The Intelligent Decision Technologies (IDT) International Conference encourages an interchange of research on intelligent systems and intelligent technologies that enhance or improve decision making. The focus of IDT is interdisciplinary and includes research on all aspects of intelligent decision technologies, from fundamental development to real applications. IDT has the potential to expand their support of decision making in such areas as finance, accounting, marketing, healthcare, medical and diagnostic systems, military decisions, production and operation, networks, traffic management, crisis response, human-machine interfaces, financial and stock market monitoring and prediction, and robotics. Intelligent decision systems implement advances in intelligent agents, fuzzy logic, multi-agent systems, artificial neural networks, and genetic algorithms, among others. Emerging areas of active research include virtual decision environments, social networking, 3D human-machine interfaces, cognitive interfaces, collaborative systems, intelligent web mining, e-commerce, e-learning, e-business, bioinformatics, evolvable systems, virtual humans, and designer drugs. This volume contains papers from the Fourth KES International Symposium on Intelligent Decision Technologies (KES IDT'12), hosted by researchers in Nagoya University and other institutions in Japan. This book contains chapters based on papers selected from a large number of submissions for consideration for the conference from the international community. The volume represents the current leading thought in intelligent decision technologies.

This book reviews the algorithms for processing geometric data, with a practical focus on important techniques not covered by traditional courses on computer vision and computer graphics. Features: presents an overview of the underlying mathematical theory, covering vector spaces, metric space, affine spaces, differential geometry, and finite difference methods for derivatives and differential equations; reviews geometry representations, including polygonal meshes, splines, and subdivision surfaces; examines techniques for computing curvature from polygonal meshes; describes algorithms for mesh smoothing, mesh parametrization, and mesh optimization and simplification; discusses point location databases and convex hulls of point sets; investigates the reconstruction of triangle meshes from point clouds, including methods for registration of point clouds and surface reconstruction; provides additional material at a supplementary website; includes self-study exercises throughout the text.

The use of optimization algorithms has seen an emergence in various professional fields due to its ability to process data and information in an efficient and productive manner. Combining computational intelligence with these algorithms has created a trending subject of research on how much more beneficial intelligent-inspired algorithms can be within companies and organizations. As modern theories and applications are continually being developed in this area, professionals are in need of current research on how intelligent algorithms are advancing in the real world. The Handbook of Research on Advancements of Swarm Intelligence Algorithms for Solving Real-World Problems is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the development of swarm intelligence algorithms and their implementation into current issues. While highlighting topics such as multi-agent systems, bio-inspired computing, and evolutionary programming, this publication explores various concepts and theories of swarm intelligence and outlines future directions of development. This book is ideally designed for IT specialists, researchers, academicians, engineers, developers, practitioners, and students seeking current research on the real-world applications of intelligent algorithms.

This edited volume is targeted at presenting the latest state-of-the-art methodologies in "Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithms." The chapters deal with the theoretical and methodological aspects, as well as various applications to many real world problems from science, technology, business or commerce. Overall, the book has 14 chapters including an introductory chapter giving the fundamental definitions and some important research challenges. The contributions were selected on the basis of fundamental ideas/concepts rather than the thoroughness of techniques deployed.

The term "soft computing" applies to variants of and combinations under the four broad categories of evolutionary computing, neural networks, fuzzy logic, and Bayesian statistics. Although each one has its separate strengths, the complem- tary nature of these techniques when used in combination (hybrid) makes them a powerful alternative for solving complex problems where conventional mat- matical methods fail. The use of intelligent and soft computing techniques in the field of geo- chanical and pavement engineering has steadily increased over the past decade owing to their ability to admit approximate reasoning, imprecision, uncertainty and partial truth. Since real-life infrastructure engineering decisions are made in ambiguous environments that require human expertise, the application of soft computing techniques has been an attractive option in pavement and geomecha- cal modeling. The objective of this carefully edited book is to highlight key recent advances made in the application of soft computing techniques in pavement and geo- chanical systems. Soft computing techniques discussed in this book include, but are not limited to: neural networks, evolutionary computing, swarm intelligence, probabilistic modeling, kernel machines, knowledge discovery and data mining, neuro-fuzzy systems and hybrid approaches. Highlighted application areas include infrastructure materials modeling, pavement analysis and design, rapid interpre- tion of nondestructive testing results, porous asphalt concrete distress modeling, model parameter identification, pavement engineering inversion problems, s- grade soils characterization, and backcalculation of pavement layer thickness and moduli.

Information security and copyright protection are more important today than before. Digital watermarking is one of the widely used techniques used in the world in the area of information security. This book introduces a number of digital watermarking techniques and is divided into four parts. The first part introduces the importance of watermarking techniques and intelligent technology. The second part includes a number of watermarking techniques. The third part includes the hybrid watermarking techniques and the final part presents conclusions. This book is directed to students, professors, researchers and application engineers who are interested in the area of information security.

This book gathers 14 of the most promising papers presented at the 18th IEEE/ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking and Parallel/Distributed Computing (SNPD 2017), which was held on June 26-28, 2017 in Kanazawa, Japan. The aim of this conference was to bring together researchers and scientists, businessmen and entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, computer users, and students to discuss the various fields of computer science and to share their experiences and exchange new ideas and information in a meaningful way. The book presents research findings concerning all aspects (theory, applications and tools) of computer and information science, and discusses the practical challenges encountered along the way, as well as the solutions adopted to solve them.

"Intelligent Routines II: Solving Linear Algebra and Differential Geometry with Sage" contains numerous of examples and problems as well as many unsolved problems. This book extensively applies the successful software Sage, which can be found free online http: //www.sagemath.org/. Sage is a recent and popular software for mathematical computation, available freely and simple to use. This book is useful to all applied scientists in mathematics, statistics and engineering, as well for late undergraduate and graduate students of above subjects. It is the first such book in solving symbolically with Sage problems in Linear Algebra and Differential Geometry. Plenty of SAGE applications are given at each step of the exposition.

MR technologies play an increasing role in different aspects of human-robot interactions. The visual combination of digital contents with real working spaces creates a simulated environment that is set out to enhance these aspects. This book presents and discusses fundamental scientific issues, technical implementations, lab testing, and industrial applications and case studies of Mixed Reality in Human-Robot Interaction. It is a reference book that not only acts as meta-book in the field that defines and frames Mixed Reality use in Human-Robot Interaction, but also addresses up-coming trends and emerging directions of the field.

This volume offers a comprehensive reference volume to the state-of-the-art in the area of MR in Human-Robot Interaction, an excellent mix of contributions from leading researcher/experts in multiple disciplines from academia and industry. All authors are experts and/or top researchers in their respective areas and each of the chapters has been rigorously reviewed for intellectual contents by the editorial team to ensure a high quality. This book provides up-to-date insight into the current research topics in this field as well as the latest technological advancements and the best working examples.

This book is devoted to the Metacognition arena. It highlights works that show relevant analysis, reviews, theoretical, and methodological proposals, as well as studies, approaches, applications, and tools that shape current state, define trends and inspire future research. As a result of the revision process fourteen manuscripts were accepted and organized into five parts as follows: * Conceptual: contains conceptual works oriented to: (1) review models of strategy instruction and tailor a hybrid strategy; (2) unveil second-order judgments and define a method to assess metacognitive judgments; (3) introduces a conceptual model to describe the metacognitive activity as an autopoietic system. * Framework: offers three works concerned with: (4) stimulate metacognitive skills and self-regulatory functions; (5) evaluate metacognitive skills and self-regulated learning at problem solving; (6) deal with executive management metacognition and strategic knowledge metacognition. * Studies: reports research related to: (7) uncover how metacognitive awareness of listening strategies bias listening proficiency; (8) unveil how metacognitive skills and motivation are achieved in science informal learning; (9) tackle stress at learning by means of coping strategies. * Approaches: focus on the following targets: (10) social metacognition to support collaborative problem solving; (11) metacognitive skills to be stimulated in computer supported collaborative learning; (12) metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive experiences are essential for teaching practices. * Tools: promotes the use of intelligent tutoring systems such as: (13) BioWorld allows learners to practice medical diagnostic by providing virtual patient cases; (14) MetaHistoReasoning provides examples to learners and inquiries about the causes of historical events. This volume will be a source of interest for researchers, practitioners, professors, and postgraduate students aimed at updating their knowledge and finding targets for future work in the metacognition arena.

Multimedia services are now commonly used in various activities in the daily lives of humans. Related application areas include services that allow access to large depositories of information, digital libraries, e-learning and e-education, e-government and e-governance, e-commerce and e-auctions, e-entertainment, e-health and e-medicine, and e-legal services, as well as their mobile counterparts (i.e., m-services). Despite the tremendous growth of multimedia services over the recent years, there is an increasing demand for their further development. This demand is driven by the ever-increasing desire of society for easy accessibility to information in friendly, personalized and adaptive environments. In this book at hand, we examine recent Advances in Recommender Systems. Recommender systems are crucial in multimedia services, as they aim at protecting the service users from information overload. The book includes nine chapters, which present various recent research results in recommender systems. This research book is directed to professors, researchers, application engineers and students of all disciplines who are interested in learning more about recommender systems, advancing the corresponding state of the art and developing recommender systems for specific applications.

Foundations of Computational Intelligence Volume 4: Bio-Inspired Data Mining Theoretical Foundations and Applications Recent advances in the computing and electronics technology, particularly in sensor devices, databases and distributed systems, are leading to an exponential growth in the amount of data stored in databases. It has been estimated that this amount doubles every 20 years. For some applications, this increase is even steeper. Databases storing DNA sequence, for example, are doubling their size every 10 months. This growth is occurring in several applications areas besides bioinformatics, like financial transactions, government data, environmental mo- toring, satellite and medical images, security data and web. As large organizations recognize the high value of data stored in their databases and the importance of their data collection to support decision-making, there is a clear demand for - phisticated Data Mining tools. Data mining tools play a key role in the extraction of useful knowledge from databases. They can be used either to confirm a parti- lar hypothesis or to automatically find patterns. In the second case, which is - lated to this book, the goal may be either to describe the main patterns present in dataset, what is known as descriptive Data Mining or to find patterns able to p- dict behaviour of specific attributes or features, known as predictive Data Mining. While the first goal is associated with tasks like clustering, summarization and association, the second is found in classification and regression problems.

The Scientific Network of Integrated Systems, Design and Technology (ISDT) is an initiative that has been established to respond industrial needs for integration of " Knowledge Technology" (KT)" with multi- and inter-disciplinary applications. In particular the objective of ISDT is to incorporate multilateral engineering disciplines i.e. Composite-, Automotive-, Industrial-, Control- and Micro-Electronics Engineering, and derive knowledge for design and development of innovative product and services. In this context, the discourse of KT is established to address effective use of Knowledge Management, Semantic Technology, Information Systems and Software Engineering towards evolution of adaptive and intelligent systems for industrial applications. This carefully edited book presents the results of the latest ISDT meeting with special involvement of leading researchers and industries whose contributions are presented in the book chapters. This book consists of three main chapters namely:

. Chapter 1: Applied Knowledge Management in Practice

. Chapter 2: Semantic Technologies for Industrial Management and Process Controlling

. Chapter 3: Knowledge Driven Approaches for Product Engineering

Each article presents a unique in-progress research with respect to the target goal of improving our common understanding of KT integration and promoting further researches and cooperation in future.

This book commemorates the 65th birthday of Dr. Boris Kovalerchuk, and reflects many of the research areas covered by his work. It focuses on data processing under uncertainty, especially fuzzy data processing, when uncertainty comes from the imprecision of expert opinions. The book includes 17 authoritative contributions by leading experts.

Focused on renewable energy systems and the development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for their integration in smart grids, this book presents recent advances and methods that help to ensure that power generation from renewable sources remains stable, that power losses are minimized, and that the reliable functioning of these power generation units is maintained. The book highlights key topics and technologies for renewable energy systems including the intelligent control of power generators, power electronics that connect renewable power generation units to the grid, and fault diagnosis for power generators and power electronics. In particular, the following topics are addressed: * Modeling and control of power generators (PMSGs, DFIGs); * Modeling and control of power electronics (converters, inverters); * Modeling and fault diagnosis of the transmission and distribution Grid; and * Modelling and control of distributed power generation units (interconnected synchronous generators or photovoltaic units). Because of the above coverage, members of the wider engineering community will find that the nonlinear control and estimation methods presented provide essential insights into the functioning of renewable energy power systems, while the academic community will find the book a valuable textbook for undergraduate or graduate courses on renewable energy systems.

This book presents and develops new reinforcement learning methods that enable fast and robust learning on robots in real-time. Robots have the potential to solve many problems in society, because of their ability to work in dangerous places doing necessary jobs that no one wants or is able to do. One barrier to their widespread deployment is that they are mainly limited to tasks where it is possible to hand-program behaviors for every situation that may be encountered. For robots to meet their potential, they need methods that enable them to learn and adapt to novel situations that they were not programmed for. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a paradigm for learning sequential decision making processes and could solve the problems of learning and adaptation on robots. This book identifies four key challenges that must be addressed for an RL algorithm to be practical for robotic control tasks. These RL for Robotics Challenges are: 1) it must learn in very few samples; 2) it must learn in domains with continuous state features; 3) it must handle sensor and/or actuator delays; and 4) it should continually select actions in real time. This book focuses on addressing all four of these challenges. In particular, this book is focused on time-constrained domains where the first challenge is critically important. In these domains, the agent's lifetime is not long enough for it to explore the domains thoroughly, and it must learn in very few samples.

While ambient intelligence has long been relegated to the realm of science fiction, creating smart technology that is increasingly responsive to individuals and environments is, in many ways, becoming reality, as the body of research and opportunity for practical application in this field continues to grow. Innovative Applications of Ambient Intelligence: Advances in Smart Systems provides perspectives on the convergence of ubiquitous computing, intelligent systems research, and context awareness with the aim of encouraging the further development of ambient intelligence frameworks and research. Focusing on interaction and communication in smart environments, as well as the successful development and design of ambient interfaces and platforms, this book aims to further the continuously growing dialogue on the promise of ambient computing.

Semantics in Adaptive and Personalised Services, initially strikes one as a specific and perhaps narrow domain. Yet, a closer examination of the term reveals much more. On one hand there is the issue of semantics. Nowadays, this most often refers to the use of OWL, RDF or some other XML based ontology description language in order to represent the entities of problem. Still, semantics may also very well refer to the consideration of the meanings and concepts, rather than arithmetic measures, regardless of the representation used. On the other hand, there is the issue of adaptation, i.e. automated re-configuration based on some context. This could be the network and device context, the application context or the user context; we refer to the latter case as personalization. From a different perspective, there is the issue of the point of view from which to examine the topic. There is the point of view of tools, referring to the algorithms and software tools one can use, the point of view of the methods, referring to the abstract methodologies and best practices one can follow, as well as the point of view of applications, referring to successful and pioneering case studies that lead the way in research and innovation. Or at least so we thought.

Based on the above reasoning, the editors identified key researchers and practitioners in each of the aforementioned categories and invited them to contribute a corresponding work to this book. However, as the authors' contributions started to arrive, the editors also started to realize that although these categories participate in each chapter to different degrees, none of them can ever be totally obsolete from them. Moreover, it seems that theory and methods are inherent in the development of tools and applications and inversely the application is also inherent in the motivation and presentation of tools and methods.

This research volume is a continuation of our previous volumes on intelligent machine. It is divided into three parts. Part I deals with big data and ontologies. It includes examples related to the text mining, rule mining and ontology. Part II is on knowledge-based systems. It includes context-centered systems, knowledge discovery, interoperability, consistency and systems of systems. The final part is on applications. The applications involve prediction, decision optimization and assessment.

This book is directed to the researchers who wish to explore the field of knowledge engineering further.

This book contains papers presented at the International Symposium on Elect- magnetic Fields in Mechatronics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering ISEF'07 which was held in Prague, the Czech Republic, from September 13 to 15, 2007. ISEF conferences have been organized since 1985 and from the very beginning it was a common initiative of Polish and other European researchers who have dealt with electromagnetic ?eld in electrical engineering. The conference travels through Europe and is organized in various academic centres. Relatively often, it was held in some Polish city as the initiative was on the part of Polish scientists. Now ISEF is much more international and successive events take place in different European academic centres renowned for electromagnetic research. This time it was Prague, famous for its beauty and historical background, as it is the place where many c- tures mingle. The venue of the conference was the historical building of Charles University, placed just in the centre of Prague. The Technical University of Prague, in turn, constituted the logistic centre of the conference. It is the tradition of the ISEF meetings that they try to tackle quite a vast area of computational and applied electromagnetics. Moreover, the ISEF symposia aim at combining theory and practice; therefore the majority of papers are deeply rooted in engineering problems, being simultaneously of a high theoretical level.

Multimedia services involve processing, transmission and retrieval of multiple forms of information. Multimedia services have gained momentum in the past few years due to the easy availability of computing power and storage media. Societyisdemandinghuman-likeintelligentbehaviour,suchasadaptationand generalization, from machines every day. With this view in mind, researchers are working on fusing intelligent paradigms such as arti?cial neural networks, swarm intelligence, arti?cial immune systems, evolutionary computing and multiagents with multimedia services. Arti?cial neural networks use neurons, interconnected using various schemes, for fusing learning in multimedia-based systems. Evolutionary c- puting techniques are used in tasks such as optimization. Typical multiagent systems are based on Belief-Desire-Intention model and act on behalf of the users. Typical examples of intelligent multimedia services include digital - braries, e-learning and teaching, e-government, e-commerce, e-entertainment, e-health and e-legal services. This book includes 15 chapters on advanced tools and methodologies pertaining to the multimedia services. The authors and reviewers have c- tributed immensely to this research-oriented book. We believe that this - search volume will be valuable to professors, researchers and students of all disciplines, such as computer science, engineering and management. We express our sincere thanks to Springer-Verlag for their wonderful e- torial support.

The series "Studies in Computational Intelligence" (SCI) publishes new developments and advances in the various areas of computational intelligence - quickly and with a high quality. The intent is to cover the theory, applications, and design methods of computational intelligence, as embedded in the fields of engineering, computer science, physics and life science, as well as the methodologies behind them. The series contains monographs, lecture notes and edited volumes in computational intelligence spanning the areas of neural networks, connectionist systems, genetic algorithms, evolutionary computation, artificial intelligence, cellular automata, self-organizing systems, soft computing, fuzzy systems, and hybrid intelligent systems. Critical to both contributors and readers are the short publication time and world-wide distribution - this permits a rapid and broad dissemination of research results.

The purpose of the 10th IEEE/ACIS International Conference on Computer and Information Science (ICIS 2011) was held on May16-18, 2011 in Sanya, Hainan Island, China is to bring together scientist, engineers, computer users, students to share their experiences and exchange new ideas, and research results about all aspects (theory, applications and tools) of computer and information science, and to discuss the practical challenges encountered along the way and the solutions adopted to solve them

The conference organizers selected the best 20 papers from those papers accepted for presentation at the conference in order to publish them in this volume. The papers were chosen based on review scores submitted by members of the program committee, and underwent further rigorous rounds of review."

This book presents as its main subject new models in mathematical neuroscience. A wide range of neural networks models with discontinuities are discussed, including impulsive differential equations, differential equations with piecewise constant arguments, and models of mixed type. These models involve discontinuities, which are natural because huge velocities and short distances are usually observed in devices modeling the networks. A discussion of the models, appropriate for the proposed applications, is also provided.

This book contains selected papers that address a variety of topics related to the design, development and operation of unmanned and fully autonomous sailing boats. These papers were presented in the 9th International Robotic Sailing Conference, in association with the 9th World Robotic Sailing Championship that took place in Viana do Castelo, Portugal from the 5th to 10th of September 2016. The book is divided in three parts, each focusing on key aspects of robotic sailing. The first part addresses the design, construction and validation of autonomous sailboat platforms, including their rigs, appendages and control mechanisms. The second part is devoted to the development of sensors and algorithms to enhance the performance of robotic sailing boats, in terms of their speed, course control and manoeuvring ability. Finally, the papers in the last part are dedicated to the improvement of behaviours required for the accomplishment of complex autonomous missions. Robotic sailing is a relatively new multidisciplinary area of research, with a recognized great potential for persistent ocean observation. Using the wind for boat propulsion is something mankind has been doing for centuries. Automating and optimizing the sailing process in the harsh marine environment is an ever present challenge which is now promising to bear fruit.