This two-volume set (CCIS 1005 and CCIS 1006) constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cognitive Systems and Signal Processing, ICCSIP2018, held in Beijing, China, in November and December 2018. The 96 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 169 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on vision and image; algorithms; robotics; human-computer interaction; deep learning; information processing and automatic driving.

This book constitutes revised selected papers from the 6th International Conference on Robot Intelligence Technology and Applications, RiTA 2018, held in Putrajaya, Malaysia, in December 2018. The 20 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 80 submissions. The papers present studies on machine learning; optimization; modelling and simulation; path planning; neural networks; landmark recognition; and reinforcement learning.

This open access book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in research and applications of Foundation Models and is intended for readers familiar with basic Natural Language Processing (NLP) concepts.  Over the recent years, a revolutionary new paradigm has been developed for training models for NLP. These models are first pre-trained on large collections of text documents to acquire general syntactic knowledge and semantic information. Then, they are fine-tuned for specific tasks, which they can often solve with superhuman accuracy. When the models are large enough, they can be instructed by prompts to solve new tasks without any fine-tuning. Moreover, they can be applied to a wide range of different media and problem domains, ranging from image and video processing to robot control learning. Because they provide a blueprint for solving many tasks in artificial intelligence, they have been called Foundation Models.  After a brief introduction to basic NLP models the main pre-trained language models BERT, GPT and sequence-to-sequence transformer are described, as well as the concepts of self-attention and context-sensitive embedding. Then, different approaches to improving these models are discussed, such as expanding the pre-training criteria, increasing the length of input texts, or including extra knowledge. An overview of the best-performing models for about twenty application areas is then presented, e.g., question answering, translation, story generation, dialog systems, generating images from text, etc. For each application area, the strengths and weaknesses of current models are discussed, and an outlook on further developments is given. In addition, links are provided to freely available program code. A concluding chapter summarizes the economic opportunities, mitigation of risks, and potential developments of AI.

This book explores and discusses various aspects of intelligent systems technologies and their applications. It constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications (ISTA'18), September 19-22, 2018, Bangalore, India. All submissions were evaluated on the basis of their significance, novelty, and technical quality. This book contains 20 papers selected for presentation at the Symposium. The book is chiefly intended for, and offers a valuable resource for, researchers and scientists engaged in various fields involving intelligent systems.

Professor Judea Pearl won the 2011 Turing Award "for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning." This book contains the original articles that led to the award, as well as other seminal works, divided into four parts: heuristic search, probabilistic reasoning, causality, first period (1988-2001), and causality, recent period (2002-2020). Each of these parts starts with an introduction written by Judea Pearl. The volume also contains original, contributed articles by leading researchers that analyze, extend, or assess the influence of Pearl's work in different fields: from AI, Machine Learning, and Statistics to Cognitive Science, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences. The first part of the volume includes a biography, a transcript of his Turing Award Lecture, two interviews, and a selected bibliography annotated by him.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 9th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, IC3K 2017, held in Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, in November 2017.The 19 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 157 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge discovery and information retrieval; knowledge engineering and ontology development; and knowledge management and information sharing.

The four-volume set LNCS 11746-11749 constitutes the proceedings of the 17th IFIP TC 13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, INTERACT 2019, held in Paphos, Cyprus, in September 2019. The total of 111 full papers presented together with 55 short papers and 48 other papers in these books was carefully reviewed and selected from 385 submissions. The contributions are organized in topical sections named: Part I: accessibility design principles; assistive technology for cognition and neurodevelopment disorders; assistive technology for mobility and rehabilitation; assistive technology for visually impaired; co-design and design methods; crowdsourcing and collaborative work; cyber security and e-voting systems; design methods; design principles for safety/critical systems. Part II: e-commerce; education and HCI curriculum I; education and HCI curriculum II; eye-gaze interaction; games and gamification; human-robot interaction and 3D interaction; information visualization; information visualization and augmented reality; interaction design for culture and development I. Part III: interaction design for culture and development II; interaction design for culture and development III; interaction in public spaces; interaction techniques for writing and drawing; methods for user studies; mobile HCI; personalization and recommender systems; pointing, touch, gesture and speech-based interaction techniques; social networks and social media interaction. Part IV: user modelling and user studies; user experience; users' emotions, feelings and perception; virtual and augmented reality I; virtual and augmented reality II; wearable and tangible interaction; courses; demonstrations and installations; industry case studies; interactive posters; panels; workshops. The chapter 'Analyzing Accessibility Barriers Using Cost-Benefit Analysis to Design Reliable Navigation Services for Wheelchair Users' is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

This book offers comprehensive coverage of information retrieval by considering both Text Based Information Retrieval (TBIR) and Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR), together with new research topics. The approach to TBIR is based on creating a thesaurus, as well as event classification and detection. N-gram thesaurus generation for query refinement offers a new method for improving the precision of retrieval, while event classification and detection approaches aid in the classification and organization of information using web documents for domain-specific retrieval applications. In turn, with regard to content based image retrieval (CBIR) the book presents a histogram construction method, which is based on human visual perceptions of color. The book's overarching goal is to introduce readers to new ideas in an easy-to-follow manner.

The four-volume set LNCS 11746-11749 constitutes the proceedings of the 17th IFIP TC 13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, INTERACT 2019, held in Paphos, Cyprus, in September 2019.The total of 111 full papers presented together with 55 short papers and 48 other papers in these books was carefully reviewed and selected from 385 submissions. The contributions are organized in topical sections named: Part I: accessibility design principles; assistive technology for cognition and neurodevelopment disorders; assistive technology for mobility and rehabilitation; assistive technology for visually impaired; co-design and design methods; crowdsourcing and collaborative work; cyber security and e-voting systems; design methods; design principles for safety/critical systems. Part II: e-commerce; education and HCI curriculum I; education and HCI curriculum II; eye-gaze interaction; games and gamification; human-robot interaction and 3D interaction; information visualization; information visualization and augmented reality; interaction design for culture and development I. Part III: interaction design for culture and development II; interaction design for culture and development III; interaction in public spaces; interaction techniques for writing and drawing; methods for user studies; mobile HCI; personalization and recommender systems; pointing, touch, gesture and speech-based interaction techniques; social networks and social media interaction. Part IV: user modelling and user studies; user experience; users' emotions, feelings and perception; virtual and augmented reality I; virtual and augmented reality II; wearable and tangible interaction; courses; demonstrations and installations; industry case studies; interactive posters; panels; workshops.

The three volume proceedings LNAI 11051 - 11053 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2018, held in Dublin, Ireland, in September 2018. The total of 131 regular papers presented in part I and part II was carefully reviewed and selected from 535 submissions; there are 52 papers in the applied data science, nectar and demo track. The contributions were organized in topical sections named as follows: Part I: adversarial learning; anomaly and outlier detection; applications; classification; clustering and unsupervised learning; deep learningensemble methods; and evaluation. Part II: graphs; kernel methods; learning paradigms; matrix and tensor analysis; online and active learning; pattern and sequence mining; probabilistic models and statistical methods; recommender systems; and transfer learning. Part III: ADS data science applications; ADS e-commerce; ADS engineering and design; ADS financial and security; ADS health; ADS sensing and positioning; nectar track; and demo track.

This book constitutes extended selected papers from the 16th Conference on Advanced Information Technologies for Management, AITM 2018, and the 13th Conference on Information Systems Management, ISM 2018, held as part of the Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, FedCSIS, which took place in Poznan, Poland, in September 2018. The total of 9 full and 3 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 43 submissions. The papers selected to be included in this book contribute to the understanding of relevant trends of current research on information technology for management in business and public organizations. They were organized in topical sections named: information technology and systems for knowledge management, and information technology and systems for business transformation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks, COMSNETS 2018, held in Banaglore, India, in January 2018.The 12 revised full papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 134 submissions. They cover various topics in networking and communications systems.

This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 7th IFIP WG 13.2 International Conference on Human-Centered Software Engineering, HCSE 2018, held in Sophia Antipolis, France, in September 2018. The 11 full papers and 7 short papers presented together with 5 poster and demo papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 36 submissions. The papers focus on the interdependencies between user interface properties and contribute to the development of theories, methods, tools and approaches for dealing with multiple properties that should be taken into account when developing interactive systems. They are organized in the following topical sections: HCI education and training; model-based and model-driven approaches; task modeling and task-based approaches; tools and tool support; and usability evaluation and UI testing.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Analysis of Images, Social Networks and Texts, AIST 2018, held in Moscow, Russia, in July 2018. The 29 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 107 submissions (of which 26 papers were rejected without being reviewed). The papers are organized in topical sections on natural language processing; analysis of images and video; general topics of data analysis; analysis of dynamic behavior through event data; optimization problems on graphs and network structures; and innovative systems.

Affective computing is a nascent field situated at the intersection of artificial intelligence with social and behavioral science. It studies how human emotions are perceived and expressed, which then informs the design of intelligent agents and systems that can either mimic this behavior to improve their intelligence or incorporate such knowledge to effectively understand and communicate with their human collaborators. Affective computing research has recently seen significant advances and is making a critical transformation from exploratory studies to real-world applications in the emerging research area known as applied affective computing. This book offers readers an overview of the state-of-the-art and emerging themes in affective computing, including a comprehensive review of the existing approaches to affective computing systems and social signal processing. It provides in-depth case studies of applied affective computing in various domains, such as social robotics and mental well-being. It also addresses ethical concerns related to affective computing and how to prevent misuse of the technology in research and applications. Further, this book identifies future directions for the field and summarizes a set of guidelines for developing next-generation affective computing systems that are effective, safe, and human-centered. For researchers and practitioners new to affective computing, this book will serve as an introduction to the field to help them in identifying new research topics or developing novel applications. For more experienced researchers and practitioners, the discussions in this book provide guidance for adopting a human-centered design and development approach to advance affective computing.

The three volume proceedings LNAI 11051 - 11053 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2018, held in Dublin, Ireland, in September 2018. The total of 131 regular papers presented in part I and part II was carefully reviewed and selected from 535 submissions; there are 52 papers in the applied data science, nectar and demo track. The contributions were organized in topical sections named as follows: Part I: adversarial learning; anomaly and outlier detection; applications; classification; clustering and unsupervised learning; deep learning; ensemble methods; and evaluation. Part II: graphs; kernel methods; learning paradigms; matrix and tensor analysis; online and active learning; pattern and sequence mining; probabilistic models and statistical methods; recommender systems; and transfer learning. Part III: ADS data science applications; ADS e-commerce; ADS engineering and design; ADS financial and security; ADS health; ADS sensing and positioning; nectar track; and demo track.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 30th Australasian Database Conference, ADC 2019, held in Sydney, NSW, Australia, in January/February 2019. The 9 full papers presented together with one demo paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 19 submissions. The Australasian Database Conference is an annual international forum for sharing the latest research progresses and novel applications of database systems, data management, data mining and data analytics for researchers and practitioners in these areas from Australia, New Zealand and in the world

This volume constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Verified Software: Theories, Tools, and Experiments, VSTTE 2018, held in Oxford, UK, in July 2018. The 19 full papers presented were carefully revised and selected from 24 submissions. The papers describe large-scale verification efforts that involve collaboration, theory unification, tool integration, and formalized domain knowledge as well as novel experiments and case studies evaluating verification techniques and technologies.

This book includes the post-conference proceedings of the 21st RoboCup International Symposium, held in Nagoya, Japan, in September 2017. The 33 full revised papers and 9 papers from the winning teams presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The papers are orginazed on topical sections on Robotics, Artificial intelligence, Environment perception, State estimation and much more.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Computer Algebra in Scientific Computing, CASC 2018, held in Lille, France, in September 2018. The 24 full papers of this volume presented with an abstract of an invited talk and one paper corresponding to another invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 29 submissions. They deal with cutting-edge research in all major disciplines of computer algebra in sciences such as physics, chemistry, life sciences, and engineering. Chapter "Positive Solutions of Systems of Signed Parametric Polynomial Inequalities" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the First International Conference on Emerging Technologies in Computing, iCEtiC 2018, held in London, UK, in August 2018. The 26 revised full papers were reviewed and selected from more than 59 submissions and are organized in topical sections covering Cloud, IoT and distributed computing, software engineering, communications engineering and vehicular technology, AI, expert systems and big data analytics, Web information systems and applications, security, database system, economics and business engineering, mLearning and eLearning.

This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the First International Conference on Smart Cities, Infrastructures, Technologies and Applications, SCITA 2017, held in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in November 2017. The 35 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 submissions. The papers are grouped in topical sections: infrastructure track, e-governance and transportation track, healthcare track, applications track.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, SAB 2018, held in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, in August 2018.The 21 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 39 submissions. They cover the main areas in animat research, including the animat approach and methodology, perception and motor control, action selection and navigation, learning and adaptation, and collective and social behavior.

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 7th International Conference on BIGDATA 2018, held as Part of SCF 2018 in Seattle, WA, USA in June 2018. The 22 full papers together with 10 short papers published in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 97 submissions. They are organized in topical sections such as Data analysis, data as a service, services computing, data conversion, data storage, data centers, dataflow architectures, data compression, data exchange, data modeling, databases, and data management.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Queueing Theory and Network Applications, QTNA 2018, held in Tsukuba, Japan in July 2018.The 8 full papers together with 10 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 initial submissions. All the papers to be presented disseminate the latest results covering up-to-date research fields such as performance modeling and analysis of telecommunication systems, retrial and vacation queueing models, optimization of queueing systems, modeling of social systems, application of machine learning in queueing models.