This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, CHES 2014, held in Busan, South Korea, in September 2014. The 33 full papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 127 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: side-channel attacks; new attacks and constructions; countermeasures; algorithm specific SCA; ECC implementations; implementations; hardware implementations of symmetric cryptosystems; PUFs; and RNGs and SCA issues in hardware.

This two volume set (CCIS 398 and 399) constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Geo-Informatics in Resource Management and Sustainable Ecosystem, GRMSE 2013, held in Wuhan, China, in November 2013. The 136 papers presented, in addition to 4 keynote speeches and 5 invited sessions, were carefully reviewed and selected from 522 submissions. The papers are divided into 5 sessions: smart city in resource management and sustainable ecosystem, spatial data acquisition through RS and GIS in resource management and sustainable ecosystem, ecological and environmental data processing and management, advanced geospatial model and analysis for understanding ecological and environmental process, applications of geo-informatics in resource management and sustainable ecosystem.

This two volume set (CCIS 398 and 399) constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Symposium on Geo-Informatics in Resource Management and Sustainable Ecosystem, GRMSE 2013, held in Wuhan, China, in November 2013. The 136 papers presented, in addition to 4 keynote speeches and 5 invited sessions, were carefully reviewed and selected from 522 submissions. The papers are divided into 5 sessions: smart city in resource management and sustainable ecosystem, spatial data acquisition through RS and GIS in resource management and sustainable ecosystem, ecological and environmental data processing and management, advanced geospatial model and analysis for understanding ecological and environmental process, applications of geo-informatics in resource management and sustainable ecosystem.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 25th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference on Testing Software and Systems, ICTSS 2013, held in Istanbul, Turkey, in November 2013. The 17 revised full papers presented together with 3 short papers were carefully selected from 68 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on model-based testing, testing timed and concurrent systems, test suite selection and effort estimation, tools and languages, and debugging.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems, FMICS 2014, held in Florence, Italy, in September 2014. The 13 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 26 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: cyber-physical systems; computer networks; railway control systems; verification methods; and hardware and software testing.

This book is designed both for FPGA users interested in developing new, specific components - generally for reducing execution times -and IP core designers interested in extending their catalog of specific components. The main focus is circuit synthesis and the discussion shows, for example, how a given algorithm executing some complex function can be translated to a synthesizable circuit description, as well as which are the best choices the designer can make to reduce the circuit cost, latency, or power consumption. This is not a book on algorithms. It is a book that shows how to translate efficiently an algorithm to a circuit, using techniques such as parallelism, pipeline, loop unrolling, and others. Numerous examples of FPGA implementation are described throughout this book and the circuits are modeled in VHDL. Complete and synthesizable source files are available for download."

This two volume set LNAI 8917 and 8918 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications, ICIRA 2014, held in Guangzhou, China, in December 2014. The 109 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 159 submissions. The papers aim at enhancing the sharing of individual experiences and expertise in intelligent robotics with particular emphasis on technical challenges associated with varied applications such as biomedical applications, industrial automations, surveillance, and sustainable mobility.

This two volume set LNAI 8917 and 8918 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications, ICIRA 2014, held in Guangzhou, China, in December 2014. The 109 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 159 submissions. The papers aim at enhancing the sharing of individual experiences and expertise in intelligent robotics with particular emphasis on technical challenges associated with varied applications such as biomedical applications, industrial automations, surveillance, and sustainable mobility.

The two-volume set LNCS 8618 and 8619 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference EuroHaptics 2014, held in Versailles, France, in June 2014. The 118 papers (36 oral presentations and 82 poster presentations) presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 183 submissions. Furthermore, 27 demos were exhibited, each of them resulting in a short paper included in the volumes. These proceedings reflect the multidisciplinary nature of EuroHaptics and cover topics such as human-computer interaction, human-robot interactions, neuroscience, perception and psychophysics, biomechanics and motor control, modelling and simulation; and a broad range of applications in medicine, rehabilitation, art, and design.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Euro-Par 2013, held in Aachen, Germany, in August 2013. The 70 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 261 submissions. The papers are organized in 16 topical sections: support tools and environments; performance prediction and evaluation; scheduling and load balancing; high-performance architectures and compilers; parallel and distributed data management; grid, cluster and cloud computing; peer-to-peer computing; distributed systems and algorithms; parallel and distributed programming; parallel numerical algorithms; multicore and manycore programming; theory and algorithms for parallel computation; high performance networks and communication; high performance and scientific applications; GPU and accelerator computing; and extreme-scale computing.

This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Intelligent Data Analysis, which was held in October/November 2014 in Leuven, Belgium. The 33 revised full papers together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 70 submissions handling all kinds of modeling and analysis methods, irrespective of discipline. The papers cover all aspects of intelligent data analysis, including papers on intelligent support for modeling and analyzing data from complex, dynamical systems.

This book is a collection of contributions defining the state of current knowledge and new trends in hybrid systems - systems involving both continuous dynamics and discrete events - as described by the work of several well-known groups of researchers. Hybrid Dynamical Systems presents theoretical advances in such areas as diagnosability, observability and stabilization for various classes of system. Continuous and discrete state estimation and self-triggering control of nonlinear systems are advanced. The text employs various methods, among them, high-order sliding modes, Takagi-Sugeno representation and sampled-data switching to achieve its ends. The many applications of hybrid systems from power converters to computer science are not forgotten; studies of flexible-joint robotic arms and - as representative biological systems - the behaviour of the human heart and vasculature, demonstrate the wide-ranging practical significance of control in hybrid systems. The cross-disciplinary origins of study in hybrid systems are evident. Academic researchers and graduate students interested in hybrid and switched systems need look no further than Hybrid Dynamical Systems for a single source which will bring them up to date with work in this area from around the world.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Knowledge Representation for Health Care, KR4HC 2014, held as part of the Vienna Summer of Logic, VSL 2014, in Vienna, Austria, in July 2014. The workshop aimed at attracting the interest of novel research and advances contributing in the definition, representation and exploitation of health care knowledge in medical informatics. The 12 revised full research papers and 4 short papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 26 submissions.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are devices that enable people to communicate via thought alone. Brain signals can be directly translated into messages or commands. Until recently, these devices were used primarily to help people who could not move. However, BCIs are now becoming practical tools for a wide variety of people, in many different situations. What will BCIs in the future be like? Who will use them, and why? This book, written by many of the top BCI researchers and developers, reviews the latest progress in the different components of BCIs. Chapters also discuss practical issues in an emerging BCI enabled community. The book is intended both for professionals and for interested laypeople who are not experts in BCI research.

Solving modern biological problems requires advanced computational methods. Bioinformatics evolved from the active interaction of two fast-developing disciplines, biology and information technology. The central issue of this emerging field is the transformation of often distributed and unstructured biological data into meaningful information. This book describes the application of well-established concepts and techniques from areas like data mining, machine learning, database technologies, and visualization techniques to problems like protein data analysis, genome analysis and sequence databases. Chen has collected contributions from leading researchers in each area. The chapters can be read independently, as each offers a complete overview of its specific area, or, combined, this monograph is a comprehensive treatment that will appeal to students, researchers, and R&D professionals in industry who need a state-of-the-art introduction into this challenging and exciting young field.

NATO's Division of Scientific and Environmental Affairs sponsored this Advan ced Study Institute because it was felt to be timely to cover this important and challengjng subject for the first time in the framework of NATO's ASI programme. The significance of real-time systems in everyones' life is rapidly growing. The vast spectrum of these systems can be characterised by just a few examples of increasing complexity: controllers in washing machines, air traffic control systems, control and safety systems of nuclear power plants and, finally, future military systems like the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The import ance of such systems for the well-being of people requires considerable efforts in research and development of highly reliable real-time systems. Furthermore, the competitiveness and prosperity of entire nations now depend on the early app lication and efficient utilisation of computer integrated manufacturing systems (CIM), of which real-time systems are an essential and decisive part. Owing to its key significance in computerised defence systems, real-time computing has also a special importance for the Alliance. The early research and development activities in this field in the 1960s and 1970s aimed towards improving the then unsatisfactory software situation. Thus, the first high-level real-time languages were defined and developed: RTL/2, Coral 66, Procol, LTR, and PEARL. In close connection with these language develop ments and with the utilisation of special purpose process control peripherals, the research on real-time operating systems advanced considerably."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Robotics in Smart Manufacturing, WRSM 2013, held in Porto, Portugal, in June 2013. The 20 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers address issues such as robotic machining, off-line robot programming, robot calibration, new robotic hardware and software architectures, advanced robot teaching methods, intelligent warehouses, robot co-workers and application of robots in the textile industry.

Information granules are fundamental conceptual entities facilitating perception of complex phenomena and contributing to the enhancement of human centricity in intelligent systems. The formal frameworks of information granules and information granulation comprise fuzzy sets, interval analysis, probability, rough sets, and shadowed sets, to name only a few representatives. Among current developments of Granular Computing, interesting options concern information granules of higher order and of higher type. The higher order information granularity is concerned with an effective formation of information granules over the space being originally constructed by information granules of lower order. This construct is directly associated with the concept of hierarchy of systems composed of successive processing layers characterized by the increasing levels of abstraction. This idea of layered, hierarchical realization of models of complex systems has gained a significant level of visibility in fuzzy modeling with the well-established concept of hierarchical fuzzy models where one strives to achieve a sound tradeoff between accuracy and a level of detail captured by the model and its level of interpretability. Higher type information granules emerge when the information granules themselves cannot be fully characterized in a purely numerical fashion but instead it becomes convenient to exploit their realization in the form of other types of information granules such as type-2 fuzzy sets, interval-valued fuzzy sets, or probabilistic fuzzy sets. Higher order and higher type of information granules constitute the focus of the studies on Granular Computing presented in this study. The book elaborates on sound methodologies of Granular Computing, algorithmic pursuits and an array of diverse applications and case studies in environmental studies, option price forecasting, and power engineering.

Both algorithms and the software . and hardware of automatic computers have gone through a rapid development in the past 35 years. The dominant factor in this development was the advance in computer technology. Computer parameters were systematically improved through electron tubes, transistors and integrated circuits of ever-increasing integration density, which also influenced the development of new algorithms and programming methods. Some years ago the situation in computers development was that no additional enhancement of their performance could be achieved by increasing the speed of their logical elements, due to the physical barrier of the maximum transfer speed of electric signals. Another enhancement of computer performance has been achieved by parallelism, which makes it possible by a suitable organization of n processors to obtain a perform ance increase of up to n times. Research into parallel computations has been carried out for several years in many countries and many results of fundamental importance have been obtained. Many parallel computers have been designed and their algorithmic and program ming systems built. Such computers include ILLIAC IV, DAP, STARAN, OMEN, STAR-100, TEXAS INSTRUMENTS ASC, CRAY-1, C mmp, CM*, CLIP-3, PEPE. This trend is supported by the fact that: a) many algorithms and programs are highly parallel in their structure, b) the new LSI and VLSI technologies have allowed processors to be combined into large parallel structures, c) greater and greater demands for speed and reliability of computers are made."

The Engineering of Complex Real-Time Computer Control Systems brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this important area. The Engineering of Complex Real-Time Computer Control Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most important research issues in the field.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Joint International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Web Society, ICPCA/SWS 2013, held in Vina de Mar, Chile, in December 2013. The 56 revised full papers presented together with 29 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 156 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on infrastructure and devices; service and solution; data and knowledge; as well as community.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 26th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference on Testing Software and Systems, ICTSS 2014, held in Istanbul, Turkey, in September 2014. The 11 revised full papers presented together with 6 short papers were carefully selected from 36 submissions. The scope of the conference was on following topics: testing methodologies, tools and frameworks, and industrial experiences.

Foundations of Dependable Computing: Paradigms for Dependable Applications, presents a variety of specific approaches to achieving dependability at the application level. Driven by the higher level fault models of Models and Frameworks for Dependable Systems, and built on the lower level abstractions implemented in a third companion book subtitled System Implementation, these approaches demonstrate how dependability may be tuned to the requirements of an application, the fault environment, and the characteristics of the target platform. Three classes of paradigms are considered: protocol-based paradigms for distributed applications, algorithm-based paradigms for parallel applications, and approaches to exploiting application semantics in embedded real-time control systems. The companion volume subtitled Models and Frameworks for Dependable Systems presents two comprehensive frameworks for reasoning about system dependability, thereby establishing a context for understanding the roles played by specific approaches presented in this book's two companion volumes. It then explores the range of models and analysis methods necessary to design, validate and analyze dependable systems. Another companion book (published by Kluwer) subtitled System Implementation, explores the system infrastructure needed to support the various paradigms of Paradigms for Dependable Applications. Approaches to implementing support mechanisms and to incorporating additional appropriate levels of fault detection and fault tolerance at the processor, network, and operating system level are presented. A primary concern at these levels is balancing cost and performance against coverage and overall dependability. As these chapters demonstrate, low overhead, practical solutions are attainable and not necessarily incompatible with performance considerations. The section on innovative compiler support, in particular, demonstrates how the benefits of application specificity may be obtained while reducing hardware cost and run-time overhead.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computer Networks, CN 2014, held in Brunow, Poland, in June 2014. The 34 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers in these proceedings cover the following topics: computer networks, tele informatics and communications, new technologies, queueing theory, innovative applications and networked and IT-related aspects of e-business."

Real-time systems are now used in a wide variety of applications. Conventionally, they were configured at design to perform a given set of tasks and could not readily adapt to dynamic situations. The concept of imprecise and approximate computation has emerged as a promising approach to providing scheduling flexibility and enhanced dependability in dynamic real-time systems. The concept can be utilized in a wide variety of applications, including signal processing, machine vision, databases, networking, etc. For those who wish to build dynamic real-time systems which must deal safely with resource unavailability while continuing to operate, leading to situations where computations may not be carried through to completion, the techniques of imprecise and approximate computation facilitate the generation of partial results that may enable the system to operate safely and avert catastrophe. Audience: Of special interest to researchers. May be used as a supplementary text in courses on real-time systems.