This book illustrates how to use description logic-based formalisms to their full potential in the creation, indexing, and reuse of multimedia semantics. To do so, it introduces researchers to multimedia semantics by providing an in-depth review of state-of-the-art standards, technologies, ontologies, and software tools. It draws attention to the importance of formal grounding in the knowledge representation of multimedia objects, the potential of multimedia reasoning in intelligent multimedia applications, and presents both theoretical discussions and best practices in multimedia ontology engineering. Readers already familiar with mathematical logic, Internet, and multimedia fundamentals will learn to develop formally grounded multimedia ontologies, and map concept definitions to high-level descriptors. The core reasoning tasks, reasoning algorithms, and industry-leading reasoners are presented, while scene interpretation via reasoning is also demonstrated. Overall, this book offers readers an essential introduction to the formal grounding of web ontologies, as well as a comprehensive collection and review of description logics (DLs) from the perspectives of expressivity and reasoning complexity. It covers best practices for developing multimedia ontologies with formal grounding to guarantee decidability and obtain the desired level of expressivity while maximizing the reasoning potential. The capabilities of such multimedia ontologies are demonstrated by DL implementations with an emphasis on multimedia reasoning applications.

This textbook presents the motion of pure nonlinear oscillatory systems and various solution procedures which give the approximate solutions of the strong nonlinear oscillator equations. It presents the author's original method for the analytical solution procedure of the pure nonlinear oscillator system. After an introduction, the physical explanation of the pure nonlinearity and of the pure nonlinear oscillator is given. The analytical solution for free and forced vibrations of the one-degree-of-freedom strong nonlinear system with constant and time variable parameters is considered. In this second edition of the book, the number of approximate solving procedures for strong nonlinear oscillators is enlarged and a variety of procedures for solving free strong nonlinear oscillators is suggested. A method for error estimation is also given which is suitable to compare the exact and approximate solutions. Besides the oscillators with one degree-of-freedom, the one and two mass oscillatory systems with two-degrees-of-freedom and continuous oscillators are considered. The chaos and chaos suppression in ideal and non-ideal mechanical systems is explained. In this second edition more attention is given to the application of the suggested methodologies and obtained results to some practical problems in physics, mechanics, electronics and biomechanics. Thus, for the oscillator with two degrees-of-freedom, a generalization of the solving procedure is performed. Based on the obtained results, vibrations of the vocal cord are analyzed. In the book the vibration of the axially purely nonlinear rod as a continuous system is investigated. The developed solving procedure and the solutions are applied to discuss the muscle vibration. Vibrations of an optomechanical system are analyzed using the oscillations of an oscillator with odd or even quadratic nonlinearities. The extension of the forced vibrations of the system is realized by introducing the Ateb periodic excitation force which is the series of a trigonometric function. The book is self-consistent and suitable for researchers and as a textbook for students and also professionals and engineers who apply these techniques to the field of nonlinear oscillations.

Graduate students who wish to become familiar with advanced computational strategies in classical and quantum dynamics will find in this book both the fundamentals of a standard course and a detailed treatment of the time-dependent oscillator, Chern-Simons mechanics, the Maslov anomaly and the Berry phase, to name just a few topics. Well-chosen and detailed examples illustrate perturbation theory, canonical transformations and the action principle, and demonstrate the usage of path integrals. The fifth edition has been revised and enlarged to include chapters on quantum electrodynamics, in particular, Schwinger's proper time method and the treatment of classical and quantum mechanics with Lie brackets and pseudocanonical transformations. It is shown that operator quantum electrodynamics can be equivalently described with c-numbers, as demonstrated by calculating the propagation function for an electron in a prescribed classical electromagnetic field.

The second edition of this textbook provides a fully updated approach to fuzzy sets and systems that can model uncertainty - i.e., "type-2" fuzzy sets and systems. The author demonstrates how to overcome the limitations of classical fuzzy sets and systems, enabling a wide range of applications from time-series forecasting to knowledge mining to control. In this new edition, a bottom-up approach is presented that begins by introducing classical (type-1) fuzzy sets and systems, and then explains how they can be modified to handle uncertainty. The author covers fuzzy rule-based systems - from type-1 to interval type-2 to general type-2 - in one volume. For hands-on experience, the book provides information on accessing MatLab and Java software to complement the content. The book features a full suite of classroom material.

This monograph presents a graduate-level treatment of partial differential equations (PDEs) for engineers. The book begins with a review of the geometrical interpretation of systems of ODEs, the appearance of PDEs in engineering is motivated by the general form of balance laws in continuum physics. Four chapters are devoted to a detailed treatment of the single first-order PDE, including shock waves and genuinely non-linear models, with applications to traffic design and gas dynamics. The rest of the book deals with second-order equations. In the treatment of hyperbolic equations, geometric arguments are used whenever possible and the analogy with discrete vibrating systems is emphasized. The diffusion and potential equations afford the opportunity of dealing with questions of uniqueness and continuous dependence on the data, the Fourier integral, generalized functions (distributions), Duhamel's principle, Green's functions and Dirichlet and Neumann problems. The target audience primarily comprises graduate students in engineering, but the book may also be beneficial for lecturers, and research experts both in academia in industry.

This book presents the fundamentals of modern tensor calculus for students in engineering and applied physics, emphasizing those aspects that are crucial for applying tensor calculus safely in Euclidian space and for grasping the very essence of the smooth manifold concept. After introducing the subject, it provides a brief exposition on point set topology to familiarize readers with the subject, especially with those topics required in later chapters. It then describes the finite dimensional real vector space and its dual, focusing on the usefulness of the latter for encoding duality concepts in physics. Moreover, it introduces tensors as objects that encode linear mappings and discusses affine and Euclidean spaces. Tensor analysis is explored first in Euclidean space, starting from a generalization of the concept of differentiability and proceeding towards concepts such as directional derivative, covariant derivative and integration based on differential forms. The final chapter addresses the role of smooth manifolds in modeling spaces other than Euclidean space, particularly the concepts of smooth atlas and tangent space, which are crucial to understanding the topic. Two of the most important concepts, namely the tangent bundle and the Lie derivative, are subsequently worked out.

This book offers a concise introduction to morphogenetic computing, showing that its use makes global and local relations, defects in crystal non-Euclidean geometry databases with source and sink, genetic algorithms, and neural networks more stable and efficient. It also presents applications to database, language, nanotechnology with defects, biological genetic structure, electrical circuit, and big data structure. In Turing machines, input and output states form a system - when the system is in one state, the input is transformed into output. This computation is always deterministic and without any possible contradiction or defects. In natural computation there are defects and contradictions that have to be solved to give a coherent and effective computation. The new computation generates the morphology of the system that assumes different forms in time. Genetic process is the prototype of the morphogenetic computing. At the Boolean logic truth value, we substitute a set of truth (active sets) values with possible contradictions. The value of a proposition is a set of true and false values. The aim of morphogenetic computing is to use and solve the contradictions in order to transform systems to allow classical computation.

This book describes an effective method for modeling advanced materials like polymers, composite materials and biomaterials, which are, as a rule, inhomogeneous. The thermoelastic theory with internal variables presented here provides a general framework for predicting a material's reaction to external loading. The basic physical principles provide the primary theoretical information, including the evolution equations of the internal variables. The cornerstones of this framework are the material representation of continuum mechanics, a weak nonlocality, a non-zero extra entropy flux, and a consecutive employment of the dissipation inequality. Examples of thermoelastic phenomena are provided, accompanied by detailed procedures demonstrating how to simulate them.

This is the first book to introduce the irrational elliptic function series, providing a theoretical treatment for the smooth and discontinuous system and opening a new branch of applied mathematics. The discovery of the smooth and discontinuous (SD) oscillator and the SD attractors discussed in this book represents a further milestone in nonlinear dynamics, following on the discovery of the Ueda attractor in 1961 and Lorenz attractor in 1963. This particular system bears significant similarities to the Duffing oscillator, exhibiting the standard dynamics governed by the hyperbolic structure associated with the stationary state of the double well. However, there is a substantial departure in nonlinear dynamics from standard dynamics at the discontinuous stage. The constructed irrational elliptic function series, which offers a way to directly approach the nature dynamics analytically for both smooth and discontinuous behaviours including the unperturbed periodic motions and the perturbed chaotic attractors without any truncation, is of particular interest. Readers will also gain a deeper understanding of the actual nonlinear phenomena by means of a simple mechanical model: the theory, methodology, and the applications in various interlinked disciplines of sciences and engineering. This book offers a valuable resource for researchers, professionals and postgraduate students in mechanical engineering, non-linear dynamics, and related areas, such as nonlinear modelling in various fields of mathematics, physics and the engineering sciences.

This work is motivated by the ongoing open question of how information in the outside world is represented and processed by the brain. Consequently, several novel methods are developed. A new mathematical formulation is proposed for the encoding and decoding of analog signals using integrate-and-fire neuron models. Based on this formulation, a novel algorithm, significantly faster than the state-of-the-art method, is proposed for reconstructing the input of the neuron. Two new identification methods are proposed for neural circuits comprising a filter in series with a spiking neuron model. These methods reduce the number of assumptions made by the state-of-the-art identification framework, allowing for a wider range of models of sensory processing circuits to be inferred directly from input-output observations. A third contribution is an algorithm that computes the spike time sequence generated by an integrate-and-fire neuron model in response to the output of a linear filter, given the input of the filter encoded with the same neuron model.

This authored monograph provides a detailed discussion of the boundary layer flow due to a moving plate. The topical focus lies on the 2- and 3-dimensional case, considering axially symmetric and unsteady flows. The author derives a criterion for the self-similar and non-similar flow, and the turbulent flow due to a stretching or shrinking sheet is also discussed. The target audience primarily comprises research experts in the field of boundary layer flow, but the book will also be beneficial for graduate students.

This book introduces readers to the principles of laser interaction with biological cells and tissues with varying degrees of organization. In addition to considering the problems of biomedical cell diagnostics, and modeling the scattering of laser irradiation of blood cells for biological structures (dermis, epidermis, vascular plexus), it presents an analytic theory based on solving the wave equation for the electromagnetic field. It discusses a range of mathematical modeling topics, including optical characterization of biological tissue with large-scale and small-scale inhomogeneities in the layers; heating blood vessels using laser irradiation on the outer surface of the skin; and thermo-chemical denaturation of biological structures based on the example of human skin. In this second edition, a new electrodynamic model of the interaction of laser radiation with blood cells is presented for the structure of cells and the in vitro prediction of optical properties. The approach developed makes it possible to determine changes in cell size as well as modifications in their internal structures, such as transformation and polymorphism nucleus scattering, which is of interest for cytological studies. The new model is subsequently used to calculate the size distribution function of irregular-shape particles with a variety of forms and structures, which allows a cytological analysis of the observed deviations from normal cells.

This book reports on the latest advances in and applications of memristors, memristive devices and systems. It gathers 20 contributed chapters by subject experts, including pioneers in the field such as Leon Chua (UC Berkeley, USA) and R.S. Williams (HP Labs, USA), who are specialized in the various topics addressed in this book, and covers broad areas of memristors and memristive devices such as: memristor emulators, oscillators, chaotic and hyperchaotic memristive systems, control of memristive systems, memristor-based min-max circuits, canonic memristors, memristive-based neuromorphic applications, implementation of memristor-based chaotic oscillators, inverse memristors, linear memristor devices, delayed memristive systems, flux-controlled memristive emulators, etc. Throughout the book, special emphasis is given to papers offering practical solutions and design, modeling, and implementation insights to address current research problems in memristors, memristive devices and systems. As such, it offers a valuable reference book on memristors and memristive devices for graduate students and researchers with a basic knowledge of electrical and control systems engineering.

This book contributes to the developing dialogue between cognitive science and social sciences. It focuses on a central issue in both fields, i.e. the nature and the limitations of the rationality of beliefs and action. The development of cognitive science is one of the most important and fascinating intellectual advances of recent decades, and social scientists are paying increasing attention to the findings of this new branch of science that forces us to consider many classical issues related to epistemology and philosophy of action in a new light. Analysis of the concept of rationality is a leitmotiv in the history of the social sciences and has involved endless disputes. Since it is difficult to give a precise definition of this concept, and there is a lack of agreement about its meaning, it is possible to say that there is a 'mystery of rationality'. What is it to be rational? Is rationality merely instrumental or does it also involve the endorsement of values, i.e. the choice of goals? Should we consider rationality to be a normative principle or a descriptive one? Can rationality be only Cartesian or can it also be argumentative? Is rationality a conscious skill or a partly tacit one? This book, which has been written by an outstanding collection of authors, including both philosophers and social scientists, tries to make a useful contribution to the debates on these problems and shed some light on the mystery of rationality. The target audience primarily comprises researchers and experts in the field.

This landmark monograph presents the most recent mathematical developments in the analysis of ionospheric distortions of SAR images and offers innovative new strategies for their mitigation. As a prerequisite to addressing these topics, the book also discusses the radar ambiguity theory as it applies to synthetic aperture imaging and the propagation of radio waves through the ionospheric plasma, including the anisotropic and turbulent cases. In addition, it covers a host of related subjects, such as the mathematical modeling of extended radar targets (as opposed to point-wise targets) and the scattering of radio waves off those targets, as well as the theoretical analysis of the start-stop approximation, which is used routinely in SAR signal processing but often without proper justification. The mathematics in this volume is clean and rigorous - no assumptions are hidden or ambiguously stated. The resulting work is truly interdisciplinary, providing both a comprehensive and thorough exposition of the field, as well as an accurate account of a range of relevant physical processes and phenomena. The book is intended for applied mathematicians interested in the area of radar imaging or, more generally, remote sensing, as well as physicists and electrical/electronic engineers who develop/operate spaceborne SAR sensors and perform the data processing. The methods in the book are also useful for researchers and practitioners working on other types of imaging. Moreover, the book is accessible to graduate students in applied mathematics, physics, engineering, and related disciplines. Praise for Transionospheric Synthetic Aperture Imaging: "I perceive that this text will mark a turning point in the field of synthetic aperture radar research and practice. I believe this text will instigate a new era of more rigorous image formation relieving the research, development and practitioner communities of inconsistent physical assumptions and numerical approaches." - Richard Albanese, Senior Scientist, Albanese Defense and Energy Development LLC

There have been substantial developments in meshfree methods, particle methods, and generalized finite element methods since the mid 1990s. The growing interest in these methods is in part due to the fact that they offer extremely flexible numerical tools and can be interpreted in a number of ways. For instance, meshfree methods can be viewed as a natural extension of classical finite element and finite difference methods to scattered node configurations with no fixed connectivity. Furthermore, meshfree methods have a number of advantageous features that are especially attractive when dealing with multiscale phenomena: A-priori knowledge about the solution's particular local behavior can easily be introduced into the meshfree approximation space, and coarse scale approximations can be seamlessly refined by adding fine scale information. However, the implementation of meshfree methods and their parallelization also requires special attention, for instance with respect to numerical integration.

This work makes major contributions to the thriving area of social, communication, and distributed networks by introducing novel methodologies and tools toward the study of the evolutionary behaviors of these networks, as well as their computational complexity and rates of convergence. By departing from the classical approaches and results in the literature, this work shows that it is possible to handle more complex and realistic nonlinear models where either the traditional approaches fail or lead to weak results. The author also develops several easily implementable algorithms, delivering excellent performance guarantees while running faster than those that exist in the literature. The study undertaken and the approaches adopted enable the analysis of the evolution of several different types of social and distributed networks, with the potential to apply to and resolve several other outstanding issues in such networks.

This book is intended as a text for a one-semester course on Mathematical and Computational Neuroscience for upper-level undergraduate and beginning graduate students of mathematics, the natural sciences, engineering, or computer science. An undergraduate introduction to differential equations is more than enough mathematical background. Only a slim, high school-level background in physics is assumed, and none in biology. Topics include models of individual nerve cells and their dynamics, models of networks of neurons coupled by synapses and gap junctions, origins and functions of population rhythms in neuronal networks, and models of synaptic plasticity. An extensive online collection of Matlab programs generating the figures accompanies the book.

Partition functions arise in combinatorics and related problems of statistical physics as they encode in a succinct way the combinatorial structure of complicated systems. The main focus of the book is on efficient ways to compute (approximate) various partition functions, such as permanents, hafnians and their higher-dimensional versions, graph and hypergraph matching polynomials, the independence polynomial of a graph and partition functions enumerating 0-1 and integer points in polyhedra, which allows one to make algorithmic advances in otherwise intractable problems. The book unifies various, often quite recent, results scattered in the literature, concentrating on the three main approaches: scaling, interpolation and correlation decay. The prerequisites include moderate amounts of real and complex analysis and linear algebra, making the book accessible to advanced math and physics undergraduates.

This book presents the latest research in computational methods for modeling and simulating brain disorders. In particular, it shows how mathematical models can be used to study the relationship between a given disorder and the specific brain structure associated with that disorder. It also describes the emerging field of computational psychiatry, including the study of pathological behavior due to impaired functional connectivity, pathophysiological activity, and/or aberrant decision-making. Further, it discusses the data analysis techniques that will be required to analyze the increasing amount of data being generated about the brain. Lastly, the book offers some tips on the application of computational models in the field of quantitative systems pharmacology. Mainly written for computational scientists eager to discover new application fields for their model, this book also benefits neurologists and psychiatrists wanting to learn about new methods.

This contributed volume comprises research articles and reviews on topics connected to the mathematical modeling of cellular systems. These contributions cover signaling pathways, stochastic effects, cell motility and mechanics, pattern formation processes, as well as multi-scale approaches. All authors attended the workshop on "Modeling Cellular Systems" which took place in Heidelberg in October 2014. The target audience primarily comprises researchers and experts in the field, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

Instabilities of fluid flows and the associated transitions between different possible flow states provide a fascinating set of problems that have attracted researchers for over a hundred years. This book addresses state-of-the-art developments in numerical techniques for computational modelling of fluid instabilities and related bifurcation structures, as well as providing comprehensive reviews of recently solved challenging problems in the field.

This book systematically studies how game theory can be used to improve security in chemical industrial areas, capturing the intelligent interactions between security managers and potential adversaries. The recent unfortunate terrorist attacks on critical infrastructures show that adversaries are intelligent and strategic. Game theoretic models have been extensively used in some domains to model these strategic adversaries. However, there is a lack of such advanced models to be employed by chemical security managers. In this book, game theoretic models for protecting chemical plants as well as clusters are proposed. Different equilibrium concepts are explored, with user-friendly explanation of how to reflect them to realistic cases. Based on efficient analysis of the properties of security issues in chemical plants/clusters, models in this book are capable to support resources allocations, cost-effectiveness analysis, cooperation incentives and alike.

Mathematical methods and theories with interdisciplinary applications are presented in this book. The eighteen contributions presented in this Work have been written by eminent scientists; a few papers are based on talks which took place at the International Conference at the Hellenic Artillery School in May 2015. Each paper evaluates possible solutions to long-standing problems such as the solvability of the direct electromagnetic scattering problem, geometric approaches to cyber security, ellipsoid targeting with overlap, non-equilibrium solutions of dynamic networks, measuring ballistic dispersion, elliptic regularity theory for the numerical solution of variational problems, approximation theory for polynomials on the real line and the unit circle, complementarity and variational inequalities in electronics, new two-slope parameterized achievement scalarizing functions for nonlinear multiobjective optimization, and strong and weak convexity of closed sets in a Hilbert space. Graduate students, scientists, engineers and researchers in pure and applied mathematical sciences, operations research, engineering, and cyber security will find the interdisciplinary scientific perspectives useful to their overall understanding and further research.

This book provides a survey on different kinds of Feistel ciphers, with their definitions and mathematical/computational properties. Feistel ciphers are widely used in cryptography in order to obtain pseudorandom permutations and secret-key block ciphers. In Part 1, we describe Feistel ciphers and their variants. We also give a brief story of these ciphers and basic security results. In Part 2, we describe generic attacks on Feistel ciphers. In Part 3, we give results on DES and specific Feistel ciphers. Part 4 is devoted to improved security results. We also give results on indifferentiability and indistinguishability.