The reader is presented an approach to the construction of a visual system, which is behaviorally, computationally and neurally motivated. The central goal is to characterize the process of visual categorization and to find a suitable representation format that can successfully deal with the structural variability existent within visual categories. It does not define such representations a priori but attempts to show directions on how to gradually work towards them. The book reviews past and existent theories of visual object and shape recognition in the fields of computer vision, neuroscience and psychology. The entire range of computations is discussed, as for example contour extraction in retinal circuits, orientation determination in cortical networks, position and scale independence of shape, as well as the issue of object and shape representation in a neural substrate. Region-based approaches are discussed and are modeled with wave-propagating networks. It is demonstrated how those networks operate on gray-scale images. A completely novel shape recognition architecture is proposed that can recognize simple shapes under various degraded conditions. It is discussed how such networks can be used for constructing basic-level object representations. It is envisioned how those networks can be implemented using the method of neuromorphic engineering, an analog electronic hardware substrate than can run neural computations in real-time and with little power.

The advances in the generation and processing of multimedia data (e. g. documents, images, video, audio, animations, etc. ) have had an immense impact on multimedia applications and, as a result, multimedia has permeated almost every aspect of our daily lives. This development has also brought with it a whole host of issues and ch- lenges which were either not as apparent before or were non-existent. Today, digital media is relied upon as primary news and information resource, as evidence in a court of law, as part of medical records or as financial documents. However, there is still lack of authoritative mechanisms to verify the origin and veracity of media data. - deed, multimedia content has become an extremely valuable asset, and it is being both disseminated and consumed on a larger scale than ever before, but the issues conce- ing how the content owners and publishers should control the distribution of and - cess to their content have not been satisfactorily resolved yet. There are various other issues related to use of multimedia that require further analysis and research. For example, it is a known fact that some criminal organi- tions communicate with its members by posting information embedded media to p- lic forums and web-sites to evade surveillance by law enforcement. Conventional multimedia processing approaches do not provide sufficiently effective means for - fending against such communication.

These proceedings showcase the best papers selected from more than 500 submissions, introducing readers to the top research topics and the latest developmental trends in the theory and application of Man-Machine-Environment System Engineering (MMESE). This research topic was first established in China by Professor Shengzhao Long in 1981, with direct support from one of the greatest modern Chinese scientists, Xuesen Qian. In a letter to Shengzhao Long from October 22nd, 1993, Xuesen Qian wrote: "You have created a very important modern science and technology in China!" MMESE primarily focuses on the relationship between Man, Machine and Environment, studying the optimum combination of related Man-Machine-Environment systems. In this paradigm, "Man" refers to working people as the subject at the workplace (e.g. operators, decision-makers); "Machine" is the general name for any object controlled by Man (including tools, machinery, computers, systems and technologies), and "Environment" describes the specific working conditions under which Man and Machine interact (e.g. temperature, noise, vibration, hazardous gases etc.). In turn, the three goals of optimization are to ensure safety, efficiency and economy in this context. These proceedings present interdisciplinary studies on the concepts and methods of physiology, psychology, system engineering, computer science, environmental science, management, education, and other related disciplines. They offer a valuable resource for all researchers and professionals whose work involves interdisciplinary areas touching on MMESE subjects.

How and why to write a movement? Who is the writer? Who is the reader? They may be choreographers working with dancers. They may be roboticists programming robots. They may be artists designing cartoons in computer animation. In all such fields the purpose is to express an intention about a dance, a specific motion or an action to perform, in terms of intelligible sequences of elementary movements, as a music score that would be devoted to motion representation. Unfortunately there is no universal language to write a motion. Motion languages live together in a Babel tower populated by biomechanists, dance notators, neuroscientists, computer scientists, choreographers, roboticists. Each community handles its own concepts and speaks its own language. The book accounts for this diversity. Its origin is a unique workshop held at LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse in 2014. Worldwide representatives of various communities met there. Their challenge was to reach a mutual understanding allowing a choreographer to access robotics concepts, or a computer scientist to understand the subtleties of dance notation. The liveliness of this multidisciplinary meeting is reflected by the book thank to the willingness of authors to share their own experiences with others.

Knowledge Engineering (KE) is a fi eld within artifi cial intelligence that develops knowledgebased systems. KE is the process of imitating how a human expert in a specifi c domain would act and take decisions. It contains large amounts of knowledge, like metadata and information about a data object that describes characteristics such as content, quality, and format, structure and processes. Such systems are computer programs that are the basis of how a decision is made or a conclusion is reached. It is having all the rules and reasoning mechanisms to provide solutions to real-world problems. This book presents an extensive collection of the recent fi ndings and innovative research in the information system and KE domain. Highlighting the challenges and diffi culties in implementing these approaches, this book is a critical reference source for academicians, professionals, engineers, technology designers, analysts, undergraduate and postgraduate students in computing science and related disciplines such as Information systems, Knowledge Engineering, Intelligent Systems, Artifi cial Intelligence, Cognitive Neuro - science, and Robotics. In addition, anyone who is interested or involved in sophisticated information systems and knowledge engineering developments will fi nd this book a valuable source of ideas and guidance.

Realizing the growing importance of semantic adaptation and personalization of media, the editors of this book brought together leading researchers and practitioners of the field to discuss the state-of-the-art, and explore emerging exciting developments. This volume comprises extended versions of selected papers presented at the 1st International Workshop on Semantic Media Adaptation and Personalization (SMAP 2006), which took place in Athens in December 2006.

This book explores the intersection of fuzzy mathematics and the spatial modeling of preferences in political science. Beginning with a critique of conventional modeling approaches predicated on Cantor set theoretical assumptions, the authors outline the potential benefits of a fuzzy approach to the study of ambiguous or uncertain preference profiles. This is a good text for a graduate seminar in formal modeling. It is also suitable as an introductory text in fuzzy mathematics.

Clear and concise explanations to understand the learning paradigms.

Chapters written by leading world experts.

This book has brought 24 groups of experts and active researchers around the world together in image processing and analysis, video processing and analysis, and communications related processing, to present their newest research results, exchange latest experiences and insights, and explore future directions in these important and rapidly evolving areas. It aims at increasing the synergy between academic and industry professionals working in the related field. It focuses on the state-of-the-art research in various essential areas related to emerging technologies, standards and applications on analysis, processing, computing, and communication of multimedia information. The target audience of this book is researchers and engineers as well as graduate students working in various disciplines linked to multimedia analysis, processing and communications, e.g., computer vision, pattern recognition, information technology, image processing, and artificial intelligence. The book is also meant to a broader audience including practicing professionals working in image/video applications such as image processing, video surveillance, multimedia indexing and retrieval, and so on. We hope that the researchers, engineers, students and other professionals who read this book would find it informative, useful and inspirational toward their own work in one way or another.

Soft Computing Approach to Pattern Classification and Object Recognition establishes an innovative, unified approach to supervised pattern classification and model-based occluded object recognition. The book also surveys various soft computing tools, fuzzy relational calculus (FRC), genetic algorithm (GA) and multilayer perceptron (MLP) to provide a strong foundation for the reader. The supervised approach to pattern classification and model-based approach to occluded object recognition are treated in one framework , one based on either a conventional interpretation or a new interpretation of multidimensional fuzzy implication (MFI) and a novel notion of fuzzy pattern vector (FPV). By combining practice and theory, a completely independent design methodology was developed in conjunction with this supervised approach on a unified framework, and then tested thoroughly against both synthetic and real-life data. In the field of soft computing, such an application-oriented design study is unique in nature. The monograph essentially mimics the cognitive process of human decision making, and carries a message of perceptual integrity in representational diversity. Soft Computing Approach to Pattern Classification and Object Recognition is intended for researchers in the area of pattern classification and computer vision. Other academics and practitioners will also find the book valuable.

Ambient intelligence is the vision of a technology that will become invisibly embedded in our natural surroundings, present whenever we need it, enabled by simple and effortless interactions, attuned to all our senses, adaptive to users and context-sensitive, and autonomous. High-quality information access and personalized content must be available to everybody, anywhere, and at any time. This book addresses ambient intelligence used to support human contacts and accompany an individual's path through the complicated modern world. From the technical standpoint, distributed electronic intelligence is addressed as hardware vanishing into the background. Devices used for ambient intelligence are small, low-power, low weight, and (very importantly) low-cost; they collaborate or interact with each other; and they are redundant and error-tolerant. This means that the failure of one device will not cause failure of the whole system. Since wired connections often do not exist, radio methods will play an important role for data transfer. This book addresses various aspects of ambient intelligence, from applications that are imminent since they use essentially existing technologies, to ambitious ideas whose realization is still far away, due to major unsolved technical challenges.

Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT): Techniques and Applications disseminates research efforts in the security and resilience of intelligent data-centric critical systems to support advanced research in this area. Sections cover the background of IoMT Architectures and Technologies, describe the problems that arise in IoMT Computing and protocols, and illustrate the application of IoMT on Industrial applications. The book will be beneficial for engineers, developers, solution designers, architects, system engineers and specialists from professional environments interested in the IoMT to seek appropriate solutions to their specific problems.

Congestion Control in Data Transmission Networks details the modeling and control of data traffic in communication networks. It shows how various networking phenomena can be represented in a consistent mathematical framework suitable for rigorous formal analysis. The monograph differentiates between fluid-flow continuous-time traffic models, discrete-time processes with constant sampling rates, and sampled-data systems with variable discretization periods.
The authors address a number of difficult real-life problems, such as:
optimal control of flows with disparate, time-varying delay;
the existence of source and channel nonlinearities;
the balancing of quality of service and fairness requirements; and
the incorporation of variable rate allocation policies.
Appropriate control mechanisms which can handle congestion and guarantee high throughput in various traffic scenarios (with different networking phenomena being considered) are proposed. Systematic design procedures using sound control-theoretic foundations are adopted. Since robustness issues are of major concern in providing efficient data-flow regulation in today s networks, sliding-mode control is selected as the principal technique to be applied in creating the control solutions. The controller derivation is given extensive analytical treatment and is supported with numerous realistic simulations. A comparison with existing solutions is also provided. The concepts applied are discussed in a number of illustrative examples, and supported by many figures, tables, and graphs walking the reader through the ideas and introducing their relevance in real networks.
Academic researchers and graduate students working in computer networks and telecommunications and in control (especially time-delay systems and discrete-time optimal and sliding-mode control) will find this text a valuable assistance in ensuring smooth data-flow within communications networks."

What is computational intelligence (CI)? Traditionally, CI is understood as a collection of methods from the ?elds of neural networks (NN), fuzzy logic and evolutionary computation. Various de?nitions and opinions exist, but what belongs to CI is still being debated; see, e.g., [1-3]. More recently there has been a proposal to de?ne the CI not in terms of the tools but in terms of challenging problems to be solved [4]. With this edited volume I have made an attempt to give a representative sample of contemporary CI activities in automotive applications to illustrate the state of the art. While CI researchand achievements in some specialized ?elds described (see, e.g., [5, 6]), this is the ?rst volume of its kind dedicated to automotive technology. As if re?ecting the general lack of consensus on what constitutes the ?eld of CI, this volume 1 illustrates automotive applications of not only neural and fuzzy computations which are considered to be the "standard" CI topics, but also others, such as decision trees, graphicalmodels, Support Vector Machines (SVM), multi-agent systems, etc. This book is neither an introductory text, nor a comprehensive overview of all CI research in this area. Hopefully, as a broad and representative sample of CI activities in automotive applications, it will be worth reading for both professionals and students. When the details appear insu?cient, the reader is encouraged to consult other relevant sources provided by the chapter authors.

This book represents a comprehensive introduction into both conceptual and rigorous brain and cognition modelling. It is devoted to understanding, prediction and control of the fundamental mechanisms of brain functioning. The reader will be provided with a scientific tool enabling him or her to perform a competitive research in brain and cognition modelling. This is a graduate level monographic textbook.

This book is a collection of some of the papers that were presented during a NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) on "Intelligent Systems: Safety, Reliability and Maintainability Issues" that was held in Kusadasi, Turkey during August 24- 28, 1992. Attendance at this workshop was mainly by invitation only, drawing people internationally representing industry, government and the academic community. Many of the participants were internationally recognized leaders in the topic of the workshop. The purpose of the ARW was to bring together a highly distinguished group of people with the express purpose of debating where the issues of safety, reliability and maintainability place direct and tangible constraints on the development of intelligent systems. As a consequence, one of the major debating points in the ARW was the definition of intelligence, intelligent behaviour and their relation to complex dynamic systems. Two major conclusions evolved from the ARW are: 1. A continued need exists to develop formal, theoretical frameworks for the architecture of such systems, together with a reflection on the concept of intelligence. 2. There is a need to focus greater attention to the role that the human play in controlling intelligent systems. The workshop began by considering the typical features of an intelligent system. The complexity associated with multi-resolutional architectures was then discussed, leading to the identification of a necessity for the use of a combinatorial synthesis/approach. This was followed by a session on human interface issues.

When we learn from books or daily experience, we make associations and draw inferences on the basis of information that is insufficient for under standing. One example of insufficient information may be a small sample derived from observing experiments. With this perspective, the need for de veloping a better understanding of the behavior of a small sample presents a problem that is far beyond purely academic importance. During the past 15 years considerable progress has been achieved in the study of this issue in China. One distinguished result is the principle of in formation diffusion. According to this principle, it is possible to partly fill gaps caused by incomplete information by changing crisp observations into fuzzy sets so that one can improve the recognition of relationships between input and output. The principle of information diffusion has been proven suc cessful for the estimation of a probability density function. Many successful applications reflect the advantages of this new approach. It also supports an argument that fuzzy set theory can be used not only in "soft" science where some subjective adjustment is necessary, but also in "hard" science where all data are recorded."

This book covers an approach to conversational informatics which encompasses science and technology for understanding and augmenting conversation in the network age. A major challenge in engineering is to develop a technology for conveying not just messages but also underlying wisdom. Relevant theories and practices in cognitive linguistics and communication science, as well as techniques developed in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, are discussed.

Time series analysis and modelling represent a large study field, implying the approach from the perspective of the time and frequency, with applications in different domains. Modelling hydro-meteorological time series is difficult due to the characteristics of these series, as long range dependence, spatial dependence, the correlation with other series. Continuous spatial data plays an important role in planning, risk assessment and decision making in environmental management. In this context, in this book we present various statistical tests and modelling techniques used for time series analysis, as well as applications to hydro-meteorological series from Dobrogea, a region situated in the south-eastern part of Romania, less studied till now. Part of the results are accompanied by their R code.

Audio Signal Processing for Next-Generation Multimedia Communication Systems presents cutting-edge digital signal processing theory and implementation techniques for problems including speech acquisition and enhancement using microphone arrays, new adaptive filtering algorithms, multichannel acoustic echo cancellation, sound source tracking and separation, audio coding, and realistic sound stage reproduction. This book's focus is almost exclusively on the processing, transmission, and presentation of audio and acoustic signals in multimedia communications for telecollaboration where immersive acoustics will play a great role in the near future.

This edited book invites the reader to explore how the latest technologies developed in computational intelligence can be extended and applied to software engineering. Leading experts demonstrate how this recent confluence of software engineering and computational intelligence provides a powerful tool to address the increasing demand for complex applications in diversified areas, the ever-increasing complexity and size of software systems, and the inherently imperfect nature of the information. The presented treatments to software modeling and formal analysis permit the extension of computational intelligence to various phases in software life cycles, such as managing fuzziness resident in the requirements, coping with fuzzy objects and imprecise knowledge, and handling uncertainty encountered in quality prediction.

This book presents new optimization approaches and methods and their application in real-world and industrial problems. Numerous processes and problems in real life and industry can be represented as optimization problems, including modeling physical processes, wildfire, natural hazards and metal nanostructures, workforce planning, wireless network topology, parameter settings for controlling different processes, extracting elements from video clips, and management of cloud computing environments. This book shows how to develop algorithms for these problems, based on new intelligent methods like evolutionary computations, ant colony optimization and constraint programming, and demonstrates how real-world problems arising in engineering, economics and other domains can be formulated as optimization problems. The book is useful for researchers and practitioners alike.

This work is the first and only book on the fundamentals of ultrasonic machining. It presents the foundations of dynamic and control for ultrasonic processing systems and considers ultrasonic systems as special vibratory machines that function by exploiting nonlinear dynamic processes. Recommendations are given for designing and tuning ultrasonic machines. The ultrasonic machines analyzed are predominantly concerned with the processing of solids.

This book discusses a number of real-world applications of computational intelligence approaches. Using various examples, it demonstrates that computational intelligence has become a consolidated methodology for automatically creating new competitive solutions to complex real-world problems. It also presents a concise and efficient synthesis of different systems using computationally intelligent techniques.