This volume contains the Proceedings of the 8th Italian Workshop on Neural Nets WIRN VIETRI-96, organized by the International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies "Eduardo R. Caianiello" and by the Societa Italiana Reti Neuroniche (SIREN). We would like to thank Professor L.B. Almeida who agreed to deliver an invited lecture which is included in these Proceedings. The spectrum of contributors and participants covers the activity of Italian research in the field and of some European groups. The highly qualified and motivated attendance is.proof of the interest with which this annual event has met in the Italian scientific community. Maria Marinaro Roberto Tagliaferri Organizing - Scientific Committee: B. Apolloni (Univ. Milano), A. Bertoni (Univ. Milano), D.o. Caviglia (Univ. Genova), P. Campadelli (Univ. Milano), M. Ceccarelli (CNR NapolD, A. Colla (ELSAG - Genova), M. Frixione (/lASS), C. Furlanello (IRST - Trento), G.M. Guazzo ( lASS), M. Gori (Univ. Firenze), F. Lauria (Univ. Napo/D, M. Marinaro (Univ. Salerno - flASS), F. Masulli (Univ. Genova), P. Morasso (Univ. Genova), G. Orlandi (Univ. Roma), E. Pasero (Politecnico Torino), A. Petrosino (CNR Napoli), M. Protasi (Univ. Roma Ilj, S. Rampone (/lASS), R. Serra (Gruppo Ferruzzi Ravenna), F. Sorbello (Univ. Palermo), R. Stefanel.1i (Politecnico Milano), R. Tagliaferri (Univ. Salerno), R. Vaccaro (CNR Napo/D."

The topic of level sets is currently very timely and useful for creating realistic 3-D images and animations. They are powerful numerical techniques for analyzing and computing interface motion in a host of application settings. In computer vision, it has been applied to stereo and segmentation, whereas in graphics it has been applied to the postproduction process of in-painting and 3-D model construction. Osher is co-inventor of the Level Set Methods, a pioneering framework introduced jointly with James Sethian from the University of Berkeley in 1998. This methodology has been used up to now to provide solutions to a wide application range not limited to image processing, computer vision, robotics, fluid mechanics, crystallography, lithography, and computer graphics. The topic is of great interest to advanced students, professors, and R&D professionals working in the areas of graphics (post-production), video-based surveillance, visual inspection, augmented reality, document image processing, and medical image processing. These techniques are already employed to provide solutions and products in the industry (Cognitech, Siemens, Philips, Focus Imaging). An essential compilation of survey chapters from the leading researchers in the field, emphasizing the applications of the methods. This book can be suitable for a short professional course related with the processing of visual information.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Human Behavior Understanding, HBU 2011, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in November 2011, in conjunction with AmI-11, the International Joint Conference on Ambient Intelligence.
The 13 revised full papers presented together with 2 keynote talks and one summarizing paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 32 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on analysis of human actions and activities, face and gesture analysis, persuasive technologies, and social interactions.

Unique blend of asymptotic theory and small sample practice through simulation experiments and data analysis.

Novel reproducing kernel Hilbert space methods for the analysis of smoothing splines and local polynomials. Leading to uniform error bounds and honest confidence bands for the mean function using smoothing splines

Exhaustive exposition of algorithms, including the Kalman filter, for the computation of smoothing splines of arbitrary order.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics, PRIB 2011, held in Delft, The Netherlands, in November 2011. The 29 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 35 submissions. The papers cover the wide range of possible applications of bioinformatics in pattern recognition: novel algorithms to handle traditional pattern recognition problems such as (bi)clustering, classification and feature selection; applications of (novel) pattern recognition techniques to infer and analyze biological networks and studies on specific problems such as biological image analysis and the relation between sequence and structure. They are organized in the following topical sections: clustering, biomarker selection and classification, network inference and analysis, image analysis, and sequence, structure, and interactions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Artificial Immune Systems, ICARIS 2011, held in Cambridge, UK, in July 2011. The 37 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on immunoinformatics and computational immunology; theory of immunological computation; and applied immunological computation.

The book presents new clustering schemes, dynamical systems and pattern recognition algorithms in geophysical, geodynamical and natural hazard applications. The original mathematical technique is based on both classical and fuzzy sets models. Geophysical and natural hazard applications are mostly original. However, the artificial intelligence technique described in the book can be applied far beyond the limits of Earth science applications. The book is intended for research scientists, tutors, graduate students, scientists in geophysics and engineers

The 30 coherently written chapters by leading researchers presented in this anthology are devoted to basic results achieved in computational intelligence since 1997. The book provides complete coverage of the core issues in the field, especially in fuzzy logic and control as well as for evolutionary optimization algorithms including genetic programming, in a comprehensive and systematic way. Theoretical and methodological investigations are complemented by prototypic applications for design and management tasks in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and chemical engineering.
This book will become a valuable source of reference for researchers active in computational intelligence. Advanced students and professionals interested in learning about and applying advanced techniques of computational intelligence will appreciate the book as a useful guide enhanced by numerous examples and applications in a variety of fields.

In recent years probabilistic graphical models, especially Bayesian networks and decision graphs, have experienced significant theoretical development within areas such as artificial intelligence and statistics. This carefully edited monograph is a compendium of the most recent advances in the area of probabilistic graphical models such as decision graphs, learning from data and inference. It presents a survey of the state of the art of specific topics of recent interest of Bayesian Networks, including approximate propagation, abductive inferences, decision graphs, and applications of influence. In addition, Advances in Bayesian Networks presents a careful selection of applications of probabilistic graphical models to various fields such as speech recognition, meteorology or information retrieval.

This book is one outcome of the NATO Advanced Studies Institute (ASI) Workshop, "Speechreading by Man and Machine," held at the Chateau de Bonas, Castera-Verduzan (near Auch, France) from August 28 to Septem ber 8, 1995 - the first interdisciplinary meeting devoted the subject of speechreading ("lipreading"). The forty-five attendees from twelve countries covered the gamut of speechreading research, from brain scans of humans processing bi-modal stimuli, to psychophysical experiments and illusions, to statistics of comprehension by the normal and deaf communities, to models of human perception, to computer vision and learning algorithms and hardware for automated speechreading machines. The first week focussed on speechreading by humans, the second week by machines, a general organization that is preserved in this volume. After the in evitable difficulties in clarifying language and terminology across disciplines as diverse as human neurophysiology, audiology, psychology, electrical en gineering, mathematics, and computer science, the participants engaged in lively discussion and debate. We think it is fair to say that there was an atmosphere of excitement and optimism for a field that is both fascinating and potentially lucrative. Of the many general results that can be taken from the workshop, two of the key ones are these: * The ways in which humans employ visual image for speech recogni tion are manifold and complex, and depend upon the talker-perceiver pair, severity and age of onset of any hearing loss, whether the topic of conversation is known or unknown, the level of noise, and so forth.

Science has made great progress in the twentieth century, with the establishment of proper disciplines in the fields of physics, computer science, molecular biology, and many others. At the same time, there have also emerged many engineering ideas that are interdisciplinary in nature, beyond the realm of such orthodox disciplines. These in clude, for example, artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic, artificial neural networks, evolutional computation, data mining, and so on. In or der to generate new technology that is truly human-friendly in the twenty-first century, integration of various methods beyond specific disciplines is required. Soft computing is a key concept for the creation of such human friendly technology in our modern information society. Professor Rutkowski is a pioneer in this field, having devoted himself for many years to publishing a large variety of original work. The present vol ume, based mostly on his own work, is a milestone in the devel opment of soft computing, integrating various disciplines from the fields of information science and engineering. The book consists of three parts, the first of which is devoted to probabilistic neural net works. Neural excitation is stochastic, so it is natural to investi gate the Bayesian properties of connectionist structures developed by Professor Rutkowski. This new approach has proven to be par ticularly useful for handling regression and classification problems vi Preface in time-varying environments. Throughout this book, major themes are selected from theoretical subjects that are tightly connected with challenging applications."

This book presents a novel approach to neural nets and thus offers a genuine alternative to the hitherto known neuro-computers. The new edition includes a section on transformation properties of the equations of the synergetic computer and on the invariance properties of the order parameter equations. Further additions are a new section on stereopsis and recent developments in the use of pulse-coupled neural nets for pattern recognition.

Evolutionary Computation (EC) techniques are e?cient, nature-inspired me- ods based on the principles of natural evolution and genetics. Due to their - ciency and simple underlying principles, these methods can be used for a diverse rangeofactivitiesincludingproblemsolving,optimization,machinelearningand pattern recognition. A large and continuously increasing number of researchers and professionals make use of EC techniques in various application domains. This volume presents a careful selection of relevant EC examples combined with a thorough examination of the techniques used in EC. The papers in the volume illustrate the current state of the art in the application of EC and should help and inspire researchers and professionals to develop e?cient EC methods for design and problem solving. All papers in this book were presented during EvoApplications 2010, which included a range of events on application-oriented aspects of EC. Since 1998, EvoApplications - formerly known as EvoWorkshops- has provided a unique opportunity for EC researchers to meet and discuss application aspects of EC and has been an important link between EC research and its application in a variety of domains. During these 12 years, new events have arisen, some have disappeared,whileothershavematuredtobecomeconferencesoftheirown,such as EuroGP in 2000, EvoCOP in 2004, and EvoBIO in 2007. And from this year, EvoApplications has become a conference as well.

The fields of image analysis, computer vision, and artificial intelligence all make use of descriptions of shape in grey-level images. Most existing algorithms for the automatic recognition and classification of particular shapes have been devel oped for specific purposes, with the result that these methods are often restricted in their application. The use of advanced and theoretically well-founded math ematical methods should lead to the construction of robust shape descriptors having more general application. Shape description can be regarded as a meeting point of vision research, mathematics, computing science, and the application fields of image analy sis, computer vision, and artificial intelligence. The NATO Advanced Research Workshop "Shape in Picture" was organised with a twofold objective: first, it should provide all participants with an overview of relevant developments in these different disciplines; second, it should stimulate researchers to exchange original results and ideas across the boundaries of these disciplines. This book comprises a widely drawn selection of papers presented at the workshop, and many contributions have been revised to reflect further progress in the field. The focus of this collection is on mathematical approaches to the construction of shape descriptions from grey-level images. The book is divided into five parts, each devoted to a different discipline. Each part contains papers that have tutorial sections; these are intended to assist the reader in becoming acquainted with the variety of approaches to the problem."

The related fields of fractal image encoding and fractal image analysis have blossomed in recent years. This book, originating from a NATO Advanced Study Institute held in 1995, presents work by leading researchers. It is developing the subjects at an introductory level, but it also has some recent and exciting results in both fields.
The book contains a thorough discussion of fractal image compression and decompression, including both continuous and discrete formulations, vector space and hierarchical methods, and algorithmic optimizations. The book also discusses multifractal approaches to image analysis, segmentation, and recognition, including medical applications.

This is the second edition of the comprehensive treatment of statistical inference using permutation techniques. It makes available to practitioners a variety of useful and powerful data analytic tools that rely on very few distributional assumptions. Although many of these procedures have appeared in journal articles, they are not readily available to practitioners. This new and updated edition places increased emphasis on the use of alternative permutation statistical tests based on metric Euclidean distance functions that have excellent robustness characteristics. These alternative permutation techniques provide many powerful multivariate tests including multivariate multiple regression analyses.

This book is a groundbreaking resource that covers both algorithms and technologies of interactive videos. It presents recent research and application work for building and browsing interactive digital videos. The book deals mainly with low-level semi-automatic and full-automatic processing of the video content for intelligent human computer interaction. There is a special focus on eye tracking methods.

Multimodal Video Characterization and Summarization is a valuable research tool for both professionals and academicians working in the video field.

This book describes the methodology for using multimodal audio, image, and text technology to characterize video content. This new and groundbreaking science has led to many advances in video understanding, such as the development of a video summary. Applications and methodology for creating video summaries are described, as well as user-studies for evaluation and testing.

This book covers content recognition in text, elaborating on past and current most successful algorithms and their application in a variety of settings: news filtering, mining of biomedical text, intelligence gathering, competitive intelligence, legal information searching, and processing of informal text. Today, there is considerable interest in integrating the results of information extraction in retrieval systems, because of the demand for search engines that return precise answers to flexible information queries.

The two-volume proceedings, LNCS 6927 and LNCS 6928, constitute the papers presented at the 13th International Conference on Computer Aided Systems Theory, EUROCAST 2011, held in February 2011 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. The total of 160 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the books. The contributions are organized in topical sections on concepts and formal tools; software applications; computation and simulation in modelling biological systems; intelligent information processing; heurist problem solving; computer aided systems optimization; model-based system design, simulation, and verification; computer vision and image processing; modelling and control of mechatronic systems; biomimetic software systems; computer-based methods for clinical and academic medicine; modeling and design of complex digital systems; mobile and autonomous transportation systems; traffic behaviour, modelling and optimization; mobile computing platforms and technologies; and engineering systems applications.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of five international workshops held in conjunction with PAKDD 2011 in Shenzhen, China, in May 2011: the International Workshop on Behavior Informatics (BI 2011), the Workshop on Quality Issues, Measures of Interestingness and Evaluation of Data Mining Models (QIMIE 2011), the Workshop on Biologically Inspired Techniques for Data Mining (BDM 2011), the Workshop on Advances and Issues in Traditional Chinese Medicine Clinical Data Mining (AI-TCM 2011), and the Second Workshop on Data Mining for Healthcare Management (DMGHM 2011). The book also includes papers from the First PAKDD Doctoral Symposium on Data Mining (DSDM 2011). The 42 papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics discussing emerging techniques in the field of knowledge discovery in databases and their application domains extending to previously unexplored areas such as data mining based on optimization techniques from biological behavior of animals and applications in Traditional Chinese Medicine clinical research and health care management.

Entropy Guided Transformation Learning: Algorithms and Applications (ETL) presents a machine learning algorithm for classification tasks. ETL generalizes Transformation Based Learning (TBL) by solving the TBL bottleneck: the construction of good template sets. ETL automatically generates templates using Decision Tree decomposition.

The authors describe ETL Committee, an ensemble method that uses ETL as the base learner. Experimental results show that ETL Committee improves the effectiveness of ETL classifiers. The application of ETL is presented to four Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks: part-of-speech tagging, phrase chunking, named entity recognition and semantic role labeling. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that ETL is an effective way to learn accurate transformation rules, and shows better results than TBL with handcrafted templates for the four tasks. By avoiding the use of handcrafted templates, ETL enables the use of transformation rules to a greater range of tasks.

Suitable for both advanced undergraduate and graduate courses, Entropy Guided Transformation Learning: Algorithms and Applications provides a comprehensive introduction to ETL and its NLP applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Digital Image Processing and Pattern Recognition, DPPR 2011, held in Tirunelveli, India, in September 2011. The 48 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from about 400 submissions. The conference brought together leading researchers, engineers and scientists in the domain of Digital Image Processing and Pattern Recognition. The papers cover all theoretical and practical aspects of the field and present new advances and current research results in two tracks, namely: digital image processing and pattern recognition, and computer science, engineering and information technology.

Biometrics is becoming increasingly common in establishments that require high security such as state security and financial sectors. The increased threat to national security by terrorists has led to the explosive popularity of biometrics. Biometric devices are now available to capture biometric measurements such as fingerprints, palm, retinal scans, keystroke, voice recognition and facial scanning. However, the accuracy of these measurements varies, which has a direct relevance on the levels of security they offer. With the need to combat the problems related to identify theft and other security issues, society will have to compromise between security and personal freedoms. Securing Biometrics Applications investigates and identifies key impacts of biometric security applications, while discovering opportunities and challenges presented by the biometric technologies available.

This book presents the most recent achievements in some rapidly developing fields within Computer Science. This includes the very latest research in biometrics and computer security systems, and descriptions of the latest inroads in artificial intelligence applications. The book contains over 30 articles by well-known scientists and engineers. The articles are extended versions of works introduced at the ACS-CISIM 2005 conference.