Antonietta M. 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 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.