This book presents recent research using cognitive science to apprehend risk situations and elaborate new organizations, new systems and new methodological tools in response. The book demonstrates the reasons, advantages and implications of the association of the concepts of cognition and risk. It is shown that this association has strong consequences on how to apprehend critical situations that emerge within various activity domains, and how to elaborate responses to these critical situations.. The following topics are covered by the book: ·     Influence of the culture in risk management, ·     Influence of the risk communication in risk management, ·     User-centred design to improve risk situation management, ·     Designing new tools to assist risk situation management, ·     Risk prevention in industrial activities.

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.

The present book is the result of a three year research project which investigated the creative act of composing by means of algorithmic composition. Central to the investigation are the compositional strategies of 12 composers, which were documented through a dialogic and cyclic process of modelling and evaluating musical materials. The aesthetic premises and compositional approaches configure a rich spectrum of diverse positions, which is reflected also in the kinds of approaches and methods used. These approaches and methods include the generation and evaluation of chord sequences using genetic algorithms, the application of morphing strategies to research harmonic transformations, an automatic classification of personal preferences via machine learning, and an application of mathematical music theory to the analysis and resynthesis of musical material. The second part of the book features contributions by Sandeep Bhagwati, William Brooks, David Cope, Darla Crispin, Nicolas Donin, and Guerino Mazzola. These authors variously consider the project from different perspectives, offer independent approaches, or provide more general reflections from their respective research fields.

This pioneering book develops definitions and concepts related to Quality of Experience in the context of multimedia- and telecommunications-related applications, systems and services and applies these to various fields of communication and media technologies. The editors bring together numerous key-protagonists of the new discipline “Quality of Experience� and combine the state-of-the-art knowledge in one single volume.

This book presents interesting, important unsolved problems in the mathematical and computational sciences. The contributing authors are leading researchers in their fields and they explain outstanding challenges in their domains, first by offering basic definitions, explaining the context, and summarizing related algorithms, theorems, and proofs, and then by suggesting creative solutions.   The authors feel a strong motivation to excite deep research and discussion in the mathematical and computational sciences community, and the book will be of value to postgraduate students and researchers in the areas of theoretical computer science, discrete mathematics, engineering, and cryptology.

Software and systems quality is playing an increasingly important role in the growth of almost all ─ profit and non-profit ─ organisations. Quality is vital to the success of enterprises in their markets. Most small trade and repair businesses use software systems in their administration and marketing processes. Every doctor’s surgery is managing its patients using software. Banking is no longer conceivable without software. Aircraft, trucks and cars use more and more software to handle their increasingly complex technical systems. Innovation, competition and cost pressure are always present in on-going business decisions. The question facing all these organisations is how to achieve the right quality of their software-based systems and products; how to get the required level of quality, a level that the market will reward, a level that mitigates the organisation’s risks and a level that the organisation is willing to pay for. Although a number of good practices are in place, there is still room for huge improvements. Thus, let us take a look into the two worlds of “Embedded systems� and “ICT systems� and let us learn from both worlds, from overlaps and individual solutions. The next step for industrialisation in the software industry is required now. Hence, three pillars will be focused in this book: (1) a fundamental notion of right software and systems quality (RiSSQ); (2) portfolio management, quality governance, quality management, and quality engineering as holistic approach over the three layers of an enterprise, i.e. strategic, tactical, and operational layer; and (3) an industrialisation framework for implementing our approach.

This book contains the full papers presented at ICCEBS 2013 – the 1st International Conference on Computational and Experimental Biomedical Sciences, which was organized in Azores, in October 2013. The included papers present and discuss new trends in those fields, using several methods and techniques, including active shape models, constitutive models, isogeometric elements, genetic algorithms, level sets, material models, neural networks, optimization and the finite element method, in order to address more efficiently different and timely applications involving biofluids, computer simulation, computational biomechanics, image based diagnosis, image processing and analysis, image segmentation, image registration, scaffolds, simulation and surgical planning. The main audience for this book consists of researchers, Ph.D students and graduate students with multidisciplinary interests related to the areas of artificial intelligence, bioengineering, biology, biomechanics, computational fluid dynamics, computational mechanics, computational vision, histology, human motion, imagiology, applied mathematics, medical image, medicine, orthopaedics, rehabilitation, speech production and tissue engineering.

The book describes advanced business analytics and shows how to apply them to many different professional areas of engineering and management. Each chapter of the book is contributed by a different author and covers a different area of business analytics. The book connects the analytic principles with business practice and provides an interface between the main disciplines of engineering/technology and the organizational, administrative and planning abilities of management. It also refers to other disciplines such as economy, finance, marketing, behavioral economics and risk analysis. This book is of special interest to engineers, economists and researchers who are developing new advances in engineering management but also to practitioners working on this subject.

This carefully edited book takes a walk through recent advances in adaptation and hybridization in the Computational Intelligence (CI) domain. It consists of ten chapters that are divided into three parts. The first part illustrates background information and provides some theoretical foundation tackling the CI domain, the second part deals with the adaptation in CI algorithms, while the third part focuses on the hybridization in CI. This book can serve as an ideal reference for researchers and students of computer science, electrical and civil engineering, economy, and natural sciences that are confronted with solving the optimization, modeling and simulation problems. It covers the recent advances in CI that encompass Nature-inspired algorithms, like Artificial Neural networks, Evolutionary Algorithms and Swarm Intelligence –based algorithms.

This work provides an assessment of the current state of near field communication (NFC) security, it reports on new attack scenarios, and offers concepts and solutions to overcome any unresolved issues. The work describes application-specific security aspects of NFC based on exemplary use-case scenarios and uses these to focus on the interaction with NFC tags and on card emulation. The current security architectures of NFC-enabled cellular phones are evaluated with regard to the identified security aspects.

This book presents a study in knowledge discovery in data with knowledge understood as a set of relations among objects and their properties. Relations in this case are implicative decision rules and the paradigm in which they are induced is that of computing with granules defined by rough inclusions, the latter introduced and studied within rough mereology, the fuzzified version of mereology. In this book basic classes of rough inclusions are defined and based on them methods for inducing granular structures from data are highlighted. The resulting granular structures are subjected to classifying algorithms, notably k—nearest neighbors and bayesian classifiers. Experimental results are given in detail both in tabular and visualized form for fourteen data sets from UCI data repository. A striking feature of granular classifiers obtained by this approach is that preserving the accuracy of them on original data, they reduce substantially the size of the granulated data set as well as the set of granular decision rules. This feature makes the presented approach attractive in cases where a small number of rules providing a high classification accuracy is desirable. As basic algorithms used throughout the text are explained and illustrated with hand examples, the book may also serve as a textbook.

This book documents recent advances in the field of modeling, simulation, control, security and reliability of Cyber- Physical Systems (CPS) in power grids. The aim of this book is to help the reader gain insights into working of CPSs and understand their potential in transforming the power grids of tomorrow. This book will be useful for all those who are interested in design of cyber-physical systems, be they students or researchers in power systems, CPS modeling software developers, technical marketing professionals and business policy-makers.

The aim of this book is to explain to high-performance computing (HPC) developers how to utilize the Intel® Xeon Phi™ series products efficiently. To that end, it introduces some computing grammar, programming technology and optimization methods for using many-integrated-core (MIC) platforms and also offers tips and tricks for actual use, based on the authors’ first-hand optimization experience. The material is organized in three sections. The first section, “Basics of MIC�, introduces the fundamentals of MIC architecture and programming, including the specific Intel MIC programming environment. Next, the section on “Performance Optimization� explains general MIC optimization techniques, which are then illustrated step-by-step using the classical parallel programming example of matrix multiplication. Finally, “Project development� presents a set of practical and experience-driven methods for using parallel computing in application projects, including how to determine if a serial or parallel CPU program is suitable for MIC and how to transplant a program onto MIC. This book appeals to two main audiences: First, software developers for HPC applications – it will enable them to fully exploit the MIC architecture and thus achieve the extreme performance usually  required in biological genetics, medical imaging, aerospace, meteorology and other areas of HPC. Second, students and researchers engaged in parallel and high-performance computing – it will guide them on how to push the limits of system performance for HPC applications.

Presenting techniques, case-studies and methodologies that combine the use of simulation approaches with optimization techniques for facing problems in manufacturing, logistics, or aeronautical problems, this book provides solutions to common industrial problems in several fields, which range from manufacturing to aviation problems, where the common denominator is the combination of simulation’s flexibility with optimization techniques’ robustness. Providing readers with a comprehensive guide to tackle similar issues in industrial environments, this text explores novel ways to face industrial problems through hybrid approaches (simulation-optimization) that benefit from the advantages of both paradigms, in order to give solutions to important problems in service industry, production processes, or supply chains, such as scheduling, routing problems and resource allocations, among others.

This book contains all refereed papers that were accepted to the first edition of the Asia-Pacific conference on « Complex Systems Design & Management » (CSD&M Asia 2014) that took place in Singapore from December 10 to December 12, 2014 (Website: http://www.2014.csdm-asia.net/). These proceedings cover the most recent trends in the emerging field of Complex Systems, both from an academic and a professional perspective. A special focus is put on Designing Smart cities. The CSD&M Asia 2014 conference is organized under the guidance of the Center of Excellence on Systems Architecture, Management, Economy and Strategy, CESAMES, non-profit organization, address: CESAMES, 8 rue de Hanovre, 75002 Paris, France ( Website : http://www.cesames.net/en).

This book investigates the functional adequacy as well as the affective impression made by feedback messages on mobile devices. It presents an easily adoptable experimental setup to examine context effects on various feedback messages and applies it to auditory, tactile and auditory-tactile feedback messages. This approach provides insights into the relationship between the affective impression and functional applicability of these messages as well as an understanding of the influence of unimodal components on the perception of multimodal feedback messages. The developed paradigm can also be extended to investigate other aspects of context and used to investigate feedback messages in modalities other than those presented. The book uses questionnaires implemented on a Smartphone, which can easily be adopted for field studies to broaden the scope even wider. Finally, the book offers guidelines for the design of system feedback.

(Preliminary) The book is a comprehensive collection of the most recent and significant research and applications in the field of fuzzy logic. It covers fuzzy structures, systems, rules, operations as well as important applications, e.g in decision making, environmental prediction and prevention, and communication. It is dedicated to Enric Trillas as an acknowledgement for his pioneering research in the field. The book include a foreword by Lotfi A. Zadeh.

Providing a comprehensive overview of various methods and applications in decision engineering, this book presents chapters written by a range experts in the field. It presents conceptual aspects of decision support applications in various areas including finance, vendor selection, construction, process management, water management and energy, agribusiness , production scheduling and control, and waste management. In addition to this, a special focus is given to methods of multi-criteria decision analysis. Decision making in organizations is a recurrent theme and is essential for business continuity.  Managers from various fields including public, private, industrial, trading or service sectors are required to make decisions. Consequently managers need the support of these structured methods in order to engage in effective decision making. This book provides a valuable resource for graduate students, professors and researchers of decision analysis, multi-criteria decision analysis and group decision analysis. It is also intended for production engineers, civil engineers and engineering consultants.

Is it possible to guide the process of self-organisation towards specific patterns and outcomes? Wouldn’t this be self-contradictory? After all, a self-organising process assumes a transition into a more organised form, or towards a more structured functionality, in the absence of centralised control. Then how can we place the guiding elements so that they do not override rich choices potentially discoverable by an uncontrolled process? This book presents different approaches to resolving this paradox. In doing so, the presented studies address a broad range of phenomena, ranging from autopoietic systems to morphological computation, and from small-world networks to information cascades in swarms. A large variety of methods is employed, from spontaneous symmetry breaking to information dynamics to evolutionary algorithms, creating a rich spectrum reflecting this emerging field. Demonstrating several foundational theories and frameworks, as well as innovative practical implementations, Guided Self-Organisation: Inception, will be an invaluable tool for advanced students and researchers in a multiplicity of fields across computer science, physics and biology, including information theory, robotics, dynamical systems, graph theory, artificial life, multi-agent systems, theory of computation and machine learning.

Neuro-robotics is one of the most multidisciplinary fields of the last decades, fusing information and knowledge from neuroscience, engineering and computer science. This book focuses on the results from the strategic alliance between Neuroscience and Robotics that help the scientific community to better understand the brain as well as design robotic devices and algorithms for interfacing humans and robots. The first part of the book introduces the idea of neuro-robotics, by presenting state-of-the-art bio-inspired devices. The second part of the book focuses on human-machine interfaces for performance augmentation, which can seen as augmentation of abilities of healthy subjects or assistance in case of the mobility impaired. The third part of the book focuses on the inverse problem, i.e. how we can use robotic devices that physically interact with the human body, in order (a) to understand human motor control and (b) to provide therapy to neurologically impaired people or people with disabilities.

This book examines optimization problems that in practice involve random model parameters. It details the computation of robust optimal solutions, i.e., optimal solutions that are insensitive with respect to random parameter variations, where appropriate deterministic substitute problems are needed. Based on the probability distribution of the random data and using decision theoretical concepts, optimization problems under stochastic uncertainty are converted into appropriate deterministic substitute problems. Due to the probabilities and expectations involved, the book also shows how to apply approximative solution techniques. Several deterministic and stochastic approximation methods are provided: Taylor expansion methods, regression and response surface methods (RSM), probability inequalities, multiple linearization of survival/failure domains, discretization methods, convex approximation/deterministic descent directions/efficient points, stochastic approximation and gradient procedures and differentiation formulas for probabilities and expectations. In the third edition, this book further develops stochastic optimization methods. In particular, it now shows how to apply stochastic optimization methods to the approximate solution of important concrete problems arising in engineering, economics and operations research.

Information technology is transforming the practices of medicine, nursing, and biomedical research. Computers can now render diagnoses and prognoses more accurately than humans. The concepts of privacy and confidentiality are evolving as data moves from paper to silicon to clouds. Big data promises financial wealth, as well as riches of information and benefits to science and public health. Online access and mobile apps provide patients with an unprecedented connection to their health and health records. This transformation is as unsettling as it is exhilarating. This unique new book is essential for anyone who uses computers in health care, biomedical research or public health, and cares about the ethical issues that arise in their work. With chapters spanning issues from professionalism and quality to mobile health and bioinformatics, it establishes what will become the 'core curriculum' in ethics and health informatics, a growing field which encourages truly inter- and multidisciplinary inquiry.

Founded in 2004, the Games for Health Project supports community, knowledge and business development efforts to use cutting-edge games and game technologies to improve health and health care. The Games for Health Conference brings together researchers, medical professionals and game developers to share information about the impact of games, playful interaction and game technologies on health, health care and policy. Over two days, more than 400 attendees participate in over 60 sessions provided by an international array of 80+ speakers, cutting across a wide range of activities in health and health care. Topics include exergaming, physical therapy, disease management, health behavior change, biofeedback, rehab, epidemiology, training, cognitive health, nutrition and health education.

This book covers diverse aspects of advanced computer and communication engineering, focusing specifically on industrial and manufacturing theory and applications of electronics, communications, computing and information technology. Experts in research, industry, and academia present the latest developments in technology, describe applications involving cutting-edge communication and computer systems and explore likely future directions. In addition, access is offered to numerous new algorithms that assist in solving computer and communication engineering problems. The book is based on presentations delivered at ICOCOE 2014, the 1st International Conference on Communication and Computer Engineering. It will appeal to a wide range of professionals in the field, including telecommunication engineers, computer engineers and scientists, researchers, academics and students.

This book presents and discusses mathematical models, numerical methods and computational techniques used for solving coupled problems in science and engineering. It takes a step forward in the formulation and solution of real-life problems with a multidisciplinary vision, accounting for all of the complex couplings involved in the physical description. Simulation of multifaceted physics problems is a common task in applied research and industry. Often a suitable solver is built by connecting together several single-aspect solvers into a network. In this book, research in various fields was selected for consideration: adaptive methodology for multi-physics solvers, multi-physics phenomena and coupled-field solutions, leading to computationally intensive structural analysis. The strategies which are used to keep these problems computationally affordable are of special interest, and make this an essential book.