Networks of Learning Automata: Techniques for Online Stochastic Optimization is a comprehensive account of learning automata models with emphasis on multiautomata systems. It considers synthesis of complex learning structures from simple building blocks and uses stochastic algorithms for refining probabilities of selecting actions. Mathematical analysis of the behavior of games and feedforward networks is provided. Algorithms considered here can be used for online optimization of systems based on noisy measurements of performance index. Also, algorithms that assure convergence to the global optimum are presented. Parallel operation of automata systems for improving speed of convergence is described. The authors also include extensive discussion of how learning automata solutions can be constructed in a variety of applications.

Computer vision is the science and technology of making machines that see. It is concerned with the theory, design and implementation of algorithms that can automatically process visual data to recognize objects, track and recover their shape and spatial layout. The International Computer Vision Summer School - ICVSS was established in 2007 to provide both an objective and clear overview and an in-depth analysis of the state-of-the-art research in Computer Vision. The courses are delivered by world renowned experts in the field, from both academia and industry, and cover both theoretical and practical aspects of real Computer Vision problems. The school is organized every year by University of Cambridge (Computer Vision and Robotics Group) and University of Catania (Image Processing Lab). Different topics are covered each year. A summary of the past Computer Vision Summer Schools can be found at: http://www.dmi.unict.it/icvss This edited volume contains a selection of articles covering some of the talks and tutorials held during the last editions of the school. The chapters provide an in-depth overview of challenging areas with key references to the existing literature.

How developments in science and technology may enable the emergence of purely digital minds-intelligent machines equal to or greater in power than the human brain. What do computers, cells, and brains have in common? Computers are electronic devices designed by humans; cells are biological entities crafted by evolution; brains are the containers and creators of our minds. But all are, in one way or another, information-processing devices. The power of the human brain is, so far, unequaled by any existing machine or known living being. Over eons of evolution, the brain has enabled us to develop tools and technology to make our lives easier. Our brains have even allowed us to develop computers that are almost as powerful as the human brain itself. In this book, Arlindo Oliveira describes how advances in science and technology could enable us to create digital minds. Exponential growth is a pattern built deep into the scheme of life, but technological change now promises to outstrip even evolutionary change. Oliveira describes technological and scientific advances that range from the discovery of laws that control the behavior of the electromagnetic fields to the development of computers. He calls natural selection the ultimate algorithm, discusses genetics and the evolution of the central nervous system, and describes the role that computer imaging has played in understanding and modeling the brain. Having considered the behavior of the unique system that creates a mind, he turns to an unavoidable question: Is the human brain the only system that can host a mind? If digital minds come into existence-and, Oliveira says, it is difficult to argue that they will not-what are the social, legal, and ethical implications? Will digital minds be our partners, or our rivals?

With the increasing importance of the Web and other text-heavy application areas, the demands for and interest in both text mining and natural language processing (NLP) have been rising. Researchers in text mining have hoped that NLPa "the attempt to extract a fuller meaning representation from free texta "can provide useful improvements to text mining applications of all kinds.

Bringing together a variety of perspectives from internationally renowned researchers, Natural Language Processing and Text Mining not only discusses applications of certain NLP techniques to certain Text Mining tasks, but also the converse, i.e., use of Text Mining to facilitate NLP. It explores a variety of real-world applications of NLP and text-mining algorithms in comprehensive detail, placing emphasis on the description of end-to-end solutions to real problems, and detailing the associated difficulties that must be resolved before the algorithm can be applied and its full benefits realized. In addition, it explores a number of cutting-edge techniques and approaches, as well as novel ways of integrating various technologies. Nevertheless, even readers with only a basic knowledge of data mining or text mining will benefit from the many illustrative examples and solutions.

Topics and features:

a [ Describes novel and high-impact text mining and/or natural language applications

a [ Points out typical traps in trying to apply NLP to text mining

a [ Illustrates preparation and preprocessing of text data a" offering practical issues and examples

a [ Surveys related supporting techniques, problem types, and potential technique enhancements

a [ Examines the interaction of textmining and NLP

This state-of-the-art, practical volume will be an essential resource for professionals and researchers who wish to learn how to apply text mining and language processing techniques to real world problems. In addition, it can be used as a supplementary text for advanced students studying text mining and NLP.

Genetic Programming Theory and Practice IV was developed from the fourth workshop at the University of Michigan's Center for the Study of Complex Systems to facilitate the exchange of ideas and information related to the rapidly advancing field of Genetic Programming (GP). The text provides a cohesive view of the issues facing both practitioners and theoreticians, and examines the synergy between GP theory and application. The foremost international researchers and practitioners in the GP arena contributed to the volume, exploring application areas including chemical process control, circuit design, financial data mining and bioinformatics, to name just a few. This volume is the result of an extensive dialog between GP theoreticians and practitioners, and is a unique and indispensable tool for both academics and industry professionals involved in GP, evolutionary computation, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

This book is the inaugural volume in the new Springer series on Learning and Analytics in Intelligent Systems. The series aims at providing, in hard-copy and soft-copy form, books on all aspects of learning, analytics, advanced intelligent systems and related technologies. These disciplines are strongly related and mutually complementary; accordingly, the new series encourages an integrated approach to themes and topics in these disciplines, which will result in significant cross-fertilization, research advances and new knowledge creation. To maximize the dissemination of research findings, the series will publish edited books, monographs, handbooks, textbooks and conference proceedings. This book is intended for professors, researchers, scientists, engineers and students. An extensive list of references at the end of each chapter allows readers to probe further into those application areas that interest them most.

Recently, increasing interest has been shown in applying the concept of Pareto-optimality to machine learning, particularly inspired by the successful developments in evolutionary multi-objective optimization. It has been shown that the multi-objective approach to machine learning is particularly successful to improve the performance of the traditional single objective machine learning methods, to generate highly diverse multiple Pareto-optimal models for constructing ensembles models and, and to achieve a desired trade-off between accuracy and interpretability of neural networks or fuzzy systems. This monograph presents a selected collection of research work on multi-objective approach to machine learning, including multi-objective feature selection, multi-objective model selection in training multi-layer perceptrons, radial-basis-function networks, support vector machines, decision trees, and intelligent systems.

This book presents a unified mathematical treatment of diverse problems in the fields of cognitive systems using Clifford, or geometric, algebra. Geometric algebra provides a rich general mathematical framework for the development of the ideas of multilinear algebra, projective and affine geometry, calculus on manifolds, the representation of Lie groups and Lie algebras, and many other areas of applications. By treating a wide spectrum of problems in a common geometric language, the book offers both new insights and new solutions that should be useful to scientists and engineers working in different but related areas of artificial intelligence. It looks at building intelligence systems through the construction of Perception Action Cycles; critical to this concept is incorporating representation and learning in a flexible geometric system. Each chapter is written in accessible terms accompanied by numerous examples and figures that clarify the application of geometric algebra to problems in geometric computing, image processing, computer vision, robotics, neural computing and engineering. Topics and features: *Introduces a nonspecialist to Clifford, or geometric, algebra and it shows applications in artificial intelligence *Thorough discussion of several tasks of signal and image processing, computer vision, robotics, neurocomputing and engineering using the geometric algebra framework *Features the computing frameworks of the linear model n-dimensional affine plane and the nonlinear model of Euclidean space known as the horosphere, and addresses the relationship of these models to conformal, affine and projective geometries *Applications of geometric algebra to other related areas: aeronautics, mechatronics, graphics engineering, and speech processing *Exercises and hints for the development of future computer software packages for extensive calculations in geometric algebra The book is an essential resource for computer scientists, AI researchers, and electrical engineers and includes computer programs to clarify and demonstrate the importance of geometric computing for cognitive systems and artificial autonomous systems research.

Genetic Programming Theory and Practice explores the emerging interaction between theory and practice in the cutting-edge, machine learning method of Genetic Programming (GP). The material contained in this contributed volume was developed from a workshop at the University of Michigan's Center for the Study of Complex Systems where an international group of genetic programming theorists and practitioners met to examine how GP theory informs practice and how GP practice impacts GP theory. The contributions cover the full spectrum of this relationship and are written by leading GP theorists from major universities, as well as active practitioners from leading industries and businesses. Chapters include such topics as John Koza's development of human-competitive electronic circuit designs; David Goldberg's application of "competent GA" methodology to GP; Jason Daida's discovery of a new set of factors underlying the dynamics of GP starting from applied research; and Stephen Freeland's essay on the lessons of biology for GP and the potential impact of GP on evolutionary theory.

The book covers tools in the study of online social networks such as machine learning techniques, clustering, and deep learning. A variety of theoretical aspects, application domains, and case studies for analyzing social network data are covered. The aim is to provide new perspectives on utilizing machine learning and related scientific methods and techniques for social network analysis. Machine Learning Techniques for Online Social Networks will appeal to researchers and students in these fields.

Since the early 1990s, genetic programming (GP) a discipline whose goal is to enable the automatic generation of computer programs has emerged as one of the most promising paradigms for fast, productive software development. GP combines biological metaphors gleaned from Darwin's theory of evolution with computer-science approaches drawn from the field of machine learning to create programs that are capable of adapting or recreating themselves for open-ended tasks.
This unique introduction to GP provides a detailed overview of the subject and its antecedents, with extensive references to the published and online literature. In addition to explaining the fundamental theory and important algorithms, the text includes practical discussions covering a wealth of potential applications and real-world implementation techniques. Software professionals needing to understand and apply GP concepts will find this book an invaluable practical and theoretical guide."

A major use of practical predictive analytics in medicine has been in the diagnosis of current diseases, particularly through medical imaging. Now there is sufficient improvement in AI, IoT and data analytics to deal with real time problems with an increased focus on early prediction using machine learning and deep learning algorithms. With the power of artificial intelligence alongside the internet of 'medical' things, these algorithms can input the characteristics/data of their patients and get predictions of future diagnoses, classifications, treatment and costs. Evolving Predictive Analytics in Healthcare: New AI techniques for real-time interventions discusses deep learning algorithms in medical diagnosis, including applications such as Covid-19 detection, dementia detection, and predicting chemotherapy outcomes on breast cancer tumours. Smart healthcare monitoring frameworks using IoT with big data analytics are explored and the latest trends in predictive technology for solving real-time health care problems are examined. By using real-time data inputs to build predictive models, this new technology can literally 'see' your future health and allow clinicians to intervene as needed. This book is suitable reading for researchers interested in healthcare technology, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence.

Techniques of vision-based motion analysis aim to detect, track, identify, and generally understand the behavior of objects in image sequences. With the growth of video data in a wide range of applications from visual surveillance to human-machine interfaces, the ability to automatically analyze and understand object motions from video footage is of increasing importance. Among the latest developments in this field is the application of statistical machine learning algorithms for object tracking, activity modeling, and recognition.

Developed from expert contributions to the first and second International Workshop on Machine Learning for Vision-Based Motion Analysis, this important text/reference highlights the latest algorithms and systems for robust and effective vision-based motion understanding from a machine learning perspective. Highlighting the benefits of collaboration between the communities of object motion understanding and machine learning, the book discusses the most active forefronts of research, including current challenges and potential future directions.

Topics and features: provides a comprehensive review of the latest developments in vision-based motion analysis, presenting numerous case studies on state-of-the-art learning algorithms; examines algorithms for clustering and segmentation, and manifold learning for dynamical models; describes the theory behind mixed-state statistical models, with a focus on mixed-state Markov models that take into account spatial and temporal interaction; discusses object tracking in surveillance image streams, discriminative multiple target tracking, and guidewire tracking in fluoroscopy; explores issues of modeling for saliency detection, human gait modeling, modeling of extremely crowded scenes, and behavior modeling from video surveillance data; investigates methods for automatic recognition of gestures in Sign Language, and human action recognition from small training sets.

Researchers, professional engineers, and graduate students in computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning, will all find this text an accessible survey of machine learning techniques for vision-based motion analysis. The book will also be of interest to all who work with specific vision applications, such as surveillance, sport event analysis, healthcare, video conferencing, and motion video indexing and retrieval.

Text Classification, or the task of automatically assigning semantic categories to natural language text, has become one of the key methods for organizing online information. Since hand-coding classification rules is costly or even impractical, most modern approaches employ machine learning techniques to automatically learn text classifiers from examples. However, none of these conventional approaches combines good prediction performance, theoretical understanding, and efficient training algorithms.

Based on ideas from Support Vector Machines (SVMs), Learning To Classify Text Using Support Vector Machines presents a new approach to generating text classifiers from examples. The approach combines high performance and efficiency with theoretical understanding and improved robustness. In particular, it is highly effective without greedy heuristic components. The SVM approach is computationally efficient in training and classification, and it comes with a learning theory that can guide real-world applications.

Learning To Classify Text Using Support Vector Machines gives a complete and detailed description of the SVM approach to learning text classifiers, including training algorithms, transductive text classification, efficient performance estimation, and a statistical learning model of text classification. In addition, it includes an overview of the field of text classification, making it self-contained even for newcomers to the field. This book gives a concise introduction to SVMs for pattern recognition, and it includes a detailed description of how to formulate text-classification tasks for machine learning.

Learning To Classify Text Using Support Vector Machines isdesigned as a reference for researchers and practitioners, and is suitable as a secondary text for graduate-level students in Computer Science within Machine Learning and Language Technology.

This book explores some of the emerging scientific and technological areas in which the need for data analytics arises and is likely to play a significant role in the years to come. At the dawn of the 4th Industrial Revolution, data analytics is emerging as a force that drives towards dramatic changes in our daily lives, the workplace and human relationships. Synergies between physical, digital, biological and energy sciences and technologies, brought together by non-traditional data collection and analysis, drive the digital economy at all levels and offer new, previously-unavailable opportunities. The need for data analytics arises in most modern scientific disciplines, including engineering; natural-, computer- and information sciences; economics; business; commerce; environment; healthcare; and life sciences. Coming as the third volume under the general title MACHINE LEARNING PARADIGMS, the book includes an editorial note (Chapter 1) and an additional 12 chapters, and is divided into five parts: (1) Data Analytics in the Medical, Biological and Signal Sciences, (2) Data Analytics in Social Studies and Social Interactions, (3) Data Analytics in Traffic, Computer and Power Networks, (4) Data Analytics for Digital Forensics, and (5) Theoretical Advances and Tools for Data Analytics. This research book is intended for both experts/researchers in the field of data analytics, and readers working in the fields of artificial and computational intelligence as well as computer science in general who wish to learn more about the field of data analytics and its applications. An extensive list of bibliographic references at the end of each chapter guides readers to probe further into the application areas of interest to them.

Data mining (DM) consists of extracting interesting knowledge from re- world, large & complex data sets; and is the core step of a broader process, called the knowledge discovery from databases (KDD) process. In addition to the DM step, which actually extracts knowledge from data, the KDD process includes several preprocessing (or data preparation) and post-processing (or knowledge refinement) steps. The goal of data preprocessing methods is to transform the data to facilitate the application of a (or several) given DM algorithm(s), whereas the goal of knowledge refinement methods is to validate and refine discovered knowledge. Ideally, discovered knowledge should be not only accurate, but also comprehensible and interesting to the user. The total process is highly computation intensive. The idea of automatically discovering knowledge from databases is a very attractive and challenging task, both for academia and for industry. Hence, there has been a growing interest in data mining in several AI-related areas, including evolutionary algorithms (EAs). The main motivation for applying EAs to KDD tasks is that they are robust and adaptive search methods, which perform a global search in the space of candidate solutions (for instance, rules or another form of knowledge representation).

The Distinguished Dissertations series is published on behalf of the Conference of Professors and Heads of Computing and the British Computer Society, who annually select the best British PhD dissertations in computer science for publication. The dissertations are selected on behalf of the CPHC by a panel of eight academics. Each dissertation chosen makes a noteworthy contribution to the subject and reaches a high standard of exposition, placing all results clearly in the context of computer science as a whole. In this way computer scientists with significantly different interests are able to grasp the essentials - or even find a means of entry - to an unfamiliar research topic. Machine learning promises both to create machine intelligence and to shed light on natural intelligence. A fundamental issue for either endevour is that of credit assignment, which we can pose as follows: how can we credit individual components of a complex adaptive system for their often subtle effects on the world? For example, in a game of chess, how did each move (and the reasoning behind it) contribute to the outcome? This text studies aspects of credit assignment in learning classifier systems, which combine evolutionary algorithms with reinforcement learning methods to address a range of tasks from pattern classification to stochastic control to simulation of learning in animals. Credit assignment in classifier systems is complicated by two features: 1) their components are frequently modified by evolutionary search, and 2) components tend to interact. Classifier systems are re-examined from first principles and the result is, primarily, a formalization of learning in these systems, and a body of theoryrelating types of classifier systems, learning tasks, and credit assignment pathologies. Most significantly, it is shown that both of the main approaches have difficulties with certain tasks, which the other type does not.

Evolutionary Algorithms and Agricultural Systems deals with the practical application of evolutionary algorithms to the study and management of agricultural systems. The rationale of systems research methodology is introduced, and examples listed of real-world applications. It is the integration of these agricultural systems models with optimization techniques, primarily genetic algorithms, which forms the focus of this book. The advantages are outlined, with examples of agricultural models ranging from national and industry-wide studies down to the within-farm scale. The potential problems of this approach are also discussed, along with practical methods of resolving these problems. Agricultural applications using alternate optimization techniques (gradient and direct-search methods, simulated annealing and quenching, and the tabu search strategy) are also listed and discussed. The particular problems and methodologies of these algorithms, including advantageous features that may benefit a hybrid approach or be usefully incorporated into evolutionary algorithms, are outlined. From consideration of this and the published examples, it is concluded that evolutionary algorithms are the superior method for the practical optimization of models of agricultural and natural systems. General recommendations on robust options and parameter settings for evolutionary algorithms are given for use in future studies. Evolutionary Algorithms and Agricultural Systems will prove useful to practitioners and researchers applying these methods to the optimization of agricultural or natural systems, and would also be suited as a text for systems management, applied modeling, or operations research.

Learning and Generalization provides a formal mathematical theory for addressing intuitive questions of the type: * How does a machine learn a new concept on the basis of examples? * How can a neural network, after sufficient training, correctly predict the outcome of a previously unseen input? * How much training is required to achieve a specified level of accuracy in the prediction? * How can one identify the dynamical behaviour of a nonlinear control system by observing its input-output behaviour over a finite interval of time? The first edition, A Theory of Learning and Generalization, was the first book to treat the problem of machine learning in conjunction with the theory of empirical process, the latter being a well-established branch of probability theory. The treatment of both topics side-by-side leads to new insights, as well as new results in both topics. The second edition extends and improves upon this material, covering new areas including: * Support vector machines (SVM's) * Fat-shattering dimensions and applications to neural network learning * Learning with dependent samples generated by a beta-mixing process * Connections between system identification and learning theory * Probabilistic solution of 'intractable problems' in robust control and matrix theory using randomized algorithms It also contains solutions to some of the open problems posed in the first edition, while adding new open problems. This book is essential reading for control and system theorists, neural network researchers, theoretical computer scientists and probabilists The Communications and Control Engineering series reflects the major technological advances which have a great impact in the fields of communication and control. It reports on the research in industrial and academic institutions around the world to exploit the new possibilities which are becoming available

In recent years, ELM has emerged as a revolutionary technique of computational intelligence, and has attracted considerable attentions. An extreme learning machine (ELM) is a single layer feed-forward neural network alike learning system, whose connections from the input layer to the hidden layer are randomly generated, while the connections from the hidden layer to the output layer are learned through linear learning methods. The outstanding merits of extreme learning machine (ELM) are its fast learning speed, trivial human intervene and high scalability.

This book contains some selected papers from the International Conference on Extreme Learning Machine 2013, which was held in Beijing China, October 15-17, 2013. This conference aims to bring together the researchers and practitioners of extreme learning machine from a variety of fields including artificial intelligence, biomedical engineering and bioinformatics, system modelling and control, and signal and image processing, to promote research and discussions of learning without iterative tuning."

This book covers algorithms and applications of ELM. It gives readers a glance of the newest developments of ELM."

Exploration of Visual Data presents latest research efforts in the area of content-based exploration of image and video data. The main objective is to bridge the semantic gap between high-level concepts in the human mind and low-level features extractable by the machines.

The two key issues emphasized are "content-awareness" and "user-in-the-loop." The authors provide a comprehensive review on algorithms for visual feature extraction based on color, texture, shape, and structure, and techniques for incorporating such information to aid browsing, exploration, search, and streaming of image and video data. They also discuss issues related to the mixed use of textual and low-level visual features to facilitate more effective access of multimedia data.

To bridge the semantic gap, significant recent research efforts have also been put on learning during user interactions, which is also known as "relevance feedback." The difficulty and challenge also come from the personalized information need of each user and a small amount of feedbacks the machine could obtain through real-time user interaction. The authors present and discuss several recently proposed classification and learning techniques that are specifically designed for this problem, with kernel- and boosting-based approaches for nonlinear extensions.

Exploration of Visual Data provides state-of-the-art materials on the topics of content-based description of visual data, content-based low-bitrate video streaming, and latest asymmetric and nonlinear relevance feedback algorithms, which to date are unpublished.

Exploration of Visual Data will be of interest to researchers, practitioners, and graduate-level students in theareas of multimedia information systems, multimedia databases, computer vision, machine learning.

Deep Network Design for Medical Image Computing: Principles and Applications covers a range of MIC tasks and discusses design principles of these tasks for deep learning approaches in medicine. These include skin disease classification, vertebrae identification and localization, cardiac ultrasound image segmentation, 2D/3D medical image registration for intervention, metal artifact reduction, sparse-view artifact reduction, etc. For each topic, the book provides a deep learning-based solution that takes into account the medical or biological aspect of the problem and how the solution addresses a variety of important questions surrounding architecture, the design of deep learning techniques, when to introduce adversarial learning, and more. This book will help graduate students and researchers develop a better understanding of the deep learning design principles for MIC and to apply them to their medical problems.

Among other topics, The Informational Complexity of Learning: Perspectives on Neural Networks and Generative Grammar brings together two important but very different learning problems within the same analytical framework. The first concerns the problem of learning functional mappings using neural networks, followed by learning natural language grammars in the principles and parameters tradition of Chomsky. These two learning problems are seemingly very different. Neural networks are real-valued, infinite-dimensional, continuous mappings. On the other hand, grammars are boolean-valued, finite-dimensional, discrete (symbolic) mappings. Furthermore the research communities that work in the two areas almost never overlap. The book's objective is to bridge this gap. It uses the formal techniques developed in statistical learning theory and theoretical computer science over the last decade to analyze both kinds of learning problems. By asking the same question - how much information does it take to learn? - of both problems, it highlights their similarities and differences. Specific results include model selection in neural networks, active learning, language learning and evolutionary models of language change. The Informational Complexity of Learning: Perspectives on Neural Networks and Generative Grammar is a very interdisciplinary work. Anyone interested in the interaction of computer science and cognitive science should enjoy the book. Researchers in artificial intelligence, neural networks, linguistics, theoretical computer science, and statistics will find it particularly relevant.

A high school student can create deep Q-learning code to control her robot, without any understanding of the meaning of 'deep' or 'Q', or why the code sometimes fails. This book is designed to explain the science behind reinforcement learning and optimal control in a way that is accessible to students with a background in calculus and matrix algebra. A unique focus is algorithm design to obtain the fastest possible speed of convergence for learning algorithms, along with insight into why reinforcement learning sometimes fails. Advanced stochastic process theory is avoided at the start by substituting random exploration with more intuitive deterministic probing for learning. Once these ideas are understood, it is not difficult to master techniques rooted in stochastic control. These topics are covered in the second part of the book, starting with Markov chain theory and ending with a fresh look at actor-critic methods for reinforcement learning.

This book collects the lectures given at the NATO Advanced Study Institute From Identijication to Learning held in Villa Olmo, Como, Italy, from August 22 to September 2, 1994. The school was devoted to the themes of Identijication, Adaptation and Learning, as they are currently understood in the Information and Contral engineering community, their development in the last few decades, their inter connections and their applications. These titles describe challenging, exciting and rapidly growing research areas which are of interest both to contral and communication engineers and to statisticians and computer scientists. In accordance with the general goals of the Institute, and notwithstanding the rat her advanced level of the topics discussed, the presentations have been generally kept at a fairly tutorial level. For this reason this book should be valuable to a variety of rearchers and to graduate students interested in the general area of Control, Signals and Information Pracessing. As the goal of the school was to explore a common methodologicalline of reading the issues, the flavor is quite interdisciplinary. We regard this as an original and valuable feature of this book."