This book offers readers a set of new approaches and tools a set of tools and techniques for facing challenges in parallelization with design of embedded systems.  It provides an advanced parallel simulation infrastructure for efficient and effective system-level model validation and development so as to build better products in less time.  Since parallel discrete event simulation (PDES) has the potential to exploit the underlying parallel computational capability in today’s multi-core simulation hosts, the author begins by reviewing the parallelization of discrete event simulation, identifying problems and solutions.  She then describes out-of-order parallel discrete event simulation (OoO PDES), a novel approach for efficient validation of system-level designs by aggressively exploiting the parallel capabilities of todays’ multi-core PCs. This approach enables readers to design simulators that can fully exploit the parallel processing capability of the multi-core system to achieve fast speed simulation, without loss of simulation and timing accuracy. Based on this parallel simulation infrastructure, the author further describes automatic approaches that help the designer quickly to narrow down the debugging targets in faulty ESL models with parallelism.

‘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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

This 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.  

Soft computing, intelligent robotics and control are in the core interest of contemporary engineering. Essential characteristics of soft computing methods are the ability to handle vague information, to apply human-like reasoning, their learning capability and ease of application. Soft computing techniques are widely applied in the control of dynamic systems, including mobile robots. The present volume is a collection of 20 chapters written by respectable experts of the fields, addressing various theoretical and practical aspects in soft computing, intelligent robotics and control. The first part of the book concerns with issues of intelligent robotics, including robust xed point transformation design, experimental verification of the input-output feedback linearization of differentially driven mobile robot and applying kinematic synthesis to micro electro-mechanical systems design. The second part of the book is devoted to fundamental aspects of soft computing. This includes practical aspects of fuzzy rule interpolation, subjective weights based meta learning in multi criteria decision making, swarm-based heuristics for an area exploration and knowledge driven adaptive product representations. The last part addresses different problems, issues and methods of applied mathematics. This includes perturbation estimates for invariant subspaces of Hessenberg matrices, uncertainty and nonlinearity modelling by probabilistic metric spaces and comparison and visualization of the DNA of six primates.

To deal with the flexible architectures and evolving functionalities of complex modern systems, the agent metaphor and agent-based computing are often the most appropriate software design approach. As a result, a broad range of special-purpose design processes has been developed in the last several years to tackle the challenges of these specific application domains. In this context, in early 2012 the IEEE-FIPA Design Process Documentation Template SC0097B was defined, which facilitates the representation of design processes and method fragments through the use of standardized templates, thus supporting the creation of easily sharable repositories and facilitating the composition of new design processes. Following this standardization approach, this book gathers the documentations of some of the best-known agent-oriented design processes. After an introductory section, describing the goal of the book and the existing IEEE FIPA standard for design process documentation, thirteen processes (including the widely known Open UP, the de facto standard in object-oriented software engineering) are documented by their original creators or other well-known scientists working in the field. As a result, this is the first work to adopt a standard, unified descriptive approach for documenting different processes, making it much easier to study the individual processes, to rigorously compare them, and to apply them in industrial projects. While there are a few books on the market describing the individual agent-oriented design processes, none of them presents all the processes, let alone in the same format. With this handbook, for the first time, researchers as well as professional software developers looking for an overview as well as for detailed and standardized descriptions of design processes will find a comprehensive presentation of the most important agent-oriented design processes, which will be an invaluable resource when developing solutions in various application areas.

This volume presents an analysis of the problems and solutions of the market mockery of the democratic collective decision-choice system with imperfect information structure composed of defective and deceptive structures using methods of fuzzy rationality. The book is devoted to the political economy of rent-seeking, rent-protection and rent-harvesting to enhance profits under democratic collective decision-choice systems. The toolbox used in the monograph consists of methods of fuzzy decision, approximate reasoning, negotiation games and fuzzy mathematics. The monograph further discusses the rent-seeking phenomenon in the Schumpeterian and Marxian political economies where the rent-seeking activities transform the qualitative character of the general capitalism into oligarchic socialism and making the democratic collective decision-choice system as an ideology rather than social calculus for resolving conflicts in preferences in the collective decision-choice space without violence.

This book presents adaptive logics as an intuitive and powerful framework for modeling defeasible reasoning. It examines various contexts in which defeasible reasoning is useful and offers a compact introduction into adaptive logics. The author first familiarizes readers with defeasible reasoning, the adaptive logics framework, combinations of adaptive logics, and a range of useful meta-theoretic properties. He then offers a systematic study of adaptive logics based on various applications. The book presents formal models for defeasible reasoning stemming from different contexts, such as default reasoning, argumentation, and normative reasoning. It highlights various meta-theoretic advantages of adaptive logics over other logics or logical frameworks that model defeasible reasoning. In this way the book substantiates the status of adaptive logics as a generic formal framework for defeasible reasoning.

This book is aimed at presenting concepts, methods and algorithms ableto cope with undersampled and limited data. One such trend that recently gained popularity and to some extent revolutionised signal processing is compressed sensing. Compressed sensing builds upon the observation that many signals in nature are nearly sparse (or compressible, as they are normally referred to) in some domain, and consequently they can be reconstructed to within high accuracy from far fewer observations than traditionally held to be necessary.  Apart from compressed sensing this book contains other related approaches. Each methodology has its own formalities for dealing with such problems. As an example, in the Bayesian approach, sparseness promoting priors such as Laplace and Cauchy are normally used for penalising improbable model variables, thus promoting low complexity solutions. Compressed sensing techniques and homotopy-type solutions, such as the LASSO, utilise l1-norm penalties for obtaining sparse solutions using fewer observations than conventionally needed. The book emphasizes on the role of sparsity as a machinery for promoting low complexity representations and likewise its connections to variable selection and dimensionality reduction in various engineering problems.  This book is intended for researchers, academics and practitioners with interest in various aspects and applications of sparse signal processing.  

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.

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.  

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 is a selection of results obtained within three years of research performed under SYNAT—a nation-wide scientific project aiming at creating an infrastructure for scientific content storage and sharing for academia, education and open knowledge society in Poland. The book is intended to be the last of the series related to the SYNAT project. The previous books, titled “Intelligent Tools for Building a Scientific Information Platform� and “Intelligent Tools for Building a Scientific Information Platform: Advanced Architectures and Solutions�, were published as volumes 390 and 467 in Springer's Studies in Computational Intelligence. Its contents is based on the SYNAT 2013 Workshop held in Warsaw. The papers included in this volume present an overview and insight into information retrieval, repository systems, text processing, ontology-based systems, text mining, multimedia data processing and advanced software engineering, addressing the problems of implementing intelligent tools for building a scientific information platform.

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�).

With an emphasis on applications of computational models for solving modern challenging problems in biomedical and life sciences, this book aims to bring collections of articles from biologists, medical/biomedical and health science researchers together with computational scientists to focus on problems at the frontier of biomedical and life sciences. The goals of this book are to build interactions of scientists across several disciplines and to help industrial users apply advanced computational techniques for solving practical biomedical and life science problems. This book is for users in the fields of biomedical and life sciences who wish to keep abreast with the latest techniques in signal and image analysis. The book presents a detailed description to each of the applications. It can be used by those both at graduate and specialist levels.

The present book includes a set of selected papers from the tenth “International Conference on Informatics in Control Automation and Robotics� (ICINCO 2013), held in Reykjavík, Iceland, from 29 to 31 July 2013. The conference was organized in four simultaneous tracks: “Intelligent Control Systems and Optimization�, “Robotics and Automation�, “Signal Processing, Sensors, Systems Modeling and Control� and “Industrial Engineering, Production and Management�. The book is based on the same structure. ICINCO 2013 received 255 paper submissions from 50 countries, in all continents. After a double blind paper review performed by the Program Committee only 30% were published and presented orally. A further refinement was made after the conference, based also on the assessment of presentation quality, so that this book includes the extended and revised versions of the very best papers of ICINCO 2013.

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 has been motivated by an urgent need for designing and implementation of innovative control algorithms and systems for tracked vehicles. Nowadays the unmanned vehicles are becoming more and more common. Therefore there is a need for innovative mechanical constructions capable of adapting to various applications regardless the ground, air or water/underwater environment. There are multiple various activities connected with tracked vehicles. They can be distributed among three main groups: design and control algorithms, sensoric and vision based in-formation, construction and testing mechanical parts of unmanned vehicles. Scientists and researchers involved in mechanics, control algorithms, image processing, computer vision, data fusion, or IC will find this book useful.

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.