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

As interactive systems are quickly becoming integral to our everyday lives, this book investigates how we can make these systems, from desktop and mobile apps to more wearable and immersive applications, more usable and maintainable by using HCI design patterns. It also examines how we can facilitate the reuse of design practices in the development lifecycle of multi-devices, multi-platforms and multi-contexts user interfaces. Effective design tools are provided for combining HCI design patterns and User Interface (UI) driven engineering to enhance design whilst differentiating between UI and the underlying system features. Several examples are used to demonstrate how HCI design patterns can support this decoupling by providing an architectural framework for pattern-oriented and model-driven engineering of multi-platforms and multi-devices user interfaces. Patterns of HCI Design and HCI Design of Patterns is for students, academics and Industry specialists who are concerned with user interfaces and usability within the software development community.

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.

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

This textbook provides a unified and self-contained presentation of the main approaches to and ideas of mathematical statistics. It collects the basic mathematical ideas and tools needed as a basis for more serious study or even independent research in statistics. The majority of existing textbooks in mathematical statistics follow the classical asymptotic framework. Yet, as modern statistics has changed rapidly in recent years, new methods and approaches have appeared. The emphasis is on finite sample behavior, large parameter dimensions, and model misspecifications. The present book provides a fully self-contained introduction to the world of modern mathematical statistics, collecting the basic knowledge, concepts and findings needed for doing further research in the modern theoretical and applied statistics. This textbook is primarily intended for graduate and postdoc students and young researchers who are interested in modern statistical methods.

The Elements of Knowledge Organization is a unique and original work introducing the fundamental concepts related to the field of Knowledge Organization (KO). There is no other book like it currently available. The author begins the book with a comprehensive discussion of “knowledge� and its associated theories. He then presents a thorough discussion of the philosophical underpinnings of knowledge organization. The author walks the reader through the Knowledge Organization domain expanding the core topics of ontologies, taxonomies, classification, metadata, thesauri and domain analysis. The author also presents the compelling challenges associated with the organization of knowledge. This is the first book focused on the concepts and theories associated with KO domain. Prior to this book, individuals wishing to study Knowledge Organization in its broadest sense would generally collocate their own resources, navigating the various methods and models and perhaps inadvertently excluding relevant materials. This text cohesively links key and related KO material and provides a deeper understanding of the domain in its broadest sense and with enough detail to truly investigate its many facets. This book will be useful to both graduate and undergraduate students in the computer science and information science domains both as a text and as a reference book. It will also be valuable to researchers and practitioners in the industry who are working on website development, database administration, data mining, data warehousing and data for search engines. The book is also beneficial to anyone interested in the concepts and theories associated with the organization of knowledge. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia is a world-renowned author who is well published in the Knowledge Organization domain. Dr. Smiraglia is editor-in-chief of the journal Knowledge Organization, published by Ergon-Verlag of Würzburg. He is a professor and member of the Information Organization Research Group at the School of Information Studies at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.

This volume is the first of the new series Advances in Dynamics and Delays. It offers the latest advances in the research of analyzing and controlling dynamical systems with delays, which arise in many real-world problems. The contributions in this series are a collection across various disciplines, encompassing engineering, physics, biology, and economics, and some are extensions of those presented at the IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) conferences since 2011. The series is categorized in five parts covering the main themes of the contributions: ·         Stability Analysis and Control Design ·         Networks and Graphs ·         Time Delay and Sampled-Data Systems ·         Computational  and Software Tools ·         Applications This volume will become a good reference point for researchers and PhD students in the field of delay systems, and for those willing to learn more about the field, and it will also be a resource for control engineers, who will find innovative control methodologies for relevant applications, from both theory and numerical analysis perspectives.

Enterprise modeling (EM) methods and techniques are indispensable for understanding the present situation of an enterprise and for preparing for its future – particularly in times of continuous organizational change, an increasing pace of innovation, new market challenges or technology advances. The authors combine a detailed description of the 4EM methodology with their concrete experience gathered in projects. Their book addresses the modeling procedure, modeling language and modeling practices in a uniquely integrated approach. It provides practical advice on common challenges faced by enterprises and offers a flexible EM method suitable for tackling those challenges. Much of the work presented stems from actual research projects and has been validated with scientific methods. The 4EM methodology has proven its practical value in a large number of successful development and/or change management projects in industry and the public sector. The book was written for anyone who wants to learn more about EM, with a specific focus on how to do it in practice and/or how to teach it. Its main target audience thus includes instructors in the field of EM or business information systems, students in Information Systems or Business Administration, and practitioners working in enterprise or change management. The authors describe a clear reading path for each of these audiences and complement the work with a set of slides and further teaching material available under www.4em-method.com.

This book is on the iterative learning control (ILC) with focus on the design and implementation. We approach the ILC design based on the frequency domain analysis and address the ILC implementation based on the sampled data methods. This is the first book of ILC from frequency domain and sampled data methodologies. The frequency domain design methods offer ILC users insights to the convergence performance which is of practical benefits. This book presents a comprehensive framework with various methodologies to ensure the learnable bandwidth in the ILC system to be set with a balance between learning performance and learning stability. The sampled data implementation ensures effective execution of ILC in practical dynamic systems. The presented sampled data ILC methods also ensure the balance of performance and stability of learning process. Furthermore, the presented theories and methodologies are tested with an ILC controlled robotic system. The experimental results show that the machines can work in much higher accuracy than a feedback control alone can offer. With the proposed ILC algorithms, it is possible that machines can work to their hardware design limits set by sensors and actuators. The target audience for this book includes scientists, engineers and practitioners involved in any systems with repetitive operations.

This book is an edited collection of chapters based on the papers presented at the conference “Beyond AI: Artificial Dreams� held in Pilsen in November 2012. The aim of the conference was to question deep-rooted ideas of artificial intelligence and cast critical reflection on methods standing at its foundations. Artificial Dreams epitomize our controversial quest for non-biological intelligence and therefore the contributors of this book tried to fully exploit such a controversy in their respective chapters, which resulted in an interdisciplinary dialogue between experts from engineering, natural sciences and humanities. While pursuing the Artificial Dreams, it has become clear that it is still more and more difficult to draw a clear divide between human and machine. And therefore this book tries to portrait such an image of what lies beyond artificial intelligence: we can see the disappearing human-machine divide, a very important phenomenon of nowadays technological society, the phenomenon which is often uncritically praised, or hypocritically condemned. And so this phenomenon found its place in the subtitle of the whole volume as well as in the title of the chapter of Kevin Warwick, one of the keynote speakers at “Beyond AI: Artificial Dreams�.

Cryptography has been employed in war and diplomacy from the time of Julius Caesar. In our Internet age, cryptography's most widespread application may be for commerce, from protecting the security of electronic transfers to guarding communication from industrial espionage. This accessible introduction for undergraduates explains the cryptographic protocols for achieving privacy of communication and the use of digital signatures for certifying the validity, integrity, and origin of a message, document, or program. Rather than offering a how-to on configuring web browsers and e-mail programs, the author provides a guide to the principles and elementary mathematics underlying modern cryptography, giving readers a look under the hood for security techniques and the reasons they are thought to be secure.

Computer simulation-based education and training is a multi-billion dollar industry. With the increased complexity of organizational decision making, projected demand for computer simulation-based decisional aids is on the rise. The objective of this book is to enhance systematically our understanding of and gain insights into the general process by which human facilitated ILEs are effectively designed and used in improving users’ decision making in dynamic tasks. This book is divided into four major parts. Part I serves as an introduction to the subject of “decision making in dynamic tasks�, its importance and its complexity. Part II provides background material, drawing upon the relevant literature, for the development of an integrated process model on the effectiveness of human facilitated ILEs in improving decision making in dynamic tasks. Part III focuses on the design, development and application of Fish Bank ILE, in laboratory experiments, to gather empirical evidence for the validity of the process model. Finally, part IV presents a comprehensive analysis of the gathered data to provide a powerful basis for understating important phenomena of training with human facilitated simulation-based learning environments, thereby, help to drive critical lessons to be learned. This book provides the reader with both a comprehensive understanding of the phenomena encountered in decision making with human facilitated ILEs and a unique way of studying the effects of these phenomena on people’s ability to make better decision in complex, dynamic tasks. This book is intended to be of use to managers and practitioners, researchers and students of dynamic decision making. The background material of Part II provides a solid base to understand and organize the existing experimental research literature and approaches.

This volume presents the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (COOP 2014). The conference is a venue for multidisciplinary research contributing to the design, assessment and analysis of cooperative systems and their integration in organizations, public venues, and everyday life. COOP emerged from the European tradition of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Cognitive Ergonomics as practiced in France.    These proceedings are a collection of 28 papers reflecting the variety of research activities in the field, as well as an increasing interest in investigating the use and design of ICT in all aspects of everyday life and society, and not merely in the workplace. The papers represent a variety of research topics, from healthcare to sustainable mobility to disaster response, in settings from all over the world. For the first time, the proceedings include papers presented in an Early-Career Researchers Track which was organized in order to give young researchers the opportunity to discuss their work with an international community.   This collection of papers provides a picture of new developments and classic topics of research around cooperative systems, based on the principle that a deep knowledge of cooperative practices is a key to understanding technology impacts and producing quality designs. The articles presented will appeal to researchers and practitioners alike, as they combine an understanding of the nature of work with the possibilities offered by novel digital technologies.  

Through a series of step-by-step tutorials and numerous hands-on exercises, this book aims to equip the reader with both a good understanding of the importance of space in the abstract world of engineers and the ability to create a model of a product in virtual space – a skill essential for any designer or engineer who needs to present ideas concerning a particular product within a professional environment. The exercises progress logically from the simple to the more complex; while Solid Works or NX is the software used, the underlying philosophy is applicable to all modeling software. In each case, the explanation covers the entire procedure from the basic idea and production capabilities through to the real model; the conversion from 3D model to 2D manufacturing drawing is also clearly explained. Topics covered include modeling of prism, axisymmetric, symmetric and sophisticated shapes; digitization of physical models using modeling software; creation of a CAD model starting from a physical model; free form surface modeling; modeling of product assemblies following bottom-up and top-down principles; and the presentation of a product in accordance with the rules of technical documentation. This book, which includes more than 500 figures, will be ideal for students wishing to gain a sound grasp of space modeling techniques. Academics and professionals will find it to be an excellent teaching and research aid, and an easy-to-use guide.

Management and enables them to deal with the demands and complexities of modern, agile systems/software/hardware development teams. The book examines the project/program manager beyond the concepts of leadership and aims to connect to employees' sense of identity. The text examines human psychological concepts such as “locus of control,� which will help the manager understand their team members’ view and how best to manage their “world� contributions. The authors cover new management tools and philosophies for agile systems/software/hardware development teams, with a specific focus on how this relates to engineering and computer science. This book also includes practical case studies. Discusses management skills needed as they relate to the advances in software development practices Examines how to manage an agile development team that includes teams across geographically, ethnically, and culturally diverse backgrounds Embraces all of the aspects of modern management and leadership

This book presents the state of the art technology in Serious Games which is driven extensive by applications and research in simulation. The topics in this book include: (1) Fashion simulation; (2) Chinese calligraphy ink diffusion simulation; (3) Rehabilitation (4) Long vehicle turning simulation; (5) Marine traffic conflict control; (6) CNC simulation; (7) Special needs education. The book also addresses the fundamental issues in Simulation and Serious Games such as rapid collision detection, game engines or game development platforms. The target audience for this book includes scientists, engineers and practitioners involved in the field of Serious Games and Simulation. The major part of this book comprises of papers presented at the 2012 Asia-Europe Workshop on Serious Games and Simulation held in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (May 9, 2012). All the contributions have been peer reviewed and by scientific committee members with report about quality, content and originality.

Recent achievements in hardware and software development, such as multi-core CPUs and DRAM capacities of multiple terabytes per server, enabled the introduction of a revolutionary technology: in-memory data management. This technology supports the flexible and extremely fast analysis of massive amounts of enterprise data. Professor Hasso Plattner and his research group at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, have been investigating and teaching the corresponding concepts and their adoption in the software industry for years. This book is based on an online course that was first launched in autumn 2012 with more than 13,000 enrolled students and marked the successful starting point of the openHPI e-learning platform. The course is mainly designed for students of computer science, software engineering, and IT related subjects, but addresses business experts, software developers, technology experts, and IT analysts alike. Plattner and his group focus on exploring the inner mechanics of a column-oriented dictionary-encoded in-memory database. Covered topics include - amongst others - physical data storage and access, basic database operators, compression mechanisms, and parallel join algorithms. Beyond that, implications for future enterprise applications and their development are discussed. Step by step, readers will understand the radical differences and advantages of the new technology over traditional row-oriented, disk-based databases. In this completely revised 2nd edition, we incorporate the feedback of thousands of course participants on openHPI and take into account latest advancements in hard- and software. Improved figures, explanations, and examples further ease the understanding of the concepts presented. We introduce advanced data management techniques such as transparent aggregate caches and provide new showcases that demonstrate the potential of in-memory databases for two diverse industries: retail and life sciences.

This book reviews a variety of methods for wave-based acoustic simulation and recent applications to architectural and environmental acoustic problems. Following an introduction providing an overview of computational simulation of sound environment, the book is in two parts: four chapters on methods and four chapters on applications. The first part explains the fundamentals and advanced techniques for three popular methods, namely, the finite-difference time-domain method, the finite element method, and the boundary element method, as well as alternative time-domain methods. The second part demonstrates various applications to room acoustics simulation, noise propagation simulation, acoustic property simulation for building components, and auralization. This book is a valuable reference that covers the state of the art in computational simulation for architectural and environmental acoustics.

When discussing classification, support vector machines are known to be a capable and efficient technique to learn and predict with high accuracy within a quick time frame. Yet, their black box means to do so make the practical users quite circumspect about relying on it, without much understanding of the how and why of its predictions. The question raised in this book is how can this ‘masked hero’ be made more comprehensible and friendly to the public: provide a surrogate model for its hidden optimization engine, replace the method completely or appoint a more friendly approach to tag along and offer the much desired explanations? Evolutionary algorithms can do all these and this book presents such possibilities of achieving high accuracy, comprehensibility, reasonable runtime as well as unconstrained performance.

This book focuses on organization and mechanisms of expert decision-making support using modern information and communication technologies, as well as information analysis and collective intelligence technologies (electronic expertise or simply e-expertise). Chapter 1 (E-Expertise) discusses the role of e-expertise in decision-making processes. The procedures of e-expertise are classified, their benefits and shortcomings are identified and the efficiency conditions are considered. Chapter 2 (Expert Technologies and Principles) provides a comprehensive overview of modern expert technologies. A special emphasis is placed on the specifics of e-expertise. Moreover, the authors study the feasibility and reasonability of employing well-known methods and approaches in e-expertise. Chapter 3 (E-Expertise: Organization and Technologies) describes some examples of up-to-date technologies to perform e-expertise. Chapter 4 (Trust Networks and Competence Networks) deals with the problems of expert finding and grouping by information and communication technologies. Chapter 5 (Active Expertise) treats the problem of expertise stability against any strategic manipulation by experts or coordinators pursuing individual goals. The book addresses a wide range of readers interested in management, decision-making and expert activity in political, economic, social and industrial spheres.

This book serves as a practical guide for practicing engineers who need to design embedded systems for high-speed data acquisition and control systems. A minimum amount of theory is presented, along with a review of analog and digital electronics, followed by detailed explanations of essential topics in hardware design and software development. The discussion of hardware focuses on microcontroller design (ARM microcontrollers and FPGAs), techniques of embedded design, high speed data acquisition (DAQ) and control systems. Coverage of software development includes main programming techniques, culminating in the study of real-time operating systems. All concepts are introduced in a manner to be highly-accessible to practicing engineers and lead to the practical implementation of an embedded board that can be used in various industrial fields as a control system and high speed data acquisition system.

The book offers an original view on channel coding, based on a unitary approach to block and convolutional codes for error correction. It presents both new concepts and new families of codes. For example, lengthened and modified lengthened cyclic codes are introduced as a bridge towards time-invariant convolutional codes and their extension to time-varying versions. The novel families of codes include turbo codes and low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, the features of which are justified from the structural properties of the component codes. Design procedures for regular LDPC codes are proposed, supported by the presented theory. Quasi-cyclic LDPC codes, in block or convolutional form, represent one of the most original contributions of the book. The use of more than 100 examples allows the reader gradually to gain an understanding of the theory, and the provision of a list of more than 150 definitions, indexed at the end of the book, permits rapid location of sought information.

This book describes how evolutionary algorithms (EA), including genetic algorithms (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) can be utilized for solving multi-objective optimization problems in the area of embedded and VLSI system design. Many complex engineering optimization problems can be modelled as multi-objective formulations. This book provides an introduction to multi-objective optimization using meta-heuristic algorithms, GA and PSO and how they can be applied to problems like hardware/software partitioning in embedded systems, circuit partitioning in VLSI, design of operational amplifiers in analog VLSI, design space exploration in high-level synthesis, delay fault testing in VLSI testing and scheduling in heterogeneous distributed systems. It is shown how, in each case, the various aspects of the EA, namely its representation and operators like crossover, mutation, etc, can be separately formulated to solve these problems. This book is intended for design engineers and researchers in the field of VLSI and embedded system design. The book introduces the multi-objective GA and PSO in a simple and easily understandable way that will appeal to introductory readers.

This book explores the extent to which fuzzy set logic can overcome some of the shortcomings of public choice theory, particularly its inability to provide adequate predictive power in empirical studies. Especially in the case of social preferences, public choice theory has failed to produce the set of alternatives from which collective choices are made. The book presents empirical findings achieved by the authors in their efforts to predict the outcome of government formation processes in European parliamentary and semi-presidential systems. Using data from the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP), the authors propose a new approach that reinterprets error in the coding of CMP data as ambiguity in the actual political positions of parties on the policy dimensions being coded. The range of this error establishes parties’ fuzzy preferences. The set of possible outcomes in the process of government formation is then calculated on the basis of both the fuzzy Pareto set and the fuzzy maximal set, and the predictions are compared with those made by two conventional approaches as well as with the government that was actually formed. The comparison shows that, in most cases, the fuzzy approaches outperform their conventional counterparts.

This book is focused on the recent advances in computer vision methodologies and technical solutions using conventional and intelligent paradigms. The Contributions include: ·         Morphological Image Analysis for Computer Vision Applications. ·         Methods for Detecting of Structural Changes in Computer Vision Systems. ·         Hierarchical Adaptive KL-based Transform: Algorithms and Applications. ·         Automatic Estimation for Parameters of Image Projective Transforms Based on Object-invariant Cores. ·         A Way of Energy Analysis for Image and Video Sequence Processing. ·         Optimal Measurement of Visual Motion Across Spatial and Temporal Scales. ·         Scene Analysis Using Morphological Mathematics and Fuzzy Logic. ·         Digital Video Stabilization in Static and Dynamic Scenes. ·         Implementation of Hadamard Matrices for Image Processing. ·         A Generalized Criterion of Efficiency for Telecommunication Systems. The book is directed to PhD students, professors, researchers and software developers working in the areas of digital video processing and computer vision technologies.