Studies in Computational Intelligence – serie

Vague concepts are intrinsic to human communication. Somehow it would seems that vagueness is central to the flexibility and robustness of natural l- guage descriptions. If we were to insist on precise concept definitions then we would be able to assert very little with any degree of confidence. In many cases our perceptions simply do not provide sufficient information to allow us to verify that a set of formal conditions are met. Our decision to describe an individual as 'tall' is not generally based on any kind of accurate measurement of their height. Indeed it is part of the power of human concepts that they do not require us to make such fine judgements. They are robust to the imprecision of our perceptions, while still allowing us to convey useful, and sometimes vital, information. The study of vagueness in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is therefore motivated by the desire to incorporate this robustness and flexibility into int- ligent computer systems. This goal, however, requires a formal model of vague concepts that will allow us to quantify and manipulate the uncertainty resulting from their use as a means of passing information between autonomous agents. I first became interested in these issues while working with Jim Baldwin to develop a theory of the probability of fuzzy events based on mass assi- ments.

Vague concepts are intrinsic to human communication. Somehow it would seems that vagueness is central to the flexibility and robustness of natural l- guage descriptions. If we were to insist on precise concept definitions then we would be able to assert very little with any degree of confidence. In many cases our perceptions simply do not provide sufficient information to allow us to verify that a set of formal conditions are met. Our decision to describe an individual as 'tall' is not generally based on any kind of accurate measurement of their height. Indeed it is part of the power of human concepts that they do not require us to make such fine judgements. They are robust to the imprecision of our perceptions, while still allowing us to convey useful, and sometimes vital, information. The study of vagueness in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is therefore motivated by the desire to incorporate this robustness and flexibility into int- ligent computer systems. This goal, however, requires a formal model of vague concepts that will allow us to quantify and manipulate the uncertainty resulting from their use as a means of passing information between autonomous agents. I first became interested in these issues while working with Jim Baldwin to develop a theory of the probability of fuzzy events based on mass assi- ments.

This book presents appealing contributions on computational intelligence and mathematics, connecting both areas and offering solutions to a number of interesting, real-world problems. Such problems often require novel solutions, as complexity exceeds the tractable size. At the same time, the need for good-quality realistic solutions results in models and algorithms with a good balance of resource intensiveness and model quality (accuracy).Many areas of knowledge call for hybrid solutions that combine traditional mathematical techniques and computational intelligence based on subsymbolic knowledge representation. Important research topics are focused on developing the interaction between computational intelligence and mathematics, in order to address various challenges of the current technological age. Written by influential, leading researchers, this book discusses the latest trends in hybridising mathematics and computational intelligence.

This book describes new theories and applications of artificial neural networks, with a special focus on addressing problems in neuroscience, biology and biophysics and cognitive research. It covers a wide range of methods and technologies, including deep neural networks, large-scale neural models, brain–computer interface, signal processing methods, as well as models of perception, studies on emotion recognition, self-organization and many more. The book includes both selected and invited papers presented at the XX International Conference on Neuroinformatics, held in Moscow, Russia on October 8–12, 2018.

This book presents a set of theoretical and experimental results that describe the features of the wide family of α-stable distributions (the normal distribution also belongs to this class) and their various applications in the mutation operator of evolutionary algorithms based on real-number representation of the individuals, and, above all, equip these algorithms with features that enrich their effectiveness in solving multi-modal, multi-dimensional global optimization problems. The overall conclusion of the research presented is that the appropriate choice of probabilistic model of the mutation operator for an optimization problem is crucial.Mutation is one of the most important operations in stochastic global optimization algorithms in the n-dimensional real space. It determines the method of search space exploration and exploitation. Most applications of these algorithms employ the normal mutation as a mutation operator. This choice is justified by the central limit theorem but is associated with a set of important limitations. Application of α-stable distributions allows more flexible evolutionary models to be obtained than those with the normal distribution. The book presents theoretical analysis and simulation experiments, which were selected and constructed to expose the most important features of the examined mutation techniques based on α-stable distributions. It allows readers to develop a deeper understanding of evolutionary processes with stable mutations and encourages them to apply these techniques to real-world engineering problems.

This book presents recent research in the field of interaction between computational intelligence and mathematics. In the current technological age, we face the challenges of tackling very complex problems – in the usual sense, but also in the mathematical and theoretical computer science sense. However, even the most up-to-date results in mathematics, are unable to provide exact solutions of such problems, and no further technical advances will ever make it possible to find general and exact solutions. Constantly developing technologies (including social technologies) necessitate handling very complex problems. This has led to a search for acceptably “good” or precise solutions, which can be achieved by the combination of traditional mathematical techniques and computational intelligence tools, in order to solve the various problems emerging in many different areas to a satisfactory degree.Important funding programs, such as the European Commission’s current framework programme for research and innovation – Horizon 2020 – are devoted to the development of new instruments to deal with the current challenges. Without doubt, research topics associated with the interactions between computational intelligence and traditional mathematics play a key role. Presenting contributions from engineers, scientists and mathematicians, this book offers a series of novel solutions for meaningful and real-world problems that connect those research areas.

The book focuses on machine learning. Divided into three parts, the first part discusses the feature selection problem. The second part then describes the application of machine learning in the classification problem, while the third part presents an overview of real-world applications of swarm-based optimization algorithms. The concept of machine learning (ML) is not new in the field of computing. However, due to the ever-changing nature of requirements in today’s world it has emerged in the form of completely new avatars. Now everyone is talking about ML-based solution strategies for a given problem set. The book includes research articles and expository papers on the theory and algorithms of machine learning and bio-inspiring optimization, as well as papers on numerical experiments and real-world applications.

This book provides a ‘one-stop source’ for all readers who are interested in a new, empirical approach to machine learning that, unlike traditional methods, successfully addresses the demands of today’s data-driven world. After an introduction to the fundamentals, the book discusses in depth anomaly detection, data partitioning and clustering, as well as classification and predictors. It describes classifiers of zero and first order, and the new, highly efficient and transparent deep rule-based classifiers, particularly highlighting their applications to image processing. Local optimality and stability conditions for the methods presented are formally derived and stated, while the software is also provided as supplemental, open-source material. The book will greatly benefit postgraduate students, researchers and practitioners dealing with advanced data processing, applied mathematicians, software developers of agent-oriented systems, and developers of embedded and real-time systems. Itcan also be used as a textbook for postgraduate coursework; for this purpose, a standalone set of lecture notes and corresponding lab session notes are available on the same website as the code.Dimitar Filev, Henry Ford Technical Fellow, Ford Motor Company, USA, and Member of the National Academy of Engineering, USA: “The book Empirical Approach to Machine Learning opens new horizons to automated and efficient data processing.”Paul J. Werbos, Inventor of the back-propagation method, USA: “I owe great thanks to Professor Plamen Angelov for making this important material available to the community just as I see great practical needs for it, in the new area of making real sense of high-speed data from the brain.” Chin-Teng Lin, Distinguished Professor at University of Technology Sydney, Australia: “This new book will set up a milestone for the modern intelligent systems.”Edward Tunstel, President of IEEE Systems, Man, Cybernetics Society, USA: “Empirical Approach to Machine Learning provides an insightful and visionary boost of progress in the evolution of computational learning capabilities yielding interpretable and transparent implementations.”

This book presents a collection of high-quality research by leading experts in computer vision and its applications. Each of the 16 chapters can be read independently and discusses the principles of a specific topic, reviews up-to-date techniques, presents outcomes, and highlights the challenges and future directions. As such the book explores the latest trends in fashion creative processes, facial features detection, visual odometry, transfer learning, face recognition, feature description, plankton and scene classification, video face alignment, video searching, and object segmentation. It is intended for postgraduate students, researchers, scholars and developers who are interested in computer vision and connected research disciplines, and is also suitable for senior undergraduate students who are taking advanced courses in related topics. However, it is also provides a valuable reference resource for practitioners from industry who want to keep abreast of recent developments in this dynamic, exciting and profitable research field.

This book gathers the peer-reviewed papers presented at the 8th edition of the International Workshop “Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-Agent Manufacturing – SOHOMA’18” held at the University of Bergamo, Italy on June 11–12, 2018. The objective of the SOHOMA annual workshops is to foster innovation in smart and sustainable manufacturing and logistics systems by promoting new concepts, methods and solutions that use service orientation of agent-based control technologies with distributed intelligence.Reflecting the theme of SOHOMA’18: “Digital transformation of manufacturing with agent-based control and service orientation of Internet-scale platforms”, the research included focuses on how the digital transformation, as advocated by the “Industry 4.0”, “Industrial Internet of Things”, “Cyber-Physical Production Systems” and “Cloud Manufacturing” frameworks, improves the efficiency, agility and sustainability of manufacturing processes, products, and services, and how itrelates to the interaction between the physical and informational worlds, which is implemented in the virtualization of products, processes and resources managed as services.

This book presents a language integrated query framework for big data. The continuous, rapid growth of data information to volumes of up to terabytes (1,024 gigabytes) or petabytes (1,048,576 gigabytes) means that the need for a system to manage and query information from large scale data sources is becoming more urgent. Currently available frameworks and methodologies are limited in terms of efficiency and querying compatibility between data sources due to the differences in information storage structures. For this research, the authors designed and programmed a framework based on the fundamentals of language integrated query to query existing data sources without the process of data restructuring. A web portal for the framework was also built to enable users to query protein data from the Protein Data Bank (PDB) and implement it on Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing environment known for its reliability, vast computing resources and cost-effectiveness.

This book demonstrates an original concept for implementing the rough set theory in the construction of decision-making systems. It addresses three types of decisions, including those in which the information or input data is insufficient. Though decision-making and classification in cases with missing or inaccurate data is a common task, classical decision-making systems are not naturally adapted to it. One solution is to apply the rough set theory proposed by Prof. Pawlak.The proposed classifiers are applied and tested in two configurations: The first is an iterative mode in which a single classification system requests completion of the input data until an unequivocal decision (classification) is obtained. It allows us to start classification processes using very limited input data and supplementing it only as needed, which limits the cost of obtaining data. The second configuration is an ensemble mode in which several rough set-based classification systems achieve the unequivocal decision collectively, even though the systems cannot separately deliver such results.

This book presents recent research on probabilistic methods in economics, from machine learning to statistical analysis. Economics is a very important – and at the same a very difficult discipline. It is not easy to predict how an economy will evolve or to identify the measures needed to make an economy prosper. One of the main reasons for this is the high level of uncertainty: different difficult-to-predict events can influence the future economic behavior. To make good predictions and reasonable recommendations, this uncertainty has to be taken into account.In the past, most related research results were based on using traditional techniques from probability and statistics, such as p-value-based hypothesis testing. These techniques led to numerous successful applications, but in the last decades, several examples have emerged showing that these techniques often lead to unreliable and inaccurate predictions. It is therefore necessary to come up with new techniques for processing the corresponding uncertainty that go beyond the traditional probabilistic techniques.This book focuses on such techniques, their economic applications and the remaining challenges, presenting both related theoretical developments and their practical applications.

This book focuses on structural changes and economic modeling. It presents papers describing how to model structural changes, as well as those introducing improvements to the existing before-structural-changes models, making it easier to later on combine these models with techniques describing structural changes. The book also includes related theoretical developments and practical applications of the resulting techniques to economic problems.Most traditional mathematical models of economic processes describe how the corresponding quantities change with time. However, in addition to such relatively smooth numerical changes, economical phenomena often undergo more drastic structural change. Describing such structural changes is not easy, but it is vital if we want to have a more adequate description of economic phenomena – and thus, more accurate and more reliable predictions and a better understanding on how best to influence the economic situation.

This book presents novel classification algorithms for four challenging prediction tasks, namely learning from imbalanced, semi-supervised, multi-instance and multi-label data. The methods are based on fuzzy rough set theory, a mathematical framework used to model uncertainty in data. The book makes two main contributions: helping readers gain a deeper understanding of the underlying mathematical theory; and developing new, intuitive and well-performing classification approaches. The authors bridge the gap between the theoretical proposals of the mathematical model and important challenges in machine learning.   The intended readership of this book includes anyone interested in learning more about fuzzy rough set theory and how to use it in practical machine learning contexts. Although the core audience chiefly consists of mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers, the content will also be interesting and accessible to students and professionals from a range of other fields.

This book provides insights into the research in the fields of artificial intelligence in combination with Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. Today, the integration of artificial intelligence and IoT technologies is attracting considerable interest from both researchers and developers from academic fields and industries around the globe. It is foreseeable that the next generation of IoT research will focus on artificial intelligence/beyond artificial intelligence approaches. The rapidly growing numbers of artificial intelligence algorithms and big data solutions have significantly increased the number of potential applications for IoT technologies, but they have also created new challenges for the artificial intelligence community. This book shares the latest scientific advances in this area.

This book highlights cutting-edge research in the field of network science, offering scientists, researchers, students and practitioners a unique update on the latest advances in theory, together with a wealth of applications. It presents the peer-reviewed proceedings of the VII International Conference on Complex Networks and their Applications (COMPLEX NETWORKS 2018), which was held in Cambridge on December 11–13, 2018. The carefully selected papers cover a wide range of theoretical topics such as network models and measures; community structure and network dynamics; diffusion, epidemics and spreading processes; and resilience and control; as well as all the main network applications, including social and political networks; networks in finance and economics; biological and neuroscience networks; and technological networks.

This book highlights cutting-edge research in the field of network science, offering scientists, researchers, students and practitioners a unique update on the latest advances in theory, together with a wealth of applications. It presents the peer-reviewed proceedings of the VII International Conference on Complex Networks and their Applications (COMPLEX NETWORKS 2018), which was held in Cambridge on December 11–13, 2018. The carefully selected papers cover a wide range of theoretical topics such as network models and measures; community structure and network dynamics; diffusion, epidemics and spreading processes; and resilience and control; as well as all the main network applications, including social and political networks; networks in finance and economics; biological and neuroscience networks; and technological networks.

This book presents innovative and high-quality research regarding the implementation of Semantic Web technologies for knowledge representation and developing intelligent applications in various domains. Semantic Web technologies have inspired many people to create innovative technologies and applications for knowledge representation, Semantic Searches, NLP and Social Networks. The goal of this book is to collect and consolidate novel and high-quality research contributions on Semantic Web technologies and their theoretical and practical application to a range of different domains. In addition to researchers, the book offers a valuable resource for PhD students, master and undergraduate students in IT-related fields such as Computer Science and Information Systems.

Building on the successful first and second volumes, this book is the third volume of the Springer book on the Robot Operating System (ROS): The Complete Reference. The Robot Operating System is evolving from year to year with a wealth of new contributed packages and enhanced capabilities. Further, the ROS is being integrated into various robots and systems and is becoming an embedded technology in emerging robotics platforms. The objective of this third volume is to provide readers with additional and comprehensive coverage of the ROS and an overview of the latest achievements, trends and packages developed with and for it. Combining tutorials, case studies, and research papers, the book consists of sixteen chapters and is divided into five parts. Part 1 presents multi-robot systems with the ROS. In Part 2, four chapters deal with the development of unmanned aerial systems and their applications. In turn, Part 3 highlights recent work related to navigation, motion planning and control. Part 4 discusses recently contributed ROS packages for security, ROS2, GPU usage, and real-time processing. Lastly, Part 5 deals with new interfaces allowing users to interact with robots. Taken together, the three volumes of this book offer a valuable reference guide for ROS users, researchers, learners and developers alike. Its breadth of coverage makes it a unique resource.

This book introduces readers to the fundamentals of artificial neural networks, with a special emphasis on evolutionary algorithms. At first, the book offers a literature review of several well-regarded evolutionary algorithms, including particle swarm and ant colony optimization, genetic algorithms and biogeography-based optimization. It then proposes evolutionary version of several types of neural networks such as feed forward neural networks, radial basis function networks, as well as recurrent neural networks and multi-later perceptron. Most of the challenges that have to be addressed when training artificial neural networks using evolutionary algorithms are discussed in detail. The book also demonstrates the application of the proposed algorithms for several purposes such as classification, clustering, approximation, and prediction problems. It provides a tutorial on how to design, adapt, and evaluate artificial neural networks as well, and includes source codes for most of the proposed techniques as supplementary materials.

This book not only discusses the important topics in the area of machine learning and combinatorial optimization, it also combines them into one. This was decisive for choosing the material to be included in the book and determining its order of presentation.Decision trees are a popular method of classification as well as of knowledge representation. At the same time, they are easy to implement as the building blocks of an ensemble of classifiers. Admittedly, however, the task of constructing a near-optimal decision tree is a very complex process.The good results typically achieved by the ant colony optimization algorithms when dealing with combinatorial optimization problems suggest the possibility of also using that approach for effectively constructing decision trees. The underlying rationale is that both problem classes can be presented as graphs. This fact leads to option of considering a larger spectrum of solutions than those based on the heuristic. Moreover, ant colony optimization algorithms can be used to advantage when building ensembles of classifiers.This book is a combination of a research monograph and a textbook. It can be used in graduate courses, but is also of interest to researchers, both specialists in machine learning and those applying machine learning methods to cope with problems from any field of R&D.

This book presents recent research on bioinspired heuristics for optimization. Learning- based and black-box optimization exhibit some properties of intrinsic parallelization, and can be used for various optimizations problems. Featuring the most relevant work presented at the 6th International Conference on Metaheuristics and Nature Inspired Computing, held at Marrakech (Morocco) from 27th to 31st October 2016, the book presents solutions, methods, algorithms, case studies, and software. It is a valuable resource for research academics and industrial practitioners.

This book features 15 chapters based on the Numerical and Evolutionary Optimization (NEO 2017) workshop, held from September 27 to 29 in the city of Tijuana, Mexico. The event gathered researchers from two complimentary fields to discuss the theory, development and application of state-of-the-art techniques to address search and optimization problems. The lively event included 7 invited talks and 64 regular talks covering a wide range of topics, from evolutionary computer vision and machine learning with evolutionary computation, to set oriented numeric and steepest descent techniques. Including research submitted by the NEO community, the book provides informative and stimulating material for future research in the field.

This book presents the outcomes of the 3rd IEEE/ACIS International Conference on Big Data, Cloud Computing, Data Science & Engineering (BCD 2018), which was held on July 10–12, 2018 in Kanazawa. The aim of the conference was to bring together researchers and scientists, businesspeople and entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, computer users, and students to discuss the various fields of computer science, to share their experiences, and to exchange new ideas and information in a meaningful way. All aspects (theory, applications and tools) of computer and information science, the practical challenges encountered along the way, and the solutions adopted to solve them are all explored here.The conference organizers selected the best papers from among those accepted for presentation. The papers were chosen on the basis of review scores submitted by members of the program committee and subsequently underwent further rigorous review. Following this second round of review, 13 of the conference’s most promising papers were selected for this Springer (SCI) book. We eagerly await the important contributions that we know these authors will make to the field of computer and information science.

This book presents the outcomes of the 5th ACIS International Conference on Computational Science/Intelligence & Applied Informatics (CSII 2018), which was held on July 10–12, 2018 in Yonago, Japan. The aim of the conference was to bring together researchers and scientists, businesspeople and entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, computer users, and students to discuss the various fields of computer science, to share their experiences, and to exchange new ideas and information in a meaningful way. All aspects (theory, applications and tools) of computer and information science, the practical challenges encountered along the way, and the solutions adopted to solve them are all explored here.The conference organizers selected the best papers from among those accepted for presentation. The papers were chosen on the basis of review scores submitted by members of the program committee and subsequently underwent further rigorous review. Following this second round of review, 13 of theconference’s most promising papers were selected for this Springer (SCI) book. We eagerly await the important contributions that we know these authors will make to the field of computer and information science.

This book gathers the peer-reviewed proceedings of the 12th Annual Meeting of the Bulgarian Section of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, BGSIAM’17, held in Sofia, Bulgaria, in December 2017. The general theme of BGSIAM’17 was industrial and applied mathematics, with a particular focus on: high-performance computing, numerical methods and algorithms, analysis of partial differential equations and their applications, mathematical biology, control and uncertain systems, stochastic models, molecular dynamics, neural networks, genetic algorithms, metaheuristics for optimization problems, generalized nets, and Big Data.

This edited book presents the scientific outcomes of the 19th IEEE/ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking and Parallel/Distributed Computing (SNPD 2018), which was held in Busan, Korea on June 27–29, 2018. The aim of this conference was to bring together researchers and scientists, businessmen and entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, computer users and students to discuss the numerous fields of computer science and to share their experiences and exchange new ideas and information in a meaningful way. The book includes research findings on all aspects (theory, applications and tools) of computer and information science and discusses the practical challenges encountered along the way and the solutions adopted to respond to them.The book includes 13 of the conference’s most promising papers.

This book presents the scientific outcomes of the 6th International Conference on Applied Computing and Information Technology (ACIT 2018), which was held in Kunming, China on June 13–15, 2018. The aim of this conference was to bring together researchers and scientists, businessmen and entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, computer users, and students to discuss the numerous fields of computer science and to share their experiences and exchange new ideas and information in a meaningful way. The book includes research findings on all aspects (theory, applications and tools) of computer and information science and discusses the practical challenges encountered and the solutions adopted to address them.The book features 13 of the conference’s most promising papers.