This monograph presents the concept of agents and agent systems. It starts with a formal approach and then presents examples of practical applications. In order to form the principles of construction of autonomous agents, a model of the agent is introduced. Subsequent parts of the monograph include several examples of applications of the term agent. Descriptions of different examples of applications of agent systems in such fields as evolution systems, mobile robot systems, artificial intelligence systems are given. The book constitutes an outline of methodology of the design and realization of agent systems based on the M-agent architecture oriented on different areas of applications.                                                                                                                                                                            

This timely review volume summarizes the state-of-the-art developments in nature-inspired algorithms and applications with the emphasis on swarm intelligence and bio-inspired computation. Topics include the analysis and overview of swarm intelligence and evolutionary computation, hybrid metaheuristic algorithms, bat algorithm, discrete cuckoo search, firefly algorithm, particle swarm optimization, and harmony search as well as convergent hybridization. Application case studies have focused on the dehydration of fruits and vegetables by the firefly algorithm and goal programming, feature selection by the binary flower pollination algorithm, job shop scheduling, single row facility layout optimization, training of feed-forward neural networks, damage and stiffness identification, synthesis of cross-ambiguity functions by the bat algorithm, web document clustering, truss analysis, water distribution networks, sustainable building designs and others. As a timely review, this book can serve as an ideal reference for graduates, lecturers, engineers and researchers in computer science, evolutionary computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computational intelligence, data mining, engineering optimization and designs.

This book presents and develops new reinforcement learning methods that enable fast and robust learning on robots in real-time. Robots have the potential to solve many problems in society, because of their ability to work in dangerous places doing necessary jobs that no one wants or is able to do. One barrier to their widespread deployment is that they are mainly limited to tasks where it is possible to hand-program behaviors for every situation that may be encountered. For robots to meet their potential, they need methods that enable them to learn and adapt to novel situations that they were not programmed for. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a paradigm for learning sequential decision making processes and could solve the problems of learning and adaptation on robots. This book identifies four key challenges that must be addressed for an RL algorithm to be practical for robotic control tasks. These RL for Robotics Challenges are: 1) it must learn in very few samples; 2) it must learn in domains with continuous state features; 3) it must handle sensor and/or actuator delays; and 4) it should continually select actions in real time. This book focuses on addressing all four of these challenges. In particular, this book is focused on time-constrained domains where the first challenge is critically important. In these domains, the agent’s lifetime is not long enough for it to explore the domains thoroughly, and it must learn in very few samples.

This book is instrumental to building a bridge between scientists and clinicians in the field of spine imaging by introducing state-of-the-art computational methods in the context of clinical applications.  Spine imaging via computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, and other radiologic imaging modalities, is essential for noninvasively visualizing and assessing spinal pathology. Computational methods support and enhance the physician’s ability to utilize these imaging techniques for diagnosis, non-invasive treatment, and intervention in clinical practice. Chapters cover a broad range of topics encompassing radiological imaging modalities, clinical imaging applications for common spine diseases, image processing, computer-aided diagnosis, quantitative analysis, data reconstruction and visualization, statistical modeling, image-guided spine intervention, and robotic surgery. This volume serves a broad audience as contributions were written by both clinicians and researchers, which reflects the intended readership as well, being a potentially comprehensive book for all spine related clinicians, technicians, scientists, and graduate students.

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.

This book is devoted to the analysis of measurement signals which requires specific mathematical operations like Convolution, Deconvolution, Laplace, Fourier, Hilbert, Wavelet or Z transform which are all presented in the present book. The different problems refer to the modulation of signals, filtration of disturbance as well as to the orthogonal signals and their use in digital form for the measurement of current, voltage, power and frequency are also widely discussed. All the topics covered in this book are presented in detail and illustrated by means of examples in MathCad and LabVIEW. This book provides a useful source for researchers, scientists and engineers who in their daily work are required to deal with problems of measurement and signal processing and can also be helpful to undergraduate students of electrical engineering.

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 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 book provides an introduction to the emerging field of planning and decision making for aerial robots. An aerial robot is the ultimate form of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, an aircraft endowed with built-in intelligence, requiring no direct human control and able to perform a specific task. It must be able to fly within a partially structured environment, to react and adapt to changing environmental conditions and to accommodate for the uncertainty that exists in the physical world. An aerial robot can be termed as a physical agent that exists and flies in the real 3D world, can sense its environment and act on it to achieve specific goals. So throughout this book, an aerial robot will also be termed as an agent. Fundamental problems in aerial robotics include the tasks of spatial motion, spatial sensing and spatial reasoning. Reasoning in complex environments represents a difficult problem. The issues specific to spatial reasoning are planning and decision making. Planning deals with the trajectory algorithmic development based on the available information, while decision making determines priorities and evaluates potential environmental uncertainties. The issues specific to planning and decision making for aerial robots in their environment are examined in this book and categorized as follows: motion planning, deterministic decision making, decision making under uncertainty and finally multi-robot planning. A variety of techniques are presented in this book, and a number of relevant case studies are examined. The topics considered in this book are multidisciplinary in nature and lie at the intersection of Robotics, Control Theory, Operational Research and Artificial Intelligence.

Most of the research efforts dealing with airline scheduling have been done on off-line plan optimization. However, nowadays, with the increasingly complex and huge traffic at airports, the real challenge is how to react to unexpected events that may cause plan-disruptions, leading to flight delays. Moreover these disruptive events usually affect at least three different dimensions of the situation: the aircraft assigned to the flight, the crew assignment and often forgotten, the passengers’ journey and satisfaction. This book includes answers to this challenge and proposes the use of the Multi-agent System paradigm to rapidly compose a multi-faceted solution to the disruptive event taking into consideration possible preferences of those three key aspects of the problem. Negotiation protocols taking place between agents that are experts in solving the different problem dimensions, combination of different utility functions and not less important, the inclusion of the human in the automatic decision-making loop make MASDIMA, the system described in this book, well suited for real-life plan-disruption management applications.

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.

Presenting the first definitive study of the subject, this Handbook of Biometric Anti-Spoofing reviews the state of the art in covert attacks against biometric systems and in deriving countermeasures to these attacks. Topics and features: provides a detailed introduction to the field of biometric anti-spoofing and a thorough review of the associated literature; examines spoofing attacks against five biometric modalities, namely, fingerprints, face, iris, speaker and gait; discusses anti-spoofing measures for multi-model biometric systems; reviews evaluation methodologies, international standards and legal and ethical issues; describes current challenges and suggests directions for future research; presents the latest work from a global selection of experts in the field, including members of the TABULA RASA project.

This book illustrates the program of Logical-Informational Dynamics. Rational agents exploit the information available in the world in delicate ways, adopt a wide range of epistemic attitudes, and in that process, constantly change the world itself. Logical-Informational Dynamics is about logical systems putting such activities at center stage, focusing on the events by which we acquire information and change attitudes. Its contributions show many current logics of information and change at work, often in multi-agent settings where social behavior is essential, and often stressing Johan van Benthem's pioneering work in establishing this program. However, this is not a Festschrift, but a rich tapestry for a field with a wealth of strands of its own. The reader will see the state of the art in such topics as information update, belief change, preference, learning over time, and strategic interaction in games. Moreover, no tight boundary has been enforced, and some chapters add more general mathematical or philosophical foundations or links to current trends in computer science.   The theme of this book lies at the interface of many disciplines. Logic is the main methodology, but the various chapters cross easily between mathematics, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive and social sciences, while also ranging from pure theory to empirical work. Accordingly, the authors of this book represent a wide variety of original thinkers from different research communities. And their interconnected themes challenge at the same time how we think of logic, philosophy and computation.   Thus, very much in line with van Benthem's work over many decades, the volume shows how all these disciplines form a natural unity in the perspective of dynamic logicians (broadly conceived) exploring their new themes today. And at the same time, in doing so, it offers a broader conception of logic with a certain grandeur, moving its horizons beyond the traditional study of consequence relations.

Structures placed on hillsides often present a number of challenges and a limited number of economical choices for site design. An option sometimes employed is to use the building frame as a retaining element, comprising a Rigidly Framed Earth Retaining Structure (RFERS). The relationship between temperature and earth pressure acting on RFERS, is explored in this monograph through a 4.5 year monitoring program of a heavily instrumented in service structure. The data indicated that the coefficient of earth pressure behind the monitored RFERS had a strong linear correlation with temperature. The study also revealed that thermal cycles, rather than lateral earth pressure, were the cause of failure in many structural elements. The book demonstrates that depending on the relative stiffness of the retained soil mass and that of the structural frame, the developed lateral earth pressure, during thermal expansion, can reach magnitudes several times larger than those determined using classical earth pressure theories. Additionally, a nearly perpetual lateral displacement away from the retained soil mass may occur at the free end of the RFERS leading to unacceptable serviceability problems. These results suggest that reinforced concrete structures designed for the flexural stresses imposed by the backfill soil will be inadequately reinforced to resist stresses produced during the expansion cycles. Parametric studies of single and multi-story RFERS with varying geometries and properties are also presented to investigate the effects of structural stiffness on the displacement of RFERS and the lateral earth pressure developed in the soil mass. These studies can aid the reader in selecting appropriate values of lateral earth pressure for the design of RFERS. Finally, simplified closed form equations that can be used to predict the lateral drift of RFERS are presented. KEY WORDS: Earth Pressure; Soil-Structure Interaction; Mechanics; Failure; Distress; Temperature; Thermal Effects; Concrete; Coefficient of Thermal Expansion; Segmental Bridges; Jointless Bridges; Integral Bridges; Geotechnical Instrumentation; Finite Element Modeling; FEM; Numerical Modeling.

This volume deals with the so-called new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and their interrelationship with Muslims and the interpretation of Islam. This volume taps into what has been labelled Media Studies 2.0, which has been characterized by an intensified focus on everyday meanings and ‘lay’ users – in contrast to earlier emphases on experts or self-acclaimed experts. This lay adoption of ICT and the subsequent digital ‘literacy’ is not least noticeable among Muslim communities. According to some global estimates, one in ten internet users is a Muslim. This volume offers an ethnography of ICT in Muslim communities. The contributors to this volume also demonstrate a new kind of moderation with regard to more sweeping and avant-gardistic claims, which have characterized the study of ICT previously. This moderation has been combined with a keen attention to the empirical material but also deliberations on new quantitative and qualitative approaches to ICT, Muslims and Islam, for instance the digital challenges and changes wrought on the Qur’an, Islam’s sacred scripture. As such this volume will also be relevant for people interested in the study of ICT and the blooming field of digital humanities. Scholars of Islam and the Islamic world have always be engaged and entangled in their object of study. The developments within ICT have also affected how scholars take part in and influence public Islamic and academic discussions. This complicated issue provides basis for a number of meta-reflexive studies in this volume. It will be essential for students and scholars within Islamic studies but will also be of interest for anthropologists, sociologists and others with a humanistic interest in ICT, religion and Islam.

The book presents a snapshot of the state-of-art in the field of turbulence modeling and covers the latest developments concerning direct numerical simulations, large eddy simulations, compressible turbulence, coherent structures, two-phase flow simulation and other related topics. It provides readers with a comprehensive review of both theory and applications, describing in detail the authors’ own experimental results. The book is based on the proceedings of the third Turbulence and Interactions Conference (TI 2012), which was held on June 11-14 in La Saline-les-Bains, La Réunion, France and includes both keynote lectures and outstanding contributed papers presented at the conference. This multifaceted collection, which reflects the conference´s emphasis on the interplay of theory, experiments and computing in the process of understanding and predicting the physics of complex flows and solving related engineering problems, offers a practice-oriented guide for students, researchers and professionals in the field of computational fluid dynamics, turbulence modeling and related areas.  

Develops insights into solving complex problems in engineering, biomedical sciences, social science and economics based on artificial intelligence. Some of the problems studied are in interstate conflict, credit scoring, breast cancer diagnosis, condition monitoring, wine testing, image processing and optical character recognition. The author discusses and applies the concept of flexibly-bounded rationality which prescribes that the bounds in Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon’s bounded rationality theory are flexible due to advanced signal processing techniques, Moore’s Law and artificial intelligence. Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Rational Decision Making examines and defines the concepts of causal and correlation machines and applies the transmission theory of causality as a defining factor that distinguishes causality from correlation. It develops the theory of rational counterfactuals which are defined as counterfactuals that are intended to maximize the attainment of a particular goal within the context of a bounded rational decision making process. Furthermore, it studies four methods for dealing with irrelevant information in decision making: Theory of the marginalization of irrelevant information Principal component analysis Independent component analysis Automatic relevance determination method In addition it studies the concept of group decision making and various ways of effecting group decision making within the context of artificial intelligence. Rich in methods of artificial intelligence including rough sets, neural networks, support vector machines, genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization, simulated annealing, incremental learning and fuzzy networks, this book will be welcomed by researchers and students working in these areas.

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.

This volume examines the concept of falsification as a central notion of semantic theories and its effects on logical laws. The point of departure is the general constructivist line of argument that Michael Dummett has offered over the last decades. From there, the author examines the ways in which falsifications can enter into a constructivist semantics, displays the full spectrum of options, and discusses the logical systems most suitable to each one of them. While the idea of introducing falsifications into the semantic account is Dummett's own, the many ways in which falsificationism departs quite radically from verificationism are here spelled out in detail for the first time. The volume is divided into three large parts. The first part provides important background information about Dummett’s program, intuitionism and logics with gaps and gluts. The second part is devoted to the introduction of falsifications into the constructive account and shows that there is more than one way in which one can do this. The third part details the logical effects of these various moves. In the end, the book shows that the constructive path may branch in different directions: towards intuitionistic logic, dual intuitionistic logic and several variations of Nelson logics. The author argues that, on balance, the latter are the more promising routes to take. "Kapsner’s book is the first detailed investigation of how to incorporate the notion of falsification into formal logic. This is a fascinating logico-philosophical investigation, which will interest non-classical logicians of all stripes." Graham Priest, Graduate Center, City University of New York and University of Melbourne

This textbook introduces a concise approach to the design of molecular algorithms for students or researchers who are interested in dealing with complex problems. Through numerous examples and exercises, you will understand the main difference of molecular circuits and traditional digital circuits to manipulate the same problem and you will also learn how to design a molecular algorithm of solving any a problem from start to finish. The book starts with an introduction to computational aspects of digital computers and molecular computing, data representation of molecular computing, molecular operations of molecular computing and number representation of molecular computing and provides many molecular algorithm to construct the parity generator and the parity checker of error-detection codes on digital communication, to encode integers of different formats, single precision and double precision of floating-point numbers, to implement addition and subtraction of unsigned integers, to construct logic operations including NOT, OR, AND, NOR, NAND, Exclusive-OR (XOR) and Exclusive-NOR (XNOR), to implement comparators, shifters, increase, decrease, and to complete two specific operations that are to find the maximum number of “1� and to find the minimum number of “1�. The book is also a useful reference source to people new for the field of molecular computing.

Since the second half of the 20th century machine computations have played a critical role in science and engineering. Computer-based techniques have become especially important in molecular biology, since they often represent the only viable way to gain insights into the behavior of a biological system as a whole. The complexity of biological systems, which usually needs to be analyzed on different time- and size-scales and with different levels of accuracy, requires the application of different approaches, ranging from comparative analysis of sequences and structural databases, to the analysis of networks of interdependence between cell components and processes, through coarse-grained modeling to atomically detailed simulations, and finally to molecular quantum mechanics. This book provides a comprehensive overview of modern computer-based techniques for computing the structure, properties and dynamics of biomolecules and biomolecular processes. The twenty-two chapters, written by scientists from all over the world, address the theory and practice of computer simulation techniques in the study of biological phenomena. The chapters are grouped into four thematic sections dealing with the following topics: the methodology of molecular simulations; applications of molecular simulations; bioinformatics methods and use of experimental information in molecular simulations; and selected applications of molecular quantum mechanics. The book includes an introductory chapter written by Harold A. Scheraga, one of the true pioneers in simulation studies of biomacromolecules.

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.

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 volume provides challenges and Opportunities with updated, in-depth material on the application of Big data to complex systems in order to find solutions for the challenges and problems facing big data sets applications. Much data today is not natively in structured format; for example, tweets and blogs are weakly structured pieces of text, while images and video are structured for storage and display, but not for semantic content and search. Therefore transforming such content into a structured format for later analysis is a major challenge. Data analysis, organization, retrieval, and modeling are other foundational challenges treated in this book. The material of this book will be useful for researchers and practitioners in the field of big data as well as advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Each of the 17 chapters in the book opens with a chapter abstract and key terms list. The chapters are organized along the lines of problem description, related works, and analysis of the results and comparisons are provided whenever feasible.

The book develops a general legal theory concerning the liability for offenses involving artificial intelligence systems. The involvement of the artificial intelligence systems in these offenses may be as perpetrators, accomplices or mere instruments. The general legal theory proposed in this book is based on the current criminal law in most modern legal systems. In most modern countries, unmanned vehicles, sophisticated surgical systems, industrial computing systems, trading algorithms and other artificial intelligence systems are commonly used for both industrial and personal purposes. The question of legal liability arises when something goes wrong, e.g. the unmanned vehicle is involved in a car accident, the surgical system is involved in a surgical error or the trading algorithm is involved in fraud, etc. Who is to be held liable for these offenses: the manufacturer, the programmer, the user, or, perhaps, the artificial intelligence system itself? The concept of liability for crimes involving artificial intelligence systems has not yet been widely researched. Advanced technologies are forcing society to face new challenges, both technical and legal. The idea of liability in the specific context of artificial intelligence systems is one such challenge that should be thoroughly explored.