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.

This book deals with the issues of modelling management processes of information technology and IT projects while its core is the model of information technology management and its component models (contextual, local) describing initial processing and the maturity capsule as well as a decision-making system represented by a multi-level sequential model of IT technology selection, which acquires a fuzzy rule-based implementation in this work. In terms of applicability, this work may also be useful for diagnosing applicability of IT standards in evaluation of IT organizations. The results of this diagnosis might prove valid for those preparing new standards so that – apart from their own visions – they could, to an even greater extent, take into account the capabilities and needs of the leaders of project and manufacturing teams. The book is intended for IT professionals using the ITIL, COBIT and TOGAF standards in their work. Students of computer science and management who are interested in the issue of IT project and technology management are also likely to benefit from this study. For young students of IT, it can serve as a source of knowledge in the field of information technology evaluation. This book is also designed for specialists in modelling socio-technical systems.  

IT changes everyday’s life, especially in education and medicine. The goal of ITME 2014 is to further explore the theoretical and practical issues of Ubiquitous Computing Application and Wireless Sensor Network. It also aims to foster new ideas and collaboration between researchers and practitioners. The organizing committee is soliciting unpublished papers for the main conference and its special tracks.

This volume focuses on uncovering the fundamental forces underlying dynamic decision making among multiple interacting, imperfect and sel�sh decision makers. The chapters are written by leading experts from different disciplines, all considering the many sources of imperfection in decision making, and always with an eye to decreasing the myriad discrepancies between theory and real world human decision making. Topics addressed include uncertainty, deliberation cost and the complexity arising from the inherent large computational scale of decision making in these systems. In particular, analyses and experiments are presented which concern: • task allocation to maximize “the wisdom of the crowd�; • design of a society of “edutainment� robots who account for one anothers’ emotional states; • recognizing and counteracting seemingly non-rational human decision making; • coping with extreme scale when learning causality in networks; • ef�ciently incorporating expert knowledge in personalized medicine; • the effects of personality on risky decision making. The volume is a valuable source for researchers, graduate students and practitioners in machine learning, stochastic control, robotics, and economics, among other �elds.

This book presents a comprehensive approach to protecting sensitive information when large data collections are released by their owners. It addresses three key requirements of data privacy: the protection of data explicitly released, the protection of information not explicitly released but potentially vulnerable due to a release of other data, and the enforcement of owner-defined access restrictions to the released data. It is also the first book with a complete examination of how to enforce dynamic read and write access authorizations on released data, applicable to the emerging data outsourcing and cloud computing situations. Private companies, public organizations and final users are releasing, sharing, and disseminating their data to take reciprocal advantage of the great benefits of making their data available to others. This book weighs these benefits against the potential privacy risks. A detailed analysis of recent techniques for privacy protection in data release and case studies illustrate crucial scenarios. Protecting Privacy in Data Release targets researchers, professionals and government employees working in security and privacy. Advanced-level students in computer science and electrical engineering will also find this book useful as a secondary text or reference.

This book contains revised selected papers from the 18th International Conference on Membrane Computing, CMC 2017, held in Bradford, UK, in July 2017. The 18 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 29 submissions. They deal with membrane computing (P systems theory), an area of computer science aiming to abstract computing ideas and models from the structure and the functioning of living cells, as well as from the way the cells are organized in tissues or higher order structures. The volume also contains 2 invited talks.

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.

Computational intelligence techniques have enjoyed growing interest in recent decades among the earth and environmental science research communities for their powerful ability to solve and understand various complex problems and develop novel approaches toward a sustainable earth. This book compiles a collection of recent developments and rigorous applications of computational intelligence in these disciplines. Techniques covered include artificial neural networks, support vector machines, fuzzy logic, decision-making algorithms, supervised and unsupervised classification algorithms, probabilistic computing, hybrid methods and morphic computing. Further topics given treatment in this volume include remote sensing, meteorology, atmospheric and oceanic modeling, climate change, environmental engineering and management, catastrophic natural hazards, air and environmental pollution and water quality. By linking computational intelligence techniques with earth and environmental science oriented problems, this book promotes synergistic activities among scientists and technicians working in areas such as data mining and machine learning. We believe that a diverse group of academics, scientists, environmentalists, meteorologists and computing experts with a common interest in computational intelligence techniques within the earth and environmental sciences will find this book to be of great value.

This book offers the first detailed, comprehensible scientific presentation of Confabulation Theory, addressing a pressing scientific question: How does brain information processing, or cognition, work? With only elementary mathematics as a prerequisite, this book will prove accessible to technologists, scientists, and the educated public.

This book explores the view that normative behaviour is part of a complex of social mechanisms, processes and narratives that are constantly shifting. From this perspective, norms are not a kind of self-contained social object or fact, but rather an interplay of many things that we label as norms when we ‘take a snapshot’ of them at a particular instant. Further, this book pursues the hypothesis that considering the dynamic aspects of these phenomena sheds new light on them. The sort of issues that this perspective opens to exploration include: Of what is this complex we call a "social norm" composed of? How do new social norms emerge and what kind of circumstances might facilitate such an appearance? How context-specific are the norms and patterns of normative behaviour that arise? How do the cognitive and the social aspects of norms interact over time? How do expectations, beliefs and individual rationality interact with social norm complexes to effect behaviour? How does our social embeddedness relate to social constraint upon behaviour? How might the socio-cognitive complexes that we call norms be usefully researched?

The present book includes extended and revised versions of a set of selected papers from the Fourth International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence (IJCCI 2012)., held in Barcelona, Spain, from 5 to 7 October, 2012. The conference was sponsored by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC) and was organized in cooperation with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The conference brought together researchers, engineers and practitioners in computational technologies, especially those related to the areas of fuzzy computation, evolutionary computation and neural computation. It is composed of three co-located conferences, each one specialized in one of the aforementioned -knowledge areas. Namely: - International Conference on Evolutionary Computation Theory and Applications (ECTA) - International Conference on Fuzzy Computation Theory and Applications (FCTA) - International Conference on Neural Computation Theory and Applications (NCTA) Recent progresses in scientific developments and applications in these three areas are reported in this book This book includes revised and extended versions of a strict selection of the best papers presented at the conference.

This thesis primarily focuses on how to carry out intelligent sensing and understand the high-dimensional and low-quality visual information. After exploring the inherent structures of the visual data, it proposes a number of computational models covering an extensive range of mathematical topics, including compressive sensing, graph theory, probabilistic learning and information theory. These computational models are also applied to address a number of real-world problems including biometric recognition, stereo signal reconstruction, natural scene parsing, and SAR image processing.

This book demonstrates how to describe and analyze a system's behavior and extract the desired prediction and control algorithms from this analysis. A typical prediction is based on observing similar situations in the past, knowing the outcomes of these past situations, and expecting that the future outcome of the current situation will be similar to these past observed outcomes. In mathematical terms, similarity corresponds to symmetry, and similarity of outcomes to invariance.   This book shows how symmetries can be used in all classes of algorithmic problems of sciences and engineering: from analysis to prediction to control. Applications cover chemistry, geosciences, intelligent control, neural networks, quantum physics, and thermal physics. Specifically, it is shown how the approach based on symmetry and similarity can be used in the analysis of real-life systems, in the algorithms of prediction, and in the algorithms of control.

This book presents a collection of computational intelligence algorithms that addresses issues in visual pattern recognition such as high computational complexity, abundance of pattern features, sensitivity to size and shape variations and poor performance against complex backgrounds. The book has 3 parts. Part 1 describes various research issues in the field with a survey of the related literature. Part 2 presents computational intelligence based algorithms for feature selection and classification. The algorithms are discriminative and fast. The main application area considered is hand posture recognition. The book also discusses utility of these algorithms in other visual as well as non-visual pattern recognition tasks including face recognition, general object recognition and cancer / tumor classification. Part 3 presents biologically inspired algorithms for feature extraction. The visual cortex model based features discussed have invariance with respect to appearance and size of the hand, and provide good inter class discrimination. A Bayesian model of visual attention is described which is effective in handling complex background problem in hand posture recognition. The book provides qualitative and quantitative performance comparisons for the algorithms outlined, with other standard methods in machine learning and computer vision. The book is self-contained with several figures, charts, tables and equations helping the reader to understand the material presented without instruction.

The book focuses on Social Collective Intelligence, a term used to denote a class of socio-technical systems that combine, in a coordinated way, the strengths of humans, machines and collectives in terms of competences, knowledge and problem solving capabilities with the communication, computing and storage capabilities of advanced ICT. Social Collective Intelligence opens a number of challenges for researchers in both computer science and social sciences; at the same time it provides an innovative approach to solve challenges in diverse application domains, ranging from health to education and organization of work. The book will provide a cohesive and holistic treatment of Social Collective Intelligence, including challenges emerging in various disciplines (computer science, sociology, ethics) and opportunities for innovating in various application areas. By going through the book the reader will gauge insight and knowledge into the challenges and opportunities provided by this new, exciting, field of investigation. Benefits for scientists will be in terms of accessing a comprehensive treatment of the open research challenges in a multidisciplinary perspective. Benefits for practitioners and applied researchers will be in terms of access to novel approaches to tackle relevant problems in their field. Benefits for policy-makers and public bodies representatives will be in terms of understanding how technological advances can support them in supporting the progress of society and economy.

Hacking Europe traces the user practices of chopping games in Warsaw, hacking software in Athens, creating chaos in Hamburg, producing demos in Turku, and partying with computing in Zagreb and Amsterdam. Focusing on several European countries at the end of the Cold War, the book shows the digital development was not an exclusively American affair. Local hacker communities appropriated the computer and forged new cultures around it like the hackers in Yugoslavia, Poland and Finland, who showed off their tricks and creating distinct “demoscenes.� Together the essays reflect a diverse palette of cultural practices by which European users domesticated computer technologies. Each chapter explores the mediating actors instrumental in introducing and spreading the cultures of computing around Europe. More generally, the “ludological� element--the role of mischief, humor, and play--discussed here as crucial for analysis of hacker culture, opens new vistas for the study of the history of technology.

Blind Source Separation intends to report the new results of the efforts on the study of Blind Source Separation (BSS). The book collects novel research ideas and some training in BSS, independent component analysis (ICA), artificial intelligence and signal processing applications. Furthermore, the research results previously scattered in many journals and conferences worldwide are methodically edited and presented in a unified form. The book is likely to be of interest to university researchers, R&D engineers and graduate students in computer science and electronics who wish to learn the core principles, methods, algorithms and applications of BSS. Dr. Ganesh R. Naik works at University of Technology, Sydney, Australia; Dr. Wenwu Wang works at University of Surrey, UK.

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.

An autonomous sailboat robot is a boat that only uses the wind on its sail as the propelling force, without remote control or human assistance to achieve its mission. Robotic sailing offers the potential of long range and long term autonomous wind propelled, solar or wave-powered carbon neutral devices. Robotic sailing devices could contribute to monitoring of environmental, ecological, meteorological, hydrographic and oceanographic data. These devices can also be used in traffic monitoring, border surveillance, security, assistance and rescue. The dependency on changing winds and sea conditions presents a considerable challenge for short and long term route and stability planning, collision avoidance and boat control. Building a robust and seaworthy sailing robot presents a truly complex and multi-disciplinary challenge for boat designers, naval architects, systems/electrical engineers and computer scientists. Over the last decade, several events such as Sailbot, World Robotic Sailing Championship and the International Robotic Sailing Conference (WRSC/IRSC) and Microtransat have sparked an explosion in the number of groups working on autonomous sailing robots. Many of the challenges in building truly autonomous sailing robots still remain unsolved. These proceedings present the work of researchers on current and future challenges in autonomous sailboat development, presented at the WRSC/IRSC 2014 in Galway, Ireland, 8th – 12th September 2014.

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.