Computational and mathematical models provide us with the opportunities to investigate the complexities of real world problems. They allow us to apply our best analytical methods to define problems in a clearly mathematical manner and exhaustively test our solutions before committing expensive resources. This is made possible by assuming parameter(s) in a bounded environment, allowing for controllable experimentation, not always possible in live scenarios. For example, simulation of computational models allows the testing of theories in a manner that is both fundamentally deductive and experimental in nature. The main ingredients for such research ideas come from multiple disciplines and the importance of interdisciplinary research is well recognized by the scientific community. This book provides a window to the novel endeavours of the research communities to present their works by highlighting the value of computational modelling as a research tool when investigating complex systems. We hope that the readers will have stimulating experiences to pursue research in these directions.

The recommendation of products, content and services cannot be considered newly born, although its widespread application is still in full swing. While its growing success in numerous sectors, the progress of the Social Web has revolutionized the architecture of participation and relationship in the Web, making it necessary to restate recommendation and reconciling it with "Collaborative Tagging," as the popularization of authoring in the Web, and "Social Networking," as the translation of personal relationships to the Web. Precisely, the convergence of recommendation with the above "Social Web" pillars is what motivates this book, which has collected contributions from well-known experts in the academy and the industry to provide a broader view of the problems that "Social Recommenders" might face with. If recommender systems have proven their key role in facilitating the user access to resources on the Web, when sharing resources has become social, it is natural for recommendation strategies in the Social Web era take into account the users' point of view and the relationships among users to calculate their predictions. This book aims to help readers to discover and understand the interplay among legal issues such as privacy; technical aspects such as interoperability and scalability; and social aspects such as the influence of affinity, trust, reputation and likeness, when the goal is to offer recommendations that are truly useful to both the user and the provider."

This book is dedicated to the memory of Professor Zdzis{\l}aw Pawlak who passed away almost six year ago. He is the founder of the Polish school of Artificial Intelligence and one of the pioneers in Computer Engineering and Computer Science with worldwide influence. He was a truly great scientist, researcher, teacher and a human being. This book prepared in two volumes contains more than 50 chapters. This demonstrates that the scientific approaches discovered by of Professor Zdzis{\l}aw Pawlak, especially the rough set approach as a tool for dealing with imperfect knowledge, are vivid and intensively explored by many researchers in many places throughout the world. The submitted papers prove that interest in rough set research is growing and is possible to see many new excellent results both on theoretical foundations and applications of rough sets alone or in combination with other approaches. We are proud to offer the readers this book.

This monograph deals with various visibility-based path and motion planning problems motivated by real-world applications such as exploration and mapping planetary surfaces, environmental surveillance using stationary or mobile robots, and imaging of global air/pollutant circulation. The formulation and solution of these problems call for concepts and methods from many areas of applied mathematics including computational geometry, set-covering, non-smooth optimization, combinatorial optimization and optimal control. Emphasis is placed on the formulation of new problems and methods of approach to these problems. Since geometry and visualization play important roles in the understanding of these problems, intuitive interpretations of the basic concepts are presented before detailed mathematical development. The development of a particular topic begins with simple cases illustrated by specific examples, and then progresses forward to more complex cases. The intended readers of this monograph are primarily students and researchers in engineering, computer science and applied mathematics. An understanding of the mathematical development of the main results requires only basic knowledge of mathematical analysis, control, and optimization theories. Some exercises with various degrees of difficulty are provided at the end of the main chapters. The material presented here may serve as a portion of an introductory course or seminar on visibility-based optimal path and motion planning problems with the objective of stimulating interest and further studies in this relatively new area.

This book presents recent applications and approaches as well as challenges in digital forensic science. One of the evolving challenges that is covered in the book is the cloud forensic analysis which applies the digital forensic science over the cloud computing paradigm for conducting either live or static investigations within the cloud environment. The book also covers the theme of multimedia forensics and watermarking in the area of information security. That includes highlights on intelligence techniques designed for detecting significant changes in image and video sequences. Moreover, the theme proposes recent robust and computationally efficient digital watermarking techniques. The last part of the book provides several digital forensics related applications, including areas such as evidence acquisition enhancement, evidence evaluation, cryptography, and finally, live investigation through the importance of reconstructing the botnet attack scenario to show the malicious activities and files as evidences to be presented in a court.

This edited book presents the scientific outcomes of the 17th International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence Research, Management and Applications (SERA 2019) held on May 29-31, 2019 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The aim of the conference was to bring together researchers and scientists, businessmen and entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, computer users and students to discuss the numerous fields of computer science and to share their experiences and exchange new ideas and information in a meaningful way. This book includes 13 of the conference's most promising papers featuring recent research in software engineering, management and applications

The amount of data used in the business world has been growing at a rapid and exponential rate. These large volumes of data have led not only to the rise of big data analytics, but to the need for improvements and advancements in the management of it. Recent Advances in Intelligent Technologies and Information Systems brings together current practices and innovations in the management and processing of diverse big data sets through technological integration. Focusing on concepts such as semantic technologies, open source tools, and soft computing, this book is an integral reference source for professionals, researchers, and practitioners interested in the application of technological advancements.

This book develops a coherent and quite general theoretical approach to algorithm design for iterative learning control based on the use of operator representations and quadratic optimization concepts including the related ideas of inverse model control and gradient-based design. Using detailed examples taken from linear, discrete and continuous-time systems, the author gives the reader access to theories based on either signal or parameter optimization. Although the two approaches are shown to be related in a formal mathematical sense, the text presents them separately as their relevant algorithm design issues are distinct and give rise to different performance capabilities. Together with algorithm design, the text demonstrates the underlying robustness of the paradigm and also includes new control laws that are capable of incorporating input and output constraints, enable the algorithm to reconfigure systematically in order to meet the requirements of different reference and auxiliary signals and also to support new properties such as spectral annihilation. Iterative Learning Control will interest academics and graduate students working in control who will find it a useful reference to the current status of a powerful and increasingly popular method of control. The depth of background theory and links to practical systems will be of use to engineers responsible for precision repetitive processes.

Autonomic computing and networking (ACN), a concept inspired by the human autonomic system, is a priority research area and a booming new paradigm in the field. Formal and Practical Aspects of Autonomic Computing and Networking: Specification, Development, and Verification outlines the characteristics, novel approaches of specification, refinement, programming and verification associated with ACN. The goal of ACN and the topics covered in this work include making networks and computers more self-organized, self- configured, self-healing, self-optimizing, self-protecting, and more. This book helpfully details the steps necessary towards realizing computer and network autonomy and its implications.

In the mid 1990s, Tim Berners-Lee had the idea of developing the World Wide Web into a "Semantic Web", a web of information that could be interpreted by machines in order to allow the automatic exploitation of data, which until then had to be done by humans manually. One of the first people to research topics related to the Semantic Web was Professor Rudi Studer. From the beginning, Rudi drove projects like ONTOBROKER and On-to-Knowledge, which later resulted in W3C standards such as RDF and OWL. By the late 1990s, Rudi had established a research group at the University of Karlsruhe, which later became the nucleus and breeding ground for Semantic Web research, and many of today's well-known research groups were either founded by his disciples or benefited from close cooperation with this think tank. In this book, published in celebration of Rudi's 60th birthday, many of his colleagues look back on the main research results achieved during the last 20 years. Under the editorship of Dieter Fensel, once one of Rudi's early PhD students, an impressive list of contributors and contributions has been collected, covering areas like Knowledge Management, Ontology Engineering, Service Management, and Semantic Search. Overall, this book provides an excellent overview of the state of the art in Semantic Web research, by combining historical roots with the latest results, which may finally make the dream of a "Web of knowledge, software and services" come true.

Recent advancements in the field of telecommunications, medical imaging and signal processing deal with signals that are inherently time varying, nonlinear and complex-valued. The time varying, nonlinear characteristics of these signals can be effectively analyzed using artificial neural networks. Furthermore, to efficiently preserve the physical characteristics of these complex-valued signals, it is important to develop complex-valued neural networks and derive their learning algorithms to represent these signals at every step of the learning process. This monograph comprises a collection of new supervised learning algorithms along with novel architectures for complex-valued neural networks. The concepts of meta-cognition equipped with a self-regulated learning have been known to be the best human learning strategy. In this monograph, the principles of meta-cognition have been introduced for complex-valued neural networks in both the batch and sequential learning modes. For applications where the computation time of the training process is critical, a fast learning complex-valued neural network called as a fully complex-valued relaxation network along with its learning algorithm has been presented. The presence of orthogonal decision boundaries helps complex-valued neural networks to outperform real-valued networks in performing classification tasks. This aspect has been highlighted. The performances of various complex-valued neural networks are evaluated on a set of benchmark and real-world function approximation and real-valued classification problems.

This book describes five qualitative investment decision-making methods based on the hesitant fuzzy information. They are: (1) the investment decision-making method based on the asymmetric hesitant fuzzy sigmoid preference relations, (2) the investment decision-making method based on the hesitant fuzzy trade-off and portfolio selection, (3) the investment decision-making method based on the hesitant fuzzy preference envelopment analysis, (4) the investment decision-making method based on the hesitant fuzzy peer-evaluation and strategy fusion, and (5) the investment decision-making method based on the EHVaR measurement and tail analysis.

This volume contains a contemporary, integrated description of the processes of language. These range from fast scales (fractions of a second) to slow ones (over a million years). The contributors, all experts in their fields, address language in the brain, production of sentences and dialogues, language learning, transmission and evolutionary processes that happen over centuries or millenia, the relation between language and genes, the origins of language, self-organization, and language competition and death. The book as a whole will help to show how processes at different scales affect each other, thus presenting language as a dynamic, complex and profoundly human phenomenon.

Context-aware ranking is an important task with many applications. E.g. in recommender systems items (products, movies, ...) and for search engines webpages should be ranked. In all these applications, the ranking is not global (i.e. always the same) but depends on the context. Simple examples for context are the user for recommender systems and the query for search engines. More complicated context includes time, last actions, etc. The major problem is that typically the variable domains (e.g. customers, products) are categorical and huge, the observations are very sparse and only positive events are observed. In this book, a generic method for context-aware ranking as well as its application are presented. For modelling a new factorization based on pairwise interactions is proposed and compared to other tensor factorization approaches. For learning, the `Bayesian Context-aware Ranking' framework consisting of an optimization criterion and algorithm is developed. The second main part of the book applies this general theory to the three scenarios of item, tag and sequential-set recommendation. Furthermore extensions of time-variant factors and one-class problems are studied. This book generalizes and builds on work that has received the `WWW 2010 Best Paper Award', the `WSDM 2010 Best Student Paper Award' and the `ECML/PKDD 2009 Best Discovery Challenge Award'.

In Artificial Intelligence in Finance and Investing, authors Robert Trippi and Jae Lee explain this fascinating new technology in terms that portfolio managers, institutional investors, investment analysis, and information systems professionals can understand. Using real-life examples and a practical approach, this rare and readable volume discusses the entire field of artificial intelligence of relevance to investing, so that readers can realize the benefits and evaluate the features of existing or proposed systems, and ultimately construct their own systems. Topics include using Expert Systems for Asset Allocation, Timing Decisions, Pattern Recognition, and Risk Assessment; overview of Popular Knowledge-Based Systems; construction of Synergistic Rule Bases for Securities Selection; incorporating the Markowitz Portfolio Optimization Model into Knowledge-Based Systems; Bayesian Theory and Fuzzy Logic System Components; Machine Learning in Portfolio Selection and Investment Timing, including Pattern-Based Learning and Fenetic Algorithms; and Neural Network-Based Systems. To illustrate the concepts presented in the book, the authors conclude with a valuable practice session and analysis of a typical knowledge-based system for investment management, K-FOLIO. For those who want to stay on the cutting edge of the "application" revolution, Artificial Intelligence in Finance and Investing offers a pragmatic introduction to the use of knowledge-based systems in securities selection and portfolio management.

There isn't a facet of human life that has not been touched and influenced by robots and automation. What makes robots and machines versatile is their computational intelligence. While modern intelligent sensors and powerful hardware capabilities have given a huge fillip to the growth of intelligent machines, the progress in the development of algorithms for smart interaction, collaboration and pro-activeness will result in the next quantum jump.

This book deals with the recent advancements in design methodologies, algorithms and implementation techniques to incorporate intelligence in "robots and automation systems." Several articles deal with navigation, localization and mapping of mobile robots, a problem that engineers and researchers are grappling with all the time. Fuzzy logic, neural networks and neuro-fuzzy based techniques for real world applications have been detailed in a few articles.

This edited volume is targeted to present the latest state-of-the-art computational intelligence techniques in Robotics and Automation. It is a compilation of the extended versions of the very best papers selected from the many that were presented at the 5th International Conference on Automation, Robotics and Applications (ICARA 2011) which was held in Wellington, New Zealand from 6-8 December, 2011. Scientists and engineers who work with robots and automation systems will find this book very useful and stimulating.

This monograph comprises work on network-based Intrusion Detection (ID) that is grounded in visualisation and hybrid Artificial Intelligence (AI). It has led to the design of MOVICAB-IDS (MObile VIsualisation Connectionist Agent-Based IDS), a novel Intrusion Detection System (IDS), which is comprehensively described in this book. This novel IDS combines different AI paradigms to visualise network traffic for ID at packet level. It is based on a dynamic Multiagent System (MAS), which integrates an unsupervised neural projection model and the Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) paradigm through the use of deliberative agents that are capable of learning and evolving with the environment. The proposed novel hybrid IDS provides security personnel with a synthetic, intuitive snapshot of network traffic and protocol interactions. This visualisation interface supports the straightforward detection of anomalous situations and their subsequent identification. The performance of MOVICAB-IDS was tested through a novel mutation-based testing method in different real domains which entailed several attacks and anomalous situations.

This book contains the combined proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing Application and Wireless Sensor Network (UCAWSN-15) and the 16th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Applications and Technologies (PDCAT-15). The combined proceedings present peer-reviewed contributions from academic and industrial researchers in fields including ubiquitous and context-aware computing, context-awareness reasoning and representation, location awareness services, and architectures, protocols and algorithms, energy, management and control of wireless sensor networks. The book includes the latest research results, practical developments and applications in parallel/distributed architectures, wireless networks and mobile computing, formal methods and programming languages, network routing and communication algorithms, database applications and data mining, access control and authorization and privacy preserving computation.

This book examines modern artificial intelligence to display how it may be applied to computer games. It spans the divide that exists between the academic research community working with advanced artificial intelligence and the games programming community which must create and release new and interesting games.

Vast amounts of data are nowadays collected, stored and processed, in an effort to assist in making a variety of administrative and governmental decisions. These innovative steps considerably improve the speed, effectiveness and quality of decisions. Analyses are increasingly performed by data mining and profiling technologies that statistically and automatically determine patterns and trends. However, when such practices lead to unwanted or unjustified selections, they may result in unacceptable forms of discrimination. Processing vast amounts of data may lead to situations in which data controllers know many of the characteristics, behaviors and whereabouts of people. In some cases, analysts might know more about individuals than these individuals know about themselves. Judging people by their digital identities sheds a different light on our views of privacy and data protection. This book discusses discrimination and privacy issues related to data mining and profiling practices. It provides technological and regulatory solutions, to problems which arise in these innovative contexts. The book explains that common measures for mitigating privacy and discrimination, such as access controls and anonymity, fail to properly resolve privacy and discrimination concerns. Therefore, new solutions, focusing on technology design, transparency and accountability are called for and set forth.

Imagine yourself as a military officer in a conflict zone trying to identify locations of weapons caches supporting road-side bomb attacks on your country's troops. Or imagine yourself as a public health expert trying to identify the location of contaminated water that is causing diarrheal diseases in a local population. Geospatial abduction is a new technique introduced by the authors that allows such problems to be solved. Geospatial Abduction provides the mathematics underlying geospatial abduction and the algorithms to solve them in practice; it has wide applicability and can be used by practitioners and researchers in many different fields. Real-world applications of geospatial abduction to military problems are included. Compelling examples drawn from other domains as diverse as criminology, epidemiology and archaeology are covered as well. This book also includes access to a dedicated website on geospatial abduction hosted by University of Maryland. Geospatial Abduction targets practitioners working in general AI, game theory, linear programming, data mining, machine learning, and more. Those working in the fields of computer science, mathematics, geoinformation, geological and biological science will also find this book valuable.

Counting belongs to the most elementary and frequent mental activities of human beings. Its results are a basis for coming to a decision in a lot of situations and dimensions of our life. This book presents a novel approach to the advanced and sophisticated case, called intelligent counting, in which the objects of counting are imprecisely, fuzzily specified. Formally, this collapses to counting in fuzzy sets, interval-valued fuzzy sets or I-fuzzy sets (Atanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy sets). The monograph is the first one showing and emphasizing that the presented methods of intelligent counting are human-consistent: are reflections and formalizations of real, human counting procedures performed under imprecision and, possibly, incompleteness of information. Other applications of intelligent counting in various areas of intelligent systems and decision support will be discussed, too. The whole presentation is self-contained, systematic, and equipped with many examples, figures and tables. Computer and information scientists, researchers, engineers and practitioners, applied mathematicians, and postgraduate students interested in information imprecision are the target readers.

In this book, the editors explain how students enrolled in two digital forensic courses at their institution are exposed to experiential learning opportunities, where the students acquire the knowledge and skills of the subject-matter while also learning how to adapt to the ever-changing digital forensic landscape. Their findings (e.g., forensic examination of different IoT devices) are also presented in the book. Digital forensics is a topic of increasing importance as our society becomes "smarter" with more of the "things" around us been internet- and inter-connected (e.g., Internet of Things (IoT) and smart home devices); thus, the increasing likelihood that we will need to acquire data from these things in a forensically sound manner. This book is of interest to both digital forensic educators and digital forensic practitioners, as well as students seeking to learn about digital forensics.

This volume includes papers presented at IIH-MSP 2017, the 13th International Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing, held from 12 to 15 August 2017 in Matsue, Shimane, Japan. The conference addresses topics ranging from information hiding and security, and multimedia signal processing and networking, to bio-inspired multimedia technologies and systems. This volume of Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies focuses on subjects related to massive image/video compression and transmission for emerging networks, advances in speech and language processing, information hiding and signal processing for audio and speech signals, intelligent distribution systems and applications, recent advances in security and privacy for multimodal network environments, multimedia signal processing, and machine learning. Updated with the latest research outcomes and findings, the papers presented appeal to researchers and students who are interested in the corresponding fields.