This volume provides the audience with an updated, in-depth and highly coherent material on the conceptually appealing and practically sound information technology of Computational Intelligence applied to the analysis, synthesis and evaluation of social networks. The volume involves studies devoted to key issues of social networks including community structure detection in networks, online social networks, knowledge growth and evaluation, and diversity of collaboration mechanisms. The book engages a wealth of methods of Computational Intelligence along with well-known techniques of linear programming, Formal Concept Analysis, machine learning, and agent modeling. Human-centricity is of paramount relevance and this facet manifests in many ways including personalized semantics, trust metric, and personal knowledge management; just to highlight a few of these aspects. The contributors to this volume report on various essential applications including cyber attacks detection, building enterprise social networks, business intelligence and forming collaboration schemes. Given the subject area, this book is aimed at a broad audience of researchers and practitioners. Owing to the nature of the material being covered and a way it is organized, the volume will appeal to the well-established communities including those active in various disciplines in which social networks, their analysis and optimization are of genuine relevance. Those involved in operations research, management, various branches of engineering, and economics will benefit from the exposure to the subject matter.

This book provides readers with a simplified and comprehensive account of the cognitive and neural bases of face perception in humans. Faces are ubiquitous in our environment and we rely on them during social interactions. The human face processing system allows us to extract information about the identity, gender, age, mood, race, attractiveness and approachability of other people in about a fraction of a second, just by glancing at their faces. By introducing readers to the most relevant research on face recognition, this book seeks to answer the questions: “Why are humans so fast at recognizing faces?�, “Why are humans so efficient at recognizing faces?�, “Do faces represent a particular category for the human visual system?�, What makes face perception in humans so special?, “Can our face recognition system fail�?. This book presents the author’s findings on face perception during his research studies on both normal subjects and subjects with prosopagnosia, a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to recognize faces. The book describes two known forms of prosopagnosia: acquired prosopagnosia, which is the result of a brain lesion, and congenital prosopagnosia, which refers to a lifelong, developmental impairment of face recognition. Written in a comprehensive and accessible style, this book addresses both experts (cognitive scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists and computer scientists) and the general public, and aims at raising awareness for a debilitating face recognition disorder, such as prosopagnosia, which is often ignored or misdiagnosed as autism, with serious consequences for the affected persons and their families.

The contributions for this book have been gathered over several years from conferences held in the series of Mechatronics and Machine Vision in Practice, the latest of which was held in Ankara, Turkey. The essential aspect is that they concern practical applications rather than the derivation of mere theory, though simulations and visualization are important components. The topics range from mining, with its heavy engineering, to the delicate machining of holes in the human skull or robots for surgery on human flesh. Mobile robots continue to be a hot topic, both from the need for navigation and for the task of stabilization of unmanned aerial vehicles. The swinging of a spray rig is damped, while machine vision is used for the control of heating in an asphalt-laying machine. Manipulators are featured, both for general tasks and in the form of grasping fingers. A robot arm is proposed for adding to the mobility scooter of the elderly. Can EEG signals be a means to control a robot? Can face recognition be achieved in varying illumination?"

Intelligent information and database systems are two closely related subfields of modern computer science which have been known for over thirty years. They focus on the integration of artificial intelligence and classic database technologies to create the class of next generation information systems. The book focuses on new trends in intelligent information and database systems and discusses topics addressed to the foundations and principles of data, information, and knowledge models, methodologies for intelligent information and database systems analysis, design, and implementation, their validation, maintenance and evolution. They cover a broad spectrum of research topics discussed both from the practical and theoretical points of view such as: intelligent information retrieval, natural language processing, semantic web, social networks, machine learning, knowledge discovery, data mining, uncertainty management and reasoning under uncertainty, intelligent optimization techniques in information systems, security in databases systems, and multimedia data analysis. Intelligent information systems and their applications in business, medicine and industry, database systems applications, and intelligent internet systems are also presented and discussed in the book. The book consists of 38 chapters based on original works presented during the 7th Asian Conference on Intelligent Information and Database Systems (ACIIDS 2015) held on 23–25 March 2015 in Bali, Indonesia. The book is divided into six parts related to Advanced Machine Learning and Data Mining, Intelligent Computational Methods in Information Systems, Semantic Web, Social Networks and Recommendation Systems, Cloud Computing and Intelligent Internet Systems, Knowledge and Language Processing, and Intelligent Information and Database Systems: Applications.

Web Dynpro ABAP, a NetWeaver web application user interface tool from SAP, enables web programming connected to SAP Systems. The authors’ main focus was to create a book based on their own practical experience. Each chapter includes examples which lead through the content step-by-step and enable the reader to gradually explore and grasp the Web Dynpro ABAP process. The authors explain in particular how to design Web Dynpro components, the data binding and interface methods, and the view controller methods. They also describe the other SAP NetWeaver Elements (ABAP Dictionary, Authorization) and the integration of the Web Dynpro Application into the SAP NetWeaver Portal. The new edition has been expanded to include chapters on subjects such as POWER Lists; creating the Modal Windows and External Windows; using Web Dynpro application parameters and Shared Objects to communicate between the Web Dynpro ABAP Application and Business Server Pages; and creating multi-language mails using Web Dynpro ABAP.

This contributed volume contains the conference proceedings of the Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) conference 2014, Berlin. The included research papers cover a wide range of topics in traffic planning and simulation, including open data, vehicular communication, e-mobility, urban mobility, multimodal traffic as well as usage approaches. The target audience primarily comprises researchers and experts in the field, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

Recent years have seen the development of two significant trends namely: the adoption of some Traditional Chinese Medicine Practices into mainstream Allopathic Western Medicine and the advent of the internet and broad band networks leading to an increased interest in the use of Telemedicine to deliver medical services. In this book, we see the convergence of these two trends leading to a semantically-based TCM Telemedicine system that utilizes an ontology to provide sharable knowledge in the TCM realm to achieve this. The underpinning research required the development of a three-layer architecture and an Ontology of the TCM knowledge. As TCM knowledge like all medical knowledge is not frozen in time it was important to develop an approach that would allow evolution of the Ontology when new evidence became available. In order for the system to be practically grounded it was important to work with an industry partner PuraPharm Group/HerbMiners Informatics Limited. This partnership was initiated through Professor Allan Wong and the Chairman of PuraPharm Group Mr. Abraham Chan. This led to the system being utilized in more than 20 Mobile Clinics in Hong Kong and 300 Hospitals in China. In order for these different deployments of the system to be coherent with the main core Ontology, it was necessary for us to develop an Ontology Driven Software System Generation approach.

As cities are rapidly expanding and encroaching into agricultural and natural areas, a question of primary concern is how this expansion affects surrounding agriculture and natural landscapes. This book presents a wide spectrum of both theoretical and empirical approaches to simulation and assessment of landscape dynamics. The first part presents state-of-the-art modelling approaches pertaining to land-use changes entailed by the urban sprawl, at different spatial resolutions and temporal time scales. The second part is dedicated to case studies of the effects and consequences of the emerging urban-agriculture open space patterns.

This book describes the development and design of a unique combined data and power management infrastructure The use in small satellites gives some particular requirements to the systems like potential hardware failure robustness and handling of different types of external analog and digital interfaces. These requirements lead to a functional merge between On Board Computer and the satellite's Power Control and Distribution Unit, which results in a very innovative design and even a patent affiliation. This book provides system engineers and university students with the technical knowledge as mix between technical brochure and a user guide.

The intensity of global competition and ever-increasing economic uncertainties has led organizations to search for more efficient and effective ways to manage their business operations. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been widely used as a conceptually simple yet powerful tool for evaluating organizational productivity and performance. Fuzzy DEA (FDEA) is a promising extension of the conventional DEA proposed for dealing with imprecise and ambiguous data in performance measurement problems. This book is the first volume in the literature to present the state-of-the-art developments and applications of FDEA. It is designed for students, educators, researchers, consultants and practicing managers in business, industry, and government with a basic understanding of the DEA and fuzzy logic concepts.

Intelligent Decision-Making Support Systems (i-DMSS) are specialized IT-based systems that support some or several phases of the individual, team, organizational or inter-organizational decision making process by deploying some or several intelligent mechanisms. This book pursues the following academic aims: (i) generate a compendium of quality theoretical and applied contributions in Intelligent Decision-Making Support Systems (i-DMSS) for engineering and management IT-based service systems (ITSS); (ii)  diffuse scarce knowledge about foundations, architectures and effective and efficient methods and strategies for successfully planning, designing, building, operating, and evaluating i-DMSS for ITSS, and (iii) create an awareness of, and a bridge between ITSS and i-DMSS academicians and practitioners in the current complex and dynamic engineering and management ITSS organizational. The book presents a collection of 11 chapters referring to relevant topics for both IT service systems and i-DMSS including: problems of selection of IT service providers, optimization of supply chain systems, IT governance decisions, clinical decision support, dynamic user-interface adaptation, re-engineering of processes, and generic decision problems. Advanced IT technologies used in some chapters are:  fuzzy multi-criteria mechanisms, semantic processing, data mining processing, and rough sets. Other chapters report traditional DSS mechanisms but used or suggested to be used in innovative mode for IT service engineering and management tasks.

This book, now at the third edition, addresses the main control aspects in underwater manipulation tasks. The mathematical model with significant impact on the control strategy is discussed. The problem of controlling a 6-degrees-of-freedoms autonomous underwater vehicle is deeply investigated and a survey of fault detection/tolerant strategies for unmanned underwater vehicles is provided. Inverse kinematics, dynamic and interaction control for underwater vehicle-manipulator systems are then discussed. The code used to generate most of the numerical simulations is made available and briefly discussed.

This monograph by Florian Röhrbein, Germano Veiga and Ciro Natale is an edited collection of 15 authoritative contributions in the area of robot technology transfer between academia and industry. It comprises three parts on Future Industrial Robotics, Robotic Grasping as well as Human-Centered Robots. The book chapters cover almost all the topics nowadays considered ‘hot’ within the robotics community, from reliable object recognition to dexterous grasping, from speech recognition to intuitive robot programming, from mobile robot navigation to aerial robotics, from safe physical human-robot interaction to body extenders. All contributions stem from the results of ECHORD – the European Clearing House for Open Robotics Development, a large-scale integrating project funded by the European Commission within the 7th Framework Programme from 2009 to 2013. ECHORD’s two main pillars were the so-called experiments, 51 small-sized industry-driven research projects and the structured dialog a powerful interaction instrument between the stakeholders. The results described in this volume are expected to shed new light on innovation and technology transfer from academia to industry in the field of robotics.

The book Intelligent Systems in Science and Information 2014 is  the carefully edited collection of 25 extended chapters from selected papers in the field of Computational Intelligence that , which received highly recommended feedback during the Science and Information Conference (SAI) 2014 review process. All chapters have gone through substantial extension and consolidation and were subject to another round of rigorous review and additional modification and represent the state of the art of the cutting-edge research and technologies in the related areas.

This book features a wide spectrum of the latest computer science research relating to cyber warfare, including military and policy dimensions. It is the first book to explore the scientific foundation of cyber warfare and features research from the areas of artificial intelligence, game theory, programming languages, graph theory and more. The high-level approach and emphasis on scientific rigor provides insights on ways to improve cyber warfare defense worldwide. Cyber Warfare: Building the Scientific Foundation targets researchers and practitioners working in cyber security, especially government employees or contractors. Advanced-level students in computer science and electrical engineering with an interest in security will also find this content valuable as a secondary textbook or reference.

Proceedings of the 2015 Chinese Intelligent Automation Conference presents selected research papers from the CIAC’15, held in Fuzhou, China. The topics include adaptive control, fuzzy control, neural network based control, knowledge based control, hybrid intelligent control, learning control, evolutionary mechanism based control, multi-sensor integration, failure diagnosis, reconfigurable control, etc. Engineers and researchers from academia, industry and the government can gain valuable insights into interdisciplinary solutions in the field of intelligent automation.

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.

3D GeoInfo aims to bring together international state-of-the-art research and facilitate the dialogue on emerging topics in the field of 3D geo-information. The conference offers an interdisciplinary forum in the fields of 3D data collection and modeling; reconstruction and methods for 3D representation; data management for maintenance of 3D geo-information or 3D data analysis and visualization. The book covers the best papers from 3D GeoInfo held in Istanbul in November 2013.

Research into social systems is challenging due to their complex nature. Traditional methods of analysis are often difficult to apply effectively as theories evolve over time. This can be due to a lack of appropriate data, or too much uncertainty. It can also be the result of problems which are not yet understood well enough in the general sense so that they can be classified, and an appropriate solution quickly identified. Simulation is one tool that deals well with these challenges, fits in well with the deductive process, and is useful for testing theory. This field is still relatively new, and much of the work is necessarily innovative, although it builds upon a rich and varied foundation. There are a number of existing modelling paradigms being applied to complex social systems research. Additionally, new methods and measures are being devised through the process of conducting research. We expect that readers will enjoy the collection of high quality research works from new and accomplished researchers.    

Sparse grids have gained increasing interest in recent years for the numerical treatment of high-dimensional problems. Whereas classical numerical discretization schemes fail in more than three or four dimensions, sparse grids make it possible to overcome the “curse� of dimensionality to some degree, extending the number of dimensions that can be dealt with. This volume of LNCSE collects the papers from the proceedings of the second workshop on sparse grids and applications, demonstrating once again the importance of this numerical discretization scheme. The selected articles present recent advances on the numerical analysis of sparse grids as well as efficient data structures, and the range of applications extends to uncertainty quantification settings and clustering, to name but a few examples.

Today the cost of solid-state two-dimensional imagers has dramatically dropped, introducing low cost systems on the market suitable for a variety of applications, including both industrial and consumer products. However, these systems can capture only a two-dimensional projection (2D), or intensity map, of the scene under observation, losing a variable of paramount importance, i.e., the arrival time of the impinging photons. Time-Of-Flight (TOF) Range-Imaging (TOF) is an emerging sensor technology able to deliver, at the same time, depth and intensity maps of the scene under observation. Featuring different sensor resolutions, RIM cameras serve a wide community with a lot of applications like monitoring, architecture, life sciences, robotics, etc. This book will bring together experts from the sensor and metrology side in order to collect the state-of-art researchers in these fields working with RIM cameras. All the aspects in the acquisition and processing chain will be addressed, from recent updates concerning the photo-detectors, to the analysis of the calibration techniques, giving also a perspective onto new applications domains.

The Internet of Services and the Internet of Things are major building blocks of the Future Internet. The digital enterprise of the future is based not only on mobile, social, and cloud technologies, but also on se­mantic technologies and the future Internet of Everything. Semantic technologies now enable mass cus­tomization for the delivery of goods and services that meet individual customer needs and tastes with near mass production efficiency and reliability. This is creating a competitive advantage in the industrial econ­omy, the service economy, and the emerging data economy, leading to smart products, smart services, and smart data, all adaptable to specific tasks, locations, situations, and contexts of smart spaces. Such tech­nologies allow us to describe, revise, and adapt the characteristics, functions, processes, and usage patterns of customization targets on the basis of machine-understandable content representation that enables auto­mated processing and information sharing between human and software agents.   This book explains the principal achievements of the Theseus research program, one of the central pro­grams in the German government's Digital 2015 initiative and its High-Tech Strategy 2020. The methods, toolsets, and standards for semantic technologies developed during this program form a solid basis for the fourth industrial revolution (Industrie 4.0), the hybrid service economy, and the transformation of big data into useful smart data for the emerging data economy.   The contributing authors are leading scientists and engineers, representing world-class academic and in­dustrial research teams, and the ideas, technologies, and representative use cases they describe in the book derive from results in multidisciplinary fields, such as the Internet of Services; the Semantic Web, and semantic technologies, knowledge management, and search; user interfaces, multimodal interaction, and visualization; machine learning and data mining; and business process support, manufacturing, automa­tion, medical systems, and integrated service engineering.   The book will be of value to both researchers and practitioners in these domains.

Towards Solid-State Quantum Repeaters: Ultrafast, Coherent Optical Control and Spin-Photon Entanglement in Charged InAs Quantum Dots summarizes several state-of-the-art coherent spin manipulation experiments in III-V quantum dots. Both high-fidelity optical manipulation, decoherence due to nuclear spins and the spin coherence extraction are discussed, as is the generation of entanglement between a single spin qubit and a photonic qubit. The experimental results are analyzed and discussed in the context of future quantum technologies, such as quantum repeaters. Single spins in optically active semiconductor host materials have emerged as leading candidates for quantum information processing (QIP). The quantum nature of the spin allows for encoding of stationary, memory quantum bits (qubits), and the relatively weak interaction with the host material preserves the spin coherence. On the other hand, optically active host materials permit direct interfacing with light, which can be used for all-optical qubit manipulation, and for efficiently mapping matter qubits into photonic qubits that are suited for long-distance quantum communication.

By using various data inputs, ubiquitous computing systems detect their current usage context, automatically adapt their services to the user’s situational needs and interact with other services or resources in their environment on an ad-hoc basis. Designing such self-adaptive, context-aware knowledge processing systems is, in itself, a formidable challenge. This book presents core findings from the VENUS project at the Interdisciplinary Research Center for Information System Design (ITeG) at Kassel University, where researchers from different fields, such as computer science, information systems, human-computer interaction and law, together seek to find general principles and guidelines for the design of socially aware ubiquitous computing systems. To this end, system usability, user trust in the technology and adherence to privacy laws and regulations were treated as particularly important criteria in the context of socio-technical system design. During the project, a comprehensive blueprint for systematic, interdisciplinary software development was developed, covering the particular functional and non-functional design aspects of ubiquitous computing at the interface between technology and human beings. The organization of the book reflects the structure of the VENUS work program. After an introductory part I, part II provides the groundwork for VENUS by presenting foundational results from all four disciplines involved. Subsequently, part III focuses on methodological research funneling the development activities into a common framework. Part IV then covers the design of the demonstrators that were built in order to develop and evaluate the VENUS method. Finally, part V is dedicated to the evaluation phase to assess the user acceptance of the new approach and applications. The presented findings are especially important for researchers in computer science, information systems, and human-computer interaction, but also for everyone working on the acceptance of new technologies in society in general.

Computer vision is the science and technology of making machines that see. It is concerned with the theory, design and implementation of algorithms that can automatically process visual data to recognize objects, track and recover their shape and spatial layout. The International Computer Vision Summer School - ICVSS was established in 2007 to provide both an objective and clear overview and an in-depth analysis of the state-of-the-art research in Computer Vision. The courses are delivered by world renowned experts in the field, from both academia and industry and cover both theoretical and practical aspects of real Computer Vision problems. The school is organized every year by University of Cambridge (Computer Vision and Robotics Group) and University of Catania (Image Processing Lab). Different topics are covered each year. This edited volume contains a selection of articles covering some of the talks and tutorials held during the last editions of the school. The chapters provide an in-depth overview of challenging areas with key references to the existing literature.