Intelligent systems are now being used more commonly than in the past. These involve cognitive, evolving and artificial-life, robotic, and decision making systems, to name a few. Due to the tremendous speed of development, on both fundamental and technological levels, it is virtually impossible to offer an up-to-date, yet comprehensive overview of this field. Nevertheless, the need for a volume presenting recent developments and trends in this domain is huge, and the demand for such a volume is continually increasing in industrial and academic engineering 1 communities. Although there are a few volumes devoted to similar issues, none offer a comprehensive coverage of the field; moreover they risk rapidly becoming obsolete. The editors of this volume cannot pretend to fill such a large gap. However, it is the editors' intention to fill a significant part of this gap. A comprehensive coverage of the field should include topics such as neural networks, fuzzy systems, neuro-fuzzy systems, genetic algorithms, evolvable hardware, cellular automata-based systems, and various types of artificial life-system implementations, including autonomous robots. In this volume, we have focused on the first five topics listed above. The volume is composed of four parts, each part being divided into chapters, with the exception of part 4. In Part 1, the topics of "Evolvable Hardware and GAs" are addressed. In Chapter 1, "Automated Design Synthesis and Partitioning for Adaptive Reconfigurable Hardware," Ranga Vemuri and co-authors present state-of-the-art adaptive architectures, their classification, and their applications."

Rapid developments in electronics over the past two decades have induced a move from purely mechanical vehicles to mechatronics design. Recent advances in computing, sensors, and information technology are pushing mobile equipment design to incorporate higher levels of automation under the novel concept of intelligent vehicles. Mechatronics and Intelligent Systems for Off-road Vehicles introduces this concept, and provides an overview of recent applications and future approaches within this field. Several case studies present real examples of vehicles designed to navigate in off-road environments typically encountered by agriculture, forestry, and construction machines. The examples analyzed describe and illustrate key features for agricultural robotics, such as automatic steering, safeguarding, mapping, and precision agriculture applications. The eight chapters include numerous figures, each designed to improve the reader's comprehension of subjects such as: * automatic steering systems; * navigation systems; * vehicle architecture; * image processing and vision; and * three-dimensional perception and localization. Mechatronics and Intelligent Systems for Off-road Vehicles will be of great interest to professional engineers and researchers in vehicle automation, robotics, and the application of artificial intelligence to mobile equipment; as well as to graduate students of mechanical, electrical, and agricultural engineering.

Processing data streams has raised new research challenges over the last few years. This book provides the reader with a comprehensive overview of stream data processing, including famous prototype implementations like the Nile system and the TinyOS operating system. Applications in security, the natural sciences, and education are presented. The huge bibliography offers an excellent starting point for further reading and future research.

The book presents automatic and reproducible methods for the analysis of medical infrared images. All methods highlighted here have been practically implemented in Matlab, and the source code is presented and discussed in detail. Further, all methods have been verified with medical specialists, making the book an ideal resource for all IT specialists, bioengineers and physicians who wish to broaden their knowledge of tailored methods for medical infrared image analysis and processing.

This book presents a discussion of problems encountered in the deployment of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). It puts emphasis on the early tasks of designing and proofing the concept of integration of technologies in Intelligent Transport Systems. In its first part the book concentrates on the design problems of urban ITS. The second part of the book features case studies representative for the different modes of transport. These are freight transport, rail transport and aerospace transport encompassing also space stations. The book provides ideas for deployment which may be developed by scientists and engineers engaged in the design of Intelligent Transport Systems. It can also be used in the training of specialists, students and post-graduate students in universities and transport high schools.

Machine Translation (MT) is both an engineering technology and a measure of all things to do with languages and computersa "whenever a new theory of language or linguistics is offered, an important criteria for its success is whether or not it will improve machine translation.

This book presents a history of machine translation (MT) from the point of view of a major writer and innovator in the subject. It describes and contrasts a range of approaches to the challenges and problems of this remarkable technology by means of a combination of historic papers along with commentaries to update their significance, both at the time of their writing and now. This volume chronicles the evolution of conflicting approaches to MT towards a somewhat skeptical consensus on future progress. Also included is a discussion of the most recent developments in the field and prospects for the future, which have been much changed by the arrival of the World Wide Web.

This book provides a broad-ranging, but detailed overview of the basics of Fuzzy Logic. The fundamentals of Fuzzy Logic are discussed in detail, and illustrated with various solved examples. The book also deals with applications of Fuzzy Logic, to help readers more fully understand the concepts involved. Solutions to the problems are programmed using MATLAB 6.0, with simulated results. The MATLAB Fuzzy Logic toolbox is provided for easy reference.

This book provides a comprehensive and timely report in the area of non-additive measures and integrals. It is based on a panel session on fuzzy measures, fuzzy integrals and aggregation operators held during the 9th International Conference on Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence (MDAI 2012) in Girona, Spain, November 21-23, 2012. The book complements the MDAI 2012 proceedings book, published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) in 2012. The individual chapters, written by key researchers in the field, cover fundamental concepts and important definitions (e.g. the Sugeno integral, definition of entropy for non-additive measures) as well some important applications (e.g. to economics and game theory) of non-additive measures and integrals. The book addresses students, researchers and practitioners working at the forefront of their field.

This book presents advanced software development tools for construction, deployment and governance of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications. Novel technical concepts and paradigms, formulated during the research stage and during development of such tools are presented and illustrated by practical usage examples. Hence this book will be of interest not only to theoreticians but also to engineers who cope with real-life problems. Additionally, each chapter contains an overview of related work, enabling comparison of the proposed concepts with exiting solutions in various areas of the SOA development process. This makes the book interesting also for students and scientists who investigate similar issues.

Understanding the recent developments in renewable energy is crucial for a range of fields in today's society. As environmental awareness and the need for a more sustainable future continues to grow, the uses of renewable energy, particularly in areas such as smart grid, must be considered and studied thoroughly to be implemented successfully and move society toward a more sustainable future. Optimal Planning of Smart Grid With Renewable Energy Resources offers a detailed guide to the new problems and opportunities for sustainable growth in engineering by focusing on modeling diverse problems occurring in science and engineering as well as novel effective theoretical methods and robust optimization theories, which can be used to analyze and solve multiple types of problems. Covering topics such as electric drives and energy systems, this publication is ideal for researchers, academicians, industry professionals, engineers, scholars, instructors, and students.

Adaptivity and learning have in recent decades become a common concern of scientific disciplines. These issues have arisen in mathematics, physics, biology, informatics, economics, and other fields more or less simultaneously. The aim of this publication is the interdisciplinary discourse on the phenomenon of learning and adaptivity. Different perspectives are presented and compared to find fruitful concepts for the disciplines involved. The authors select problems showing representative traits concerning the frame up, the methods and the achievements rather than to present extended overviews.

This is the first book-length presentation and defense of a new theory of human and machine cognition, according to which human persons are superminds. Superminds are capable of processing information not only at and below the level of Turing machines (standard computers), but above that level (the "Turing Limit"), as information processing devices that have not yet been (and perhaps can never be) built, but have been mathematically specified; these devices are known as super-Turing machines or hypercomputers. Superminds, as explained herein, also have properties no machine, whether above or below the Turing Limit, can have. The present book is the third and pivotal volume in Bringsjord's supermind quartet; the first two books were What Robots Can and Can't Be (Kluwer) and AI and Literary Creativity (Lawrence Erlbaum). The final chapter of this book offers eight prescriptions for the concrete practice of AI and cognitive science in light of the fact that we are superminds.

This book discusses innovative methods for mining information from images of plants, especially leaves, and highlights the diagnostic features that can be implemented in fully automatic systems for identifying plant species. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, it explores the problem of plant species identification, covering both the concepts of taxonomy and morphology. It then provides an overview of morphometrics, including the historical background and the main steps in the morphometric analysis of leaves together with a number of applications. The core of the book focuses on novel diagnostic methods for plant species identification developed from a computer scientist's perspective. It then concludes with a chapter on the characterization of botanists' visions, which highlights important cognitive aspects that can be implemented in a computer system to more accurately replicate the human expert's fixation process. The book not only represents an authoritative guide to advanced computational tools for plant identification, but provides experts in botany, computer science and pattern recognition with new ideas and challenges. As such it is expected to foster both closer collaborations and further technological developments in the emerging field of automatic plant identification.

Future Data and Knowledge Base Systems will require new functionalities: richer data modelling capabilities, more powerful query languages, and new concepts of query answers. Future query languages will include functionalities such as hypothetical reasoning, abductive reasoning, modal reasoning, and metareasoning, involving knowledge and belief. Intentional answers will lead to cooperative query answering in which the answer to a query takes into consideration user's expectations. Non-classical logic plays an important role in this book for the formalization of new queries and new answers. It is shown how logic permits precise definitions for concepts like cooperative answers, subjective queries, or reliable sources of information, and gives a precise framework for reasoning about these complex concepts. It is worth noting that advances in knowledge management are not just an application domain for existing results in logic, but also require new developments in logic. The book is organized into 10 chapters which cover the areas of cooperative query answering (in the first three chapters), metareasoning and abductive reasoning (chapters 5 to 7), and, finally, hypothetical and subjunctive reasoning (last three chapters).

The theory and applications of intelligent systems is today an important field of research. This book is an up-to-date collection of seventeen chapters, written by recognized experts in the field. In an introductory mathematical foundations part an overview of generalizations of the integral inequalities for nonadditive integrals and a construction of the General Prioritized Fuzzy Satisfaction Problem is given. Then different aspects of robotics are presented, such as the differences between human beings and robots, the motion of bipedal humanoid robots, and an evaluation of different autonomous quadrotor flight controllers. Also Fuzzy Systems are presented by a model of basic planar imprecise geometric objects allowing various applications in image analysis , GIS, and robotics, as well as a type-2 fuzzy logic in a software library for developing perceptual computers, and a two--degree--of--freedom speed control solutions for a brushless Direct Current motor. The book also presents recent applications in medicine such as a Virtual Doctor System, methods for a face to face human machine interaction, and an emotion estimation, with applications for multiple diseases and the effect of the applied therapy. The last part of the book covers different applications in transportation, network monitoring, and localization of pedestrians in images.

This book describes the struggle to introduce a mechanism that enables next-generation information systems to maintain themselves. Our generation observed the birth and growth of information systems, and the Internet in particular. Surprisingly information systems are quite different from conventional (energy, material-intensive) artificial systems, and rather resemble biological systems (information-intensive systems). Many artificial systems are designed based on (Newtonian) physics assuming that every element obeys simple and static rules; however, the experience of the Internet suggests a different way of designing where growth cannot be controlled but self-organized with autonomous and selfish agents. This book suggests using game theory, a mechanism design in particular, for designing next-generation information systems which will be self-organized by collective acts with autonomous components. The challenge of mapping a probability to time appears repeatedly in many forms throughout this book. The book contains interdisciplinary research encompassing game theory, complex systems, reliability theory and particle physics. All devoted to its central theme: what happens if systems self-repair themselves?

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th Dortmund Fuzzy Days, Dortmund, Germany, 2006. This conference has established itself as an international forum for the discussion of new results in the field of Computational Intelligence. The papers presented here, all thoroughly reviewed, are devoted to foundational and practical issues in fuzzy systems, neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, and machine learning and thus cover the whole range of computational intelligence.

Over the last two decades, the field of artificial intelligence has experienced

a separation into two schools that hold opposite opinions on how uncertainty should be treated. This separation is the result of a debate that began at the end of the 1960 s when AI first faced the problem of building machines required to make decisions and act in the real world. This debate witnessed the contraposition between the mainstream school, which relied on probability for handling uncertainty, and an alternative school, which criticized the adequacy of probability in AI applications and developed alternative formalisms.

The debate has focused on the technical aspects of the criticisms raised against probability while neglecting an important element of contrast. This element is of an epistemological nature, and is therefore exquisitely philosophical. In this book, the historical context in which the debate on probability developed is presented and the key components of the technical criticisms therein are illustrated. By referring to the original texts, the epistemological element that has been neglected in the debate is analyzed in detail. Through a philosophical analysis of the epistemological element it is argued that this element is metaphysical in Popper s sense. It is shown that this element cannot be tested nor possibly disproved on the

basis of experience and is therefore extra-scientific. Ii is established that a philosophical analysis is now compelling in order to both solve the problematic division that characterizes the uncertainty field and to secure the foundations of the field itself.

Today s highly parameterized large-scale distributed computing systems may be composed of a large number of various components (computers, databases, etc) and must provide a wide range of services. The users of such systems, located at different (geographical or managerial) network cluster may have a limited access to the system s services and resources, and different, often conflicting, expectations and requirements. Moreover, the information and data processed in such dynamic environments may be incomplete, imprecise, fragmentary, and overloading. All of the above mentioned issues require some intelligent scalable methodologies for the management of the whole complex structure, which unfortunately may increase the energy consumption of such systems. An optimal energy utilization has reached to a point that many information technology (IT) managers and corporate executives are all up in arms to identify scalable solution that can reduce electricity consumption (so that the total cost of operation is minimized) of their respective large-scale computing systems and simultaneously improve upon or maintain the current throughput of the system.

This book in its eight chapters, addresses the fundamental issues related to the energy usage and the optimal low-cost system design in high performance green computing systems. The recent evolutionary and general metaheuristic-based solutions for energy optimization in data processing, scheduling, resource allocation, and communication in modern computational grids, could and network computing are presented along with several important conventional technologies to cover the hot topics from the fundamental theory of the green computing concept and to describe the basic architectures of systems. This book points out the potential application areas and provides detailed examples of application case studies in low-energy computational systems. The development trends and open research issues are also outlined. All of those technologies have formed the foundation for the green computing that we know of today."

Chaos is a fascinating phenomenon that has been observed in nature, laboratory, and has been applied in various real-world applications. Chaotic systems are deterministic with no random elements involved yet their behavior appears to be random. Obser- tions of chaotic behavior in nature include weather and climate, the dynamics of sat- lites in the solar system, the time evolution of the magnetic field of celestial bodies, population growth in ecology, to mention only a few examples. Chaos has been observed in the laboratory in a number of systems such as electrical circuits, lasers, chemical reactions, fluid dynamics, mechanical systems, and magneto-mechanical devices. Chaotic behavior has also found numerous applications in electrical and communication engineering, information and communication technologies, biology and medicine. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first book edited on chaos applications in intelligent computing. To access the latest research related to chaos applications in intelligent computing, we launched the book project where researchers from all over the world provide the necessary coverage of the mentioned field. The primary obj- tive of this project was to assemble as much research coverage as possible related to the field by defining the latest innovative technologies and providing the most c- prehensive list of research references.

Evolutionary Algorithms, in particular Evolution Strategies, Genetic Algorithms, or Evolutionary Programming, have found wide acceptance as robust optimization algorithms in the last ten years. Compared with the broad propagation and the resulting practical prosperity in different scientific fields, the theory has not progressed as much.This monograph provides the framework and the first steps toward the theoretical analysis of Evolution Strategies (ES). The main emphasis is on understanding the functioning of these probabilistic optimization algorithms in real-valued search spaces by investigating the dynamical properties of some well-established ES algorithms. The book introduces the basic concepts of this analysis, such as progress rate, quality gain, and self-adaptation response, and describes how to calculate these quantities. Based on the analysis, functioning principles are derived, aiming at a qualitative understanding of why and how ES algorithms work.

This book addresses key design and computational issues related to radiators in hydronic heating installations. A historical outline is included to highlight the evolution of radiators and heating technologies. Further, the book includes a chapter on thermal comfort, which is the decisive factor in selecting the ideal heating system and radiator type. The majority of the book is devoted to an extensive discussion of the types and kinds of radiators currently in use, and to identifying the reasons for the remarkable diversity of design solutions. The differences between the solutions are also addressed, both in terms of the effects of operation and of the thermal comfort that needs to be ensured. The book then compares the advantages and disadvantages of each solution, as well as its potential applications. A detailed discussion, supported by an extensive theoretical and mathematical analysis, is presented of the computational relations that are used in selecting the radiator type. The dynamics of radiator heat output regulation are also covered, with particular emphasis on underfloor-surface radiators, for which this aspect is particularly important. The book closes with a chapter presenting computational examples. It includes numerous examples of calculations for all essential thermal parameters of radiator operation in heating installations.

This book details a systematic characteristics-based finite element procedure to investigate incompressible, free-surface and compressible flows. Several sections derive the Fluid Dynamics equations from first thermo-mechanics principles and develop this multi-dimensional and infinite-directional upstream procedure by combining a finite element discretization with an implicit non-linearly stable Runge-Kutta time integration for the numerical solution of the Euler and Navier Stokes equations.