self-regulated learning have been known to be the best human learning strategy. In this monograph, the principles of meta-cognition have been introduced for complex-valued neural networks in both the batch and sequential learning modes. For applications where the computation time of the training process is critical, a fast learning complex-valued neural network called as a fully complex-valued relaxation network along with its learning algorithm has been presented. The presence of orthogonal decision boundaries helps complex-valued neural networks to outperform real-valued networks in performing classification tasks. This aspect has been highlighted. The performances of various complex-valued neural networks are evaluated on a set of benchmark and real-world function approximation and real-valued classification problems.

This book covers the latest advances in Big Data technologies and provides the readers with a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art in Big Data processing, analysis, analytics, and other related topics. It presents new models, algorithms, software solutions and methodologies, covering the full data cycle, from data gathering to their visualization and interaction, and includes a set of case studies and best practices. New research issues, challenges and opportunities shaping the future agenda in the field of Big Data are also identified and presented throughout the book, which is intended for researchers, scholars, advanced students, software developers and practitioners working at the forefront in their field.

This book provides a description of advanced multi-agent and artificial intelligence technologies for the modeling and simulation of complex systems, as well as an overview of the latest scientific efforts in this field. A complex system features a large number of interacting components, whose aggregate activities are nonlinear and self-organized. A multi-agent system is a group or society of agents which interact with others cooperatively and/or competitively in order to reach their individual or common goals. Multi-agent systems are suitable for modeling and simulation of complex systems, which is difficult to accomplish using traditional computational approaches.

One of the most successful methodology that arose from the worldwide diffusion of Fuzzy Logic is Fuzzy Control. After the first attempts dated in the seventies, this methodology has been widely exploited for controlling many industrial components and systems. At the same time, and very independently from Fuzzy Logic or Fuzzy Control, the birth of the Web has impacted upon almost all aspects of computing discipline. Evolution of Web, Web2.0 and Web 3.0 has been making scenarios of ubiquitous computing much more feasible; consequently information technology has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities.

What happens when Fuzzy Logic meets Web technology? Interesting results might come out, as you will discover in this book. Fuzzy Mark-up Language is a son of this synergistic view, where some technological issues of Web are re-interpreted taking into account the transparent notion of Fuzzy Control, as discussed here. The concept of a Fuzzy Control that is conceived and modeled in terms of a native web wisdom represents another step towards the last picture of Pervasive Web Intelligence.