‘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.

The book you hold in your hands is the outcome of the "ISCS 2013: Interdisciplinary Symposium on Complex Systems" held at the historical capital of Bohemia as a continuation of our series of symposia in the science of complex systems. Prague, one of the most beautiful European cities, has its own beautiful genius loci. Here, a great number of important discoveries were made and many important scientists spent fruitful and creative years to leave unforgettable traces. The perhaps most significant period was the time of Rudolf II who was a great supporter of the art and the science and attracted a great number of prominent minds to Prague. This trend would continue. Tycho Brahe, Niels Henrik Abel, Johannes Kepler, Bernard Bolzano, August Cauchy Christian Doppler, Ernst Mach, Albert Einstein and many others followed developing fundamental mathematical and physical theories or expanding them. Thus in the beginning of the 17th century, Kepler formulated here the first two of his three laws of planetary motion on the basis of Tycho Brahe’s observations. In the 19th century, nowhere differentiable continuous functions (of a fractal character) were constructed here by Bolzano along with a treatise on infinite sets, titled “Paradoxes of Infinity� (1851). Weierstrass would later publish a similar function in 1872. In 1842, Doppler as a professor of mathematics at the Technical University of Prague here first lectured about a physical effect to bear his name later. And the epoch-making physicist Albert Einstein – while being a chaired professor of theoretical physics at the German University of Prague – arrived at the decisive steps of his later finished theory of general relativity during the years 1911–1912. In Prague, also many famous philosophers and writers accomplished their works; for instance, playwright arel ape coined the word "robot" in Prague (“robot� comes from the Czech word “robota� which means “forced labor�).

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 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.

This book describes analytical models and estimation methods to enhance performance estimation of pipelined multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs). A framework is introduced for both design-time and run-time optimizations. For design space exploration, several algorithms are presented to minimize the area footprint of a pipelined MPSoC under a latency or a throughput constraint. A novel adaptive pipelined MPSoC architecture is described, where idle processors are transitioned into low-power states at run-time to reduce energy consumption. Multi-mode pipelined MPSoCs are introduced, where multiple pipelined MPSoCs optimized separately are merged into a single pipelined MPSoC, enabling further reduction of the area footprint by sharing the processors and communication buffers. Readers will benefit from the authors’ combined use of analytical models, estimation methods and exploration algorithms and will be enabled to explore billions of design points in a few minutes.

This research book provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art subspace learning methods for pattern recognition in intelligent environment. With the fast development of internet and computer technologies, the amount of available data is rapidly increasing in our daily life. How to extract core information or useful features is an important issue. Subspace methods are widely used for dimension reduction and feature extraction in pattern recognition. They transform a high-dimensional data to a lower-dimensional space (subspace), where most information is retained. The book covers a broad spectrum of subspace methods including linear, nonlinear and multilinear subspace learning methods and applications. The applications include face alignment, face recognition, medical image analysis, remote sensing image classification, traffic sign recognition, image clustering, super resolution, edge detection, multi-view facial image synthesis.

The idea of the Gröbner basis first appeared in a 1927 paper by F. S. Macaulay, who succeeded in creating a combinatorial characterization of the Hilbert functions of homogeneous ideals of the polynomial ring. Later, the modern definition of the Gröbner basis was independently introduced by Heisuke Hironaka in 1964 and Bruno Buchberger in 1965. However, after the discovery of the notion of the Gröbner basis by Hironaka and Buchberger, it was not actively pursued for 20 years. A breakthrough was made in the mid-1980s by David Bayer and Michael Stillman, who created the Macaulay computer algebra system with the help of the Gröbner basis. Since then, rapid development on the Gröbner basis has been achieved by many researchers, including Bernd Sturmfels. This book serves as a standard bible of the Gröbner basis, for which the harmony of theory, application, and computation are indispensable. It provides all the fundamentals for graduate students to learn the ABC’s of the Gröbner basis, requiring no special knowledge to understand those basic points. Starting from the introductory performance of the Gröbner basis (Chapter 1), a trip around mathematical software follows (Chapter 2). Then comes a deep discussion of how to compute the Gröbner basis (Chapter 3). These three chapters may be regarded as the first act of a mathematical play. The second act opens with topics on algebraic statistics (Chapter 4), a fascinating research area where the Gröbner basis of a toric ideal is a fundamental tool of the Markov chain Monte Carlo method. Moreover, the Gröbner basis of a toric ideal has had a great influence on the study of convex polytopes (Chapter 5). In addition, the Gröbner basis of the ring of differential operators gives effective algorithms on holonomic functions (Chapter 6). The third act (Chapter 7) is a collection of concrete examples and problems for Chapters 4, 5 and 6 emphasizing computation by using various software systems.

​This book is an excellent introduction to multiword expressions. It provides a unique, comprehensive and up-to-date overview of this exciting topic in computational linguistics. The first part describes the diversity and richness of multiword expressions, including many examples in several languages. These constructions are not only complex and arbitrary, but also much more frequent than one would guess, making them a real nightmare for natural language processing applications.  The second part introduces a new generic framework for automatic acquisition of multiword expressions from texts. Furthermore, it describes the accompanying free software tool, the mwetoolkit, which comes in handy when looking for expressions in texts (regardless of the language). Evaluation is greatly emphasized, underlining the fact that results depend on parameters like corpus size, language, MWE type, etc. The last part contains solid experimental results and evaluates the mwetoolkit, demonstrating its usefulness for computer-assisted lexicography and machine translation. This is the first book to cover the whole pipeline of multiword expression acquisition in a single volume. It is addresses the needs of students and researchers in computational and theoretical linguistics, cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence and computer science. Its good balance between computational and linguistic views make it the perfect starting point for anyone interested in multiword expressions, language and text processing in general.

This book includes extended and revised versions of a set of selected papers from the Ninth International Conference on Informatics in Control Automation and Robotics (ICINCO 2012), held in Rome, Italy, from 28 to 31 July 2012. The conference was organized in four simultaneous tracks: Intelligent Control Systems and Optimization, Robotics and Automation, Systems Modeling, Signal Processing and Control and Industrial Engineering, Production and Management.   ICINCO 2012 received 360 paper submissions, from 58 countries in all continents. From these, after a blind review process, only 40 were accepted as full papers, of which 20 were selected for inclusion in this book, based on the classifications provided by the Program Committee. The selected papers reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the conference as well as the logic equilibrium between the four abovementioned tracks. The diversity of topics is an important feature of this conference, enabling an overall perception of several important scientific and technological trends.

Evolution and complexity characterize both biological and artificial life – by direct modeling of biological processes and the creation of populations of interacting entities from which complex behaviors can emerge and evolve. This edited book includes invited chapters from leading scientists in the fields of artificial life, complex systems, and evolutionary computing. The contributions identify both fundamental theoretical issues and state-of-the-art real-world applications. The book is intended for researchers and graduate students in the related domains.

The proceedings from the  eighth KMO conference represent the findings of this international meeting which brought together researchers and developers from industry and the academic world to report on the latest scientific and technical advances on knowledge management in organizations. This conference provided an international forum for authors to present and discuss research focused on the role of knowledge management for innovative services in industries, to shed light on recent advances in social and big data computing for KM as well as to identify future directions for researching the role of knowledge management in service innovation and how cloud computing can be used to address many of the issues currently facing KM in academia and industrial sectors.

Convergence proposes the enhancement of the Internet with a novel, content-centric, publish–subscribe service model based on the versatile digital item (VDI): a common container for all kinds of digital content, including digital representations of real-world resources. VDIs will serve the needs of the future Internet, providing a homogeneous method for handling structured information, incorporating security and privacy mechanisms. CONVERGENCE subsumes the following areas of research: · definition of the VDI as a new fundamental unit of distribution and transaction; · content-centric networking functionality to complement or replace IP-address-based routing; · security and privacy protection mechanisms; · open-source middleware, including a community dictionary service to enable rich semantic searches; · applications, tested under real-life conditions. This book shows how CONVERGENCE allows publishing, searching and subscribing to any content. Creators can publish their content by wrapping it and its descriptions into a VDI, setting rights for other users to access this content, monitor its use, and communicate with people using it; they may even update or revoke content previously published. Access to content is more efficient, as search engines exploit VDI metadata for indexing, and the network uses the content name to ensure users always access the copy closest to them. Every node in the network is a content cache; handover is easy; multicast is natural; peer-to-peer is built-in; time/space-decoupling is possible. Application developers can exploit CONVERGENCE’s middleware and network without having to resort to proprietary/ad hoc solutions for common/supporting functionality. Operators can use the network more efficiently, better controlling information transfer and related revenues flows. Network design, operation and management are simplified by integrating diverse functions and avoiding patches and stopgap solutions. Whether as a text for graduate students working on the future of the Internet, or a resource for practitioners providing e-commerce or multimedia services, or scientists defining new technologies, CONVERGENCE will make a valuable contribution to the future shape of the Internet.

This book provides an overview of state-of-the-art research on “Systems and Optimization Aspects of Smart Grid Challenges.� The authors have compiled and integrated different aspects of applied systems optimization research to smart grids, and also describe some of its critical challenges and requirements. The promise of a smarter electricity grid could significantly change how consumers use and pay for their electrical power, and could fundamentally reshape the current Industry. Gaining increasing interest and acceptance, Smart Grid technologies combine power generation and delivery systems with advanced communication systems to help save energy, reduce energy costs and improve reliability. Taken together, these technologies support new approaches for load balancing and power distribution, allowing optimal runtime power routing and cost management. Such unprecedented capabilities, however, also present a set of new problems and challenges at the technical and regulatory levels that must be addressed by Industry and the Research Community.

This book is a collection of representative and novel works done in Data Mining, Knowledge Discovery, Clustering and Classification that were originally presented in French at the EGC'2012 Conference held in Bordeaux, France, on January 2012. This conference was the 12th edition of this event, which takes place each year and which is now successful and well-known in the French-speaking community. This community was structured in 2003 by the foundation of the French-speaking EGC society (EGC in French stands for ``Extraction et Gestion des Connaissances'' and means ``Knowledge Discovery and Management'', or KDM). This book is intended to be read by all researchers interested in these fields, including PhD or MSc students, and researchers from public or private laboratories. It concerns both theoretical and practical aspects of KDM. The book is structured in two parts called ``Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining'' and ``Classification and Feature Extraction or Selection''. The first part (6 chapters) deals with data clustering and data mining. The three remaining chapters of the second part are related to classification and feature extraction or feature selection.