This book presents adaptive logics as an intuitive and powerful framework for modeling defeasible reasoning. It examines various contexts in which defeasible reasoning is useful and offers a compact introduction into adaptive logics. The author first familiarizes readers with defeasible reasoning, the adaptive logics framework, combinations of adaptive logics, and a range of useful meta-theoretic properties. He then offers a systematic study of adaptive logics based on various applications. The book presents formal models for defeasible reasoning stemming from different contexts, such as default reasoning, argumentation, and normative reasoning. It highlights various meta-theoretic advantages of adaptive logics over other logics or logical frameworks that model defeasible reasoning. In this way the book substantiates the status of adaptive logics as a generic formal framework for defeasible reasoning.

This book presents new findings in industrial cyber-physical system design and control for various domains, as well as their social and economic impacts on society. Industry 4.0 requires new approaches in the context of secure connections, control, and maintenance of cyber-physical systems as well as enhancing their interaction with humans. The book focuses on open issues of cyber-physical system control and its usage, discussing implemented breakthrough systems, models, programs, and methods that could be used in industrial processes for the control, condition assessment, diagnostics, prognostication, and proactive maintenance of cyber-physical systems. Further, it addresses the topic of ensuring the cybersecurity of industrial cyber-physical systems and proposes new, reliable solutions. The authors also examine the impact of university courses on the performance of industrial complexes, and the organization of education for the development of cyber-physical systems. The book is intended for practitioners, enterprise representatives, scientists, students, and Ph.D. and master's students conducting research in the area of cyber-physical system development and implementation in various domains.

This book introduces readers to recent advancements in financial technologies. The contents cover some of the state-of-the-art fields in financial technology, practice, and research associated with artificial intelligence, big data, and blockchain-all of which are transforming the nature of how products and services are designed and delivered, making less adaptable institutions fast become obsolete. The book provides the fundamental framework, research insights, and empirical evidence in the efficacy of these new technologies, employing practical and academic approaches to help professionals and academics reach innovative solutions and grow competitive strengths.

This book presents the proceedings of the 8th International Ergonomics Conference (ERGONOMICS), held in Zagreb, Croatia on December 2-5, 2020. By highlighting the latest theories and models, as well as cutting-edge technologies and applications, and by combining findings from a range of disciplines including engineering, design, robotics, healthcare, management, computer science, human biology and behavioral science, it provides researchers and practitioners alike with a comprehensive, timely guide on human factors and ergonomics. It also offers an excellent source of innovative ideas to stimulate future discussions and developments aimed at applying knowledge and techniques to optimize system performance, while at the same time promoting the health, safety and wellbeing of individuals. The proceedings include papers from researchers and practitioners, scientists and physicians, institutional leaders, managers and policy makers that contribute to constructing the Human Factors and Ergonomics approach across a variety of methodologies, domains and productive sectors.

This book presents a unified framework, based on specialized evolutionary algorithms, for the global induction of various types of classification and regression trees from data. The resulting univariate or oblique trees are significantly smaller than those produced by standard top-down methods, an aspect that is critical for the interpretation of mined patterns by domain analysts. The approach presented here is extremely flexible and can easily be adapted to specific data mining applications, e.g. cost-sensitive model trees for financial data or multi-test trees for gene expression data. The global induction can be efficiently applied to large-scale data without the need for extraordinary resources. With a simple GPU-based acceleration, datasets composed of millions of instances can be mined in minutes. In the event that the size of the datasets makes the fastest memory computing impossible, the Spark-based implementation on computer clusters, which offers impressive fault tolerance and scalability potential, can be applied.

This book presents advanced control techniques that use neural networks to deal with grid disturbances in the context renewable energy sources, and to enhance low-voltage ride-through capacity, which is a vital in terms of ensuring that the integration of distributed energy resources into the electrical power network. It presents modern control algorithms based on neural identification for different renewable energy sources, such as wind power, which uses doubly-fed induction generators, solar power, and battery banks for storage. It then discusses the use of the proposed controllers to track doubly-fed induction generator dynamics references: DC voltage, grid power factor, and stator active and reactive power, and the use of simulations to validate their performance. Further, it addresses methods of testing low-voltage ride-through capacity enhancement in the presence of grid disturbances, as well as the experimental validation of the controllers under both normal and abnormal grid conditions. The book then describes how the proposed control schemes are extended to control a grid-connected microgrid, and the use of an IEEE 9-bus system to evaluate their performance and response in the presence of grid disturbances. Lastly, it examines the real-time simulation of the entire system under normal and abnormal conditions using an Opal-RT simulator.

Membrane Computing was introduced as a computational paradigm in Natural Computing. The models introduced, called Membrane (or P) Systems, provide a coherent platform to describe and study living cells as computational systems. Membrane Systems have been investigated for their computational aspects and employed to model problems in other fields, like: Computer Science, Linguistics, Biology, Economy, Computer Graphics, Robotics, etc. Their inherent parallelism, heterogeneity and intrinsic versatilityallow them to model a broad range of processes and phenomena, being also an efficient means to solve and analyze problems in a novel way.

Membrane Computing has been used to model biological systems, becoming with time a thorough modeling paradigm comparable, in its modeling and predicting capabilities, to more established models in this area. This book is the result of the need to collect, in an organic way, different facets of this paradigm.

The chapters of this book, together with the web pages accompanying them, present different applications of Membrane Systems to Biology. Deterministic, non-deterministic and stochastic systems paired with different algorithms and methodologies show the full potential of this framework.

The book is addressed to researchers interested in applications of discrete biological models and the interplay between Membrane Systems and other approaches to analyze complex systems."

This book presents a novel framework, known as Active Robust Optimization, which provides the tools for evaluating, comparing and optimizing changeable products. Since any product that can change its configuration during normal operation may be considered a "changeable product," the framework is widely applicable. Further, the methodology enables designers to use adaptability to deal with uncertainties and so avoid over-conservative designs. Offering a comprehensive overview of the framework, including its unique features, such as its ability to optimally respond to uncertain situations, the book also defines a new class of optimization problem and examines the effects of changes in various parameters on their solution. Lastly, it discusses innovative approaches for solving the problem and demonstrates these with two examples from different fields in engineering design: optimization of an optical table and optimization of a gearbox.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the notion that nearly everything we use, from gym shorts to streetlights, will soon be connected to the Internet; the Internet of Everything (IoE) encompasses not just objects, but the social connections, data, and processes that the IoT makes possible. Industry and financial analysts have predicted that the number of Internet-enabled devices will increase from 11 billion to upwards of 75 billion by 2020. Regardless of the number, the end result looks to be a mind-boggling explosion in Internet connected stuff. Yet, there has been relatively little attention paid to how we should go about regulating smart devices, and still less about how cybersecurity should be enhanced. Similarly, now that everything from refrigerators to stock exchanges can be connected to a ubiquitous Internet, how can we better safeguard privacy across networks and borders? Will security scale along with this increasingly crowded field? Or, will a combination of perverse incentives, increasing complexity, and new problems derail progress and exacerbate cyber insecurity? For all the press that such questions have received, the Internet of Everything remains a topic little understood or appreciated by the public. This volume demystifies our increasingly "smart" world, and unpacks many of the outstanding security, privacy, ethical, and policy challenges and opportunities represented by the IoE. Scott J. Shackelford provides real-world examples and straightforward discussion about how the IoE is impacting our lives, companies, and nations, and explain how it is increasingly shaping the international community in the twenty-first century. Are there any downsides of your phone being able to unlock your front door, start your car, and control your thermostat? Is your smart speaker always listening? How are other countries dealing with these issues? This book answers these questions, and more, along with offering practical guidance for how you can join the effort to help build an Internet of Everything that is as secure, private, efficient, and fun as possible.

This book makes available a self-contained collection of modern research addressing the general constrained optimization problems using evolutionary algorithms. Broadly the topics covered include constraint handling for single and multi-objective optimizations; penalty function based methodology; multi-objective based methodology; new constraint handling mechanism; hybrid methodology; scaling issues in constrained optimization; design of scalable test problems; parameter adaptation in constrained optimization; handling of integer, discrete and mix variables in addition to continuous variables; application of constraint handling techniques to real-world problems; and constrained optimization in dynamic environment. There is also a separate chapter on hybrid optimization, which is gaining lots of popularity nowadays due to its capability of bridging the gap between evolutionary and classical optimization. The material in the book is useful to researchers, novice, and experts alike. The book will also be useful for classroom teaching and future research.

This book describes an effective framework for setting the right process parameters and new mold design to reduce the current plastic defects in injection molding. It presents a new approach for the optimization of injection molding process via (i) a new mold runner design which leads to 20 percent reduction in scrap rate, 2.5 percent reduction in manufacturing time, and easier ejection of injected part, (ii) a new mold gate design which leads to less plastic defects; and (iii) the introduction of a number of promising alternatives with high moldability indices. Besides presenting important developments of relevance academic research, the book also includes useful information for people working in the injection molding industry, especially in the green manufacturing field.

Over the past decade the field of Human-Computer Interaction has evolved from the study of the usability of interactive products towards a more holistic understanding of how they may mediate desired human experiences. This book identifies the notion of diversity in users' experiences with interactive products and proposes methods and tools for modeling this along two levels: (a) interpersonal diversity in users' responses to early conceptual designs, and (b) the dynamics of users' experiences over time. The Repertory Grid Technique is proposed as an alternative to standardized psychometric scales for modeling interpersonal diversity in users' responses to early concepts in the design process, and new Multi-Dimensional Scaling procedures are introduced for modeling such complex quantitative data. iScale, a tool for the retrospective assessment of users' experiences over time is proposed as an alternative to longitudinal field studies, and a semi-automated technique for the analysis of the elicited experience narratives is introduced. Through these two methodological contributions, this book argues against averaging in the subjective evaluation of interactive products. It proposes the development of interactive tools that can assist designers in moving across multiple levels of abstraction of empirical data, as design-relevant knowledge might be found on all these levels. Foreword by Jean-Bernard Martens and Closing Note by Marc Hassenzahl.

This book contains the contributions presented at the 8th International KES Conference on Smart Education and e-Learning (KES SEEL 2021), which being held as a virtual conference on June 14-16, 2021. It contains high-quality peer-reviewed papers that are grouped into several interconnected parts: smart education; smart e-learning; smart education: systems and technology; smart education: case studies and research; digital education and economics in smart university, smart university development: organizational, managerial and social Issues; smart universities and their Impact on students with disabilities. This book serves as a useful source of research data and valuable information on current research projects, best practices, and case studies for faculty, scholars, Ph.D. students, administrators, and practitioners- all those who are interested in smart education and smart e-learning.

This book offers a self-study program on how mathematics, computer science and science can be profitably and seamlessly intertwined. This book focuses on two variable ODE models, both linear and nonlinear, and highlights theoretical and computational tools using MATLAB to explain their solutions. It also shows how to solve cable models using separation of variables and the Fourier Series.

These papers on Intelligent Data Analysis and Management (IDAM) examine issues related to the research and applications of Artificial Intelligence techniques in data analysis and management across a variety of disciplines. The papers derive from the 2013 IDAM conference in Kaohsiung ,Taiwan. It is an interdisciplinary research field involving academic researchers in information technologies, computer science, public policy, bioinformatics, medical informatics, and social and behavior studies, etc. The techniques studied include (but are not limited to): data visualization, data pre-processing, data engineering, database mining techniques, tools and applications, evolutionary algorithms, machine learning, neural nets, fuzzy logic, statistical pattern recognition, knowledge filtering, and post-processing, etc.

This book presents the proceedings of the International Science and Technology Conference "FarEastCon 2019," which took place on October 1-4, 2019, in Vladivostok, Russian Federation. The conference provided a platform for gathering expert opinions on projects and initiatives aimed at the implementation of far-sighted scientific research and development, and allowed current theoretical and practical advances to be shared with the broader research community. Featuring selected papers from the conference, this book will be of interest to experts in various fields whose work involves developing innovative solutions and increasing the efficiency of economic activities.

This book is an introduction to relevant aspects of the foraging literature for algorithmic design, and an overview of key families of optimization algorithms that stem from a foraging metaphor. The authors first offer perspectives on foraging and foraging-inspired algorithms for optimization, they then explain the techniques inspired by the behaviors of vertebrates, invertebrates, and non-neuronal organisms, and they then discuss algorithms based on formal models of foraging, how to evolve a foraging strategy, and likely future developments. No prior knowledge of natural computing is assumed. This book will be of particular interest to graduate students, academics and practitioners in computer science, informatics, data science, management science, and other application domains.

This book provides an overview of the research work on data privacy and privacy enhancing technologies carried by the participants of the ARES project. ARES (Advanced Research in Privacy an Security, CSD2007-00004) has been one of the most important research projects funded by the Spanish Government in the fields of computer security and privacy. It is part of the now extinct CONSOLIDER INGENIO 2010 program, a highly competitive program which aimed to advance knowledge and open new research lines among top Spanish research groups. The project started in 2007 and will finish this 2014. Composed by 6 research groups from 6 different institutions, it has gathered an important number of researchers during its lifetime. Among the work produced by the ARES project, one specific work package has been related to privacy. This books gathers works produced by members of the project related to data privacy and privacy enhancing technologies. The presented works not only summarize important research carried in the project but also serve as an overview of the state of the art in current research on data privacy and privacy enhancing technologies.

This volume presents a collection of original research works by leading specialists focusing on novel and promising approaches in which the multi-agent system paradigm is used to support, enhance or replace traditional approaches to solving difficult optimization problems. The editors have invited several well-known specialists to present their solutions, tools, and models falling under the common denominator of the agent-based optimization. The book consists of eight chapters covering examples of application of the multi-agent paradigm and respective customized tools to solve difficult optimization problems arising in different areas such as machine learning, scheduling, transportation and, more generally, distributed and cooperative problem solving.

Biological and other natural processes have always been a source of inspiration for computer science and information technology. Many emerging problem solving techniques integrate advanced evolution and cooperation strategies, encompassing a range of spatio-temporal scales for visionary conceptualization of evolutionary computation. This book is a collection of research works presented in the VI International Workshop on Nature Inspired Cooperative Strategies for Optimization (NICSO) held in Canterbury, UK. Previous editions of NICSO were held in Granada, Spain (2006 & 2010), Acireale, Italy (2007), Tenerife, Spain (2008), and Cluj-Napoca, Romania (2011). NICSO 2013 and this book provides a place where state-of-the-art research, latest ideas and emerging areas of nature inspired cooperative strategies for problem solving are vigorously discussed and exchanged among the scientific community. The breadth and variety of articles in this book report on nature inspired methods and applications such as Swarm Intelligence, Hyper-heuristics, Evolutionary Algorithms, Cellular Automata, Artificial Bee Colony, Dynamic Optimization, Support Vector Machines, Multi-Agent Systems, Ant Clustering, Evolutionary Design Optimisation, Game Theory and other several Cooperation Models.

Mismatch or best match? This book demonstrates that best matching of individual entities to each other is essential to ensure smooth conduct and successful competitiveness in any distributed system, natural and artificial. Interactions must be optimized through best matching in planning and scheduling, enterprise network design, transportation and construction planning, recruitment, problem solving, selective assembly, team formation, sensor network design, and more. Fundamentals of best matching in distributed and collaborative systems are explained by providing: Methodical analysis of various multidimensional best matching processes Comprehensive taxonomy, comparing different best matching problems and processes Systematic identification of systems' hierarchy, nature of interactions, and distribution of decision-making and control functions Practical formulation of solutions based on a library of best matching algorithms and protocols, ready for direct applications and apps development. Designed for both academics and practitioners, oriented to systems engineers and applied operations researchers, diverse types of best matching processes are explained in production, manufacturing, business and service, based on a new reference model developed at Purdue University PRISM Center: "The PRISM Taxonomy of Best Matching". The book concludes with major challenges and guidelines for future basic and applied research in the area of best matching.

This book presents the state-of-the-art in various aspects of analysis and mining of online social networks. Within the broader context of online social networks, it focuses on important and upcoming topics of social network analysis and mining such as the latest in sentiment trends research and a variety of techniques for community detection and analysis. The book collects chapters that are expanded versions of the best papers presented at the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM'2015), which was held in Paris, France in August 2015. All papers have been peer reviewed and checked carefully for overlap with the literature. The book will appeal to students and researchers in social network analysis/mining and machine learning.

In the fields of data mining and control, the huge amount of unstructured data and the presence of uncertainty in system descriptions have always been critical issues. The book Randomized Algorithms in Automatic Control and Data Mining introduces the readers to the fundamentals of randomized algorithm applications in data mining (especially clustering) and in automatic control synthesis. The methods proposed in this book guarantee that the computational complexity of classical algorithms and the conservativeness of standard robust control techniques will be reduced. It is shown that when a problem requires "brute force" in selecting among options, algorithms based on random selection of alternatives offer good results with certain probability for a restricted time and significantly reduce the volume of operations.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of security issues in Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs), by analyzing the issues and vulnerabilities in CPSs and examining state of the art security measures. Furthermore, this book proposes various defense strategies including intelligent attack and anomaly detection algorithms. Today's technology is continually evolving towards interconnectivity among devices. This interconnectivity phenomenon is often referred to as Internet of Things (IoT). IoT technology is used to enhance the performance of systems in many applications. This integration of physical and cyber components within a system is associated with many benefits; these systems are often referred to as Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs). The CPSs and IoT technologies are used in many industries critical to our daily lives. CPSs have the potential to reduce costs, enhance mobility and independence of patients, and reach the body using minimally invasive techniques. Although this interconnectivity of devices can pave the road for immense advancement in technology and automation, the integration of network components into any system increases its vulnerability to cyber threats. Using internet networks to connect devices together creates access points for adversaries. Considering the critical applications of some of these devices, adversaries have the potential of exploiting sensitive data and interrupting the functionality of critical infrastructure. Practitioners working in system security, cyber security & security and privacy will find this book valuable as a reference. Researchers and scientists concentrating on computer systems, large-scale complex systems, and artificial intelligence will also find this book useful as a reference.