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.

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.

This book consists of a number of chapters addressing different aspects of activity recognition, roughly in three main categories of topics. The first topic will be focused on activity modeling, representation and reasoning using mathematical models, knowledge representation formalisms and AI techniques. The second topic will concentrate on activity recognition methods and algorithms. Apart from traditional methods based on data mining and machine learning, we are particularly interested in novel approaches, such as the ontology-based approach, that facilitate data integration, sharing and automatic/automated processing. In the third topic we intend to cover novel architectures and frameworks for activity recognition, which are scalable and applicable to large scale distributed dynamic environments. In addition, this topic will also include the underpinning technological infrastructure, i.e. tools and APIs, that supports function/capability sharing and reuse, and rapid development and deployment of technological solutions. The fourth category of topic will be dedicated to representative applications of activity recognition in intelligent environments, which address the life cycle of activity recognition and their use for novel functions of the end-user systems with comprehensive implementation, prototyping and evaluation. This will include a wide range of application scenarios, such as smart homes, intelligent conference venues and cars.

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.

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".

This book highlights recent research on metaheuristics for biomedical engineering, addressing both theoretical and applications aspects. Given the multidisciplinary nature of bio-medical image analysis, it has now become one of the most central topics in computer science, computer engineering and electrical and electronic engineering, and attracted the interest of many researchers. To deal with these problems, many traditional and recent methods, algorithms and techniques have been proposed. Among them, metaheuristics is the most common choice. This book provides essential content for senior and young researchers interested in methodologies for implementing metaheuristics to help solve biomedical engineering problems.

The field of data mining has made significant and far-reaching advances over the past three decades.Because of its potential power for solving complex problems, data mining has been successfully applied to diverse areas such as business, engineering, social media, and biological science. Many of these applications search for patterns in complex structural information. In biomedicine for example, modeling complex biological systems requires linking knowledge across many levels of science, from genes to disease. Further, the data characteristics of the problems have also grown from static to dynamic and spatiotemporal, complete to incomplete, and centralized to distributed, and grow in their scope and size (this is known as "big data"). The effective integration of big data for decision-making also requires privacy preservation.

The contributions to this monograph summarize the advances of data mining in the respective fields. This volume consists of nine chapters that address subjects ranging from mining data from opinion, spatiotemporal databases, discriminative subgraph patterns, path knowledge discovery, social media, and privacy issues to the subject of computation reduction via binary matrix factorization."

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.

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.

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."

This book gathers contributions to the 3rd International Conference on Smart Learning Ecosystems and Regional Developments (SLERD 2018), held at Aalborg University, Denmark on 23-25 May 2018. What characterizes smart learning ecosystems? What is their role in city and regional development and innovation? How can we promote citizen engagement in smart learning ecosystems? These are some of the questions addressed at SLERD 2018 and documented in these proceedings, which include a diverse range of papers intended to help understand, conceive, and promote innovative human-centric design and development methods, education/training practices, informal social learning, and citizen-driven policies. The papers elaborate on the notion of smart learning ecosystems, assess the relation of smart learning ecosystems with their physical surroundings, and identify new resources for smart learning. SLERD 2018 contributes to foster the social innovation sectors, ICT and economic development and deployment strategies, as well as new policies for smarter, more proactive citizens. As such, these proceedings are relevant for researchers and policymakers alike.

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."

This book describes a set of hybrid fuzzy models showing how to use them to deal with incomplete and/or vague information in different kind of decision-making problems. Based on the authors' research, it offers a concise introduction to important models, ranging from rough fuzzy digraphs and intuitionistic fuzzy rough models to bipolar fuzzy soft graphs and neutrosophic graphs, explaining how to construct them. For each method, applications to different multi-attribute, multi-criteria decision-making problems, are presented and discussed. The book, which addresses computer scientists, mathematicians, and social scientists, is intended as concise yet complete guide to basic tools for constructing hybrid intelligent models for dealing with some interesting real-world problems. It is also expected to stimulate readers' creativity thus offering a source of inspiration for future research.

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."

The present book includes a set of selected extended papers from the third International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence (IJCCI 2011), held in Paris, France, from 24 to 26 October 2011. The conference was composed of three co-located conferences: The International Conference on Fuzzy Computation (ICFC), the International Conference on Evolutionary Computation (ICEC), and the International Conference on Neural Computation (ICNC). Recent progresses in scientific developments and applications in these three areas are reported in this book. IJCCI received 283 submissions, from 59 countries, in all continents. This book includes the revised and extended versions of a strict selection of the best papers presented at the conference.

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."

Temporal Information Systems in Medicine introduces the engineering of information systems for medically-related problems and applications. The chapters are organized into four parts; fundamentals, temporal reasoning & maintenance in medicine, time in clinical tasks, and the display of time-oriented clinical information. The chapters are self-contained with pointers to other relevant chapters or sections in this book when necessary. Time is of central importance and is a key component of the engineering process for information systems. This book is designed as a secondary text or reference book for upper -undergraduate level students and graduate level students concentrating on computer science, biomedicine and engineering. Industry professionals and researchers working in health care management, information systems in medicine, medical informatics, database management and AI will also find this book a valuable asset.

This book offers an excellent presentation of intelligent engineering and informatics foundations for researchers in this field as well as many examples with industrial application. It contains extended versions ofselected papers presented at the inaugural ACASE 2012 Conference dedicated to the Applications of Systems Engineering. This conference was held from the 6th to the 8th of February 2012, at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, organized by the University of Technology, Sydney (Australia), Wroclaw University of Technology (Poland) and the"University of Applied Sciences"in Hagenberg ("Austria)"."" The book is organized into three main parts. Part I contains papers devoted to the heuristic approaches that are applicable in situations where the problem cannot be solved by exact methods, due to various characteristics or dimensionality problems. Part II covers essential issues of the network management, presents intelligent models of the next generation of networks and distributed systems as well as discusses applications of modern numerical methods in large intractable systems. Part III covers salient issues of complexity in intelligent system applications. This part also contains papers and articles which discuss concurrency issues that arise when multiple systems attempt to use the same radio space and the inter-connected system applications in the field of medical simulation and training. "

This book gives a state-of-the-art view by recognized researchers of the nanotechnologies required for future integrated systems leading to innovations in energy, the environment, and biotechnologies. Nanostructures that would be difficult to form using the current semiconductor technology will be realized using a combination of bottom-up and top-down processes, including hybrid nanostructures made of inorganic and organic/biological materials. Bio-sensing, imaging, and cell or molecular manipulation are discussed in Chapters 2-7. The acquisition of basic knowledge on the cellular level will lead to curing serious diseases. Also, nanofabrication technologies, discussed in Chapters 8-15, will lead to next-generation solar cells, secondary batteries, and advanced electronic circuits using nanostructured materials, thus providing solutions for serious energy and environment issues. Prospective readers of this book include graduate students as well as researchers and engineers working in this field.

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.

IFIP's Working Group 2.7(13.4)* has, since its establishment in 1974, con centrated on the software problems of user interfaces. From its original interest in operating systems interfaces the group has gradually shifted em phasis towards the development of interactive systems. The group has orga nized a number of international working conferences on interactive software technology, the proceedings of which have contributed to the accumulated knowledge in the field. The current title of the Working Group is 'User Interface Engineering', with the aim of investigating the nature, concepts, and construction of user interfaces for software systems. The scope of work involved is: - to increase understanding of the development of interactive systems; - to provide a framework for reasoning about interactive systems; - to provide engineering models for their development. This report addresses all three aspects of the scope, as further described below. In 1986 the working group published a report (Beech, 1986) with an object-oriented reference model for describing the components of operating systems interfaces. The modelwas implementation oriented and built on an object concept and the notion of interaction as consisting of commands and responses. Through working with that model the group addressed a number of issues, such as multi-media and multi-modal interfaces, customizable in terfaces, and history logging. However, a conclusion was reached that many software design considerations and principles are independent of implemen tation models, but do depend on the nature of the interaction process."