The book is a compilation of high-quality scientific papers presented at the 3rd International Conference on Computer & Communication Technologies (IC3T 2016). The individual papers address cutting-edge technologies and applications of soft computing, artificial intelligence and communication. In addition, a variety of further topics are discussed, which include data mining, machine intelligence, fuzzy computing, sensor networks, signal and image processing, human-computer interaction, web intelligence, etc. As such, it offers readers a valuable and unique resource.

One of the attractions of fuzzy logic is its utility in solving many real engineering problems. As many have realised, the major obstacles in building a real intelligent machine involve dealing with random disturbances, processing large amounts of imprecise data, interacting with a dynamically changing environment, and coping with uncertainty. Neural-fuzzy techniques help one to solve many of these problems. Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems reflects the most recent developments in neural networks and fuzzy logic, and their application in intelligent systems. In addition, the balance between theoretical work and applications makes the book suitable for both researchers and engineers, as well as for graduate students.

Modern theories of brain function are increasingly concerned with dynamics. The task of organizing perception and behaviour in a meaningful interaction with the external world prompts the brain to recruit its various resources in a properly coordinated manner. Vis-a-vis the complexity and multitude of the dynamics involved, a careful orchestration of the various processing components, distributed over space and time, is essential. Hence, it should come as no surprise that a number of recent developments in both experimental and theoretical brain science have emphasized the aspect of spatio-temporal coordination.

This collection of papers intends to capture these various developments in the brain sciences. It brings together new insights and concepts from various branches of experimental and theoretical neuroscience, partly in the form of review chapters, partly in short, focussed contributions, or critical essays. Further it sets out to explore the problems of the processing of the temporal dimension of sensory input and of the generation of space-time patterns in the motor output, as well as the intervening storage and transformation of temporal patterns in nerve nets.

The publication is divided into four major sections: the first considers spatio-temporal aspects of brain function in the context of processing of sensory input and perception and the third, spatio-temporal aspects of brain function at the output end: planning and control of movement. The second section is dedicated to the intervening level of neuronal activity in the working brain and the various dynamics observed at different levels of resolution in space and time. The fourth part combines contributions that transcend this scheme.

It is hoped the book achieves its goal which is to raise an interest in theoretical models that actively seek confrontation with experimental data from the functioning brain, and by a didactic effort aimed at experimentalists to present their data in a format that makes them more amenable to theory.

The field of Intelligent Systems has expanded enormously during the last two decades with many theoretical and practical results already available, which are the outcome of the synergetic merging of classical fields such as system theory, artificial intelligence, information theory, soft computing, operations research, linguistic theory and others. This book presents a collection of timely contributions that cover a wide, well-selected range of topics within the field. The book contains forty-seven contributions with an emphasis on computational and processing issues. The book is structured in four parts, as follows: Part I: Computer-aided intelligent systems and tools; Part II: Information extraction from texts, natural language interfaces and intelligent retrieval systems; Part III: Image processing and video-based systems; Part IV: Applications Particular topics treated include: planning; problem solving; information extraction from texts; natural language interfaces; audio retrieval systems; multi-agent systems; image compression, image and segmentation, and human face recognition. Applications include: peri-urban road network extraction; analysis of structures; climatic sensor signal analysis; aortic pressure assessment; hospital laboratory planning; fatigue analysis using electromyographic signals; forecasting in power systems. The book can serve as a reference pool of knowledge that may inspire and motivate researchers and practitioners for further developments and modern-day applications. The teacher and student in related postgraduate and research programs can thereby save considerable time in searching the scattered literature in the field.

Computational Intelligence is tolerant of imprecise information, partial truth and uncertainty. This book presents a selected collection of contributions on a focused treatment of important elements of CI, centred on its key element: learning. This book presents novel applications and real world applications working in Manufacturing and Engineering, and it sets a basis for understanding Domotic and Production Methods of the XXI Century.

Dexterous and autonomous manipulation is a key technology for the personal and service robots of the future. Advances in Bimanual Manipulation edited by Bruno Siciliano provides the robotics community with the most noticeable results of the four-year European project DEXMART (DEXterous and autonomous dual-arm hand robotic manipulation with sMART sensory-motor skills: A bridge from natural to artificial cognition). The volume covers a host of highly important topics in the field, concerned with modelling and learning of human manipulation skills, algorithms for task planning, human-robot interaction, and grasping, as well as hardware design of dexterous anthropomorphic hands. The results described in this five-chapter collection are believed to pave the way towards the development of robotic systems endowed with dexterous and human-aware dual-arm/hand manipulation skills for objects, operating with a high degree of autonomy in unstructured real-world environments.

In this book, internationally recognized experts in philosophy of science, computer science, and modeling and simulation are contributing to the discussion on how ontology, epistemology, and teleology will contribute to enable the next generation of intelligent modeling and simulation applications. It is well understood that a simulation can provide the technical means to display the behavior of a system over time, including following observed trends to predict future possible states, but how reliable and trustworthy are such predictions? The questions about what we can know (ontology), how we gain new knowledge (epistemology), and what we do with this knowledge (teleology) are therefore illuminated from these very different perspectives, as each experts uses a different facet to look at these challenges. The result of bringing these perspectives into one book is a challenging compendium that gives room for a spectrum of challenges: from general philosophy questions, such as can we use modeling and simulation and other computational means at all to discover new knowledge, down to computational methods to improve semantic interoperability between systems or methods addressing how to apply the recent insights of service oriented approaches to support distributed artificial intelligence. As such, this book has been compiled as an entry point to new domains for students, scholars, and practitioners and to raise the curiosity in them to learn more to fully address the topics of ontology, epistemology, and teleology from philosophical, computational, and conceptual viewpoints.

Bioinspired computation methods such as evolutionary algorithms and ant colony optimization are being applied successfully to complex engineering problems and to problems from combinatorial optimization, and with this comes the requirement to more fully understand the computational complexity of these search heuristics. This is the first textbook covering the most important results achieved in this area.

The authors study the computational complexity of bioinspired computation and show how runtime behavior can be analyzed in a rigorous way using some of the best-known combinatorial optimization problems -- minimum spanning trees, shortest paths, maximum matching, covering and scheduling problems. A feature of the book is the separate treatment of single- and multiobjective problems, the latter a domain where the development of the underlying theory seems to be lagging practical successes.

This book will be very valuable for teaching courses on bioinspired computation and combinatorial optimization. Researchers will also benefit as the presentation of the theory covers the most important developments in the field over the last 10 years. Finally, with a focus on well-studied combinatorial optimization problems rather than toy problems, the book will also be very valuable for practitioners in this field.

This book describes approaches to solving the problems of developing the central nervous system of robots (CNSR) based on smart electromechanical systems (SEMS) modules, principles of construction of the various modules of the central nervous system and variants of mathematical software CNSR in control systems for intelligent robots. It presents the latest advances in theory and practice at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Developers of intelligent robots to solve modern problems in robotics are increasingly addressing the use of the bionic approach to create robots that mimic the complexity and adaptability of biological systems. These have smart electromechanical system (SEMS), which are used in various cyber-physical systems (CPhS), and allow the functions of calculation, control, communications, information storage, monitoring, measurement and control of parameters and environmental parameters to be integrated. The behavior of such systems is based on the information received from the central nervous system of the robot (CNSR) on the state of the environment and system state. Recent advances in computer science, measuring and computing techniques have stimulated the practical realization of the CNSR, providing a fundamentally new approach to the methods and algorithms of formation of appropriate robot behavior. Intelligent robots with CNSR occupy a special place among the highly efficient robotic systems with parallel structures and play an important role in modern automated industries, and this timely book is a valuable resource for specialists in the field of robotics and control, as well as for students majoring in "Robots", "System analysis and management", and "Automation and control".

The modern origin of fuzzy sets, fuzzy algebra, fuzzy decision making, and "computing with words" is conventionally traced to Lotfi Zadeh's publication in 1965 of his path-breaking refutation of binary set theory. In a sixteen-page article, modestly titled "Fuzzy Sets" and published in the journal Information and Control, Zadeh launched a multi-disciplinary revolution. The start was relatively slow, but momentum gathered quickly. From 1970 to 1979 there were about 500 journal publications with the word fuzzy in the title; from 2000 to 2009 there were more than 35,000. At present, citations to Zadeh's publications are running at a rate of about 1,500-2,000 per year, and this rate continues to rise. Almost all applications of Zadeh's ideas have been in highly technical scientific fields, not in the social sciences. Zadeh was surprised by this development. In a personal note he states: "When I wrote my l965 paper, I expected that fuzzy set theory would be applied primarily in the realm of human sciences. Contrary to my expectation, fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic are applied in the main in physical and engineering sciences." In fact, the first comprehensive examination of fuzzy sets by a social scientist did not appear until 1987, a full twenty-two years after the publication of Zadeh's seminal article, when Michael Smithson, an Australian psychologist, published Fuzzy Set Analysis for Behavioral and Social Sciences.

The present book outlines a new approach to possibilistic clustering in which the sought clustering structure of the set of objects is based directly on the formal definition of fuzzy cluster and the possibilistic memberships are determined directly from the values of the pairwise similarity of objects. The proposed approach can be used for solving different classification problems. Here, some techniques that might be useful at this purpose are outlined, including a methodology for constructing a set of labeled objects for a semi-supervised clustering algorithm, a methodology for reducing analyzed attribute space dimensionality and a methods for asymmetric data processing. Moreover, a technique for constructing a subset of the most appropriate alternatives for a set of weak fuzzy preference relations, which are defined on a universe of alternatives, is described in detail, and a method for rapidly prototyping the Mamdani s fuzzy inference systems is introduced. This book addresses engineers, scientists, professors, students and post-graduate students, who are interested in and work with fuzzy clustering and its applications

Current Biomedical Databases are independently administered in geographically distinct locations, lending them almost ideally to adoption of intelligent data management approaches. This book focuses on research issues, problems and opportunities in Biomedical Data Infrastructure identifying new issues and directions for future research in Biomedical Data and Information Retrieval, Semantics in Biomedicine, and Biomedical Data Modeling and Analysis. The book will be a useful guide for researchers, practitioners, and graduate-level students interested in learning state-of-the-art development in biomedical data management.

During the past few years, data mining has grown rapidly in visibility and importance within information processing and decision analysis. This is par ticularly true in the realm of e-commerce, where data mining is moving from a "nice-to-have" to a "must-have" status. In a different though related context, a new computing methodology called granular computing is emerging as a powerful tool for the conception, analysis and design of information/intelligent systems. In essence, data mining deals with summarization of information which is resident in large data sets, while granular computing plays a key role in the summarization process by draw ing together points (objects) which are related through similarity, proximity or functionality. In this perspective, granular computing has a position of centrality in data mining. Another methodology which has high relevance to data mining and plays a central role in this volume is that of rough set theory. Basically, rough set theory may be viewed as a branch of granular computing. However, its applications to data mining have predated that of granular computing."

Parsing technology traditionally consists of two branches, which correspond to the two main application areas of context-free grammars and their generalizations. Efficient deterministic parsing algorithms have been developed for parsing programming languages, and quite different algorithms are employed for analyzing natural language. The Functional Treatment of Parsing provides a functional framework within which the different traditional techniques are restated and unified. The resulting theory provides new recursive implementations of parsers for context-free grammars. The new implementations, called recursive ascent parsers, avoid explicit manipulation of parse stacks and parse matrices, and are in many ways superior to conventional implementations. They are applicable to grammars for programming languages as well as natural languages. The book has been written primarily for students and practitioners of parsing technology. With its emphasis on modern functional methods, however, the book will also be of benefit to scientists interested in functional programming. The Functional Treatment of Parsing is an excellent reference and can be used as a text for a course on the subject.

Anyone involved in the philosophy of science is naturally drawn into the study of the foundations of probability. Different interpretations of probability, based on competing philosophical ideas, lead to different statistical techniques, and frequently to mutually contradictory consequences.

This unique book presents a new interpretation of probability, rooted in the traditional interpretation that was current in the 17th and 18th centuries. Mathematical models are constructed based on this interpretation, and statistical inference and decision theory are applied, including some examples in artificial intelligence, solving the main foundational problems. Nonstandard analysis is extensively developed for the construction of the models and in some of the proofs. Many nonstandard theorems are proved, some of them new, in particular, a representation theorem that asserts that any stochastic process can be approximated by a process defined over a space with equiprobable outcomes.

Case-based reasoning paradigms offer automatic reasoning capabilities which are useful for the implementation of human like machines in a limited sense.

This research book is the second volume in a series devoted to presenting Case-based reasoning (CBR) applications. The first volume, published in 2010, testified the flexibility of CBR, and its applicability in all those fields where experiential knowledge is available. This second volume further witnesses the heterogeneity of the domains in which CBR can be exploited, but also reveals some common directions that are clearly emerging in recent years.

This book will prove useful to the application engineers, scientists, professors and students who wish to develop successful case-based reasoning applications."

Knowledge, hidden in voluminous data repositories routinely created and maintained by today s applications, can be extracted by data mining. The next step is to transform this discovered knowledge into the inference mechanisms or simply the behavior of agents and multi-agent systems. Agent Intelligence Through Data Mining addresses this issue, as well as the arguable challenge of generating intelligence from data while transferring it to a separate, possibly autonomous, software entity. This book contains a methodology, tools and techniques, and several examples of agent-based applications developed with this approach. This volume focuses mainly on the use of data mining for smarter, more efficient agents.

Agent Intelligence Through Data Mining is designed for a professional audience of researchers and practitioners in industry. This book is also suitable for graduate-level students in computer science."

Fuzzy logic is a computational paradigm capable of modelling the own uncertainness of human beings. This wide-ranging book focuses in-depth on the VLSI CMOS implementation and application of programmable analogue Fuzzy Logic Controllers following a mixed-signal philosophy.

This volume gathers the peer reviewed papers which were presented at the third edition of the International Workshop Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-agent Manufacturing and Robotics SOHOMA 13 organized on June 20-22, 2013 by the Centre of Research in Computer Integrated Manufacturing and Robotics CIMR Bucharest, and hosted by the University of Valenciennes, France.

The book is structured in five parts, each one covering a specific research domain which represents a trend for modern manufacturing control: Distributed Intelligence for Sustainable Manufacturing, Holonic and Multi-Agent Technologies for Manufacturing Planning and Control; Service Orientation in Manufacturing Management and Control, Intelligent Products and Product-driven Automation and Robotics for Manufacturing and Services. These five evolution lines have in common concepts related to service orientation in a distributed planning and control agent-based industrial environment; today it is generally recognized that the Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture paradigm has been looked upon as a suitable and effective approach for industrial automation and management of manufacturing enterprises."

th This volume contains the papers presented at the 16 DGLR/STAB-Symposium held at the Eurogress Aachen and organized by RWTH Aachen University, Germany, November, 3 - 4, 2008. STAB is the German Aerospace Aerodynamics Association, founded towards the end of the 1970's, whereas DGLR is the German Society for Aeronautics and Astronautics (Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Luft- und Raumfahrt - Lilienthal Oberth e.V.). The mission of STAB is to foster development and acceptance of the discipline "Aerodynamics" in Germany. One of its general guidelines is to concentrate resources and know-how in the involved institutions and to avoid duplication in research work as much as possible. Nowadays, this is more necessary than ever. The experience made in the past makes it easier now, to obtain new knowledge for solving today's and tomorrow's problems. STAB unites German scientists and engineers from universities, research-establishments and industry doing research and project work in numerical and experimental fluid mechanics and aerodynamics for aerospace and other applications. This has always been the basis of numerous common research activities sponsored by different funding agencies. Since 1986 the symposium has taken place at different locations in Germany every two years. In between STAB workshops regularly take place at the DLR in Goettingen.

The book provides a survey of numerical methods for acoustics, namely the finite element method (FEM) and the boundary element method (BEM). It is the first book summarizing FEM and BEM (and optimization) for acoustics. The book shows that both methods can be effectively used for many other cases, FEM even for open domains and BEM for closed ones. Emphasis of the book is put on numerical aspects and on treatment of the exterior problem in acoustics, i.e. noise radiation.

Business rules are everywhere. Every enterprise process, task, activity, or function is governed by rules. However, some of these rules are implicit and thus poorly enforced, others are written but not enforced, and still others are perhaps poorly written and obscurely enforced. The business rule approach looks for ways to elicit, communicate, and manage business rules in a way that all stakeholders can understand, and to enforce them within the IT infrastructure in a way that supports their traceability and facilitates their maintenance.

Boyer and Mili will help you to adopt the business rules approach effectively. While most business rule development methodologies put a heavy emphasis on up-front business modeling and analysis, agile business rule development (ABRD) as introduced in this book is incremental, iterative, and test-driven. Rather than spending weeks discovering and analyzing rules for a complete business function, ABRD puts the emphasis on producing executable, tested rule sets early in the project without jeopardizing the quality, longevity, and maintainability of the end result. The authors presentation covers all four aspects required for a successful application of the business rules approach: (1) foundations, to understand what business rules are (and are not) and what they can do for you; (2) methodology, to understand how to apply the business rules approach; (3) architecture, to understand how rule automation impacts your application; (4) implementation, to actually deliver the technical solution within the context of a particular business rule management system (BRMS). Throughout the book, the authors use an insurance case study that deals with claim processing.

Boyer and Mili cater to different audiences: Project managers will find a pragmatic, proven methodology for delivering and maintaining business rule applications. Business analysts and rule authors will benefit from guidelines and best practices for rule discovery and analysis. Application architects and software developers will appreciate an exploration of the design space for business rule applications, proven architectural and design patterns, and coding guidelines for using JRules.

This book reports on advanced theories and cutting-edge applications in the field of soft computing. The individual chapters, written by leading researchers, are based on contributions presented during the 4th World Conference on Soft Computing, held May 25-27, 2014, in Berkeley. The book covers a wealth of key topics in soft computing, focusing on both fundamental aspects and applications. The former include fuzzy mathematics, type-2 fuzzy sets, evolutionary-based optimization, aggregation and neural networks, while the latter include soft computing in data analysis, image processing, decision-making, classification, series prediction, economics, control, and modeling. By providing readers with a timely, authoritative view on the field, and by discussing thought-provoking developments and challenges, the book will foster new research directions in the diverse areas of soft computing.