Soft Computing Based Modeling in Intelligent Systems

This is an examination of the broader context for the re-emergence of land reform and resource conflicts in Africa. Efforts to change the race based systems of land ownership and land tenure in Namibi

First recognized in 1665 by Christiaan Huygens, synchronization phenomena are abundant in science, nature, engineering and social life. Systems as diverse as clocks, singing crickets, cardiac pacemakers, firing neurons and applauding audiences exhibit a tendency to operate in synchrony. These phenomena are universal and can be understood within a common framework based on modern nonlinear dynamics. The first half of this book describes synchronization without formulae, and is based on qualitative intuitive ideas. The main effects are illustrated with experimental examples and figures, and the historical development is outlined. The remainder of the book presents the main effects of synchronization in a rigorous and systematic manner, describing classical results on synchronization of periodic oscillators, and recent developments in chaotic systems, large ensembles, and oscillatory media. This comprehensive book will be of interest to a broad audience, from graduate students to special

Organizations and businesses strive toward excellence, and solutions to problems are based mostly on judgment and experience. However, increased competition and consumer demands require that the solutions be optimum and not just feasible. Theory leads to algorithms. Algorithms need to be translated into computer codes. Engineering problems need to be modeled. Optimum solutions are obtained using theory and computers, and then interpreted. Revised and expanded in its third edition, this textbook integrates theory, modeling, development of numerical methods, and problem solving, thus preparing students to apply optimization to real-world problems. This text covers a broad variety of optimization problems using: unconstrained, constrained, gradient, and non-gradient techniques; duality concepts; multi-objective optimization; linear, integer, geometric, and dynamic programming with applications; and finite element-based optimization. It is ideal for advanced undergraduate or graduate cours

Handbook of Computational Intelligence in Biomedical Engineering and Healthcare helps readers analyze and conduct advanced research in specialty healthcare applications surrounding oncology, genomics and genetic data, ontologies construction, bio-memetic systems, biomedical electronics, protein structure prediction, and biomedical data analysis. The book provides the reader with a comprehensive guide to advanced computational intelligence, spanning deep learning, fuzzy logic, connectionist systems, evolutionary computation, cellular automata, self-organizing systems, soft computing, and hybrid intelligent systems in biomedical and healthcare applications. Sections focus on important biomedical engineering applications, including biosensors, enzyme immobilization techniques, immuno-assays, and nanomaterials for biosensors and other biomedical techniques.Other sections cover gene-based solutions and applications through computational intelligence techniques and the impact of nonlinear/un

Creating Change Through Family Philanthropy explains how privilege works in our society, and how young people can use it to better society. Based on the authors’ experiences with Resource Gener

Vicarious liability is controversial: a principle of strict liability in an area dominated by fault-based liability. By making an innocent party pay compensation for the torts of another, it can also appear unjust. Yet it is a principle found in all Western legal systems, be they civil law or common law. Despite uncertainty as to its justifications, it is accepted as necessary. In our modern global economy, we are unlikely to understand its meaning and rationale through study of one legal system alone. Using her considerable experience as a comparative tort lawyer, Paula Giliker examines the principle of vicarious liability (or, to a civil lawyer, liability for the acts of others) in England and Wales, Australia, Canada, France and Germany, and with reference to legal systems in countries such as the United States, New Zealand and Spain.

Phyllotaxis, the study of the patterns exhibited by leaves and other organs of plants, raises some of the deepest questions of plant morphogenesis. What principles of biological organisation produce these dynamical geometric systems? The constant occurrence of the Fibonacci sequence in such systems is a phenomenon that has fascinated botanists and mathematicians for centuries. In this book, first published in 1994, the many facets of phyllotaxis are dealt with in an integrated manner for the first time. The author describes a unified concept of phyllotaxis based on experimental, anatomical, cellular, physiological and paleontological observations. The book provides a framework for formal analyses of botanical data and emphasises the relevance of the phyllotactic paradigm in the study of other structures, such as crystals and proteins. It is of interest to cystallographers and physicists as well as to botanists and mathematicians.

Phyllotaxis, the study of the patterns exhibited by leaves and other organs of plants, raises some of the deepest questions of plant morphogenesis. What principles of biological organisation produce these dynamical geometric systems? The constant occurrence of the Fibonacci sequence in such systems is a phenomenon that has fascinated botanists and mathematicians for centuries. In this book, first published in 1994, the many facets of phyllotaxis are dealt with in an integrated manner for the first time. The author describes a unified concept of phyllotaxis based on experimental, anatomical, cellular, physiological and paleontological observations. The book provides a framework for formal analyses of botanical data and emphasises the relevance of the phyllotactic paradigm in the study of other structures, such as crystals and proteins. It is of interest to cystallographers and physicists as well as to botanists and mathematicians.

Flood risk management is presented in this book as a framework for identifying, assessing and prioritizing climate-related risks and developing appropriate adaptation responses. Rigorous assessment is employed to determine the available probabilistic and fuzzy set-based analytic tools, when each is appropriate and how to apply them to practical problems. Academic researchers in the fields of hydrology, climate change, environmental science and policy and risk assessment, and professionals and policy-makers working in hazard mitigation, water resources engineering and environmental economics, will find this an invaluable resource. This volume is the fourth in a collection of four books on flood disaster management theory and practice within the context of anthropogenic climate change. The others are: Floods in a Changing Climate: Extreme Precipitation by Ramesh Teegavarapu, Floods in a Changing Climate: Hydrologic Modeling by P. P. Mujumdar and D. Nagesh Kumar and Floods in a Changing C

Designed for all providers of women's healthcare - including those undertaking Maintenance of Certification programs, trainees preparing for postgraduate examinations, and those initiating or growing a program of quality improvement and patient safety - this practical manual guides those implementing QI and safety programs with specific emphasis on Obstetrics and Gynecology practice. The content contains a strong case-based element to improve accessibility and understanding. An introductory section covers core attributes needed by all physicians to build a culture of patient safety, including leadership, communication and QI skills. Core clinical skills are then reviewed - in a variety of labor ward, office, operating room, and outpatient settings. Finally systems implications are highlighted, including information transparency and disclosure, training programs, and regulatory and legal implications. The editors are involved with national and international initiatives educating physici

Monitoring in Anesthesia and Perioperative Care is a practical and comprehensive resource documenting the current art and science of perioperative patient monitoring, addressing the systems-based practice issues that drive the highly regulated health care industry of the early twenty-first century. Initial chapters cover the history, medicolegal implications, validity of measurement and education issues relating to monitoring. The core of the book addresses the many monitoring modalities, with the majority of the chapters organized in a systematic fashion to describe technical concepts, parameters monitored, evidence of utility complications, credentialing and monitoring standards, and practice guidelines. Describing each device, technique and principle of clinical monitoring in an accessible style, Monitoring in Anesthesia and Perioperative Care is full of invaluable advice from the leading experts in the field, making it an essential tool for every anesthesiologist.

Introducing digital communication receiver performance analysis basics, this book presents a unified method for computing the performance of digital communication systems characterized by a variety of

There is mounting hope in the United States that federal legislation in the form of No Child Left Behind will improve educational outcomes. As titanic as the challenge appears to be, however, the solution could be at our fingertips. This volume identifies visual types of cognitive models in reading, science and mathematics for researchers, test developers, school administrators, policy makers and teachers. In the process of identifying these cognitive models, the book also explores methodological or translation issues to consider as decisions are made about how to generate psychologically informative and psychometrically viable large-scale assessments based on the learning sciences. Initiatives to overhaul educational systems in disrepair may begin with national policies, but the success of these policies will hinge on how well stakeholders begin to rethink what is possible with a keystone of the educational system: large-scale assessment.

"This book brings together new ways to process and monitor data, and to put it to work in everything from intelligent transportation systems to healthcare to multimedia applications"--

Color perception plays an important role in object recognition and scene understanding both for humans and intelligent vision systems. Recent advances in digital color imaging and computer hardware te

The book adopts a tutorial-based approach to introduce the user to Scikit-learn. If you are a programmer who wants to explore machine learning and data-based methods to build intelligent applications

Information structure, or the way the information in a sentence is 'divided' into categories such as topic, focus, comment, background, and old versus new information, is one of the most widely debated topics in linguistics. This volume incorporates exciting work on the relationship between syntax and information structure. The contributors are united in rejecting accounts that assume designated syntactic positions associated with specific information-structural interpretations, and aim instead to derive information-structural conditions on word order and other phenomena from the way syntax and syntax-external systems interact. Beyond this shared aim, the authors of the various chapters advocate a number of approaches, based on different types of data (syntactic, semantic, phonological/phonetic) from a range of languages. The book is aimed at specialists in syntax and/or information structure, as well as students and linguists in related fields keen to familiarise themselves with curre

Information structure, or the way the information in a sentence is 'divided' into categories such as topic, focus, comment, background, and old versus new information, is one of the most widely debated topics in linguistics. This volume incorporates exciting work on the relationship between syntax and information structure. The contributors are united in rejecting accounts that assume designated syntactic positions associated with specific information-structural interpretations, and aim instead to derive information-structural conditions on word order and other phenomena from the way syntax and syntax-external systems interact. Beyond this shared aim, the authors of the various chapters advocate a number of approaches, based on different types of data (syntactic, semantic, phonological/phonetic) from a range of languages. The book is aimed at specialists in syntax and/or information structure, as well as students and linguists in related fields keen to familiarise themselves with curre

The book is a collection of invited chapters by experts in Chinese document and text processing, and is part of a series on Language Processing, Pattern Recognition, and Intelligent Systems. The chapt

An understanding of critical care is vital to the modern surgeon, who is often responsible for patients requiring intensive care or high-dependency support. Key Questions in Surgical Critical Care has been designed as a companion to Surgical Critical Care, by Robert Ashford and Neal Evans, and is split into two main sections, multiple choice questions and viva topics. Based on the syllabus of the Royal College of Surgeons, each of these two sections is further subdivided into six sub-sections covering the cardiovascular system, the respiratory system, other systems and multisystem failure, problems in intensive care, principles of intensive care and practical procedures. The MCQs and viva topics provided are typical of those appearing in the MRCS examination, and the authors provide detailed explanatory notes to accompany each answer, almost all of which are cross-referenced directly to the relevant pages of Surgical Critical Care, as well as other sources of further reading.

This authoritative book presents a comprehensive account of the essential roles of nonlinear dynamic and chaos theories in understanding, modeling, and forecasting hydrologic systems. This is done thr

The first book to provide comprehensive coverage of FACTS power systems modeling and simulation.* Detailed coverage of the development of FACTS controllers and guidance on the selection of appropriate

The essential aim of this book is to consider a wide set of problems arising in the mathematical modeling of mechanical systems under unilateral constraints. In these investigations elastic and non-el

This book is first of its kind describing a new direction in modeling processes taking place in interplanetary and interstellar space (magnetic fields, plasma, cosmic rays, etc.). This method is based

This book was first published in 1993. Computing systems are becoming highly complex, harder to understand, and therefore more prone to failure. Where such systems control aircraft for example, system failure could have disastrous consequences. It is important therefore that we are able to employ mathematical techniques to specify the behaviour or safety critical systems. This thesis uses the theory of Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) to show how a real-lime system may be specified. Included is a case study in which a local area network protocol is described at two levels of abstraction, and a general method 14 structuring CSP descriptions of layered protocols is given.

This 2002 book investigates the opportunities in building intelligent decision support systems offered by multi-agent distributed probabilistic reasoning. Probabilistic reasoning with graphical models, also known as Bayesian networks or belief networks, has become increasingly an active field of research and practice in artificial intelligence, operations research and statistics. The success of this technique in modeling intelligent decision support systems under the centralized and single-agent paradigm has been striking. Yang Xiang extends graphical dependence models to the distributed and multi-agent paradigm. He identifies the major technical challenges involved in such an endeavor and presents the results. The framework developed in the book allows distributed representation of uncertain knowledge on a large and complex environment embedded in multiple cooperative agents, and effective, exact and distributed probabilistic inference.

This 2002 book investigates the opportunities in building intelligent decision support systems offered by multi-agent distributed probabilistic reasoning. Probabilistic reasoning with graphical models, also known as Bayesian networks or belief networks, has become increasingly an active field of research and practice in artificial intelligence, operations research and statistics. The success of this technique in modeling intelligent decision support systems under the centralized and single-agent paradigm has been striking. Yang Xiang extends graphical dependence models to the distributed and multi-agent paradigm. He identifies the major technical challenges involved in such an endeavor and presents the results. The framework developed in the book allows distributed representation of uncertain knowledge on a large and complex environment embedded in multiple cooperative agents, and effective, exact and distributed probabilistic inference.

Within the rapidly-growing arena of 'virtual worlds', such as Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs), individuals behave in particular ways, influence one another, and develop complex relationships. This setting can be a useful tool for modeling complex social systems, cognitive factors, and interactions between groups and within organizations. To study these worlds effectively requires a cross-disciplinary approach that integrates social science theories with big data analytics. This broad-based book offers a comprehensive and holistic perspective on the field. It brings together research findings from an international team of experts in computer science (artificial intelligence, game design, and social computing), psychology, and the social sciences to help researchers and practitioners better understand the fundamental processes underpinning social behavior in virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft, Rift, Eve Online, and Travian.

Based on fundamental principles from mathematics, linear systems, and signal analysis, digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms are useful for extracting information from signals collected all aroun

This edited volume examines current disability classification systems, the dilemmas educators face in categorizing students with special needs, and alternative options based on recent challenges and

This Handbook provides a complete compendium of methods for evaluation of IT-based systems and solutions within healthcare. Emphasis is entirely on assessment of the IT-system within its organization

Written by experienced SQL Server developers, this second edition shows readers how to build Windows or Web-based reporting systems. The book covers features added to the newest version of Reporting S

The question of complexity, as in what makes one language more 'complex' than another, is a long-established topic of debate amongst linguists. Recently, this issue has been complemented with the view that languages are complex adaptive systems, in which emergence and self-organization play major roles. However, few students of the phenomenon have gone beyond the basic assessment of the number of units and rules in a language (what has been characterized as 'bit complexity') or shown some familiarity with the science of complexity. This book reveals how much can be learned by overcoming these limitations, especially by adopting developmental and evolutionary perspectives. The contributors include specialists of language acquisition, evolution and ecology, grammaticization, phonology, and modeling, all of whom approach languages as dynamical, emergent, and adaptive complex systems.

This is a study of the effects of 'modernization' on the social and economic world of women in Morocco. Vanessa Maher suggests that three systems of social stratification modify one another: a system of classes based on relation to the means of production; a system of estates, differentiated by inherited status; and a system of segmentary tribal groups, based on territorial rights. Although all Moroccans use all these systems on different occasions it is the women who, faced with their own exclusion from wage-earning, along with the instability of marriage and the inadequacy of most family incomes, respond by perpetually reconstituting the groups on which they must depend, those based on territorial rights and putative kinship. By observing these social networks, Maher has been able to identify part of what inhibits the development of class consciousness, and what favours a clientistic political structure.

The central role of mathematical modeling in modern evolutionary theory has raised a concern as to why and how abstract formulae can say anything about empirical phenomena of evolution. This Element introduces existing philosophical approaches to this problem and proposes a new account according to which evolutionary models are based on causal, and not just mathematical, assumptions. The novel account features causal models both as the Humean 'uniform nature' underlying evolutionary induction and as the organizing framework that integrates mathematical and empirical assumptions into a cohesive network of beliefs that functions together to achieve epistemic goals of evolutionary biology.

In China, as Internet of Things and cloud-computing have been widely used in various areas, the concept of Intelligent City quickly became one of the most exciting topics in urban development. Various

In many applications, radio frequency (RF) signals need to be transmitted and processed without being digitalized. Optical fiber provides a transmission medium in which RF modulated optical carriers can be transmitted and distributed with very low loss, making it more efficient and less costly than conventional electronic systems. This volume presents a review of RF photonic components, transmission systems, and signal processing examples in optical fibers from leading academic, government, and industry scientists working in this field. It also introduces the reader to various related technologies such as direct modulation of laser sources, external modulation techniques, and detectors. The text is aimed at engineers and scientists engaged in the research and development of optical fibers and analog RF applications. With an emphasis on design, performance and practical application, this book will be of particular interest to those developing systems based on this technology.

This book presents a full spectrum of views on current approaches to modeling cell mechanics. The authors come from the biophysics, bioengineering and physical chemistry communities and each joins the discussion with a unique perspective on biological systems. Consequently, the approaches range from finite element methods commonly used in continuum mechanics to models of the cytoskeleton as a cross-linked polymer network to models of glassy materials and gels. Studies reflect both the static, instantaneous nature of the structure, as well as its dynamic nature due to polymerization and the full array of biological processes. While it is unlikely that a single unifying approach will evolve from this diversity, it is the hope that a better appreciation of the various perspectives will lead to a highly coordinated approach to exploring the essential problems and better discussions among investigators with differing views.

Vicarious liability is controversial: a principle of strict liability in an area dominated by fault-based liability. By making an innocent party pay compensation for the torts of another, it can also appear unjust. Yet it is a principle found in all Western legal systems, be they civil law or common law. Despite uncertainty as to its justifications, it is accepted as necessary. In our modern global economy, we are unlikely to understand its meaning and rationale through study of one legal system alone. Using her considerable experience as a comparative tort lawyer, Paula Giliker examines the principle of vicarious liability (or, to a civil lawyer, liability for the acts of others) in England and Wales, Australia, Canada, France and Germany, and with reference to legal systems in countries such as the United States, New Zealand and Spain.

Our technologies are progressively developing into algorithmic devices that seamlessly interface with digital personhood. This text discusses the ways in which technology is increasingly becoming a part of personhood and the resulting ethical issues. It extends upon the framework for a brain-based cyberpsychology outlined by the author's earlier book Cyberpsychology and the Brain: The Interaction of Neuroscience and Affective Computing (Cambridge, 2017). Using this framework, Thomas D. Parsons investigates the ethical issues involved in cyberpsychology research and praxes, which emerge in algorithmically coupled people and technologies. The ethical implications of these ideas are important as we consider the cognitive enhancements that can be afforded by our technologies. If people are intimately linked to their technologies, then removing or damaging the technology could be tantamount to a personal attack. On the other hand, algorithmic devices may threaten autonomy and privacy. This