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.

When discussing classification, support vector machines are known to be a capable and efficient technique to learn and predict with high accuracy within a quick time frame. Yet, their black box means to do so make the practical users quite circumspect about relying on it, without much understanding of the how and why of its predictions. The question raised in this book is how can this 'masked hero' be made more comprehensible and friendly to the public: provide a surrogate model for its hidden optimization engine, replace the method completely or appoint a more friendly approach to tag along and offer the much desired explanations? Evolutionary algorithms can do all these and this book presents such possibilities of achieving high accuracy, comprehensibility, reasonable runtime as well as unconstrained performance.

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 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 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.

The intention of this booklet is a brief but general introduction into the treatment of the Finite Element Method (FEM). The FEM has become the leading method in computer-oriented mechanics, so that many scienti?c brancheshavegrownup besides overthelastdecades. Nevertheless,theFEM today is a question of economy. On the one hand its industrial application is forced to reduce product development costs and time, on the other hand a large number of commercial FEM codes and a still growing number of software for e?ective pre- and postprocessors are available in the meantime. Due to that, today it is a quite challenging task to operate with all these di?erent tools at the same time and to understand all handling and so- tion techniques developed over the last years. So, we want to help in getting a deeper insight into the main "interfaces" between the "customers of the FEM" and the codes itself by providing a totally open structured FE-code based on Matlab, which is a very powerful tool in operating with matrix based formulations. That idea and conditions forced us some years ago to initiateDAEdalon as a tool for general FE developments in research appli- tions. In spite of still existing high sophisticated - mostly commercial - FE codes, the success and the acceptance of such a structured tool justify that decision afterwards more and more.

This book focuses on new research challenges in intelligent information filtering and retrieval. It collects invited chapters and extended research contributions from DART 2014 (the 8th International Workshop on Information Filtering and Retrieval), held in Pisa (Italy), on December 10, 2014, and co-hosted with the XIII AI*IA Symposium on Artificial Intelligence. The main focus of DART was to discuss and compare suitable novel solutions based on intelligent techniques and applied to real-world contexts. The chapters of this book present a comprehensive review of related works and the current state of the art. The contributions from both practitioners and researchers have been carefully reviewed by experts in the area, who also gave useful suggestions to improve the quality of the book.

Advanced Computing, Networking and Informatics are three distinct and mutually exclusive disciplines of knowledge with no apparent sharing/overlap among them. However, their convergence is observed in many real world applications, including cyber-security, internet banking, healthcare, sensor networks, cognitive radio, pervasive computing amidst many others. This two volume proceedings explore the combined use of Advanced Computing and Informatics in the next generation wireless networks and security, signal and image processing, ontology and human-computer interfaces (HCI). The two volumes together include 132 scholarly articles, which have been accepted for presentation from over 550 submissions in the Third International Conference on Advanced Computing, Networking and Informatics, 2015, held in Bhubaneswar, India during June 23-25, 2015.

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.

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.

This book brings together leading research from engineers and practitioners interested in the technical advances, business and industrial applications of intelligent systems. AIAI 2007 is focused on providing insights on how AI can be implemented in real world applications.

Topics covered in this volume include:

- Theoretical Advances in AI

- Intelligent Internet Systems: Emerging Technologies and Applications

- Intelligent Systems in Electronic Healthcare

- AI in Business and Finance

- Applications of AI in Industry and Daily Round

- Applications of AI in Communications and Networks

- Intelligent Processing of Audiovisual Content

This book provides an overview of the current research in the interdisciplinary area of personal assistants (PA) and cognitively inspired systems. It discusses the most relevant topics in this highly diversified domain, like reasoning, health, personalization, robotics, and ethical and social issues. Personal assistants (PA) are a relatively new concept directed at people with cognitive or physical disabilities, and is expanding to include complex platforms such as sensors, actuators, monitoring abilities and decision processes. Designed for a general audience, it is also of interest to undergraduates, graduates and researchers involved with intelligent systems, ambient intelligence or ambient assisted living. The content goes from an introduction of the field (aimed at undergraduates and a general readership) to specific and complex architectures (aimed at graduates and researchers).

Spatial reasoning and planning is a core constituent in robotics, graphics, computer-aided design, and geographic information systems.

After a review of previous work in the related areas, Liu and Daneshmend present here a unified framework for qualitative spatial representation and reasoning, which enables the generation of solutions to spatial problems where the geometric knowledge is imprecise. The approach utilizes qualitative spatial representation and reasoning integrated with a quantitative search procedure based on simulated annealing. Many graphical illustrations and detailed algorithm descriptions help the readers to comprehend the solution paths and to develop their own applications.

The book is written as a self-contained text for researchers and graduate students in computer science and related engineering disciplines. The methodologies, algorithmic details, and case studies presented can be used as course material as well as a convenient reference.

This book gathers the Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Robot Intelligence Technology and Applications (RITA 2018). Reflecting the conference's main theme, "Robotics and Machine Intelligence: Building Blocks for Industry 4.0," it features relevant and current research investigations into various aspects of these building blocks. The areas covered include: Instrumentation and Control, Automation, Autonomous Systems, Biomechatronics and Rehabilitation Engineering, Intelligent Systems, Machine Learning, Robotics, Sensors and Actuators, and Machine Vision, as well as Signal and Image Processing. A valuable asset, the book offers researchers and practitioners a timely overview of the latest advances in robot intelligence technology and its applications.

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."

This volume focuses on new challenges in distributed Information Filtering and Retrieval. It collects invited chapters and extended research contributions from the DART 2011 Workshop, held in Palermo (Italy), on September 2011, and co-located with the XII International Conference of the Italian Association on Artificial Intelligence. The main focus of DART was to discuss and compare suitable novel solutions based on intelligent techniques and applied to real-world applications. The chapters of this book present a comprehensive review of related works and state of the art. Authors, both practitioners and researchers, shared their results in several topics such as "Multi-Agent Systems", "Natural Language Processing", "Automatic Advertisement", "Customer Interaction Analytics", "Opinion Mining".

This book presents papers from the First International Conference on Smart Vehicular Technology, Transportation, Communication and Applications (VTCA 2017). Held from 6 to 8 November 2017 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, the conference was co-sponsored by Springer, Fujian University of Technology in China, Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Digital Equipment, Fujian Provincial Key Lab of Big Data Mining and Applications, and National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences in Taiwan. The book is a valuable resource for researchers and professionals engaged in all areas of smart vehicular technology, vehicular transportation, vehicular communication, and applications.

This book is a tribute to Etienne E. Kerre on the occasion of his retirement on October 1st, 2010, after being active for 35 years in the field of fuzzy set theory. It gathers contributions from researchers that have been close to him in one way or another during his long and fruitful career. Besides a foreword by Lotfi A. Zadeh, it contains 13 chapters on both theoretical and applied topics in fuzzy set theory, divided in three parts: 1) logics and connectives, 2) data analysis, and 3) media applications. The first part deals with fuzzy logics and with operators on (extensions of) fuzzy sets. Part 2 deals with fuzzy methods in rough set theory, formal concept analysis, decision making and classification. The last part discusses the use of fuzzy methods for representing and manipulating media objects, such as images and text documents. The diversity of the topics that are covered reflect the diversity of Etienne's research interests, and indeed, the diversity of current research in the area of fuzzy set theory.

This book gathers the proceedings of the KES-IDT-2018 conference, held in Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, on June 20-22, 2018 The conference provided opportunities to present and discuss the latest research results, promoting knowledge transfer and the generation of new ideas in the field of intelligent decision-making. The range of topics explored is wide, and includes methods for decision-making, decision support, data analysis, modeling and many more in areas such as finance, economics, management, engineering and transportation. The book contains several sections devoted to specific topics, such as: * Decision-Making Theory for Economics * Advances in Knowledge-based Statistical Data Analysis * On Knowledge-Based Digital Ecosystems & Technologies for Smart and Intelligent Decision Support Systems * Soft Computing Models in Industrial and Management Engineering * Computational Media Computing and its Applications * Intelligent Decision-Making Technologies * Digital Architectures and Decision Management

This timely review book summarizes the state-of-the-art developments in nature-inspired optimization algorithms and their applications in engineering. Algorithms and topics include the overview and history of nature-inspired algorithms, discrete firefly algorithm, discrete cuckoo search, plant propagation algorithm, parameter-free bat algorithm, gravitational search, biogeography-based algorithm, differential evolution, particle swarm optimization and others. Applications include vehicle routing, swarming robots, discrete and combinatorial optimization, clustering of wireless sensor networks, cell formation, economic load dispatch, metamodeling, surrogated-assisted cooperative co-evolution, data fitting and reverse engineering as well as other case studies in engineering. This book will be an ideal reference for researchers, lecturers, graduates and engineers who are interested in nature-inspired computation, artificial intelligence and computational intelligence. It can also serve as a reference for relevant courses in computer science, artificial intelligence and machine learning, natural computation, engineering optimization and data mining.

"AI4U: Mind-1.1 Programer's Manual" has the following positive and negative points. + It describes the rapidly evolving AI Minds on the Web. - It quickly becomes obsolete as the AI hyper-evolves. + On-demand publishing (ODP) makes for quick updates. - The Mentifex project is considered oddball on the 'Net. + You've got the first book about the first real AI Mind. - There are other, better, more authoritative AI textbooks. + AI4U makes a good supplement for actually coding AI. - Artificial intelligence is too hard to understand. + AI4U describes the AI while it is still easy to learn. - "I would rather build robots than study AI programming." + If you want to build a smart robot, then AI4U is for you. - "I'm only a high school student/teacher; what's the use?" + This book will challenge even the most gifted student. - "I am not a programmer and so I can't code AI." + AI4U teaches you how to operate an AI, not just code it. - "I just want to do Web design, not artificial intelligence." + AI4U provides an AI that you may install on your website. - "I am more interested in neuroscience and/or psychology." + AI4U teaches a theory of how the brain works psychologically.

Hugo de Man Professor Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Senior Research Fellow IMEC The steady evolution of hardware, software and communications technology is rapidly transforming the PC- and dot.com world into the world of Ambient Intelligence (AmI). This next wave of information technology is fundam- tally different in that it makes distributed wired and wireless computing and communication disappear to the background and puts users to the foreground. AmI adapts to people instead of the other way around. It will augment our consciousness, monitor our health and security, guide us through traffic etc. In short, its ultimate goal is to improve the quality of our life by a quiet, reliable and secure interaction with our social and material environment. What makes AmI engineering so fascinating is that its design starts from studying person to world interactions that need to be implemented as an int- ligent and autonomous interplay of virtually all necessary networked electronic intelligence on the globe. This is a new and exciting dimension for most elect- cal and software engineers and may attract more creative talent to engineering than pure technology does. Development of the leading technology for AmI will only succeed if the engineering research community is prepared to join forces in order to make Mark Weiser s dream of 1991 come true. This will not be business as usual by just doubling transistor count or clock speed in a microprocessor or increasing the bandwidth of communication."

Production engineering and management involve a series of planning and control activities in a production system. A production system can be as small as a shop with only one machine or as big as a global operation including many manufacturing plants, distribution centers, and retail locations in multiple continents. The product of a production system can also vary in complexity based on the material used, technology employed, etc. Every product, whether a pencil or an airplane, is produced in a system which depends on good management to be successful. Production management has been at the center of industrial engineering and management science disciplines since the industrial revolution. The tools and techniques of production management have been so successful that they have been adopted to various service industries, as well. The book is intended to be a valuable resource to undergraduate and graduate students interested in the applications of production management under fuzziness. The chapters represent all areas of production management and are organized to reflect the natural order of production management tasks. In all chapters, special attention is given to applicability and wherever possible, numerical examples are presented. While the reader is expected to have a fairly good understanding of the fuzzy logic, the book provides the necessary notation and preliminary knowledge needed in each chapter.

"Practical Applications of Evolutionary Computation to Financial Engineering" presents the state of the art techniques in Financial Engineering using recent results in Machine Learning and Evolutionary Computation. This book bridges the gap between academics in computer science and traders and explains the basic ideas of the proposed systems and the financial problems in ways that can be understood by readers without previous knowledge on either of the fields. To cement the ideas discussed in the book, software packages are offered that implement the systems described within. The book is structured so that each chapter can be read independently from the others. Chapters 1 and 2 describe evolutionary computation. The third chapter is an introduction to financial engineering problems for readers who are unfamiliar with this area. The following chapters each deal, in turn, with a different problem in the financial engineering field describing each problem in detail and focusing on solutions based on evolutionary computation. Finally, the two appendixes describe software packages that implement the solutions discussed in this book, including installation manuals and parameter explanations.