This book provides an overview of the research work on data privacy and privacy enhancing technologies carried by the participants of the ARES project. ARES (Advanced Research in Privacy an Security, CSD2007-00004) has been one of the most important research projects funded by the Spanish Government in the fields of computer security and privacy. It is part of the now extinct CONSOLIDER INGENIO 2010 program, a highly competitive program which aimed to advance knowledge and open new research lines among top Spanish research groups. The project started in 2007 and will finish this 2014. Composed by 6 research groups from 6 different institutions, it has gathered an important number of researchers during its lifetime. Among the work produced by the ARES project, one specific work package has been related to privacy. This books gathers works produced by members of the project related to data privacy and privacy enhancing technologies. The presented works not only summarize important research carried in the project but also serve as an overview of the state of the art in current research on data privacy and privacy enhancing technologies.

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

The work described in this book is an excellent example of interdisciplinary research in systems biology. It shows how concepts and approaches from the field of physics can be efficiently used to answer biological questions and reports on a novel methodology involving creative computer-based analyses of high-throughput biological data. Many of the findings described in the book, which are the result of collaborations between the author (a theoretical scientist) and experimental biologists and between different laboratories, have been published in high-quality peer-reviewed journals such as Molecular Cell and Nature. However, while those publications address different aspects of post-transcriptional gene regulation, this book provides readers with a complete, coherent and logical view of the research project as a whole. The introduction presents post-transcriptional gene regulation from a distinct angle, highlighting aspects of information theory and evolution and laying the groundwork for the questions addressed in the subsequent chapters, which concern the regulation of the transcriptome as the primary functional carrier of active genetic information.

This edited book presents scientific results of the 13th IEEE/ACIS International Conference on Computer and Information Science (ICIS 2014) which was held on June 4-6, 2014 in Taiyuan, China. The aim of this conference was to bring together researchers and scientists, businessmen and entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, computer users, and students to discuss the numerous fields of computer science and to share their experiences and exchange new ideas and information in a meaningful way. Research results about all aspects (theory, applications and tools) of computer and information science, and to discuss the practical challenges encountered along the way and the solutions adopted to solve them. The conference organizers selected the best papers from those papers accepted for presentation at the conference.  The papers were chosen based on review scores submitted by members of the program committee, and underwent further rigorous rounds of review. This publication captures 14 of the conference’s most promising papers, and we impatiently await the important contributions that we know these authors will bring to the field of computer and information science.

Based on a rigorous selection of submissions to The 29th International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS 2014),  this books includes some of the most recent ideas and technical results in computer systems, computer science, and computer-communication networks. It offers the reader a timely access to innovative research and advances in computing and communications from many different areas of the world.   The topics covered include (but are not limited to) computer architectures and digital systems, algorithms, theory, software engineering, data engineering, computational intelligence, system security, computer systems and networks, performance modeling and analysis, distributed and parallel systems, bioinformatics, computer vision and significant applications such as medical informatics and imaging.   The 29th International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS 2014) took place in Krakow Old City, Poland on October, 27–8, 2014.

This book consists of 20 chapters in which the authors deal with different theoretical and practical aspects of new trends in Collective Computational Intelligence techniques. Computational Collective Intelligence methods and algorithms are one the current trending research topics from areas related to Artificial Intelligence, Soft Computing or Data Mining among others. Computational Collective Intelligence is a rapidly growing field that is most often understood as an AI sub-field dealing with soft computing methods which enable making group decisions and processing knowledge among autonomous units acting in distributed environments. Web-based Systems, Social Networks, and Multi-Agent Systems very often need these tools for working out consistent knowledge states, resolving conflicts and making decisions. The chapters included in this volume cover a selection of topics and new trends in several domains related to Collective Computational Intelligence: Language and Knowledge Processing, Data Mining Methods and Applications, Computer Vision, and Intelligent Computational Methods. This book will be useful for graduate and PhD students in computer science as well as for mature academics, researchers and practitioners interested in the methods and applications of collective computational intelligence in order to create new intelligent systems.

This book 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 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.

Data Preprocessing for Data Mining addresses one of the most important issues within the well-known Knowledge Discovery from Data process. Data directly taken from the source will likely have inconsistencies, errors or most importantly, it is not ready to be considered for a data mining process. Furthermore, the increasing amount of data in recent science, industry and business applications, calls to the requirement of more complex tools to analyze it. Thanks to data preprocessing, it is possible to convert the impossible into possible, adapting the data to fulfill the input demands of each data mining algorithm. Data preprocessing includes the data reduction techniques, which aim at reducing the complexity of the data, detecting or removing irrelevant and noisy elements from the data. This book is intended to review the tasks that fill the gap between the data acquisition from the source and the data mining process. A comprehensive look from a practical point of view, including basic concepts and surveying the techniques proposed in the specialized literature, is given.Each chapter is a stand-alone guide to a particular data preprocessing topic, from basic concepts and detailed descriptions of classical algorithms, to an incursion of an exhaustive catalog of recent developments. The in-depth technical descriptions make this book suitable for technical professionals, researchers, senior undergraduate and graduate students in data science, computer science and engineering.

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.

The success of a BCI system depends as much on the system itself as on the user’s ability to produce distinctive EEG activity. BCI systems can be divided into two groups according to the placement of the electrodes used to detect and measure neurons firing in the brain. These groups are: invasive systems, electrodes are inserted directly into the cortex are used for single cell or multi unit recording, and electrocorticography (EcoG), electrodes are placed on the surface of the cortex (or dura); noninvasive systems, they are placed on the scalp and use electroencephalography (EEG) or magnetoencephalography (MEG) to detect neuron activity. The book is basically divided into three parts. The first part of the book covers the basic concepts and overviews of Brain Computer Interface. The second part describes new theoretical developments of BCI systems. The third part covers views on real applications of BCI systems.

Presenting the concept and design and implementation of configurable intelligent optimization algorithms in manufacturing systems, this book provides a new configuration method to optimize manufacturing processes. It provides a comprehensive elaboration of basic intelligent optimization algorithms, and demonstrates how their improvement, hybridization and parallelization can be applied to manufacturing. Furthermore, various applications of these intelligent optimization algorithms are exemplified in detail, chapter by chapter. The intelligent optimization algorithm is not just a single algorithm; instead it is a general advanced optimization mechanism which is highly scalable with robustness and randomness. Therefore, this book demonstrates the flexibility of these algorithms, as well as their robustness and reusability in order to solve mass complicated problems in manufacturing. Since the genetic algorithm was presented decades ago, a large number of intelligent optimization algorithms and their improvements have been developed. However, little work has been done to extend their applications and verify their competence in solving complicated problems in manufacturing. This book will provide an invaluable resource to students, researchers, consultants and industry professionals interested in engineering optimization. It will also be particularly useful to three groups of readers: algorithm beginners, optimization engineers and senior algorithm designers. It offers a detailed description of intelligent optimization algorithms to algorithm beginners; recommends new configurable design methods for optimization engineers, and provides future trends and challenges of the new configuration mechanism to senior algorithm designers.

This book deals with the theory, design principles, and application of hybrid intelligent systems using type-2 fuzzy sets in combination with other paradigms of Soft Computing technology such as Neuro-Computing and Evolutionary Computing. It provides a self-contained exposition of the foundation of type-2 fuzzy neural networks and presents a vast compendium of its applications to control, forecasting, decision making, system identification and other real problems. Type-2 Fuzzy Neural Networks and Their Applications is helpful for teachers and students of universities and colleges, for scientists and practitioners from various fields such as control, decision analysis, pattern recognition and similar fields.

This book offers comprehensive coverage of all the core topics of bioinformatics, and includes practical examples completed using the MATLAB bioinformatics toolbox™. It is primarily intended as a textbook for engineering and computer science students attending advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in bioinformatics and computational biology. The book develops bioinformatics concepts from the ground up, starting with an introductory chapter on molecular biology and genetics. This chapter will enable physical science students to fully understand and appreciate the ultimate goals of applying the principles of information technology to challenges in biological data management, sequence analysis, and systems biology. The first part of the book also includes a survey of existing biological databases, tools that have become essential in today’s biotechnology research. The second part of the book covers methodologies for retrieving biological information, including fundamental algorithms for sequence comparison, scoring, and determining evolutionary distance. The main focus of the third part is on modeling biological sequences and patterns as Markov chains. It presents key principles for analyzing and searching for sequences of significant motifs and biomarkers. The last part of the book, dedicated to systems biology, covers phylogenetic analysis and evolutionary tree computations, as well as gene expression analysis with microarrays. In brief, the book offers the ideal hands-on reference guide to the field of bioinformatics and computational biology.

This book describes how the principle of self-sufficiency can be applied to a reconfigurable modular robotic organism. It shows the design considerations for a novel REPLICATOR robotic platform, both hardware and software, featuring the behavioral characteristics of social insect colonies. Following a comprehensive overview of some of the bio-inspired techniques already available, and of the state-of-the-art in re-configurable modular robotic systems, the book presents a novel power management system with fault-tolerant energy sharing, as well as its implementation in the REPLICATOR robotic modules. In addition, the book discusses, for the first time, the concept of “artificial energy homeostasis� in the context of a modular robotic organism, and shows its verification on a custom-designed simulation framework in different dynamic power distribution and fault tolerance scenarios. This book offers an ideal reference guide for both hardware engineers and software developers involved in the design and implementation of autonomous robotic systems.

This book examines the context, motivation and current status of biometric systems based on the palmprint, with a specific focus on touchless and less-constrained systems. It covers new technologies in this rapidly evolving field and is one of the first comprehensive books on palmprint recognition systems. It discusses the research literature and the most relevant industrial applications of palmprint biometrics, including the low-cost solutions based on webcams. The steps of biometric recognition are described in detail, including acquisition setups, algorithms, and evaluation procedures. Constraints and limitations of current palmprint recognition systems are analyzed and discussed. The authors also introduce innovative methods for touchless and less-constrained palmprint recognition, with the aim to make palmprint biometrics easier to use in practical, daily-life applications, and overcome the typical constraints and limitations described. Touchless Palmprint Recognition Systems targets professionals and researchers working in biometrics, image processing and three-dimensional reconstruction. Advanced-level students studying biometrics and computer science will also find this material valuable as a secondary text book or reference.

This edited book presents scientific results of the 12th International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence Research, Management and Applications (SERA 2014) held on August 31 – September 4, 2014 in Kitakyushu, Japan. The aim of this conference was to bring together researchers and scientists, businessmen and entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, computer users, and students to discuss the numerous fields of computer science and to share their experiences and exchange new ideas and information in a meaningful way. Research results about all aspects (theory, applications and tools) of computer and information science, and to discuss the practical challenges encountered along the way and the solutions adopted to solve them. This publication captures 17 of the conference’s most promising papers.

This book presents up-to-date research developments and novel methodologies on fuzzy control systems. It presents solutions to a series of problems with new approaches for the analysis and synthesis of fuzzy time-delay systems and fuzzy stochastic systems, including stability analysis and stabilization, dynamic output feedback control, robust filter design, and model approximation. A set of newly developed techniques such as fuzzy Lyapunov function approach, delay-partitioning, reciprocally convex, cone complementary linearization approach are presented. Fuzzy Control Systems with Time-Delay and Stochastic Perturbation: Analysis and Synthesis is a comprehensive reference for researcher and practitioners working in control engineering, system sciences and applied mathematics, and is also a useful source of information for senior undergraduates and graduates in these areas. The readers will benefit from some new concepts, new models and new methodologies with practical significance in control engineering and signal processing.    

What are the limitations of computer models and why do we still not have working models of people that are recognizably human? This is the principle puzzle explored in this book where ideas behind systems that behave intelligently are described and different philosophical issues are touched upon. The key to human behavior is taken to be intelligence and the ability to reason about the world. A strong scientific approach is taken, but first it was required to understand what a scientific approach could mean in the context of both natural and artificial systems. A theory of intelligence is proposed that can be tested and developed in the light of experimental results. The book illustrates that intelligence is much more than just behavior confined to a unique person or a single computer program within a fixed time frame. Some answers are unraveled and some puzzles emerge from these investigations and experiments. Natural and Artificial Reasoning provides a few steps of an exciting journey that began many centuries ago with the word ‘why?’

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 deals with the theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications of bounded rationality in the operation of institutions. It focuses on decisions made under uncertainty, and presents a reliable strategy of knowledge acquisition for the design and implementation of decision-support systems. Based on the distinction between the inner and outer environment of decisions, the book explores both the cognitive mechanisms at work when actors decide, and the institutional mechanisms existing among and within organizations that make decisions fairly predictable. While a great deal of work has been done on how organizations act as patterns of events for (boundedly) rational decisions, less effort has been devoted to study under which circumstances  organizations cease to act as such reliable mechanisms. Through an empirical strategy on open-ended response data from a survey among junior judges, the work pursues two main goals. The first one is to explore the limits of “institutional rationality� of the Spanish lower courts on-call service, an optimal scenario to observe decision-making under uncertainty. The second aim is to achieve a better understanding of the kind of uncertainty under which inexperienced decision-makers work. This entails exploring the demands imposed by problems and the knowledge needed to deal with them, making this book also a study on expertise achievement in institutional environments. This book combines standard multivariate statistical methods with machine learning techniques such as multidimensional scaling and topic models, treating text as data. Doing so, the book contributes to the collaboration between empirical social scientific approaches and the community of scientists that provide the set of tools and methods to make sense of the fastest growing resource of our time: data.

Vehicular communication is a key technology in intelligent transportation systems. For many years now, the academic and industrial research communities have been investigating these communications in order to improve efficiency and safety of future transportation. Vehicular networking offers a wide variety of applications, including safety applications as well as infotainment applications. This book highlights the recent developments in vehicular networking technologies and their interaction with future smart cities in order to promote further research activities and challenges. SAADI BOUDJIT, University of Paris 13, France  HAKIMA CHAOUCHI, Telecom SudParis, France  YACINE GHAMRI, University La Rochelle, France HALABI HASBULLAH, Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Malaysia ANIS LAOUITI, Telecom SudParis, France  SAOUCENE MAHFOUDH, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia  PAUL MUHLETHALER, INRIA, France AMIR QAYYUM, Mohamad Ali Jinnah University, Pakistan NAUFAL SAAD, Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Malaysia AHMED SOUA, NIST, USA HAJIME TAZAKI, University of Tokyo, Japan APINUN TUNPAN, Aintec, Thailand WEI WEI, Xi'an University, China RACHID ZAGROUBA, ENSI, Tunisia.

This edited collection will provide an overview of the field of physiological computing, i.e. the use of physiological signals as input for computer control. It will cover a breadth of current research, from brain-computer interfaces to telemedicine.

Providing a comprehensive introduction into an overview of the field of pervasive healthcare applications, this volume incorporates a variety of timely topics ranging from medical sensors and hardware infrastructures, to software platforms and applications and addresses issues of user experience and technology acceptance. The recent developments in the area of information and communication technologies have laid the groundwork for new patient-centred healthcare solutions. While the majority of computer-supported healthcare tools designed in the last decades focused mainly on supporting care-givers and medical personnel, this trend changed with the introduction of pervasive healthcare technologies, which provide supportive and adaptive services for a broad variety and diverse set of end users. With contributions from key researchers the book integrates the various aspects of pervasive healthcare systems including application design, hardware development, system implementation, hardware and software infrastructures as well as end-user aspects providing an excellent overview of this important and evolving field.

This book captures the state of the art in cloud technologies, infrastructures, and service delivery and deployment models. The work provides guidance and case studies on the development of cloud-based services and infrastructures from an international selection of expert researchers and practitioners. Features: presents a focus on security and access control mechanisms for cloud environments, analyses standards and brokerage services, and investigates the role of certification for cloud adoption; evaluates cloud ERP, suggests a framework for implementing “big data� science, and proposes an approach for cloud interoperability; reviews existing elasticity management solutions, discusses the relationship between cloud management and governance, and describes the development of a cloud service capability assessment model; examines cloud applications in higher education, including the use of knowledge-as-a-service in the provision of education, and cloud-based e-learning for students with disabilities.