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.

In Computer Graphics, the use of intelligent techniques started more recently than in other research areas. However, during these last two decades, the use of intelligent Computer Graphics techniques is growing up year after year and more and more interesting techniques are presented in this area. The purpose of this volume is to present current work of the Intelligent Computer Graphics community, a community growing up year after year. This volume is a kind of continuation of the previously published Springer volumes "Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Computer Graphics" (2008), "Intelligent Computer Graphics 2009" (2009), "Intelligent Computer Graphics 2010" (2010) and "Intelligent Computer Graphics 2011" (2011). Usually, this kind of volume contains, every year, selected extended papers from the corresponding 3IA Conference of the year. However, the current volume is made from directly reviewed and selected papers, submitted for publication in the volume "Intelligent Computer Graphics 2012". This year papers are particularly exciting and concern areas like plant modelling, text-to-scene systems, information visualization, computer-aided geometric design, artificial life, computer games, realistic rendering and many other very important themes.

"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.

Hybrid Intelligent Systems summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of five intelligent technologies: fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, case-based reasoning, neural networks and expert systems, reviewing the status and significance of research into their integration. Engineering and scientific examples and case studies are used to illustrate principles and application development techniques. The reader will gain a clear idea of the current status of hybrid intelligent systems and discover how to choose and develop appropriate applications. The book is based on a thorough literature search of recent publications on research and development in hybrid intelligent systems; the resulting 50-page reference section of the book is invaluable. The book starts with a summary of the five major intelligent technologies and of the issues in and current status of research into them. Each subsequent chapter presents a detailed discussion of a different combination of intelligent technologies, along with examples and case studies. Four chapters contain detailed case studies of working hybrid systems. The book enables the reader to: Describe the important concepts, strengths and limitations of each technology; Recognize and analyze potential problems with the application of hybrid systems; Choose appropriate hybrid intelligent solutions; Understand how applications are designed with any of the approaches covered; Choose appropriate commercial development shells or tools. An invaluable reference source for those who wish to apply intelligent systems techniques to their own problems.

The International Workshop on Human-Friendly Robotics (HFR) is an annual meeting that brings together academic scientists, researchers and research scholars to exchange and share their experiences and research results on all aspects related to the introduction of robots into everyday life. HFR collects contributions on current developments of a new generation of human-friendly robots, i.e., safe and dependable machines, operating in the close vicinity to humans or directly interacting with them in a wide range of domains. The papers contained in the book describe the newest and most original achievements in the field of human-robot-interaction coming from the work and ideas of young researchers. The contributions cover a wide range of topics related to human-robot interaction, both physical and cognitive, including theories, methodologies, technologies, empirical and experimental studies.

Knighting in sequence biology Edward N. Trifonov Genome classification, construction of phylogenetic trees, became today a major approach in studying evolutionary relatedness of various species in their vast - versity. Although the modern genome clustering delivers the trees which are very similar to those generated by classical means, and basic terminology is the same, the phenotypic traits and habitats are not anymore the playground for the classi- cation. The sequence space is the playground now. The phenotypic traits are - placed by sequence characteristics, "words", in particular. Matter-of-factually, the phenotype and genotype merged, to confusion of both classical and modern p- logeneticists. Accordingly, a completely new vocabulary of stringology, information theory and applied mathematics took over. And a new brand of scientists emerged - those who do know the math and, simultaneously, (do?) know biology. The book is written by the authors of this new brand. There is no way to test their literacy in biology, as no biologist by training would even try to enter into the elite circle of those who masters their almost occult language. But the army of - formaticians, formal linguists, mathematicians humbly (or aggressively) longing to join modern biology, got an excellent introduction to the field of genome cl- tering, written by the team of their kin.

Semantic Models in IoT and eHealth Applications explores the key role of semantic web modeling in eHealth technologies, including remote monitoring, mobile health, cloud data and biomedical ontologies. The book explores different challenges and issues through the lens of various case studies of healthcare systems currently adopting these technologies. Chapters introduce the concepts of semantic interoperability within a healthcare model setting and explore how semantic representation is key to classifying, analyzing and understanding the massive amounts of biomedical data being generated by connected medical devices. Continuous health monitoring is a strong solution which can provide eHealth services to a community through the use of IoT-based devices that collect sensor data for efficient health diagnosis, monitoring and treatment. All of this collected data needs to be represented in the form of ontologies which are considered the cornerstone of the Semantic Web for knowledge sharing, information integration and information extraction.

This 2nd edition textbook has been expanded to include of 175 additional pages of additional content, created in response to readers feedback, as well as to new hardware and software releases. The book presents foundational robotics concepts using the ROBOTIS BIOLOID and OpenCM-904 robotic systems, and is suitable as a curriculum for a first course in robotics for undergraduate students or a self-learner. It covers wheel-based robots, as well as walking robots. Although it uses the standard "Sense, Think, Act" approach, communications (bot-to-bot and PC-to-bot) programming concepts are treated in more depth (wired and wireless ZigBee/BlueTooth). Algorithms are developed and described via ROBOTIS' proprietary RoboPlus IDE, as well as the more open Arduino-based Embedded C environments. Additionally, a vast array of web-based multimedia materials are used for illustrating robotics concepts, code implementations and videos of actual resulting robot behaviors. Advanced sensor interfacing for gyroscope, inertial measuring unit, foot pressure sensor and color camera are also demonstrated.

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 addresses the major issues in the Web data management related to technologies and infrastructures, methodologies and techniques as well as applications and implementations. Emphasis is placed on Web engineering and technologies, Web graph managing, searching and querying and the importance of social Web.

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.

The notion of Fuzziness stands as one of the really new concepts that have recently enriched the world of Science. Science grows not only through technical and formal advances on one side and useful applications on the other side, but also as consequence of the introduction and assimilation of new concepts in its corpus. These, in turn, produce new developments and applications. And this is what Fuzziness, one of the few new concepts arisen in the XX Century, has been doing so far. This book aims at paying homage to Professor Lotfi A. Zadeh, the "father of fuzzy logic" and also at giving credit to his exceptional work and personality. In a way, this is reflected in the variety of contributions collected in the book. In some of them the authors chose to speak of personal meetings with Lotfi; in others, they discussed how certain papers of Zadeh were able to open for them a new research horizon. Some contributions documented results obtained from the author/s after taking inspiration from a particular idea of Zadeh, thus implicitly acknowledging him. Finally, there are contributions of several "third generation fuzzysists or softies" who were firstly led into the world of Fuzziness by a disciple of Lotfi Zadeh, who, following his example, took care of opening for them a new road in science. Rudolf Seising is Adjoint Researcher at the European Centre for Soft Computing in Mieres, Asturias (Spain). Enric Trillas and Claudio Moraga are Emeritus Researchers at the European Centre for Soft Computing, Mieres, Asturias (Spain). Settimo Termini is Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Palermo, Italy and Affiliated Researcher at the European Centre for Soft Computing, Mieres, Asturias (Spain)

Intelligent Distributed Computing - IDC Symposium Series was started as an initiative of research groups from: (i) Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland and(ii)SoftwareEngineeringDepartmentoftheUniversity ofCraiova, Craiova, Romania.IDCaimsatbringingtogetherresearchersandpractitionersinvolved in all aspects of intelligent and distributed computing to allow cross-fertilization and search for synergies of ideas and to enable advancement of research in these exciting sub- elds of computer science. Intelligent Distributed Computing 2008 - IDC 2008 wasthe secondeventin thisseries. IDC2008was hostedbyDipartimentodiIngegneria Informatica e delle Telecomunicazioni, Universita di Catania, Italia during September 18-19, 2008. This book represents the peer-reviewed proceedings of the IDC 2008. We received 58submissionsfrom24countries.Each submissionwas carefullyreviewedby at least 3 membersofthe ProgramCommittee.Acceptanceandpublicationwere judgedbased on the relevanceto the symposiumthemes, clarity of presentation, originalityand accuracy of results and proposed solutions. Finally 20 regular papers and 12 short papers were selected for presentationand were includedin this volume, resultingin acceptancerates of 34.48 % for regular papers and 55.17 % for regular and short papers. The book contains also 3 invited papers authored by well-known researchers in the eld. The 35 contributions in this book address many topics related to intelligent d- tributedcomputing, systemsandapplications, including: adaptivityandlearning;agents and multi-agent systems; argumentation; auctions; case-based reasoning; collaborative systems; data structures; distributed algorithms; formal modeling and veri cation; - netic and immune algorithms; grid computing; information extraction, annotation and integration; network and security protocols; mobile and ubiquitous computing; onto- gies and metadata; P2P computing; planning; recommender systems; rules; semantic Web; services and processes; trust and social computing;virtual organizations;wireless networks; XML technolog

Cognition and artificial intelligence are entering a new era in which the aspects of symbolic manipulation and of connectionism begin to come together. This leads to a dialog of truly interdisciplinary character. The book covers aspects of fuzzy logic, case based reasoning, learning as well as meaning, language, and consciousness. The authors of this topical volume have their background in logic, computer science, physics and mathematics, philosophy, psychology and neurobiology.

Self-organisation, self-regulation, self-repair and self-maintenance are promising conceptual approaches for dealing with complex distributed interactive software and information-handling systems. Self-organising applications dynamically change their functionality and structure without direct user intervention, responding to changes in requirements and the environment. This is the first book to offer an integrated view of self-organisation technologies applied to distributed systems, particularly focusing on multiagent systems.

The editors developed this integrated book with three aims: to explain self-organisation concepts and principles, using clear definitions and a strong theoretical background; to examine how self-organising behaviour can be modelled, analysed and systematically engineered into agent behaviour; and to assess the types of problems that can be solved using self-organising multiagent systems. The book comprises chapters covering all three dimensions, synthesising up-to-date research work and the latest technologies and applications. The book offers dedicated chapters on concepts such as self-organisation, emergence in natural systems, software agents, stigmergy, gossip, cooperation and immune systems. The book then explains how to engineer artificial self-organising software, in particular it examines methodologies and middleware infrastructures. Finally, the book presents diverse applications of self-organising software, such as constraint satisfaction, trust management, image recognition and networking.

The book will be of interest to researchers working on emergent phenomena and adaptive systems. It will also be suitable for use as a graduate textbook, with chapter summaries and exercises, and an accompanying website that includes teaching slides, exercise solutions and research project outlines.

Self-organisation, self-regulation, self-repair and self-maintenance are promising conceptual approaches for dealing with complex distributed interactive software and information-handling systems. Self-organising applications dynamically change their functionality and structure without direct user intervention, responding to changes in requirements and the environment. This is the first book to offer an integrated view of self-organisation technologies applied to distributed systems, particularly focusing on multiagent systems.

The editors developed this integrated book with three aims: to explain self-organisation concepts and principles, using clear definitions and a strong theoretical background; to examine how self-organising behaviour can be modelled, analysed and systematically engineered into agent behaviour; and to assess the types of problems that can be solved using self-organising multiagent systems. The book comprises chapters covering all three dimensions, synthesising up-to-date research work and the latest technologies and applications. The book offers dedicated chapters on concepts such as self-organisation, emergence in natural systems, software agents, stigmergy, gossip, cooperation and immune systems. The book then explains how to engineer artificial self-organising software, in particular it examines methodologies and middleware infrastructures. Finally, the book presents diverse applications of self-organising software, such as constraint satisfaction, trust management, image recognition and networking.

The book will be of interest to researchers working on emergent phenomena and adaptive systems. It will also be suitable for use as a graduate textbook, with chapter summaries and exercises, and an accompanying website that includes teaching slides, exercise solutions and research project outlines."

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 presents the Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference ENVIROSOFT 92. Since the beginning of this conference cycle in 1986, EN VIROSOFT has provided a forum for discussion and debate for scientists, engineers and decision makers involved in the development and application of computer techniques to environmental sciences. Our main goal is to pro vide an opportunity for cross-fertilization among the several groups involved in the study of the environment. A couple of years ago a reviewer of ENVIROSOFT 90 made a very in teresting and appropriate comment. He congratulated us for the effort of providing a forum for discussion among environmental scientists but criti cized us for maintaining, in the proceedings and in the conference schedule, a strict division between 'atmospheric' papers, 'water' papers, etc. I agree with the reviewer and, in this conference, I made an effort to separate the articles not on the basis of their physical medium (air, water, groundwa ter, etc.) but on the basis of the methods and approaches adopted by the authors. Again, I hope that this change will improve the dialogue among scientists and, in particular, the interactions between 'air' and 'water' re searchers.

This book is an attempt to bring closer the greater vision of the development of Social Informatics. Social Informatics can be de?ned as a discipline of informatics that studies how information systems can realize social goals, use social concepts, or become sources of information about social phenomena. All of these research directions are present in this book: fairness is a social goal; trust is a social concept; and much of this book bases on the study of traces of Internet auctions (used also to drive social simulations) that are a rich source of information about social phenomena. The book has been written for an audience of graduate students working in the area of informatics and the social sciences, in an attempt to bridge the gap between the two disciplines. Because of this, the book avoids the use of excessive mathematical formalism, especially in Chapter 2 that attempts to summarize the theoretical basis of the two disciplines of trust and fa- ness management. Readers are usually directed to quoted literature for the purpose of studying mathematical proofs of the cited theorems.

Risk management is often complicated by situational uncertainties and the subjective preferences of decision makers. Fuzzy Hierarchical Model for Risk Assessment introduces a fuzzy-based hierarchical approach to solve risk management problems considering both qualitative and quantitative criteria to tackle imprecise information. This approach is illustrated through number of case studies using examples from the food, fashion and electronics sectors to cover a range of applications including supply chain management, green product design and green initiatives. These practical examples explore how this method can be adapted and fine tuned to fit other industries as well. Supported by an extensive literature review, Fuzzy Hierarchical Model for Risk Assessment comprehensively introduces a new method for project managers across all industries as well as researchers in risk management. this area.

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.

The book describes a system for visual surveillance using intelligent cameras. The camera uses robust techniques for detecting and tracking moving objects. The real time capture of the objects is then stored in the database. The tracking data stored in the database is analysed to study the camera view, detect and track objects, and study object behavior. These set of models provide a robust framework for coordinating the tracking of objects between overlapping and non-overlapping cameras, and recording the activity of objects detected by the system.