This book presents a systematic introduction to the latest developments in video text detection. Opening with a discussion of the underlying theory and a brief history of video text detection, the text proceeds to cover pre-processing and post-processing techniques, character segmentation and recognition, identification of non-English scripts, techniques for multi-modal analysis and performance evaluation. The detection of text from both natural video scenes and artificially inserted captions is examined. Various applications of the technology are also reviewed, from license plate recognition and road navigation assistance, to sports analysis and video advertising systems. Features: explains the fundamental theory in a succinct manner, supplemented with references for further reading; highlights practical techniques to help the reader understand and develop their own video text detection systems and applications; serves as an easy-to-navigate reference, presenting the material in self-contained chapters.

This monograph covers some selected problems of positive and fractional electrical circuits composed of resistors, coils, capacitors and voltage (current) sources. The book consists of 8 chapters, 4 appendices and a list of references. Chapter 1 is devoted to fractional standard and positive continuous-time and discrete-time linear systems without and with delays. In chapter 2 the standard and positive fractional electrical circuits are considered and the fractional electrical circuits in transient states are analyzed. Descriptor linear electrical circuits and their properties are investigated in chapter 3, while chapter 4 is devoted to the stability of fractional standard and positive linear electrical circuits. The reachability, observability and reconstructability of fractional positive electrical circuits and their decoupling zeros are analyzed in chapter 5. The fractional linear electrical circuits with feedbacks are considered in chapter 6. In chapter 7 solutions of minimum energy control for standard and fractional systems with and without bounded inputs is presented. In chapter 8 the fractional continuous-time 2D linear systems described by the Roesser type models are investigated.

This book presents the very concept of an index matrix and its related augmented matrix calculus in a comprehensive form. It mostly illustrates the exposition with examples related to the generalized nets and intuitionistic fuzzy sets which are examples of an extremely wide array of possible application areas. The present book contains the basic results of the author over index matrices and some of its open problems with the aim to stimulating more researchers to start working in this area.

This edited book presents scientific results of the 13th IEEE/ACIS International Conference on Computer and Information Science (ICIS 2014) which was held on June 4-6, 2014 in Taiyuan, China. The aim of this conference was to bring together researchers and scientists, businessmen and entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, computer users, and students to discuss the numerous fields of computer science and to share their experiences and exchange new ideas and information in a meaningful way. Research results about all aspects (theory, applications and tools) of computer and information science, and to discuss the practical challenges encountered along the way and the solutions adopted to solve them. The conference organizers selected the best papers from those papers accepted for presentation at the conference.  The papers were chosen based on review scores submitted by members of the program committee, and underwent further rigorous rounds of review. This publication captures 14 of the conference’s most promising papers, and we impatiently await the important contributions that we know these authors will bring to the field of computer and information science.

This book consists of 20 chapters in which the authors deal with different theoretical and practical aspects of new trends in Collective Computational Intelligence techniques. Computational Collective Intelligence methods and algorithms are one the current trending research topics from areas related to Artificial Intelligence, Soft Computing or Data Mining among others. Computational Collective Intelligence is a rapidly growing field that is most often understood as an AI sub-field dealing with soft computing methods which enable making group decisions and processing knowledge among autonomous units acting in distributed environments. Web-based Systems, Social Networks, and Multi-Agent Systems very often need these tools for working out consistent knowledge states, resolving conflicts and making decisions. The chapters included in this volume cover a selection of topics and new trends in several domains related to Collective Computational Intelligence: Language and Knowledge Processing, Data Mining Methods and Applications, Computer Vision, and Intelligent Computational Methods. This book will be useful for graduate and PhD students in computer science as well as for mature academics, researchers and practitioners interested in the methods and applications of collective computational intelligence in order to create new intelligent systems.

This book deals with the theory, design principles, and application of hybrid intelligent systems using type-2 fuzzy sets in combination with other paradigms of Soft Computing technology such as Neuro-Computing and Evolutionary Computing. It provides a self-contained exposition of the foundation of type-2 fuzzy neural networks and presents a vast compendium of its applications to control, forecasting, decision making, system identification and other real problems. Type-2 Fuzzy Neural Networks and Their Applications is helpful for teachers and students of universities and colleges, for scientists and practitioners from various fields such as control, decision analysis, pattern recognition and similar fields.

This book addresses the challenges of data abstraction generation using a least number of database scans, compressing data through novel lossy and non-lossy schemes, and carrying out clustering and classification directly in the compressed domain. Schemes are presented which are shown to be efficient both in terms of space and time, while simultaneously providing the same or better classification accuracy. Features: describes a non-lossy compression scheme based on run-length encoding of patterns with binary valued features; proposes a lossy compression scheme that recognizes a pattern as a sequence of features and identifying subsequences; examines whether the identification of prototypes and features can be achieved simultaneously through lossy compression and efficient clustering; discusses ways to make use of domain knowledge in generating abstraction; reviews optimal prototype selection using genetic algorithms; suggests possible ways of dealing with big data problems using multiagent systems.

This book provides readers with modern computational techniques for solving variety of problems from electrical, mechanical, civil and chemical engineering. Mathematical methods are presented in a unified manner, so they can be applied consistently to problems in applied electromagnetics, strength of materials, fluid mechanics, heat and mass transfer, environmental engineering, biomedical engineering, signal processing, automatic control and more.

This book focuses on emerging technologies in the field of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) namely efficient information dissemination between vehicles, infrastructures, pedestrians and public transportation systems. It covers the state-of-the-art of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), with centralized and decentralized (Peer-to-Peer) communication architectures, considering several application scenarios. With a detailed treatment of emerging communication paradigms, including cross networking and distributed algorithms. Unlike most of the existing books, this book presents a multi-layer overview of information dissemination systems, from lower layers (MAC) to high layers (applications). All those aspects are investigated considering the use of mobile devices, such as smartphones/tablets and embedded systems, i.e. technologies that during last years completely changed the current market, the user expectations, and communication networks. The presented networking paradigms are supported and validated by means of extensive simulative analysis and real field deployments in different application scenarios. This book represents a reference for professional technologist, postgraduates and researchers in the area of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs), wireless communication and distributed systems.   

This comprehensive textbook/reference provides an in-depth overview of the key aspects of transportation analysis, with an emphasis on modeling real transportation systems and executing the models. Topics and features: presents comprehensive review questions at the end of each chapter, together with detailed case studies, useful links, references and suggestions for further reading; supplies a variety of teaching support materials at the book’s webpage on Springer.com, including a complete set of lecture slides; examines the classification of models used for multimodal transportation systems, and reviews the models and evaluation methods used in transportation planning; explains traffic assignment to road networks, and describes computer simulation integration platforms and their use in the transportation systems sector; provides an overview of transportation simulation tools, and discusses the critical issues in the design, development and use of the simulation models.

‘Entertainment media’ are entertainment products and services that rely on digital technology and include traditional media (such as movies, TV, computer animation etc) as well as emerging services for wireless and broadband, electronic toys, video games, edutainment, and location-based entertainment (from PC game rooms to theme parks). Whilst most of the digital entertainment industry is found in the developed countries such as USA, Europe, and Japan, the decreasing costs of computer and programming technologies enables developing countries to really benefit from entertainment media in two ways: as creators and producers of games and entertainment for the global market and as a way to increase creativity and learning among the youth of the developing world. Focusing specifically on initiatives that  use entertainment technologies to promote economic development, education, creativity and cultural dissemination, this book explores how current technology and the use of off-the-shelf technologies (such as cheap sensors, Kinect, Arduino and others) can be exploited to achieve more innovative and affordable ways to harness the entertainment power of creating. It poses questions such as ‘How can we convert consumers of entertainment into creators of entertainment?’ ‘How can digital entertainment make a contribution to the emerging world?’. Academic researchers and students in human-computer interaction, entertainment computing, learning technologies will find the content thought-provoking, and companies and professionals in game and entertainment technology, mobile applications, social networking etc. will find this a valuable resource in developing new products and new markets.

This book offers comprehensive coverage of all the core topics of bioinformatics, and includes practical examples completed using the MATLAB bioinformatics toolbox™. It is primarily intended as a textbook for engineering and computer science students attending advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in bioinformatics and computational biology. The book develops bioinformatics concepts from the ground up, starting with an introductory chapter on molecular biology and genetics. This chapter will enable physical science students to fully understand and appreciate the ultimate goals of applying the principles of information technology to challenges in biological data management, sequence analysis, and systems biology. The first part of the book also includes a survey of existing biological databases, tools that have become essential in today’s biotechnology research. The second part of the book covers methodologies for retrieving biological information, including fundamental algorithms for sequence comparison, scoring, and determining evolutionary distance. The main focus of the third part is on modeling biological sequences and patterns as Markov chains. It presents key principles for analyzing and searching for sequences of significant motifs and biomarkers. The last part of the book, dedicated to systems biology, covers phylogenetic analysis and evolutionary tree computations, as well as gene expression analysis with microarrays. In brief, the book offers the ideal hands-on reference guide to the field of bioinformatics and computational biology.

The importance of accuracy verification methods was understood at the very beginning of the development of numerical analysis. Recent decades have seen a rapid growth of results related to adaptive numerical methods and a posteriori estimates. However, in this important area there often exists a noticeable gap between mathematicians creating the theory and researchers developing applied algorithms that could be used in engineering and scientific computations for guaranteed and efficient error control.   The goals of the book are to (1) give a transparent explanation of the underlying mathematical theory in a style accessible not only to advanced numerical analysts but also to engineers and students; (2) present detailed step-by-step algorithms that follow from a theory; (3) discuss their advantages and drawbacks, areas of applicability, give recommendations and examples.

This book focuses on the use of farm level, micro- and macro-data of cooperative systems and networks in developing new robust, reliable and coherent modeling tools for agricultural and environmental policy analysis. The efficacy of public intervention on agriculture is largely determined by the existence of reliable information on the effects of policy options and market developments on farmers' production decisions and in particular, on key issues such as levels of agricultural and non-agricultural output, land use and incomes, use of natural resources, sustainable-centric management, structural change and the viability of family farms. Over the last years, several methods and analytical tools have been developed for policy analysis using various sets of data. Such methods have been based on integrated approaches in an effort to investigate the above key issues and have thus attempted to offer a powerful environment for decision making, particularly in an era of radical change for both agriculture and the wider economy.

This book presents current progress on challenges related to Big Data management by focusing on the particular challenges associated with context-aware data-intensive applications and services. The book is a state-of-the-art reference discussing progress made, as well as prompting future directions on the theories, practices, standards and strategies that are related to the emerging computational technologies and their association with supporting the Internet of Things advanced functioning for organizational settings including both business and e-science. Apart from inter-operable and inter-cooperative aspects, the book deals with a notable opportunity namely, the current trend in which a collectively shared and generated content is emerged from Internet end-users. Specifically, the book presents advances on managing and exploiting the vast size of data generated from within the smart environment (i.e. smart cities) towards an integrated, collective intelligence approach. The book also presents methods and practices to improve large storage infrastructures in response to increasing demands of the data intensive applications. The book contains 19 self-contained chapters that were very carefully selected based on peer review by at least two expert and independent reviewers and is organized into the three sections reflecting the general themes of interest to the IoT and Big Data communities: Section I: Foundations and Principles Section II: Advanced Models and Architectures Section III: Advanced Applications and Future Trends The book is intended for researchers interested in joining interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary works in the areas of Smart Environments, Internet of Things and various computational technologies for the purpose of an integrated collective computational intelligence approach into the Big Data era.  

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art, data flow-based techniques for the analysis, modeling and mapping technologies of concurrent applications on multi-processors.  The authors present a flow for designing embedded hard/firm real-time multiprocessor streaming applications, based on data flow formalisms, with a particular focus on wireless modem applications. Architectures are described for the design tools and run-time scheduling and resource management of such a platform.  

This book presents the development of a theory of social goal-objective formation and its relationship to national interest and social vision under a democratic decision-choice system with imperfect information structure. It provides a framework for the application of fuzzy logic and its mathematics to the analysis in resolving conflicts in individual preferences in the collective decision-choice space without violence. The book demonstrates how to use fuzzy logic and its mathematics in the study of economics, social sciences and other complex systems. It also presents the use of collaborative tools of opposites, duality, polarity, continuum in fuzzy paradigm with its logic, laws of thought and mathematics in developing a new approach to the theory of political economy in order to enhance the constructs of social decision-choice theory.

This book describes recent advances on hybrid intelligent systems using soft computing techniques for diverse areas of application, such as intelligent control and robotics, pattern recognition, time series prediction and optimization complex problems. Soft Computing (SC) consists of several intelligent computing paradigms, including fuzzy logic, neural networks and bio-inspired optimization algorithms, which can be used to produce powerful hybrid intelligent systems. The book is organized in five main parts, which contain a group of papers around a similar subject. The first part consists of papers with the main theme of type-2 fuzzy logic, which basically consists of papers that propose new models and applications for type-2 fuzzy systems. The second part contains papers with the main theme of bio-inspired optimization algorithms, which are basically papers using nature-inspired techniques to achieve optimization of complex optimization problems in diverse areas of application. The third part contains papers that deal with new models and applications of neural networks in real world problems. The fourth part contains papers with the theme of intelligent optimization methods, which basically consider the proposal of new methods of optimization to solve complex real world optimization problems. The fifth part contains papers with the theme of evolutionary methods and intelligent computing, which are papers considering soft computing methods for applications related to diverse areas, such as natural language processing, recommending systems and optimization.

With the onset of massive cosmological data collection through media such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), galaxy classification has been accomplished for the most part with the help of citizen science communities like Galaxy Zoo. Seeking the wisdom of the crowd for such Big Data processing has proved extremely beneficial. However, an analysis of one of the Galaxy Zoo morphological classification data sets has shown that a significant majority of all classified galaxies are labelled as “Uncertain�. This book reports on how to use data mining, more specifically clustering, to identify galaxies that the public has shown some degree of uncertainty for as to whether they belong to one morphology type or another. The book shows the importance of transitions between different data mining techniques in an insightful workflow. It demonstrates that Clustering enables to identify discriminating features in the analysed data sets, adopting a novel feature selection algorithms called Incremental Feature Selection (IFS). The book shows the use of state-of-the-art classification techniques, Random Forests and Support Vector Machines to validate the acquired results. It is concluded that a vast majority of these galaxies are, in fact, of spiral morphology with a small subset potentially consisting of stars, elliptical galaxies or galaxies of other morphological variants.

This book provides an insightful and comprehensive look at the issues regarding the use of the Internet and social media by activists in more than 30 countries—and how many governments in these countries are trying to blunt these efforts to promote freedom. The innovators who created social media might never have imagined the possibility: that activists living in countries where oppressive conditions are the norm would use social media to call for changes to bring greater freedom, opportunity, and justice to the masses. The attributes of social media that make it so powerful for casual socializing—the ability to connect with nearly limitless numbers of like-minded individuals instantaneously—enables political activists to recruit, communicate, and organize like never before. This book examines three aspects of the use of social media for political activism: the degrees of media freedom practiced in countries around the world; the methods by which governments attempt to block access to information; and the various ways in which activists use the media—especially social media—to advance their cause of greater freedoms. Readers will learn how these political uprisings came from the grassroots efforts of oppressed and unhappy citizens desperate to make better lives for themselves and others like them—and how the digital age is allowing them to protest and call attention to their plights in unprecedented ways.

This book analyzes the philosophical foundations of sensorimotor theory and discusses the most recent applications of sensorimotor theory to human computer interaction, child’s play, virtual reality, robotics, and linguistics. Why does a circle look curved and not angular? Why does red not sound like a bell? Why, as I interact with the world, is there something it is like to be me? An analytic philosopher might suggest: ``if we ponder the concept of circle we find that it is the essence of a circle to be round’’. However, where does this definition come from? Was it set in stone by the Gods, in other words by divine arbiters of circleness, redness and consciousness? Particularly, with regard to visual consciousness, a first attempt to explain why our conscious experience of the world appears as it does has been attributed to Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noe, who published their sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness in 2001. Starting with a chapter by Kevin O’Regan, Contemporary Sensorimotor Theory continues by presenting fifteen additional essays on as many developments achieved in recent years in this field. It provides readers with a critical review of the sensorimotor theory and in so doing introduces them to a radically new enactive approach in cognitive science.

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.

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 edited collection will provide an overview of the field of physiological computing, i.e. the use of physiological signals as input for computer control. It will cover a breadth of current research, from brain-computer interfaces to telemedicine.

  Humanoid robotics have made remarkable progress since the dawn of robotics. So why don't we have humanoid robot assistants in day-to-day life yet? This book analyzes the keys to building a successful humanoid robot for field robotics, where collisions become an unavoidable part of the game. The author argues that the design goal should be real anthropomorphism, as opposed to mere human-like appearance. He deduces three major characteristics to aim for when designing a humanoid robot, particularly robot hands: - Robustness against impacts - Fast dynamics - Human-like grasping and manipulation performance Instead of blindly copying human anatomy, this book opts for a holistic design methodology. It analyzes human hands and existing robot hands to elucidate the important functionalities that are the building blocks toward these necessary characteristics. They are the keys to designing an anthropomorphic robot hand, as illustrated in the high performance anthropomorphic Awiwi Hand presented in this book. This is not only a handbook for robot hand designers. It gives a comprehensive survey and analysis of the state of the art in robot hands as well as the human anatomy. It is also aimed at researchers and roboticists interested in the underlying functionalities of hands, grasping and manipulation. The methodology of functional abstraction is not limited to robot hands, it can also help realize a new generation of humanoid robots to accommodate a broader spectrum of the needs of human society.