Ambient Intelligence is one of the new paradigms in the development of information and communication technology, which has attracted much attention over the past years. The aim is the to integrate technology into people environment in such a way that it improves their daily lives in terms of well-being, creativity, and productivity. Ambient Intelligence is a multidisciplinary concept, which heavily builds on a number of fundamental breakthroughs that have been achieved in the development of new hardware concepts over the past years. New insights in nano and micro electronics, packaging and interconnection technology, large-area electronics, energy scavenging devices, wireless sensors, low power electronics and computing platforms enable the realization of the heaven of ambient intelligence by overcoming the hell of physics. Based on contributions from leading technical experts, this book presents a number of key topics on novel hardware developments, thus providing the reader a good insight into the physical basis of ambient intelligence. It also indicates key research challenges that must be addressed in the future.

Local search has been applied successfully to a diverse collection of optimization problems. However, results are scattered throughout the literature. This is the first book that presents a large collection of theoretical results in a consistent manner. It provides the reader with a coherent overview of the achievements obtained so far, and serves as a source of inspiration for the development of novel results in the challenging field of local search.

The rapid growth in electronic systems in the past decade has boosted research in the area of computational intelligence. As it has become increasingly easy to generate, collect, transport, process, and store huge amounts of data, the role of intelligent algorithms has become prominent in order to visualize, manipulate, retrieve, and interpret the data. For instance, intelligent search techniques have been developed to search for relevant items in huge collections of web pages, and data mining and interpretation techniques play a very important role in making sense out of huge amounts of biomolecular measurements. As a result, the added value of many modern systems is no longer determined by hardware only, but increasingly by the intelligent software that supports and facilitates the user in realizing his or her objectives. This book is the outcome of a series of discussions at the Philips Symposium on Intelligent Algorithms,

The advent of the digital era, the Internet, and the development of fast com puting devices that can access mass storage servers at high communication bandwidths have brought within our reach the world of ambient intelligent systems. These systems provide users with information, communication, and entertainment at any desired place and time. Since its introduction in 1998, the vision of Ambient Intelligence has attracted much attention within the re search community. Especially, the need for intelligence generated by smart al gorithms, which run on digital platforms that are integrated into consumer elec tronics devices, has strengthened the interest in Computational Intelligence. This newly developing research field, which can be positioned at the inter section of computer science, discrete mathematics, and artificial intelligence, contains a large variety of interesting topics including machine learning, con tent management, vision, speech, data mining, content augmentation, profiling, contextual awareness, feature extraction, resource management, security, and privacy."

This book is the outcome of a series of discussions at the Philips Symposium on Intelligent Algorithms, held in Eindhoven in December 2004. It offers exciting and practical examples of the use of intelligent algorithms in ambient and biomedical computing. It contains topics such as bioscience computing, database design, machine consciousness, scheduling, video summarization, audio classification, semantic reasoning, machine learning, tracking and localization, secure computing, and communication.

Local search has been applied successfully to a diverse collection of optimization problems. However, results are scattered throughout the literature. This is the first book that presents a large collection of theoretical results in a consistent manner. It provides the reader with a coherent overview of the achievements obtained so far, and serves as a source of inspiration for the development of novel results in the challenging field of local search.

The advent of the digital era, the Internet, and the development of fast com puting devices that can access mass storage servers at high communication bandwidths have brought within our reach the world of ambient intelligent systems. These systems provide users with information, communication, and entertainment at any desired place and time. Since its introduction in 1998, the vision of Ambient Intelligence has attracted much attention within the re search community. Especially, the need for intelligence generated by smart al gorithms, which run on digital platforms that are integrated into consumer elec tronics devices, has strengthened the interest in Computational Intelligence. This newly developing research field, which can be positioned at the inter section of computer science, discrete mathematics, and artificial intelligence, contains a large variety of interesting topics including machine learning, con tent management, vision, speech, data mining, content augmentation, profiling, contextual awareness, feature extraction, resource management, security, and privacy."

This volume of the LNCS is the formal proceedings of the 2nd European Symposium on Ambient Intelligence, EUSAI 2004. This event was held on November 8 10, 2004 at the Eindhoven University of Technology, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. EUSAI 2004 followed a successful first event in 2003, organized by Philips Research. This turned out to be a timely initiative that created a forum for bringing together European researchers, working on different disciplines all contributing towards the human-centric technological vision of ambient intelligence. Compared to conferences working on similar and overlapping fields, the first EUSAI was characterized by a strong industrial focus reflected in the program committee and the content of the program. As program chairs of EUSAI 2004 we tried to preserve the character for this event and its combined focus on the four major thematic areas: ubiquitous computing, context awareness, intelligence, and natural interaction. Further, we tried to make EUSAI 2004 grow into a full-fledged double-track conference, with surrounding events like tutorials and specialized workshops, a poster and demonstration exhibition and a student design competition. The conference program included three invited keynotes, Ted Selker from MIT, Tom Rodden from the University of Nottingham and Tom Erickson from IBM."

No symposium of this size can be organized without the help of many dedicated persons. EUSAI was organized by Philips Research in close cooperation with the ITEA Ambience project. Many people were involved in this joint effort and we are greatly indebted to them for their valuable contribution to the organization of EUSAI. Special thanks in this respect go to Ad de Beer for taking care of the local arrangements and to Maurice Groten for guaranteeing the financial budget. EUSAI has succeeded in bringing together a wealth of information on the research progress in ambient intelligence, and we are confident that these proceedings will contribute to the realization of the truly great concept that ambient intelligence provides. Eindhoven, Emile Aarts August 2003 Rene Collier Evert van Loenen Boris de Ruyter Le nouveau poeme electronique On the occasion of the 1958 World s Fair in Brussels, Le Corbusier designed for the Philips company a pavilion (see photograph below) that was later referred to as the neglected building by Le Corbusier, since it was dismantled after the fair. In his visually compelling book, Treib 1996] brought this object back to life, and positioned it as an ephemeral structure that exhibited a landmark multimedia production. The nearly two million visitors to the pavilion were exposed to a media show rather than to the typical display of consumer products."

This open access book presents the scientific views of some fifty experts on how they believe the COVID-19 pandemic is currently affecting society, and how it will continue to do so in the years to come. Using the concept of a "common" (in the sense of common values, common places, common goods, and common sense), they elaborate on the transition from an Old Common to a New Common. In carefully crafted chapters, the authors address expected shifts in major fields like health, education, finance, business, work, and citizenship, applying concepts from law, psychology, economics, sociology, religious studies, and computer science to do so. Many of the authors anticipate an acceleration of the digital transformation in the forthcoming years, but at the same time, they argue that a successful shift to a new common can only be achieved by re-evaluating life on our planet, strengthening resilience at an individual level, and assuming more responsibility at a societal level.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference of Ambient Intelligence, AmI 2014, held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in November 2014. The 21 revised full papers presented together with 5 short papers and 4 workshop papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 59 submissions. The papers are organized along a set of thematic tracks: ambient assisted living; internet of things; ambient play and learning; smart buildings and cities; intelligent driving; data science; smart healthcare and healing environments; ambient persuasion; and new and emerging themes.

In the past three decades, local search has grown from a simple heuristic idea into a mature field of research in combinatorial optimization that is attracting ever-increasing attention. Local search is still the method of choice for NP-hard problems as it provides a robust approach for obtaining high-quality solutions to problems of a realistic size in reasonable time. "Local Search in Combinatorial Optimization" covers local search and its variants from both a theoretical and practical point of view, each topic discussed by a leading authority. This book is an important reference and invaluable source of inspiration for students and researchers in discrete mathematics, computer science, operations research, industrial engineering, and management science.

In addition to the editors, the contributors are Mihalis Yannakakis, Craig A. Tovey, Jan H. M. Korst, Peter J. M. van Laarhoven, Alain Hertz, Eric Taillard, Dominique de Werra, Heinz Muhlenbein, Carsten Peterson, Bo Soderberg, David S. Johnson, Lyle A. McGeoch, Michel Gendreau, Gilbert Laporte, Jean-Yves Potvin, Gerard A. P. Kindervater, Martin W. P. Savelsbergh, Edward J. Anderson, Celia A. Glass, Chris N. Potts, C. L. Liu, Peichen Pan, Iiro Honkala, and Patric R. J. Ostergard."