This book provides fresh insights into the cutting edge of multimedia data mining, reflecting how the research focus has shifted towards networked social communities, mobile devices and sensors. The work describes how the history of multimedia data processing can be viewed as a sequence of disruptive innovations. Across the chapters, the discussion covers the practical frameworks, libraries, and open source software that enable the development of ground-breaking research into practical applications. Features: reviews how innovations in mobile, social, cognitive, cloud and organic based computing impacts upon the development of multimedia data mining; provides practical details on implementing the technology for solving real-world problems; includes chapters devoted to privacy issues in multimedia social environments and large-scale biometric data processing; covers content and concept based multimedia search and advanced algorithms for multimedia data representation, processing and visualization.

This cutting-edge book presents the theory and practice of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution (GMCR), which is used for strategically investigating disputes in any field to enable informed decision making. It clearly explains how GMCR can determine what is the best a particular decision maker (DM) can independently achieve in dynamic interaction with others. Moves and counter-moves follow various stability definitions reflecting human behavior under conflict. The book defines a wide range of preference structures to represent a DM's comparisons of states or scenarios: equally preferred, more or less preferred; unknown; degrees of strength of preference; and hybrid. It vividly describes how GMCR can ascertain whether a DM can fare even better by cooperating with others in a coalition. The book portrays how a conflict can evolve from the status quo to a desirable resolution, and provides a universal design for a decision support system to implement the innovative decision technologies using the matrix formulation of GMCR. Further, it illustrates the key ideas using real-world conflicts and supplies problems at the end of each chapter. As such, this highly instructive book benefits teachers, mentors, students and practitioners in any area where conflict arises.

This book describes the development of an integrated approach for generating the path and gait of realistic hexapod robotic systems. It discusses in detail locomation with straight-ahead, crab and turning motion capabilities in varying terrains, like sloping surfaces, staircases, and various user-defined rough terrains. It also presents computer simulations and validation using Virtual Prototyping (VP) tools and real-world experiments. The book also explores improving solutions by applying the developed nonlinear, constrained inverse dynamics model of the system formulated as a coupled dynamical problem based on the Newton-Euler (NE) approach and taking into account realistic environmental conditions. The approach is developed on the basis of rigid multi-body modelling and the concept that there is no change in the configuration of the system in the short time span of collisions.

This thesis develops several systematic and unified approaches for analyzing dynamic systems with positive characteristics or a more general cone invariance property. Based on these analysis results, it uses linear programming tools to address static output feedback synthesis problems with a focus on optimal gain performances. Owing to their low computational complexity, the established controller design algorithms are applicable for large-scale systems. The theory and control strategies developed will not only be useful in handling large-scale positive delay systems with improved solvability and at lower cost, but also further our understanding of the system characteristics in other related areas, such as distributed coordination of networked multi-agent systems, formation control of multiple robots.

This book examines the introduction of smart technologies into public administrations and the organizational issues caused by these implementations, and the potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to rationalize and improve government, transform governance and organizational issues, and address economic, social, and environmental challenges. Cities are increasingly using new technologies in the delivery of public sector services and in the improvement of government transparency, business-led urban development, and urban sustainability. The book will examine specific smart projects that cities are embracing to improve transparency, efficiency, sustainability, mobility, and whether all cities are prepared to implement smart technologies and the incentives for promoting implementation. This focus on the smart technologies applied to public sector entities will be of interest to academics, researchers, policy-makers, public managers, international organizations and technical experts involved in and responsible for the governance, development and design of Smart Cities.

This book presents a unique approach to stream data mining. Unlike the vast majority of previous approaches, which are largely based on heuristics, it highlights methods and algorithms that are mathematically justified. First, it describes how to adapt static decision trees to accommodate data streams; in this regard, new splitting criteria are developed to guarantee that they are asymptotically equivalent to the classical batch tree. Moreover, new decision trees are designed, leading to the original concept of hybrid trees. In turn, nonparametric techniques based on Parzen kernels and orthogonal series are employed to address concept drift in the problem of non-stationary regressions and classification in a time-varying environment. Lastly, an extremely challenging problem that involves designing ensembles and automatically choosing their sizes is described and solved. Given its scope, the book is intended for a professional audience of researchers and practitioners who deal with stream data, e.g. in telecommunication, banking, and sensor networks.

This book introduces the challenges of robotic tactile perception and task understanding, and describes an advanced approach based on machine learning and sparse coding techniques. Further, a set of structured sparse coding models is developed to address the issues of dynamic tactile sensing. The book then proves that the proposed framework is effective in solving the problems of multi-finger tactile object recognition, multi-label tactile adjective recognition and multi-category material analysis, which are all challenging practical problems in the fields of robotics and automation. The proposed sparse coding model can be used to tackle the challenging visual-tactile fusion recognition problem, and the book develops a series of efficient optimization algorithms to implement the model. It is suitable as a reference book for graduate students with a basic knowledge of machine learning as well as professional researchers interested in robotic tactile perception and understanding, and machine learning.

Agent technology has recently become one of the most vibrant and fastest growing areas in information technology. And advanced digital communicatiion is a central enabling technology for the coming information society. So software agents and their exploitation for future communication systems are attracting particular attention from the research and development community as well as from economic and user communities interested in everyday private and professional digital communication applications. This monograph-like anthology is the first systematic introduction to software agents and future communication systems. Fifteen coherently written chapters by leading software agent researchers provide complementary coverage of the relevant issues. Multi-agent systems and mobile agent approaches are presented in a well-balanced way and applied to most important topics in future communication systems. In addition, the volume editors have provided a detailed introductory survey chapters.

This book focuses on the characteristics of cooperative control problems for general linear multi-agent systems, including formation control, air traffic control, rendezvous, foraging, role assignment, and cooperative search. On this basis and combined with linear system theory, it introduces readers to the cooperative tracking problem for identical continuous-time multi-agent systems under state-coupled dynamics; the cooperative output regulation for heterogeneous multi-agent systems; and the optimal output regulation for model-free multi-agent systems. In closing, the results are extended to multiple leaders, and cooperative containment control for uncertain multi-agent systems is addressed. Given its scope, the book offers an essential reference guide for researchers and designers of multi-agent systems, as well as a valuable resource for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students.

This is the third book presenting selected results of research on the further development of the shape understanding system (SUS) carried out by authors in the newly founded Queen Jadwiga Research Institute of Understanding. In this book the new term Machine Understanding is introduced referring to a new area of research aiming to investigate the possibility of building machines with the ability to understand. It is presented that SUS needs to some extent mimic human understanding and for this reason machines are evaluated according to the rules applied for the evaluation of human understanding. The book shows how to formulate problems and how it can be tested if the machine is able to solve these problems.

We are now entering an era where the human world assumes recognition of itself as data. Much of humanity's basis for existence is becoming subordinate to software processes that tabulate, index, and sort the relations that comprise what we perceive as reality. The acceleration of data collection threatens to relinquish ephemeral modes of representation to ceaseless processes of computation. This situation compels the human world to form relations with non-human agencies, to establish exchanges with software processes in order to allow a profound upgrade of our own ontological understanding. By mediating with a higher intelligence, we may be able to rediscover the inner logic of the age of intelligent machines. In The End of the Future, Stephanie Polsky conceives an understanding of the digital through its dynamic intersection with the advent and development of the nation-state, race, colonization, navigational warfare, mercantilism, and capitalism, and the mathematical sciences over the past five centuries, the era during which the world became "modern." The book animates the twenty-first century as an era in which the screen has split off from itself and proliferated onto multiple surfaces, allowing an inverted image of totalitarianism to flash up and be altered to support our present condition of binary apperception. It progresses through a recognition of atomized political power, whose authority lies in the control not of the means of production, but of information, and in which digital media now serves to legitimize and promote a customized micropolitics of identity management. On this new apostolate plane, humanity may be able to shape a new world in which each human soul is captured and reproduced as an autonomous individual bearing affects and identities. The digital infrastructure of the twenty-first century makes it possible for power to operate through an esoteric mathematical means, and for factual material to be manipulated in the interest of advancing the means of control. This volume travels a course from Elizabethan England, to North American slavery, through cybernetic Social Engineering, Cold War counterinsurgency, and the (neo)libertarianism of Silicon Valley in order to arrive at a place where an organizing intelligence that started from an ambition to resourcefully manipulate physical bodies has ended with their profound neutralization.

This edited book presents the scientific outcomes of the 19th IEEE/ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking and Parallel/Distributed Computing (SNPD 2018), which was held in Busan, Korea on June 27-29, 2018. The aim of this 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. The book includes research findings on all aspects (theory, applications and tools) of computer and information science and discusses the practical challenges encountered along the way and the solutions adopted to respond to them. The book includes 13 of the conference's most promising papers.

This provides a comprehensive overview of the key principles of security concerns surrounding the upcoming Internet of Things (IoT), and introduces readers to the protocols adopted in the IoT. It also analyses the vulnerabilities, attacks and defense mechanisms, highlighting the security issues in the context of big data. Lastly, trust management approaches and ubiquitous learning applications are examined in detail. As such, the book sets the stage for developing and securing IoT applications both today and in the future.

This book delivers concise coverage of classical methods and new developments related to indoor location-based services. It collects results from isolated domains including geometry, artificial intelligence, statistics, cooperative algorithms, and distributed systems and thus provides an accessible overview of fundamental methods and technologies. This makes it an ideal starting point for researchers, students, and professionals in pervasive computing. Location-based services are services using the location of a mobile computing device as their primary input. While such services are fairly easy to implement outside buildings thanks to accessible global positioning systems and high-quality environmental information, the situation inside buildings is fundamentally different. In general, there is no simple way of determining the position of a moving target inside a building without an additional dedicated infrastructure. The book's structure is learning oriented, starting with a short introduction to wireless communication systems and basic positioning techniques and ending with advanced features like event detection, simultaneous localization and mapping, and privacy aspects. Readers who are not familiar with the individual topics will be able to work through the book from start to finish. At the same time all chapters are self-contained to support readers who are already familiar with some of the content and only want to pick selected topics that are of particular interest.

This book gathers the outcomes of the thirteenth Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR), the premier event for showcasing cutting-edge research on algorithmic robotics. The latest WAFR, held at Universidad Politecnica de Yucatan in Merida, Mexico on December 9-11, 2018, continued this tradition. This book contains fifty-four papers presented at WAFR, which highlight the latest research on fundamental algorithmic robotics (e.g., planning, learning, navigation, control, manipulation, optimality, completeness, and complexity) demonstrated through several applications involving multi-robot systems, perception, and contact manipulation. Addressing a diverse range of topics in papers prepared by expert contributors, the book reflects the state of the art and outlines future directions in the field of algorithmic robotics.

Focusing on the vision-based and sensor-based recognition and analysis of human activity and behavior, this book gathers extended versions of selected papers presented at the International Conference on Activity and Behavior Computing (ABC 2020), held in Kitakyushu, Japan on August 26 - 29, 2020. The respective chapters cover action recognition, action understanding, gait analysis, gesture recognition, behavior analysis, emotion and affective computing, and related areas. The book addresses various challenges and aspects of human activity recognition in both the sensor-based and vision-based domains, making it a unique guide to the field.

A comprehensive analysis of current theory and research in the psychological, computational, and neural sciences elucidates the stuctures and processes of language and thought. Chapters discuss language comprehension and artificial intelligence, ARCS system for analogical retrieval, ACME model of analogical mapping, PAULINE, an artificial intelligence system for pragmatic language generation, a theory of understanding of spoken and written text, recent developments and effect of different modes of language representation on the efficiency of information processing. This book will be of interest to professionals and scholars in psychology, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science.

This carefully edited volume is the outcome of the eleventh edition of the Workshop on Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR), which is the premier venue showcasing cutting edge research in algorithmic robotics. The eleventh WAFR, which was held August 3-5, 2014 at Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey continued this tradition. This volume contains extended versions of the 42 papers presented at WAFR. These contributions highlight the cutting edge research in classical robotics problems (e.g. manipulation, motion, path, multi-robot and kinodynamic planning), geometric and topological computation in robotics as well novel applications such as informative path planning, active sensing and surgical planning. This book - rich by topics and authoritative contributors - is a unique reference on the current developments and new directions in the field of algorithmic foundations.

This book is a remarkable collection of chapters covering a wider range of topics, including unsupervised text mining, anomaly and Intrusion Detection, Self-reconfiguring Robotics, application of Fuzzy Logic to development aid, Design and Optimization, Context-Aware Reasoning, DNA Sequence Assembly and Multilayer Perceptron Networks. The twenty-one chapters present extended results from the SAI Intelligent Systems Conference (IntelliSys) 2015 and have been selected based on high recommendations during IntelliSys 2015 review process. This book presents innovative research and development carried out presently in fields of knowledge representation and reasoning, machine learning, and particularly in intelligent systems in a more broad sense. It provides state - of - the - art intelligent methods and techniques for solving real world problems along with a vision of the future research.

This is the proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Design Computing and Cognition (DCC'18) held at the Polytecnico di Milano in Italy. This volume presents both advances in theory and applications and demonstrates the depth and breadth of design computing and design cognition. Design thinking, the label given to the acts of designing, has become a paradigmatic view that has transcended the discipline of design and is now widely used in business and elsewhere. As a consequence there is an increasing interest in design research. This volume contains papers that represent the state-of-the-art research and developments in design computing and design cognition. This book is of particular interest to researchers, developers and users of advanced computation in design and those who need to gain a better understanding of designing that can be obtained through empirical studies.

This book is a collection of selected papers presented at the First International Conference on Industrial IoT, Big Data and Supply Chain (IIoTBDSC), held as an online conference due to COVID-19 (initially to be held in Macao, Special Administration Region (SAR) of China), during September 15-17, 2020. It includes novel and innovative work from experts, practitioners, scientists and decision-makers from academia and industry. It brings multi-disciplines together on IIoT, data science, cloud computing, software engineering approaches to design, development, testing and quality of products and services.

This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the IFIP TC 3 Open Conference on Computers in Education, OCCE 2020, held in Mumbai, India, in January 2020. The 11 full papers and 4 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 submissions. The papers discuss key emerging topics and evolving practices in the area of educational computing research. They are organized in the following topical sections: computing education; learners' and teachers' perspectives; teacher professional development; the industry perspective; and further aspects.

As a movement, transhumanism aims to upgrade the human body through science, constantly pushing back the limits of a person by using cutting-edge technologies to fix the human body and upgrade it beyond its natural abilities. Transhumanism can not only change human habits, but it can also change learning practices. By improving human learning, it improves the human organism beyond natural and biological limits. The Handbook of Research on Learning in the Age of Transhumanism is an essential research publication that discusses global values, norms, and ethics that relate to the diverse needs of learners in the digital world and addresses future priorities and needs for transhumanism. The book will identify and scrutinize the needs of learners in the age of transhumanism and examine best practices for transhumanist leaders in learning. Featuring topics such as cybernetics, pedagogy, and sociology, this book is ideal for educators, trainers, instructional designers, curriculum developers, professionals, researchers, academicians, policymakers, and librarians.

This book seeks to interpret connections between the machine brain, mind and vision in an alternative way and promote future research into the Interdisciplinary Evolution of Machine Brain (IEMB). It gathers novel research on IEMB, and offers readers a step-by-step introduction to the theory and algorithms involved, including data-driven approaches in machine learning, monitoring and understanding visual environments, using process-based perception to expand insights, mechanical manufacturing for remote sensing, reconciled connections between the machine brain, mind and vision, and the interdisciplinary evolution of machine intelligence. This book is intended for researchers, graduate students and engineers in the fields of robotics, Artificial Intelligence and brain science, as well as anyone who wishes to learn the core theory, principles, methods, algorithms, and applications of IEMB.