This book reconsiders key issues, such as description and explanation, which affect data analytics.  For starters: the soul does not exist. Once released from this cumbersome roommate, we are left with complex biological systems: namely, ourselves, who must configure their environment in terms of worlds that are compatible with what they sense. Far from supplying yet another cosmogony, the book provides the cultivated reader with computational tools for describing and understanding data arising from his surroundings, such as climate parameters or stock market trends, even the win/defeat story of his son football team. Besides the superposition of the very many universes considered by quantum mechanics, we aim to manage families of worlds that may have generated those data through the key feature of their compatibility. Starting from a sharp engineering of ourselves in term of pairs consisting of genome plus a neuron ensemble, we toss this feature in different cognitive frameworks within a span of exploitations ranging from probability distributions to the latest implementations of machine learning. From the perspective of human society as an ensemble of the above pairs, the book also provides scientific tools for analyzing the benefits and drawbacks of the modern paradigm of the world as a service.

Rem tene, verba sequentur (Gaius J. Victor, Rome VI century b.c.)

The ultimate goal of this book is to bring the fundamental issues of information granularity, inference tools and problem solving procedures into a coherent, unified, and fully operational framework. The objective is to offer the reader a comprehensive, self-contained, and uniform exposure to the subject.The strategy is to isolate some fundamental bricks of Computational Intelligence in terms of key problems and methods, and discuss their implementation and underlying rationale within a well structured and rigorous conceptual framework as well as carefully related to various application facets. The main assumption is that a deep understanding of the key problems will allow the reader to compose into a meaningful mosaic the puzzle pieces represented by the immense varieties of approaches present in the literature and in the computational practice. All in all, the main approach advocated in the monograph consists of a sequence of steps offering solid conceptual fundamentals, presenting a carefully selected collection of design methodologies, discussing a wealth of development guidelines, and exemplifying them with a pertinent, accurately selected illustrative material.

This volume collects a selection of contributions which has been presented at the 22nd Italian Workshop on Neural Networks, the yearly meeting of the Italian Society for Neural Networks (SIREN). The conference was held in Italy, Vietri sul Mare (Salerno), during May 17-19, 2012. 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 three main components, two special sessions and a group of regular sessions featuring different aspects and point of views of artificial neural networks and natural intelligence, also including applications of present compelling interest.

This book reconsiders key issues, such as description and explanation, which affect data analytics.  For starters: the soul does not exist. Once released from this cumbersome roommate, we are left with complex biological systems: namely, ourselves, who must configure their environment in terms of worlds that are compatible with what they sense. Far from supplying yet another cosmogony, the book provides the cultivated reader with computational tools for describing and understanding data arising from his surroundings, such as climate parameters or stock market trends, even the win/defeat story of his son football team. Besides the superposition of the very many universes considered by quantum mechanics, we aim to manage families of worlds that may have generated those data through the key feature of their compatibility. Starting from a sharp engineering of ourselves in term of pairs consisting of genome plus a neuron ensemble, we toss this feature in different cognitive frameworks within a span of exploitations ranging from probability distributions to the latest implementations of machine learning. From the perspective of human society as an ensemble of the above pairs, the book also provides scientific tools for analyzing the benefits and drawbacks of the modern paradigm of the world as a service.

Rem tene, verba sequentur (Gaius J. Victor, Rome VI century b.c.)

The ultimate goal of this book is to bring the fundamental issues of information granularity, inference tools and problem solving procedures into a coherent, unified, and fully operational framework. The objective is to offer the reader a comprehensive, self-contained, and uniform exposure to the subject.The strategy is to isolate some fundamental bricks of Computational Intelligence in terms of key problems and methods, and discuss their implementation and underlying rationale within a well structured and rigorous conceptual framework as well as carefully related to various application facets. The main assumption is that a deep understanding of the key problems will allow the reader to compose into a meaningful mosaic the puzzle pieces represented by the immense varieties of approaches present in the literature and in the computational practice. All in all, the main approach advocated in the monograph consists of a sequence of steps offering solid conceptual fundamentals, presenting a carefully selected collection of design methodologies, discussing a wealth of development guidelines, and exemplifying them with a pertinent, accurately selected illustrative material.

This volume collects a selection of contributions which has been presented at the 22nd Italian Workshop on Neural Networks, the yearly meeting of the Italian Society for Neural Networks (SIREN). The conference was held in Italy, Vietri sul Mare (Salerno), during May 17-19, 2012. 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 three main components, two special sessions and a group of regular sessions featuring different aspects and point of views of artificial neural networks and natural intelligence, also including applications of present compelling interest.