This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Fourth Computer Games Workshop, CGW 2015, and the Fourth Workshop on General Intelligence in Game-Playing Agents, GIGA 2015, held in conjunction with the 24th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2015, Buenos Aires, Argentina, in July 2015.The 12 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. The papers address all aspects of artificial intelligence and computer game playing. They discuss topics such as Monte-Carlo methods; heuristic search; board games; card games; video games; perfect and imperfect information games; puzzles and single player games; multi-player games; combinatorial game theory; applications; computational creativity; computational game theory; evaluation and analysis; game design; knowledge representation; machine learning; multi-agent systems; opponent modeling; planning; reasoning; search.

This book contains the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Modeling and Simulation in Engineering, Economics and Management, MS 2016, held in Teruel, Spain, in July 2016. The event was co-organized by the AMSE Association and the University of Zaragoza through the GESES Research Group, with the support of the SoGReS-MF Research Group from University Jaume I. This edition of the conference paid special attention to modeling and simulation in diverse fields of business management. The 20 papers in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 52 submissions. They are organized in topical sections on modeling and simulation in finance and accounting; modeling and simulation in business management and economy; and engineering and other general applications.

This book presents the algorithms used to provide recommendations by exploiting matrix factorization and tensor decomposition techniques. It highlights well-known decomposition methods for recommender systems, such as Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), UV-decomposition, Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), etc. and describes in detail the pros and cons of each method for matrices and tensors. This book provides a detailed theoretical mathematical background of matrix/tensor factorization techniques and a step-by-step analysis of each method on the basis of an integrated toy example that runs throughout all its chapters and helps the reader to understand the key differences among methods. It also contains two chapters, where different matrix and tensor methods are compared experimentally on real data sets, such as Epinions, GeoSocialRec, Last.fm, BibSonomy, etc. and provides further insights into the advantages and disadvantages of each method. The book offers a rich blend of theory and practice, making it suitable for students, researchers and practitioners interested in both recommenders and factorization methods. Lecturers can also use it for classes on data mining, recommender systems and dimensionality reduction methods.

Thomas Hubauer addresses the challenge of providing reasonable interpretations of incomplete observational data in the context of imperfect domain models - a situation often encountered in the context of industrial diagnostics. To tackle this problem, the author proposes a novel approach called Relaxed Abduction, which is able to derive pragmatic interpretations in situations where existing methods either fail or provide overly complex solutions. To strengthen the link to applications in industrial diagnostics, he develops a methodology to structure diagnosis problems according to ISO 13379 and express it using multiple description logic knowledge bases.

This book describes a novel methodology for studying algorithmic skills, intended as cognitive activities related to rule-based symbolic transformation, and argues that some human computational abilities may be interpreted and analyzed as genuine examples of extended cognition. It shows that the performance of these abilities relies not only on innate neurocognitive systems or language-related skills, but also on external tools and general agent-environment interactions. Further, it asserts that a low-level analysis, based on a set of core neurocognitive systems linking numbers and language, is not sufficient to explain some specific forms of high-level numerical skills, like those involved in algorithm execution. To this end, it reports on the design of a cognitive architecture for modeling all the relevant features involved in the execution of algorithmic strategies, including external tools, such as paper and pencils. The first part of the book discusses the philosophical premises for endorsing and justifying a position in philosophy of mind that links a modified form of computationalism with some recent theoretical and scientific developments, like those introduced by the so-called dynamical approach to cognition. The second part is dedicated to the description of a Turing-machine-inspired cognitive architecture, expressly designed to formalize all kinds of algorithmic strategies.

This book constitutes the revised selected papers of the 10th Italian Workshop on Advances in Artificial Life, Evolutionary Computation and Systems Chemistry, WIVACE 2015, held at Bari, Italy, in September 2015. The 18 papers presented have been thoroughly reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. They cover the following topics: evolutionary computation, bioinspired algorithms, genetic algorithms, bioinformatics and computational biology, modeling and simulation of artificial and biological systems, complex systems, synthetic and systems biology, systems chemistry.

This book offers an in-depth insight into the general-purpose finite element program MSC Marc, which is distributed by MSC Software Corporation. It is a specialized program for nonlinear problems (implicit solver) which is common in academia and industry. The primary goal of this book is to provide a comprehensive introduction to a special feature of this software: the user can write user-subroutines in the programming language Fortran, which is the language of all classical finite element packages. This subroutine feature allows the user to replace certain modules of the core code and to implement new features such as constitutive laws or new elements. Thus, the functionality of commercial codes ('black box') can easily be extended by linking user written code to the main core of the program. This feature allows to take advantage of a commercial software package with the flexibility of a 'semi-open' code.

This book compares the performance of various evolutionary computation (EC) techniques when they are faced with complex optimization problems extracted from different engineering domains. Particularly focusing on recently developed algorithms, it is designed so that each chapter can be read independently. Several comparisons among EC techniques have been reported in the literature, however, they all suffer from one limitation: their conclusions are based on the performance of popular evolutionary approaches over a set of synthetic functions with exact solutions and well-known behaviors, without considering the application context or including recent developments. In each chapter, a complex engineering optimization problem is posed, and then a particular EC technique is presented as the best choice, according to its search characteristics. Lastly, a set of experiments is conducted in order to compare its performance to other popular EC methods.

This book addresses agent-based computing, concentrating in particular on evolutionary multi-agent systems (EMAS), which have been developed since 1996 at the AGH University of Science and Technology in Cracow, Poland. It provides the relevant background information on and a detailed description of this computing paradigm, along with key experimental results. Readers will benefit from the insightful discussion, which primarily concerns the efficient implementation of computing frameworks for developing EMAS and similar computing systems, as well as a detailed formal model. Theoretical deliberations demonstrating that computing with EMAS always helps to find the optimal solution are also included, rounding out the coverage.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures, FOSSACS 2016, which took place in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in April 2016, held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2016. The 31 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 85 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: types; recursion and fixed-points; verification and program analysis; automata, logic, games; probabilistic and timed systems; proof theory and lambda calculus; algorithms for infinite systems; and monads.

This timely text presents a comprehensive overview of fault tolerance techniques for high-performance computing (HPC). The text opens with a detailed introduction to the concepts of checkpoint protocols and scheduling algorithms, prediction, replication, silent error detection and correction, together with some application-specific techniques such as ABFT. Emphasis is placed on analytical performance models. This is then followed by a review of general-purpose techniques, including several checkpoint and rollback recovery protocols. Relevant execution scenarios are also evaluated and compared through quantitative models. Features: provides a survey of resilience methods and performance models; examines the various sources for errors and faults in large-scale systems; reviews the spectrum of techniques that can be applied to design a fault-tolerant MPI; investigates different approaches to replication; discusses the challenge of energy consumption of fault-tolerance methods in extreme-scale systems.

This new edition includes the latest advances and developments in computational probability involving A Probability Programming Language (APPL). The book examines and presents, in a systematic manner, computational probability methods that encompass data structures and algorithms. The developed techniques address problems that require exact probability calculations, many of which have been considered intractable in the past. The book addresses the plight of the probabilist by providing algorithms to perform calculations associated with random variables. Computational Probability: Algorithms and Applications in the Mathematical Sciences, 2nd Edition begins with an introductory chapter that contains short examples involving the elementary use of APPL. Chapter 2 reviews the Maple data structures and functions necessary to implement APPL. This is followed by a discussion of the development of the data structures and algorithms (Chapters 3-6 for continuous random variables and Chapters 7-9 for discrete random variables) used in APPL. The book concludes with Chapters 10-15 introducing a sampling of various applications in the mathematical sciences. This book should appeal to researchers in the mathematical sciences with an interest in applied probability and instructors using the book for a special topics course in computational probability taught in a mathematics, statistics, operations research, management science, or industrial engineering department.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods, ICFEM 2016, held in Tokyo, Japan, in November 2016. The 27 revised full papers presented together with three invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 64 submissions. The conference focuses in all areas related to formal engineering meth-ods, such as verification and validation, software engineering, formal specification and modeling, software security, and software reliability.

This focuses on the developing field of building probability models with the power of symbolic algebra systems. The book combines the uses of symbolic algebra with probabilistic/stochastic application and highlights the applications in a variety of contexts. The research explored in each chapter is unified by the use of A Probability Programming Language (APPL) to achieve the modeling objectives. APPL, as a research tool, enables a probabilist or statistician the ability to explore new ideas, methods, and models. Furthermore, as an open-source language, it sets the foundation for future algorithms to augment the original code. Computational Probability Applications is comprised of fifteen chapters, each presenting a specific application of computational probability using the APPL modeling and computer language. The chapter topics include using inverse gamma as a survival distribution, linear approximations of probability density functions, and also moment-ratio diagrams for univariate distributions. These works highlight interesting examples, often done by undergraduate students and graduate students that can serve as templates for future work. In addition, this book should appeal to researchers and practitioners in a range of fields including probability, statistics, engineering, finance, neuroscience, and economics.

In this essay collection, leading physicists, philosophers, and historians attempt to fill the empty theoretical ground in the foundations of information and address the related question of the limits to our knowledge of the world. Over recent decades, our practical approach to information and its exploitation has radically outpaced our theoretical understanding - to such a degree that reflection on the foundations may seem futile. But it is exactly fields such as quantum information, which are shifting the boundaries of the physically possible, that make a foundational understanding of information increasingly important. One of the recurring themes of the book is the claim by Eddington and Wheeler that information involves interaction and putting agents or observers centre stage. Thus, physical reality, in their view, is shaped by the questions we choose to put to it and is built up from the information residing at its core. This is the root of Wheeler's famous phrase "it from bit." After reading the stimulating essays collected in this volume, readers will be in a good position to decide whether they agree with this view.

Introduces the basic concepts and characteristics of string pattern matching strategies and provides numerous references for further reading.

The text describes and evaluates the BF, KMP, BM, and KR algorithms, discusses improvements for string pattern matching machines, and details a technique for detecting and removing the redundant operation of the AC machine. Also explored are typical problems in approximate string matching . In addition, the reader will find a description for applying string pattern matching algorithms to multidimensional matching problems, an investigation of numerous hardware-based solutions for pattern matching, and an examination of hardware approaches for full text search.

The first chapter's survey paper describes the basic concepts of algorithm classifications. The five chapters that follow include 15 papers further illustrating these classifications: Single keyword matching Matching sets of keywords Approximate string matching Multidimensional matching Hardware matching

This book considers specific inferential issues arising from the analysis of dynamic shapes with the attempt to solve the problems at hand using probability models and nonparametric tests. The models are simple to understand and interpret and provide a useful tool to describe the global dynamics of the landmark configurations. However, because of the non-Euclidean nature of shape spaces, distributions in shape spaces are not straightforward to obtain. The book explores the use of the Gaussian distribution in the configuration space, with similarity transformations integrated out. Specifically, it works with the offset-normal shape distribution as a probability model for statistical inference on a sample of a temporal sequence of landmark configurations. This enables inference for Gaussian processes from configurations onto the shape space. The book is divided in two parts, with the first three chapters covering material on the offset-normal shape distribution, and the remaining chapters covering the theory of NonParametric Combination (NPC) tests. The chapters offer a collection of applications which are bound together by the theme of this book. They refer to the analysis of data from the FG-NET (Face and Gesture Recognition Research Network) database with facial expressions. For these data, it may be desirable to provide a description of the dynamics of the expressions, or testing whether there is a difference between the dynamics of two facial expressions or testing which of the landmarks are more informative in explaining the pattern of an expression.

This book presents the basics of quantum information, e.g., foundation of quantum theory, quantum algorithms, quantum entanglement, quantum entropies, quantum coding, quantum error correction and quantum cryptography. The required knowledge is only elementary calculus and linear algebra. This way the book can be understood by undergraduate students. In order to study quantum information, one usually has to study the foundation of quantum theory. This book describes it from more an operational viewpoint which is suitable for quantum information while traditional textbooks of quantum theory lack this viewpoint. The current book bases on Shor's algorithm, Grover's algorithm, Deutsch-Jozsa's algorithm as basic algorithms. To treat several topics in quantum information, this book covers several kinds of information quantities in quantum systems including von Neumann entropy. The limits of several kinds of quantum information processing are given. As important quantum protocols, this book contains quantum teleportation, quantum dense coding, quantum data compression. In particular conversion theory of entanglement via local operation and classical communication are treated too. This theory provides the quantification of entanglement, which coincides with von Neumann entropy. The next part treats the quantum hypothesis testing. The decision problem of two candidates of the unknown state are given. The asymptotic performance of this problem is characterized by information quantities. Using this result, the optimal performance of classical information transmission via noisy quantum channel is derived. Quantum information transmission via noisy quantum channel by quantum error correction are discussed too. Based on this topic, the secure quantum communication is explained. In particular, the quantification of quantum security which has not been treated in existing book is explained. This book treats quantum cryptography from a more practical viewpoint.

This book explains music's comprehensive ontology, its way of existence and processing, as specified in its compact characterization: music embodies meaningful communication and mediates physically between its emotional and mental layers. The book unfolds in a basic discourse in everyday language that is accessible to everybody who wants to understand what this topic is about. Musical ontology is delayed in its fundamental dimensions: its realities, its meaningful communication, and its embodied utterance from musical creators to an interested audience. The authors' approach is applicable to every musical genre and is scientific, the book is suitable for non-musicians and non-scientists alike.

This self-contained essay collection is published to commemorate half a century of Bell's theorem. Like its much acclaimed predecessor "Quantum [Un]Speakables: From Bell to Quantum Information" (published 2002), it comprises essays by many of the worlds leading quantum physicists and philosophers. These revisit the foundations of quantum theory as well as elucidating the remarkable progress in quantum technologies achieved in the last couple of decades. Fundamental concepts such as entanglement, nonlocality and contextuality are described in an accessible manner and, alongside lively descriptions of the various theoretical and experimental approaches, the book also delivers interesting philosophical insights. The collection as a whole will serve as a broad introduction for students and newcomers as well as delighting the scientifically literate general reader.

The papers in this volume represent a broad, applied swath of advanced contributions to the 2015 ICSA/Graybill Applied Statistics Symposium of the International Chinese Statistical Association, held at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. The contributions cover topics that range from statistical applications in business and finance to applications in clinical trials and biomarker analysis. Each papers was peer-reviewed by at least two referees and also by an editor. The conference was attended by over 400 participants from academia, industry, and government agencies around the world, including from North America, Asia, and Europe.

In this book the authors present new results on interpolation for nonmonotonic logics, abstract (function) independence, the Talmudic Kal Vachomer rule, and an equational solution of contrary-to-duty obligations. The chapter on formal construction is the conceptual core of the book, where the authors combine the ideas of several types of nonmonotonic logics and their analysis of 'natural' concepts into a formal logic, a special preferential construction that combines formal clarity with the intuitive advantages of Reiter defaults, defeasible inheritance, theory revision, and epistemic considerations. It is suitable for researchers in the area of computer science and mathematical logic.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Approximation and Online Algorithms, WAOA 2015, held in Patras, Greece, in September 2015 as part of ALGO 2015. The 17 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. Topics of interest for WAOA 2015 were: algorithmic game theory, algorithmic trading, coloring and partitioning, competitive analysis, computational advertising, computational finance, cuts and connectivity, geometric problems, graph algorithms, inapproximability, mechanism design, natural algorithms, network design, packing and covering, paradigms for the design and analysis of approximation and online algorithms, parameterized complexity, scheduling problems,and real-world applications.

This book is a comprehensive, systematic survey of the synthesis problem, and of region theory which underlies its solution, covering the related theory, algorithms, and applications. The authors focus on safe Petri nets and place/transition nets (P/T-nets), treating synthesis as an automated process which, given behavioural specifications or partial specifications of a system to be realized, decides whether the specifications are feasible, and then produces a Petri net realizing them exactly, or if this is not possible produces a Petri net realizing an optimal approximation of the specifications. In Part I the authors introduce elementary net synthesis. In Part II they explain variations of elementary net synthesis and the unified theory of net synthesis. The first three chapters of Part III address the linear algebraic structure of regions, synthesis of P/T-nets from finite initialized transition systems, and the synthesis of unbounded P/T-nets. Finally, the last chapter in Part III and the chapters in Part IV cover more advanced topics and applications: P/T-net with the step firing rule, extracting concurrency from transition systems, process discovery, supervisory control, and the design of speed-independent circuits. Most chapters conclude with exercises, and the book is a valuable reference for both graduate students of computer science and electrical engineering and researchers and engineers in this domain.

This text offers an extension to the traditional Kripke semantics for non-classical logics by adding the notion of reactivity. Reactive Kripke models change their accessibility relation as we progress in the evaluation process of formulas in the model. This feature makes the reactive Kripke semantics strictly stronger and more applicable than the traditional one. Here we investigate the properties and axiomatisations of this new and most effective semantics, and we offer a wide landscape of applications of the idea of reactivity. Applied topics include reactive automata, reactive grammars, reactive products, reactive deontic logic and reactive preferential structures. Reactive Kripke semantics is the next step in the evolution of possible world semantics for non-classical logics, and this book, written by one of the leading authorities in the field, is essential reading for graduate students and researchers in applied logic, and it offers many research opportunities for PhD students.