th This two-volume set constitutes the Proceedings of the 16 International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP 2009), held in Bangkok, Thailand, during December 1-5, 2009. ICONIP is a world-renowned international conference that is held annually in the Asia-Pacific region. This prestigious event is sponsored by the Asia Pacific Neural Network Assembly (APNNA), and it has provided an annual forum for international researchers to exchange the latest ideas and advances in neural networks and related discipline. The School of Information Technology (SIT) at King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT), Bangkok, Thailand was the proud host of ICONIP 2009. The conference theme was "Challenges and Trends of Neural Information Processing," with an aim to discuss the past, present, and future challenges and trends in the field of neural information processing. ICONIP 2009 accepted 145 regular session papers and 53 special session papers from a total of 466 submissions received on the Springer Online Conference Service (OCS) system. The authors of accepted papers alone covered 36 countries and - gions worldwide and there are over 500 authors in these proceedings. The technical sessions were divided into 23 topical categories, including 9 special sessions.

Following two successful events in Guilin, People's Republic of China (KSEM 2006) and in Melbourne, Australia (KSEM 2007) the third event in this conference series was held for the first time in Europe, namely, in Vienna, Austria. KSEM 2009 aimed to be a communication platform and meeting ground for research on knowledge science, engineering and management, attracting high-quality, state-of-the-art publications from all over the world. It offers an exceptional opportunity for presenting original work, technological advances, practical problems and concerns of the research community. The importance of studying "knowledge" from different viewpoints such as science, engineering and management has been widely acknowledged. The accelerating pace of the "Internet age" challenges organizations to compress communication and innovation cycles to achieve a faster return on investment for knowledge. Thus, next-generation business solutions must be focused on supporting the creation of value by adding knowledge-rich components as an integral part to the work process. Therefore, an integrated approach is needed, which combines issues from a large array of knowledge fields such as science, engineering and management. Based on the reviews by the members of the Program Committee and the additional reviewers, 42 papers were selected for this year's conference. Additionally, two discussion panels dealing with "Knowware: The Third Star after Hardware and Software" and "Required Knowledge for Delivering Services" took place under the auspices of the conference. The papers and the discussions covered a great variety of approaches of knowledge science, management and engineering, thus making KSEM a unique conference.

The Radial Basis Function (RBF) network has gained in popularity in recent years. This is due to its desirable properties in classification and functional approximation applications, accompanied by training that is more rapid than that of many other neural-network techniques. RBF network research has focused on enhanced training algorithms and variations on the basic architecture to improve the performance of the network. In addition, the RBF network is proving to be a valuable tool in a diverse range of applications areas, for example, robotics, biomedical engineering, and the financial sector. The two-title series Theory and Applications of Radial Basis Function Networks provides a comprehensive survey of recent RBF network research. This volume, New Advances in Design, contains a wide range of applications in the laboratory and case-studies describing current use. The sister volume to this one, Recent Developments in Theory and Applications, covers advances in training algorithms, variations on the architecture and function of the basis neurons, and hybrid paradigms. The combination of the two volumes will prove extremely useful to practitioners in the field, engineers, researchers, students and technically accomplished managers.

The 14th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition (CIARP 2009, C- gresoIberoAmericanodeReconocimientodePatrones)formedthelatestofanow longseriesofsuccessfulmeetingsarrangedbytherapidlygrowingIberoamerican pattern recognition community. The conference was held in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico and organized by the Mexican Association for Computer Vision, Neural Computing and Robotics (MACVNR). It was sponsodred by MACVNR and ?ve other Iberoamerican PR societies. CIARP 2009 was like the previous conferences in the series supported by the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). CIARP 2009 attracted participants from all over the world presenting sta- of-the-artresearchon mathematical methods and computing techniques for p- tern recognition, computer vision, image and signal analysis, robot vision, and speech recognition, as well as on a wide range of their applications. This time the conference attracted participants from 23 countries,9 in Ibe- america, and 14 from other parts of the world. The total number of submitted papers was 187, and after a serious review process 108 papers were accepted, all of them with a scienti?c quality above overall mean rating. Sixty-four were selected as oral presentations and 44 as posters. Since 2008 the conference is almost single track, and therefore there was no real grading in quality between oral and poster papers. As an acknowledgment that CIARP has established itself as a high-quality conference, its proceedings appear in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Moreover, its visibility is further enhanced by a selection of a set of papers that will be published in a special issue of the journal Pattern Recognition Letters.

The concept of CAST as Computer Aided Systems Theory was introduced by F. Pichler in the late 1980s to refer to computer theoretical and practical developments as tools for solving problems in system science. It was thought of as the third component (the other two being CAD and CAM) required to complete the path from computer and systems sciences to practical developments in science and engineering. Franz Pichler, of the University of Linz, organized the first CAST workshop in April 1988, which demonstrated the acceptance of the concepts by the scientific and technical community. Next, the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria joined the University of Linz to organize the first international meeting on CAST (Las Palmas, February 1989) under the name EUROCAST'89. This proved to be a very successful gathering of systems theorists, computer scientists and engineers from most European countries, North America and Japan. It was agreed that EUROCAST international conferences would be organized every two years, alternating between Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and a continental European location. From 2001 the conference has been held exclusively in Las Palmas. Thus, successive EUROCAST meetings took place in Krems (1991), Las Palmas (1993), In- bruck (1995), Las Palmas (1997), Vienna (1999), Las Palmas (2001), Las Palmas (2003) Las Palmas (2005) and Las Palmas (2007), in addition to an extra-European CAST c- ference in Ottawa in 1994.

Thebookpresentsa cross-sectionofstate-of-the-artresearchonmultimodalc- pora, a highly interdisciplinary area that is a prerequisite for various specialized disciplines. A number of the papers included are revised and expanded versions ofpapersacceptedtotheInternationalWorkshoponMultimodal Corpora: From Models of Natural Interaction to Systems and Applications, held in conjunction th with the 6 International Conference for Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) on May 27, 2008, in Marrakech, Morocco. This international workshop series started in 2000 and has since then grown into a regular satellite event of the bi-annual LREC conference, attracting researchers from ?elds as diverse as psychology, arti?cial intelligence, robotics, signal processing, computational linguisticsandhuman-computerinteraction. Tocomplement theselected papers from the 2008 workshop, we invited well-known researchers from corpus coll- tioninitiativestocontributetothisvolume. Wewereabletoobtainseveninvited research articles, including contributions from major international multimodal corpus projects like AMI and SmartWeb, which complement the six selected workshop contributions. All papers underwent a special review process for this volume, resulting in signi?cant revisions and extensions based on the experts' advice. While we were pleased that the 2006 edition of the workshop resulted in a special issue of the Journal of Language Resources and Evaluation, published in 2007, we felt that this was the time for another major publication, given not onlytherapidprogressandincreasedinterestin this researchareabut especially in order to acknowledge the di?culty of disseminating results across discipline borders. The Springer LNAI series is the perfect platform for doing so. We also created the website www. multimodal-corpora.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th IAPR International Conference on Discrete Geometry for Computer Imagery, DGCI 2009, held in Montreal, Canada, in September/October 2009.

The 42 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on discrete shape, representation, recognition and analysis; discrete and combinatorial tools for image segmentation and analysis; discrete and combinatorial Topology; models for discrete geometry; geometric transforms; and discrete tomography.

Readers will find in the pages of this book a treatment of the statistical analysis of clustered survival data. Such data are encountered in many scientific disciplines including human and veterinary medicine, biology, epidemiology, public health and demography. A typical example is the time to death in cancer patients, with patients clustered in hospitals. Frailty models provide a powerful tool to analyze clustered survival data. In this book different methods based on the frailty model are described and it is demonstrated how they can be used to analyze clustered survival data. All programs used for these examples are available on the Springer website.

This book constitutes the research papers presented at the Joint 2101 & 2102 International Conference on Biometric ID Management and Multimodal Communication.

BioID_MultiComm'09 is a joint International Conference organized cooperatively by COST Actions 2101 and 2102. COST 2101 Action is focused on "Biometrics for Identity Documents and Smart Cards (BIDS)," while COST 2102 Action is entitled "Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Non-verbal Communication."

The aim of COST 2101 is to investigate novel technologies for unsupervised multimodal biometric authentication systems using a new generation of biometrics-enabled identity documents and smart cards.

COST 2102 is devoted to develop an advanced acoustical, perceptual and psychological analysis of verbal and non-verbal communication signals originating in spontaneous face-to-face interaction, in order to identify algorithms and automatic procedures capable of recognizing human emotional states.

th TSD 2009was the 12 eventin the series of InternationalConferenceson Text, Speech andDialoguesupportedbytheInternationalSpeechCommunicationAssociation(ISCA) ? and Czech Society for Cybernetics and Informatics (CSKI). This year, TSD was held in Plzen ? (Pilsen), in the Primavera Conference Center, during September 13-17, 2009 and it was organized by the University of West Bohemia in Plzen ? in cooperation with Masaryk University of Brno, Czech Republic. Like its predecessors, TSD 2009 hi- lighted to both the academic and scienti?c world the importance of text and speech processing and its most recent breakthroughsin current applications. Both experienced researchers and professionals as well as newcomers to the text and speech processing ?eld, interested in designing or evaluating interactive software, developing new int- action technologies, or investigatingoverarchingtheories of text and speech processing found in the TSD conference a forum to communicate with people sharing similar - terests. The conference is an interdisciplinary forum, intertwining research in speech and language processing with its applications in everyday practice. We feel that the mixture of different approaches and applications offered a great opportunity to get - quaintedwith currentactivitiesin all aspects oflanguagecommunicationand to witness the amazing vitality of researchers from developing countries too. This year's conference was partially oriented toward semantic processing, which was chosen as the main topic of the conference. All invited speakers (Frederick Jelinek, Louise Guthrie, Roberto Pieraccini, Tilman Becker, and Elmar Not ] h) gave lectures on thenewestresultsintherelativelybroadandstillunexploredareaofsemanticprocessing."

This volume is part of the two-volume proceedings of the 19th International Conf- ence on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN 2009), which was held in Cyprus during September 14-17, 2009. The ICANN conference is an annual meeting sp- sored by the European Neural Network Society (ENNS), in cooperation with the - ternational Neural Network Society (INNS) and the Japanese Neural Network Society (JNNS). ICANN 2009 was technically sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intel- gence Society. This series of conferences has been held annually since 1991 in various European countries and covers the field of neurocomputing, learning systems and related areas. Artificial neural networks provide an information-processing structure inspired by biological nervous systems. They consist of a large number of highly interconnected processing elements, with the capability of learning by example. The field of artificial neural networks has evolved significantly in the last two decades, with active partici- tion from diverse fields, such as engineering, computer science, mathematics, artificial intelligence, system theory, biology, operations research, and neuroscience. Artificial neural networks have been widely applied for pattern recognition, control, optimization, image processing, classification, signal processing, etc.

This volume is part of the two-volume proceedings of the 19th International Conf- ence on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN 2009), which was held in Cyprus during September 14-17, 2009. The ICANN conference is an annual meeting sp- sored by the European Neural Network Society (ENNS), in cooperation with the - ternational Neural Network Society (INNS) and the Japanese Neural Network Society (JNNS). ICANN 2009 was technically sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intel- gence Society. This series of conferences has been held annually since 1991 in various European countries and covers the field of neurocomputing, learning systems and related areas. Artificial neural networks provide an information-processing structure inspired by biological nervous systems. They consist of a large number of highly interconnected processing elements, with the capability of learning by example. The field of artificial neural networks has evolved significantly in the last two decades, with active partici- tion from diverse fields, such as engineering, computer science, mathematics, artificial intelligence, system theory, biology, operations research, and neuroscience. Artificial neural networks have been widely applied for pattern recognition, control, optimization, image processing, classification, signal processing, etc.

The Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics (PRIB) meeting was established in 2006 under the auspices of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) to create a focus for the development and application of pattern recognition techniques in the biological domain. PRIB's aim to explore the full spectrum of pattern recognition application was re?ected in the breadth of techniquesrepresented in this year's subm- sions and in this book. These range from image analysis for biomedical data to systems biology. We werefortunatetohaveinvitedspeakersofthehighestcalibredeliveringkeynotes at the conference. These were Pierre Baldi (UC Irvine), Alvis Brazma (EMBL-EBI), GunnarRats .. ch(MPITubi .. ngen)andMichaelUnser(EPFL).Weacknowledgesupportof theEUFP7NetworkofExcellencePASCAL2forpartiallyfundingtheinvitedspeakers. Immediately prior to the conference, we hosted half day of tutorial lectures, while a special session on "Machine Learningfor IntegrativeGenomics" was held immediately after the main conference.Duringthe conference,a poster session was heldwith further discussion. Wewouldlikeonceagaintothankalltheauthorsforthehighqualityofsubmissions, as well as Yorkshire South and the University of Shef?eld for providing logistical help in organizing the conference. Finally, we would like to thank Springer for their help in assembling this proceedings volume and for the continued support of PRIB.

Biometrics is a rapidly evolving field with applications ranging from accessing one 's computer to gaining entry into a country. The deployment of large-scale biometric systems in both commercial and government applications has increased public awareness of this technology. Recent years have seen significant growth in biometric research resulting in the development of innovative sensors, new algorithms, enhanced test methodologies and novel applications. This book addresses this void by inviting some of the prominent researchers in Biometrics to contribute chapters describing the fundamentals as well as the latest innovations in their respective areas of expertise.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Vision Systems, ICVS 2009, held in Liege, Belgium, October 13-15, 2009.

The 21 papers for oral presentation presented together with 24 poster presentations and 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 96 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on human-machine-interaction, sensors, features and representations, stereo, 3D and optical flow, calibration and registration, mobile and autonomous systems, evaluation, studies and applications, learning, recognition and adaption.

Privacy, Security and Trust within the Context of Pervasive Computing is an edited volume based on a post workshop at the second international conference on Pervasive Computing. The workshop was held April18-23, 2004, in Vienna, Austria.

The goal of the workshop was not to focus on specific, even novel mechanisms, but rather on the interfaces between mechanisms in different technical and social problem spaces. An investigation of the interfaces between the notions of context, privacy, security, and trust will result in a deeper understanding of the "atomic" problems, leading to a more complete understanding of the social and technical issues in pervasive computing.

Starting with fingerprints more than a hundred years ago, there has been ongoing research in biometrics. Within the last forty years face and speaker recognition have emerged as research topics. However, as recently as a decade ago, biometrics itself did not exist as an independent field. Each of the biometric-related topics grew out of different disciplines. For example, the study of fingerprints came from forensics and pattern recognition, speaker recognition evolved from signal processing, the beginnings of face recognition were in computer vision, and privacy concerns arose from the public policy arena. One of the challenges of any new field is to state what the core ideas are that define the field in order to provide a research agenda for the field and identify key research problems. Biometrics has been grappling with this challenge since the late 1990s. With the matu ration of biometrics, the separate biometrics areas are coalescing into the new discipline of biometrics. The establishment of biometrics as a recognized field of inquiry allows the research community to identify problems that are common to biometrics in general. It is this identification of common problems that will define biometrics as a field and allow for broad advancement."

Model Based Fuzzy Control uses a given conventional or fuzzy open loop model of the plant under control to derive the set of fuzzy rules for the fuzzy controller. Of central interest are the stability, performance, and robustness of the resulting closed loop system. The major objective of model based fuzzy control is to use the full range of linear and nonlinear design and analysis methods to design such fuzzy controllers with better stability, performance, and robustness properties than non-fuzzy controllers designed using the same techniques. This objective has already been achieved for fuzzy sliding mode controllers and fuzzy gain schedulers - the main topics of this book. The primary aim of the book is to serve as a guide for the practitioner and to provide introductory material for courses in control theory.

This book introduces the area of image processing and data-parallel processing. It covers a number of standard algorithms in image processing and describes their parallel implementation. The programming language chosen for all examples is a structured parallel programming language which is ideal for educational purposes. It has a number of advantages over C, and since all image processing tasks are inherently parallel, using a parallel language for presentation actually simplifies the subject matter. This results in shorter source codes and a better understanding. Sample programs and a free compiler are available on an accompanying Web site.

Humans have always been hopeless at predicting the future...most people now generally agree that the margin of viability in prophecy appears to be 1 ten years. Even sophisticated research endeavours in this arena tend to go 2 off the rails after a decade or so. The computer industry has been particularly prone to bold (and often way off the mark) predictions, for example: 'I think there is a world market for maybe five computers' Thomas J. Watson, IBM Chairman (1943), 'I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year' Prentice Hall Editor (1957), 'There is no reason why anyone would want a computer in their home' Ken Olsen, founder of DEC (1977) and '640K ought to be enough for anybody' Bill Gates, CEO Microsoft (1981). 3 The field of Artificial Intelligence - right from its inception - has been particularly plagued by 'bold prediction syndrome', and often by leading practitioners who should know better. AI has received a lot of bad press 4 over the decades, and a lot of it deservedly so. How often have we groaned in despair at the latest 'by the year-20xx, we will all have...(insert your own particular 'hobby horse' here - e. g.

Computer security - the protection of data and computer systems from intentional, malicious intervention - is attracting increasing attention. Much work has gone into development of tools to detect ongoing or already perpetrated attacks, but a key shortfall in current intrusion detection systems is the high number of false alarms they produce. This book analyzes the false alarm problem, then applies results from the field of information visualization to the problem of intrusion detection. Four different visualization approaches are presented, mainly applied to data from web server access logs.

This book provides a unified framework that describes how genetic learning can be used to design pattern recognition and learning systems. It examines how a search technique, the genetic algorithm, can be used for pattern classification mainly through approximating decision boundaries. Coverage also demonstrates the effectiveness of the genetic classifiers vis-a-vis several widely used classifiers, including neural networks. "

This textbook is for graduate students and research workers in social statistics and related subject areas. It follows a novel curriculum developed around the basic statistical activities: sampling, measurement and inference. The monograph aims to prepare the reader for the career of an independent social statistician and to serve as a reference for methods, ideas for and ways of studying of human populations. Elementary linear algebra and calculus are prerequisites, although the exposition is quite forgiving. Familiarity with statistical software at the outset is an advantage, but it can be developed while reading the first few chapters.

A sharp increase in the computing power of modern computers has triggered the development of powerful algorithms that can analyze complex patterns in large amounts of data within a short time period. Consequently, it has become possible to apply pattern recognition techniques to new tasks. The main goal of this book is to cover some of the latest application domains of pattern recognition while presenting novel techniques that have been developed or customized in those domains.

The Annual (ICGS) International Conference is an established platform in which se- rity, safety and sustainability issues can be examined from several global perspectives through dialogue between academics, students, government representatives, chief executives, security professionals, and research scientists from the United Kingdom and from around the globe. The 2009 two-day conference focused on the challenges of complexity, rapid pace of change and risk/opportunity issues associated with modern products, systems, s- cial events and infrastructures. The importance of adopting systematic and systemic approaches to the assurance of these systems was emphasized within a special stream focused on strategic frameworks, architectures and human factors. The conference provided an opportunity for systems scientists, assurance researchers, owners, ope- tors and maintainers of large, complex and advanced systems and infrastructures to update their knowledge with the state of best practice in these challenging domains while networking with the leading researchers and solution providers. ICGS3 2009 received paper submissions from more than 20 different countries around the world. Only 28 papers were selected and were presented as full papers. The program also included three keynote lectures by leading researchers, security professionals and government representatives. June 2009 Hamid Jahankhani Ali Hessami Feng Hsu