Anna Esposito – författare

This book addresses the usefulness of knowledge discovery through data mining. With this aim, contributors from different fields propose concrete problems and applications showing how data mining and discovering embedded knowledge from raw data can be beneficial to social organizations, domestic spheres, and ICT markets.

Data mining or knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) has received increasing interest due to its focus on transforming large amounts of data into novel, valid, useful, and structured knowledge by detecting concealed patterns and relationships.

The concept of knowledge is broad and speculative and has promoted epistemological debates in western philosophies. The intensified interest in knowledge management and data mining stems from the difficulty in identifying computational models able to approximate human behaviors and abilities in resolving organizational, social, and physical problems. Current ICT interfaces are not yet adequately advanced to support and simulate the abilities of physicians, teachers, assistants or housekeepers in domestic spheres. And unlike in industrial contexts where abilities are routinely applied, the domestic world is continuously changing and unpredictable. There are challenging questions in this field: Can knowledge locked in conventions, rules of conduct, common sense, ethics, emotions, laws, cultures, and experiences be mined from data? Is it acceptable for automatic systems displaying emotional behaviors to govern complex interactions based solely on the mining of large volumes of data?

Discussing multidisciplinary themes, the book proposes computational models able to approximate, to a certain degree, human behaviors and abilities in resolving organizational, social, and physical problems.

The innovations presented are of primary importance for:

a.            The academic research community

b.            The ICT market

c.             Ph.D. students and early stage researchers

d.            Schools, hospitals, rehabilitation and assisted-living centers

e.            Representatives from multimedia industries and standardization bodies

This book provides innovative ideas on achieving sustainable development and using green technologies to conserve our ecosystem. Innovation is the successful exploitation of a new idea. Through innovation, we can achieve MORE while using LESS. Innovations in science & technology will not only help mankind as a whole, but also contribute to the economic growth of individual countries.

It is essential that the global problem of environmental degradation be addressed immediately, and thus, we need to rethink the concept of sustainable development. Indeed, new environmentally friendly technologies are fundamental to attaining sustainable development. The book shares a wealth of innovative green technological ideas on how to preserve and improve the quality of the environment, and how to establish a more resource-efficient and sustainable society.

In short, it offers valuable information and insights for budding engineers, researchers, upcoming young minds and industry professionals, promoting awareness for recent advances in the various fields mentioned above. 

Big data and data science are transforming our world today in ways we could not have imagined at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The accompanying wave of innovation has sparked advances in healthcare, engineering, business, science, and human perception, among others. The tremendous advances in computing power and intelligent techniques have opened many opportunities for managing data and investigating data in virtually every field, and the scope of data science is expected to grow over the next decade. These future research achievements will solve old challenges and create new opportunities for growth and development. Thus, the research presented in this book is interdisciplinary and covers themes embracing emotions, artificial intelligence, robotics applications, sentiment analysis, smart city problems, assistive technologies, speech melody, and fall and abnormal behavior detection. The book is directed to the researchers, practitioners, professors and students interested in recent advances in methodologies and applications of data science. An introduction to the topic is provided, and research challenges and future research opportunities are highlighted throughout.

The book consists of an editorial note and an additional twelve (12) chapters, all of which have been written by authors who work on the corresponding chapter theme and are recognized for their significant research contributions. In more detail, the chapters in the book are organized into four parts, namely (i) Advances in Assistive Technologies in Healthcare, (ii) Advances in Assistive Technologies in Medical Diagnosis, (iii) Advances in Assistive Technologies in Mobility and Navigation, and (iv) Advances in Privacy and Explainability in Assistive Technologies.

This volume collects a selection of contributions which has been presented at the 23rd Italian Workshop on Neural Networks, the yearly meeting of the Italian Society for Neural Networks (SIREN). The conference was held in Vietri sul Mare, Salerno, Italy during May 23-24, 2013. The annual meeting of SIREN is sponsored by International Neural Network Society (INNS), European Neural Network Society (ENNS) and IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS). The book – as well as the workshop-  is organized in two main components, a special session and a group of regular sessions featuring different aspects and point of views of artificial neural networks, artificial and natural intelligence, as well as psychological and cognitive theories for modeling human behaviors and human machine interactions, including Information Communication applications of compelling interest.

This book collects research works that exploit neural networks and machine learning techniques from a multidisciplinary perspective. Subjects covered include theoretical, methodological and computational topics which are grouped together into chapters devoted to the discussion of novelties and innovations related to the field of Artificial Neural Networks as well as the use of neural networks for applications, pattern recognition, signal processing, and special topics such as the detection and recognition of multimodal emotional expressions and daily cognitive functions, and  bio-inspired memristor-based networks.

Providing insights into the latest research interest from a pool of international experts coming from different research fields, the volume becomes valuable to all those with any interest in a holistic approach to implement believable, autonomous, adaptive and context-aware Information Communication Technologies.

This book presents recent advances in nonlinearspeech processing beyond nonlinear techniques. It shows that it exploitsheuristic and psychological models of human interaction in order to succeed inthe implementations of socially believable VUIs and applications for humanhealth and psychological support. The book takes into account themultifunctional role of speech and what is “outside of the box” (see BjörnSchuller’s foreword). To this aim, the book is organized in 6 sections, eachcollecting a small number of short chapters reporting advances “inside” and“outside” themes related to nonlinear speech research. The themes emphasizetheoretical and practical issues for modelling socially believable speechinterfaces, ranging from efforts to capture the nature of sound changes inlinguistic contexts and the timing nature of speech; labors to identify anddetect speech features that help in the diagnosis of psychological and neuronaldisease, attempts to improve the effectiveness and performance of Voice UserInterfaces, new front-end algorithms for the coding/decoding of effective andcomputationally efficient acoustic and linguistic speech representations, aswell as investigations capturing the social nature of speech in signalingpersonality traits, emotions and improving human machine interactions.

This volume presents a collection of research studies on sophisticated and functional computational instruments able to recognize, process, and store relevant situated interactional signals, as well as, interact with people, displaying reactions (under conditions of limited time) that show abilities of appropriately sensing and understanding environmental changes, producing suitable, autonomous, and adaptable responses to various social situations. These social robotic autonomous systems will improve the quality of life of their end-users while assisting them on several needs, ranging from educational settings, health care assistance, communicative disorders, and any disorder impairing either their physical, cognitive, or social functional activities. The multidisciplinary themes presented in the volume will be interesting for experts and students coming from different research fields and with different knowledge and backgrounds. The research reported is particularly relevant for academic centers, and Research & Development Institutions.