This book contains the full papers on which the invited lectures of the 4th International Conference on Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering (4ICEGE) were based. The conference was held in Thessaloniki, Greece, from 25 to 28 June, 2007. The papers offer a comprehensive overview of the progress achieved in soil dynamics and geotechnical earthquake engineering, examine ongoing and unresolved issues, and discuss ideas for the future.

What is combinatorial optimization? Traditionally, a problem is considered to be c- binatorial if its set of feasible solutions is both ?nite and discrete, i. e. , enumerable. For example, the traveling salesman problem asks in what order a salesman should visit the cities in his territory if he wants to minimize his total mileage (see Sect. 2. 2. 2). The traveling salesman problem’s feasible solutions - permutations of city labels - c- prise a ?nite, discrete set. By contrast, Differential Evolution was originally designed to optimize functions de?ned on real spaces. Unlike combinatorial problems, the set of feasible solutions for real parameter optimization is continuous. Although Differential Evolution operates internally with ?oating-point precision, it has been applied with success to many numerical optimization problems that have t- ditionally been classi?ed as combinatorial because their feasible sets are discrete. For example, the knapsack problem’s goal is to pack objects of differing weight and value so that the knapsack’s total weight is less than a given maximum and the value of the items inside is maximized (see Sect. 2. 2. 1). The set of feasible solutions - vectors whose components are nonnegative integers - is both numerical and discrete. To handle such problems while retaining full precision, Differential Evolution copies ?oating-point - lutions to a temporary vector that, prior to being evaluated, is truncated to the nearest feasible solution, e. g. , by rounding the temporary parameters to the nearest nonnegative integer.

This book provides an original graph theoretical approach to the fundamental properties of wireless mobile ad-hoc networks. This approach is combined with a realistic radio model for physical links between nodes to produce new insight into network characteristics like connectivity, degree distribution, hopcount, interference and capacity. The book establishes directives for designing ad-hoc networks and sensor networks. It will interest the academic community, and engineers who roll out ad-hoc and sensor networks.

Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM) constitute cognitive models in the form of fuzzy directed graphs consisting of two basic elements: the nodes, which basically correspond to “concepts� bearing different states of activation depending on the knowledge they represent, and the “edges� denoting the causal effects that each source node exercises on the receiving concept expressed through weights. Weights take values in the interval [-1,1], which denotes the positive, negative or neutral causal relationship between two concepts. An FCM can be typically obtained through linguistic terms, inherent to fuzzy systems, but with a structure similar to the neural networks, which facilitates data processing, and has capabilities for training and adaptation. During the last 10 years, an exponential growth of published papers in FCMs was followed showing great impact potential. Different FCM structures and learning schemes have been developed, while numerous studies report their use in many contexts with highly successful modeling results.   The aim of this book is to fill the existing gap in the literature concerning fundamentals, models, extensions and learning algorithms for FCMs in knowledge engineering. It comprehensively covers the state-of-the-art FCM modeling and learning methods, with algorithms, codes and software tools, and provides a set of applications that demonstrate their various usages in applied sciences and engineering.

                                                                                                                                  

Approaches in Integrative Bioinformatics provides a basic introduction to biological information systems, as well as guidance for the computational analysis of systems biology. This book also covers a range of issues and methods that reveal the multitude of omics data integration types and the relevance that integrative bioinformatics has today. Topics include biological data integration and manipulation, modeling and simulation of metabolic networks, transcriptomics and phenomics, and virtual cell approaches, as well as a number of applications of network biology. It helps to illustrate the value of integrative bioinformatics approaches to the life sciences. This book is intended for researchers and graduate students in the field of Bioinformatics. Professor Ming Chen is the Director of the Bioinformatics Laboratory at the College of Life Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. Professor Ralf Hofestädt is the Chair of the Department of Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics, Bielefeld University, Germany.

This book is devoted to a novel approach for dimensionality reduction based on the famous nearest neighbor method that is a powerful classification and regression approach. It starts with an introduction to machine learning concepts and a real-world application from the energy domain. Then, unsupervised nearest neighbors (UNN) is introduced as efficient iterative method for dimensionality reduction. Various UNN models are developed step by step, reaching from a simple iterative strategy for discrete latent spaces to a stochastic kernel-based algorithm for learning submanifolds with independent parameterizations. Extensions that allow the embedding of incomplete and noisy patterns are introduced. Various optimization approaches are compared, from evolutionary to swarm-based heuristics. Experimental comparisons to related methodologies taking into account artificial test data sets and also real-world data demonstrate the behavior of UNN in practical scenarios. The book contains numerous color figures to illustrate the introduced concepts and to highlight the experimental results.  

There are many books on the use of numerical methods for solving engineering problems and for modeling of engineering artifacts. In addition there are many styles of such presentations ranging from books with a major emphasis on theory to books with an emphasis on applications. The purpose of this book is hopefully to present a somewhat different approach to the use of numerical methods for - gineering applications. Engineering models are in general nonlinear models where the response of some appropriate engineering variable depends in a nonlinear manner on the - plication of some independent parameter. It is certainly true that for many types of engineering models it is sufficient to approximate the real physical world by some linear model. However, when engineering environments are pushed to - treme conditions, nonlinear effects are always encountered. It is also such - treme conditions that are of major importance in determining the reliability or failure limits of engineering systems. Hence it is essential than engineers have a toolbox of modeling techniques that can be used to model nonlinear engineering systems. Such a set of basic numerical methods is the topic of this book. For each subject area treated, nonlinear models are incorporated into the discussion from the very beginning and linear models are simply treated as special cases of more general nonlinear models. This is a basic and fundamental difference in this book from most books on numerical methods.

This textbook teaches crucial statistical methods to answer research questions using a unique range of statistical software programs, including MINITAB and R. This textbook is developed for undergraduate students in agriculture, nursing, biology and biomedical research. Graduate students will also find it to be a useful way to refresh their statistics skills and to reference software options. The unique combination of examples is approached using MINITAB and R for their individual strengths. Subjects covered include among others data description, probability distributions, experimental design, regression analysis, randomized design and biological assay. Unlike other biostatistics textbooks, this text also includes outliers, influential observations in regression and an introduction to survival analysis. Material is taken from the author's extensive teaching and research in Africa, USA and the UK. Sample problems, references and electronic supplementary material accompany each chapter.

Learn to write C++ programs by interfacing a computer to a wide range of popular and fundamental real-world technologies. Unique and original approach to use the PC to do real things- not just number crunching and graphics – but writing programs to interact with the outside world. Learn C++ programming in an enjoyable and powerful way. Includes a purpose-designed circuit board

Ditch the devices and bring back the magic of being a kid Screens are everywhere. Children spend an average of 7.5 hours on digital devices every day with profoundly negative consequences. While some tech may “amplify� real life experience (online music lessons or Zoom calls with faraway family, for example), the vast majority “amputates� by limiting physical activity, creating anxiety, or damaging self-esteem. Childhood Unplugged takes a bold approach to creating healthy boundaries around the use of digital media, suggesting kids should be offline for the majority of their time. Drawing on her own family’s experience, plus interviews with digital minimalists, educators, and child development experts, author Katherine Martinko presents: Meticulously researched analysis of the impacts of excessive screen time on children's physical, neurological, emotional, and social development Specific pathways to reduced screen exposure, naturally leading to more time spent outdoors, increased confidence and empathy, more creative and active play, and other benefits Inspiration for caregivers overwhelmed by the thought of severing ties with the digital babysitter Age-appropriate advice for fundamental change, with specific sections for babies and toddlers, school-aged children, and adolescents. Taking a calming, nonjudgmental approach, Childhood Unplugged is a lifeline for parents, caregivers, educators, and anyone who questions the role of digital media and yearns for the young people in their life to experience the profound beauty and magic of childhood.

The aim of this book is to unlock the power of the freeware R language to advanced university students and researchers dealing with whole-rock geochemistry of (meta-) igneous rocks. The first part covers data input/output, calculation of commonly used indexes and plotting in R. The core of the book then focusses on the presentation and practical implementations of modelling techniques used for fingerprinting processes such as partial melting, fractional crystallization, binary mixing or AFC using major-, trace-element and radiogenic isotope data. The reader will be given a firm theoretical basis for forward/reverse modelling, followed by exercises dealing with typical problems likely to be encountered in real life, and their solutions using R. The concluding sections demonstrate, using practical examples, how a researcher can proceed in developing a realistic model simulating natural systems. The appendices outline the fundamentals of the R language and provide a quick introduction to the open-source R-package GCDkit for interpretation of whole-rock geochemical data from igneous and metamorphic rocks.

Patricia Lotz behandelt Rechtsfragen zum Einsatz moderner Marketingformen und gibt einen ersten Überblick über die Fallstricke, die sich dem E-Commerce in Zukunft vor allem im Bereich des Datenschutzes stellen werden. Die Autorin zeigt gleichzeitig mögliche Lösungswege auf. Aus rechtlicher Sicht bespricht sie Webtracking, Geolokalisierung und Social Plugins. Zudem gibt sie eine Übersicht über die Integration von E-Payment-Lösungen.

The aims of these proceedings are to provide a complete coverage of the areas outlined, and to bring together researchers from academic and industry to share ideas, challenges, and solutions relating to the multifaceted aspects of this field. New multimedia standards (for example, MPEG-21) facilitate the seamless integration of multiple modalities into interoperable multimedia frameworks, transforming the way people work and interact with multimedia data. These key technologies and multimedia solutions interact and collaborate with each other in increasingly effective ways, contributing to the multimedia revolution and having a significant impact across a wide spectrum of consumer, business, healthcare, education, and governmental domains.

This book covers the basic theory, practical details and advanced research of the implementation of evolutionary methods on physical substrates. Most of the examples are from electronic engineering applications, including transistor-level design and system-level implementation. The authors present an overview of the successes achieved, and the book will act as a point of reference for both academic and industrial researchers.

In this book, experts from academia and industry present the latest advances in scientific theory relating to applied electromagnetics and examine current and emerging applications particularly within the fields of electronics, communications, and computer technology. The book is based on presentations delivered at APPEIC 2014, the 1st Applied Electromagnetic International Conference, held in Bandung, Indonesia in December 2014. The conference provided an ideal platform for researchers and specialists to deliver both theoretically and practically oriented contributions on a wide range of topics relevant to the theme of nurturing applied electromagnetics for human technology. Many novel aspects were addressed, and the contributions selected for this book highlight the relevance of advances in applied electromagnetics to a variety of industrial engineering problems and identify exciting future directions for research.

This book contains innovative research from leading researchers who presented their work at the 17th International Conference on Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES 2013, held in Kitakyusha, Japan, in September 2013. The conference provided a competitive field of 236 contributors, from which 38 authors expanded their contributions and only 21 published. A plethora of techniques and innovative applications are represented within this volume. The chapters are organized using four themes. These topics include: data mining, knowledge management, advanced information processes and system modelling applications. Each topic contains multiple contributions and many offer case studies or innovative examples. Anyone that wants to work with information repositories or process knowledge should consider reading one or more chapters focused on their technique of choice. They may also benefit from reading other chapters to assess if an alternative technique represents a more suitable approach. This book will benefit anyone already working with Knowledge-Based or Intelligent Information Systems, however is suitable for students and researchers seeking to learn more about modern Artificial Intelligence techniques.

This engaging volume celebrates the life and work of Theodor Holm “Ted� Nelson, a pioneer and legendary figure from the history of early computing. Presenting contributions from world-renowned computer scientists and figures from the media industry, the book delves into hypertext, the docuverse, Xanadu and other products of Ted Nelson’s unique mind. Features: includes a cartoon and a sequence of poems created in Nelson’s honor, reflecting his wide-ranging and interdisciplinary intellect; presents peer histories, providing a sense of the milieu that resulted from Nelson’s ideas; contains personal accounts revealing what it is like to collaborate directly with Nelson; describes Nelson’s legacy from the perspective of his contemporaries from the computing world; provides a contribution from Ted Nelson himself. With a broad appeal spanning computer scientists, science historians and the general reader, this inspiring collection reveals the continuing influence of the original visionary of the World Wide Web.

This book addresses the problems that are encountered, and solutions that have been proposed, when we aim to identify people and to reconstruct populations under conditions where information is scarce, ambiguous, fuzzy and sometimes erroneous. The process from handwritten registers to a reconstructed digitized population consists of three major phases, reflected in the three main sections of this book. The first phase involves transcribing and digitizing the data while structuring the information in a meaningful and efficient way. In the second phase, records that refer to the same person or group of persons are identified by a process of linkage. In the third and final phase, the information on an individual is combined into a reconstruction of their life course. The studies and examples in this book originate from a range of countries, each with its own cultural and administrative characteristics, and from medieval charters through historical censuses and vital registration, to the modern issue of privacy preservation. Despite the diverse places and times addressed, they all share the study of fundamental issues when it comes to model reasoning for population reconstruction and the possibilities and limitations of information technology to support this process. It is thus not a single discipline that is involved in such an endeavor. Historians, social scientists, and linguists represent the humanities through their knowledge of the complexity of the past, the limitations of sources, and the possible interpretations of information. The availability of big data from digitized archives and the need for complex analyses to identify individuals calls for the involvement of computer scientists. With contributions from all these fields, often in direct cooperation, this book is at the heart of the digital humanities, and will hopefully offer a source of inspiration for future investigations.

This textbook provides an introduction to the concept of sustainability in the context of transportation planning, management, and decision-making. The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, indicators and frameworks for measuring sustainable development in the transportation sector are developed. In the second, the authors analyze actual planning and decision-making in transportation agencies in a variety of governance settings. This analysis of real-world case studies demonstrates the benefits and limitations of current approaches to sustainable development in transportation. The book concludes with a discussion on how to make sustainability count in transportation decision-making and practice.

This authored monograph presents key aspects of signal processing analysis in the biomedical arena. Unlike wireless communication systems, biological entities produce signals with underlying nonlinear, chaotic nature that elude classification using the standard signal processing techniques, which have been developed over the past several decades for dealing primarily with standard communication systems. This book separates what is random from that which appears to be random and yet is truly deterministic with random appearance. At its core, this work gives the reader a perspective on biomedical signals and the means to classify and process such signals. In particular, a review of random processes along with means to assess the behavior of random signals is also provided. The book also includes a general discussion of biological signals in order to demonstrate the inefficacy of the well-known techniques to correctly extract meaningful information from such signals. Finally, a thorough discussion of recently proposed signal processing tools and methods for addressing biological signals is included. The target audience primarily comprises researchers and expert practitioners but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

This timely book presents Applications in Recommender Systems which are making recommendations using machine learning algorithms trained via examples of content the user likes or dislikes. Recommender systems built on the assumption of availability of both positive and negative examples do not perform well when negative examples are rare. It is exactly this problem that the authors address in the monograph at hand. Specifically, the books approach is based on one-class classification methodologies that have been appearing in recent machine learning research. The blending of recommender systems and one-class classification provides a new very fertile field for research, innovation and development with potential applications in “big data� as well as “sparse data� problems. The book will be useful to researchers, practitioners and graduate students dealing with problems of extensive and complex data. It is intended for both the expert/researcher in the fields of Pattern Recognition, Machine Learning and Recommender Systems, as well as for the general reader in the fields of Applied and Computer Science who wishes to learn more about the emerging discipline of Recommender Systems and their applications. Finally, the book provides an extended list of bibliographic references which covers the relevant literature completely.

This monograph presents recent and original work of the author on inequalities in real, functional and fractional analysis. The chapters are self-contained and can be read independently, they include an extensive list of references per chapter.The book’s results are expected to find applications in many areas of applied and pure mathematics, especially in ordinary and partial differential equations and fractional differential equations. As such this monograph is suitable for researchers, graduate students, and seminars of the above subjects, as well as Science and Engineering University libraries.  

This book clarifies the role and relevance of the body in social interaction and cognition from an embodied cognitive science perspective. Theories of embodied cognition have during the last decades offered a radical shift in explanations of the human mind, from traditional computationalism, to emphasizing the way cognition is shaped by the body and its sensorimotor interaction with the surrounding social and material world. This book presents a theoretical framework for the relational nature of embodied social cognition, which is based on an interdisciplinary approach that ranges historically in time and across different disciplines. It includes work in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, phenomenology, ethology, developmental psychology, neuroscience, social psychology, linguistics, communication and gesture studies. The theoretical framework is illustrated by empirical work that provides some detailed observational fieldwork on embodied actions captured in three different episodes of spontaneous social interaction and cognition in situ. Furthermore, the theoretical contributions and implications of the study of embodied social cognition are discussed and summed up. Finally, the issue what it would take for an artificial system to be socially embodied is addressed and discussed, as well as the practical relevance for applications to artificial intelligence (AI) and socially interactive technology.