The two-volume set LNAI 8265 and LNAI 8266 constitutes the proceedings of the 12th Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, MICAI 2013, held in Mexico City, Mexico, in November 2013. The total of 85 papers presented in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 284 submissions. The first volume deals with advances in artificial intelligence and its applications and is structured in the following five sections: logic and reasoning; knowledge-based systems and multi-agent systems; natural language processing; machine translation; and bioinformatics and medical applications. The second volume deals with advances in soft computing and its applications and is structured in the following eight sections: evolutionary and nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms; neural networks and hybrid intelligent systems; fuzzy systems; machine learning and pattern recognition; data mining; computer vision and image processing; robotics, planning and scheduling and emotion detection, sentiment analysis and opinion mining.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Brain and Health Informatics, BHI 2013, held in Maebashi, Japan, in October 2013. The 33 revised full papers presented together with 8 workshop papers and 12 special session papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on thinking and perception-centric Investigations of human Information processing system; information technologies for curating, mining, managing and using big brain/health data; information technologies for healthcare; data analytics, data mining, and machine learning; and applications. The topics of the workshop papers are: mental health with ICT; and granular knowledge discovery in biomedical and active-media environments; and the topics of the special sessions are: human centered computing; neuro-robotics; and intelligent healthcare data analytics.

This book constitutes revised selected papers from the International Workshop on Clinical Image-Based Procedures, CLIP 2013, held in conjunction with MICCAI 2012 in Nagoya, Japan, in September 2013. The 19 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 26 submissions. The workshop was a productive and exciting forum for the discussion and dissemination of clinically tested, state-of-the-art methods for image-based planning, monitoring and evaluation of medical procedures.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Information Technology in Bio- and Medical Informatics, ITBAM 2013, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in August 2013, held in conjunction with DEXA 2013. The 7 revised long papers presented together with 4 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers address the following topics: critical health and intelligent systems in medical research, and obstetrics, neonatology and decision systems in cardiology.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings at PAKDD Workshops 2013, affiliated with the 17th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD) held in Gold Coast, Australia in April 2013. The 47 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 92 submissions. The workshops affiliated with PAKDD 2013 include: Data Mining Applications in Industry and Government (DMApps), Data Analytics for Targeted Healthcare (DANTH), Quality Issues, Measures of Interestingness and Evaluation of Data Mining Models (QIMIE), Biologically Inspired Techniques for Data Mining (BDM), Constraint Discovery and Application (CDA), Cloud Service Discovery (CloudSD).

This is the second part of the two-volume set (LNCS 8023-8024) that constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Cross-Cultural Design, held as part of the 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2013, held in Las Vegas, USA in July 2013, jointly with 12 other thematically similar conferences. The total of 1666 papers and 303 posters presented at the HCII 2013 conferences was carefully reviewed and selected from 5210 submissions. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of human-computer interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas. This two-volume set contains 113 papers. The papers in this volume focus on the following topics: cultural issues in business and industry; culture, health and quality of life; cross-cultural and intercultural collaboration; culture and the smart city; cultural differences on the Web.

The three-volume set LNCS 8009-8011 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction, UAHCI 2013, held as part of the 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2013, held in Las Vegas, USA in July 2013, jointly with 12 other thematically similar conferences. The total of 1666 papers and 303 posters presented at the HCII 2013 conferences was carefully reviewed and selected from 5210 submissions. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of human-computer interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas. The total of 230 contributions included in the UAHCI proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this three-volume set. The 74 papers included in this volume are organized in the following topical sections: design for all methods, techniques and tools; eInclusion practice; universal access to the built environment; multi-sensory and multimodal interfaces; brain-computer interfaces.

Here is the second of a two-volume set (LNCS 8021 and 8022) that constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality, VAMR 2013, held as part of the 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2013, held in Las Vegas, USA in July 2013, jointly with 12 other thematically similar conferences. The total of 1666 papers and 303 posters presented at the HCII 2013 conferences was carefully reviewed and selected from 5210 submissions. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of human-computer interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas. The total of 88 contributions included in the VAMR proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this two-volume set. The papers included in this volume are organized in the following topical sections: healthcare and medical applications; virtual and augmented environments for learning and education; business, industrial and military applications; culture and entertainment applications.

This is the first of a two-volume set (CCIS 373 and CCIS 374) that constitutes the extended abstracts of the posters presented during the 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2013, held in Las Vegas, USA, in July 2013, jointly with 12 other thematically similar conferences. The total of 1666 papers and 303 posters presented at the HCII 2013 conferences was carefully reviewed and selected from 5210 submissions. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of human-computer interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas. The extended abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this two-volume set. The papers included in this volume are organized in the following topical sections: HCI design approaches, methods and techniques; usability methods, techniques and studies; universal access and eInclusion; multimodal and ambient interaction; cognitive and psychological aspects of interaction; perception and interaction; ergonomic and human modelling issues; capturing gaze, biosignals and brainwaves; development environments; product design, marketing and advertisement.

The three-volume set LNCS 8016, 8017, and 8018 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2013, held in Las Vegas, NV, USA in July 2013. The total of 1666 papers and 303 posters presented at the HCII 2013 conferences was carefully reviewed and selected from 5210 submissions. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of human-computer Interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas. This volume contains papers in the thematic area of human interface and the management of Information, addressing the following major topics: complex information environments; health and quality of life; mobile interaction; safety in transport, aviation and industry.

This is the second of a two-volume set (CCIS 373 and CCIS 374) that constitutes the extended abstracts of the posters presented during the 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2013, held in Las Vegas, USA, in July 2013, jointly with 12 other thematically similar conferences. The total of 1666 papers and 303 posters presented at the HCII 2013 conferences was carefully reviewed and selected from 5210 submissions. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of human-computer interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas. The extended abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this two-volume set. The papers included in this volume are organized in the following topical sections: learning and education; health and medicine; media, art and culture; transport; Web and social media; information search and retrieval; work, collaboration and creativity; text and storytelling; agents, avatars and robots; smart environments; virtual and mixed environments; security and privacy.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Augemented Environments for Computer-Assisted Interventions, held in conjunction with MICCAI 2012, in Nice, France in September 2012. The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 22 submissions. The papers cover the topics of image registration and fusion, calibration, visualization and 3D perception, hardware and optical design, real-time implementation, as well as validation, clinical applications, and clinical evaluation.

The four-volume set LNCS 7724--7727 constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 11th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, ACCV 2012, held in Daejeon, Korea, in November 2012. The total of 226 contributions presented in these volumes was carefully reviewed and selected from 869 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on object detection, learning and matching; object recognition; feature, representation, and recognition; segmentation, grouping, and classification; image representation; image and video retrieval and medical image analysis; face and gesture analysis and recognition; optical flow and tracking; motion, tracking, and computational photography; video analysis and action recognition; shape reconstruction and optimization; shape from X and photometry; applications of computer vision; low-level vision and applications of computer vision.

The four-volume set LNCS 7724--7727 constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 11th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, ACCV 2012, held in Daejeon, Korea, in November 2012. The total of 226 contributions presented in these volumes was carefully reviewed and selected from 869 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on object detection, learning and matching; object recognition; feature, representation, and recognition; segmentation, grouping, and classification; image representation; image and video retrieval and medical image analysis; face and gesture analysis and recognition; optical flow and tracking; motion, tracking, and computational photography; video analysis and action recognition; shape reconstruction and optimization; shape from X and photometry; applications of computer vision; low-level vision and applications of computer vision.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Persuasive Technology, PERSUASIVE 2013, held in Sydney, NSW, Australia, in April 2013. The 16 revised full papers and 12 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 47 submissions. The papers address not only typical persuasive domains like health and environment, but also cover emerging research topics, such as data safety and evaluation of persuasive technologies.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies, BIOSTEC 2012, held in Vilamoura, Portugal, in February 2012. The 26 revised full papers presented together with one invited lecture were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 522 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics and are organized in four general topical sections on biomedical electronics and devices; bioinformatics models, methods and algorithms; bio-inspired systems and signal processing; health informatics.

The two-volume set LNAI 7629 and LNAI 7630 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, MICAI 2012, held in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, in October/November 2012. The 80 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 224 submissions. The second volume includes 40 papers focusing on soft computing. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: natural language processing; evolutionary and nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms; neural networks and hybrid intelligent systems; fuzzy systems and probabilistic models in decision making.

Computer software has been productive in helping individuals with cognitive disabilities. Personalizing the user interface is an important strategy in designing software for these users, because of the barriers created by conventional user interfaces for the cognitively disabled. Cognitive assistive technology (CAT) has typically been used to provide help with everyday activities, outside of cognitive rehabilitation therapy. This book describes a quarter century of computing R&D at the Institute for Cognitive Prosthetics, focusing on the needs of individuals with cognitive disabilities from brain injury. Models and methods from Human Computer Interaction (HCI) have been particularly valuable, initially in illuminating those needs. Subsequently HCI methods have expanded CAT to be powerful rehabilitation therapy tools, restoring some damaged cognitive abilities which have resisted conventional therapy. Patient-Centered Design (PCD) emerged as a design methodology which incorporates both clinical and technical factors. PCD also takes advantage of the patient's ability to redesign and refine the user interface, and to achieve a very good fit between user and system. Cognitive Prosthetics Telerehabilitation is a powerful therapy modality. Essential characteristics are delivering service to patients in their own home, having the patient's priority activities be the focus of therapy, using cognitive prosthetic software which applies Patient Centered Design, and videoconferencing with a workspace shared between therapist and patient. Cognitive Prosthetics Telerehabilitation has a rich set of advantages for the many stakeholders involved with brain injury rehabilitation.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the PAKDD 2012 International Workshops: Third Workshop on Data Mining for Healthcare Management (DMHM 2012), First Workshop on Geospatial Information and Documents (GeoDoc 2012), First Workshop on Multi-view data, High-dimensionality, External Knowledge: Striving for a Unified Approach to Clustering (3Clust 2012), and the Second Doctoral Symposium on Data Mining (DSDM 2012); held in conjunction with the 16th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2012), in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, May/June 2012.
The 12 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. DMHM 2012 aimed at providing a common platform for the discussion of challenging issues and potential techniques in this emerging field of data mining for health care management; 3Clust 2012 focused on solving emerging problems such as clustering ensembles, semi-supervised clustering, subspace/projective clustering, co-clustering, and multi-view clustering; GeoDoc 2012 highlighted the formalization of geospatial concepts and relationships with a focus on the extraction of geospatial relations in free text datasets to offer to the database community a unified framework for geodata discovery; and DSDM 2012 provided the opportunity for Ph.D. students and junior researchers to discuss their work on data mining foundations, techniques and applications.

Despite its high cost, the US healthcare system produces relatively short life spans, and is wasteful, inefficient and has serious safety and quality issues. While other industries have surmounted similar challenges by transforming themselves through information technology, healthcare lags behind. Major reasons are that our approaches to care delivery and financial incentives were designed for a bygone era. Beyond that the technology offered to practitioners has often been overly expensive, poorly designed, overly proprietary, hard to implement and difficult to use. Spurred by a unique, one-time Federal stimulus and the new mobile, wireless and cloud technologies now available, this landscape is rapidly changing. To succeed going forward practitioners, and those interested in entering the field, need to understand the new driving forces and have a basic understanding of contemporary clinical informatics. Practitioners, in particular, need to understand the alternative technologies and approaches available for their use in individual patient care and more continuous management of their chronic disease patients. To efficiently meet these needs, this book provides an introduction to the rationale for care transformation through clinical informatics; its application to patient care outside of hospitals; and a look at its future. Key points are illustrated throughout by actual examples of open source and commercial health IT products and services. While written with practitioners and students entering the field of clinical informatics in mind, the book eschews technical terminology and is easily accessible by the lay reader not proficient in clinical medicine or information technology."

Anonymization of Electronic Medical Records to Support Clinical Analysis closely examines the privacy threats that may arise from medical data sharing, and surveys the state-of-the-art methods developed to safeguard data against these threats.

To motivate the need for computational methods, the book first explores the main challenges facing the privacy-protection of medical data using the existing policies, practices and regulations. Then, it takes an in-depth look at the popular computational privacy-preserving methods that have been developed for demographic, clinical and genomic data sharing, and closely analyzes the privacy principles behind these methods, as well as the optimization and algorithmic strategies that they employ. Finally, through a series of in-depth case studies that highlight data from the US Census as well as the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, the book outlines a new, innovative class of privacy-preserving methods designed to ensure the integrity of transferred medical data for subsequent analysis, such as discovering or validating associations between clinical and genomic information.

Anonymization of Electronic Medical Records to Support Clinical Analysis is intended for professionals as a reference guide for safeguarding the privacy and data integrity of sensitive medical records. Academics and other research scientists will also find the book invaluable.

"Automatic Speech Signal Analysis for Clinical Diagnosis and Assessment of Speech Disorders "provides a survey of methods designed to aid clinicians in the diagnosis and monitoring of speech disorders such as dysarthria and dyspraxia, with an emphasis on the signal processing techniques, statistical validity of the results presented in the literature, and the appropriateness of methodsthat do not requirespecialized equipment, rigorously controlled recording procedures or highly skilled personnel to interpret results.
Such techniques offer the promise of a simple and cost-effective, yet objective, assessment of a range of medical conditions, which would be of great value to clinicians. The ideal scenario would begin with the collection of examples of the clients' speech, either over the phone or using portable recording devices operated by non-specialist nursing staff.
The recordings could then be analyzed initially to aid diagnosis of conditions, and subsequently to monitor the clients' progress and response to treatment. The automation of this process would allow more frequent and regular assessments to be performed, as well as providing greater objectivity."

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 7th Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems, MCIS 2012, held in Guimaraes, Portugal, in September 2012. MCIS 2012 comprised theories, research, and practices based on knowledge management and innovations in organizations, society, and businesses. The 18 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 89 submissions. They are organized in topical sections on: emerging and innovative information systems, enterprise systems and enterprise engineering, Web 2.0 enabled business models, information quality management and data accuracy in innovative IS, and ICT applications in healthcare.

Virtual reality (VR) techniques are becoming increasingly popular. The use of computer modeling and visualization is no longer uncommon in the area of ergonomics and occupational health and safety. This book explains how studies conducted in a simulated virtual world are making it possible to test new solutions for designed workstations, offering a high degree of ease for introducing modifications and eliminating risk and work-related accidents. Virtual reality techniques offer a wide range of possibilities including increasing the cognitive abilities of the elderly, adapting workstations for people with disabilities and special needs, and remote control of machines using collaborative robots. Detailed discussions include: Testing protective devices, safety systems, and the numerical reconstruction of work accidents Using computer simulation in generic virtual environments On the one hand, it is a self-study book made so by well-crafted and numerous examples. On the other hand, through a detailed analysis of the virtual reality from a point of view of work safety and ergonomics and health improvement. Ewa Grabska, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland Noteworthy is the broad scope and diversity of the addressed problems, ranging from training employees using VR environments with different degrees of perceived reality; training and rehabilitation of the elderly; to designing, testing, modifying, and adapting workplaces to various needs including those of disabled workers; to simulation and investigation of the cause of accidents at a workplace. Andrzej Krawiecki, Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland

Emerging technologies have been successfully employed within different disciplines improving the quality of life globally in India these have been employed to address the multifarious issues in a limited manner to improve the way of life for individuals with different disabilities. Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad, therefore, organized International and National Seminars since 2008 to deliberate on the application of information communication technologies ICT] in the rehabilitation of people with disabilities . Domain experts have recognized that management of differently abled individuals requires participation of multidisciplinary experts. We also require an enormous bank of skilled, qualified trained manpower with support to keep themselves in tune with latest technology and developments. We also face the problems of having to deal with individuals located countrywide; inadequate ICT-based infrastructure to assist with accessing services of experts that are based in urban areas. This is one of the major constraints for a sustained and effective therapeutic program. This is the fifth publication under the IIIT-A Series on e-Governance. It is a collection of 20 articles based on the presentations made in the Seminars. This book will of interest to all stakeholders in the disability rehabilitation management as the population of people with disabilities in growing. The articles cover the following four areas on disability rehabilitation management: Rehabilitation of Differently Abled Persons: Overview and Issues Infrastructure and potentials for use of ICT in Disability Rehabilitation ICT Initiatives for Rehabilitation of Differently Abled Persons Assistive Technology for Differently Abled Persons - the road ahead