الصفحة 7
الصفحة 7
Learning and Adaption in Multi-Agent Systems ; 1st International Workshop, LAMAS 2005, Utrecht, The Netherlands, July 25, 2005, Revised Selected Papers
Contains selected and revised papers of the International Workshop on Lea- ing and Adaptation in Multi-Agent Systems (LAMAS 2005), held at the AAMAS 2005 Conference in Utrecht, The Netherlands, July 26. An important aspect in multi-agent systems (MASs) is that the environment evolves over time, not only due to external environmental changes but also due to agent int- actions. For this reason it is important that an agent can learn, based on experience, and adapt its knowledge to make rational decisions and act in this changing environment autonomously. Machine learning techniques for single-agent frameworks are well established. Agents operate in uncertain environments and must be able to learn and act - tonomously. This task is, however, more complex when the agent interacts with other agents that have potentially different capabilities and goals. The single-agent case is structurally different from the multi-agent case due to the added dimension of dynamic interactions between the adaptive agents. Multi-agent learning, i.e., the ability of the agents to learn how to cooperate and compete, becomes crucial in many domains. Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems (AAMAS) is an emerging multi-disciplinary area encompassing computer science, software engineering, biology, as well as cognitive and social sciences. A t- oretical framework, in which rationality of learning and interacting agents can be - derstood, is still under development in MASs, although there have been promising ?
Lamto : Structure, Functioning, and Dynamics of a Savanna Ecosystem
Known as "a dream place for scientists," the Lamto savannas, located on the edge of the Cote d'Ivoire rain forests, are one of the only savannas in the world where ongoing ecological research has endured for more than forty years. Drawing from and synthesizing this abundance of research, the book examines the structure, functioning, and dynamics of the Lamto humid savanna. Beginning with the history of the Lamto ecology station and an overview of the major environmental conditions of the site, this exacting work specifically examines the integrative view of energy and nutrient fluxes relative to the dynamics of the savanna's vegetation.
Competition in Marketing : Two Essays on the Impact of Information on Managerial Decisions and on Spatial Product Differentiation
In her first essay Vera Magin uses primary experimental data to explore the effects of information on marketing decisions, performance, and competition. In her second essay the author discusses several approaches to measure product differentiation in spatial contexts. In doing so, she refers to the measurement of diversity and also applies methods from disciplines like spatial statistics, forestry, and geography.
Communicating, Networking : Interacting : The International Year of Global Understanding - IYGU
illustrates the benefits to be gained from digitally networked communication for health, education and transitioning economies in developing nations (Sierra Leone and Papua New Guinea) and developed nations. Growing powers of e-citizenship can help build sustainable futures. This small volume provides a collection of examples and ideas from which the authors hope will help build a wider resource. Understanding how to link everyday lives with global networks in the digital world in ways that add benefit for the world’s people, and the health of the planet, is an ongoing project. IYGU recognises the integral roles of networking and communication systems, as well as interactions between people, near and far, as fundamental for building better futures. The global penetration of digital devices means everyday life, present and future, is inextricably linked with information technologies
Communicating Science in Social Contexts : New models, new practices
Science communication, as a multidisciplinary field, has developed remarkably in recent years. It is now a distinct and exceedingly dynamic science that melds theoretical approaches with practical experience. Formerly well-established theoretical models now seem out of step with the social reality of the sciences, and the previously clear-cut delineations and interacting domains between cultural fields have blurred. Communicating Science in Social Contexts examines that shift, which itself depicts a profound recomposition of knowledge fields, activities and dissemination practices, and the value accorded to science and technology.
Climate and Land Degradation
In many parts of the world, climatic variations are recognized as one of the major factors contributing to land degradation impacting on agricultural systems performance and management. To accurately assess sustainable land management practices, the climate resources and the risk of climate-related or induced natural disasters in a region must be known. Only when climate resources are paired with management or development practices can the land degradation potential be assessed and appropriate mitigation technologies be developed. This book is based on an International Workshop held in Arusha, Tanzania and should be of interest to all organizations and agencies interested in sustainable land management to arrest land degradation.
Civil engineering materials : From theory to practice ; 1st ed.
Presents the state-of-the-art in civil engineering materials, including the fundamental theory of materials needed for civil engineering projects and unique insights from decades of large-scale construction in China. The title includes the latest advances in new materials and techniques for civil engineering, showing the relationship between composition, structure and properties, and covering ultra-high-performance concrete and self-compacting concrete developed in China. This book provides comprehensive coverage of the most commonly used, most advanced materials for use in civil engineering. This volume consists of eight chapters covering the fundamentals of materials, inorganic cementing materials, Portland cement concrete, bricks, blocks and building mortar, metal, wood, asphalt and polymers.
Chromatin and Disease
It is more evident now than ever before that dynamic organization of human genome into nucleoprotein structure, chromatin confers the unique regulatory mechanisms for most of the cellular phenomena, which include replication, transcription, DNA repair, recombination and also apoptosis. The dynamic nature of the chromatin is regulated by chromatin modifications (epigenetic alterations), remodeling, histone chaperones and functional interactions of different chromatin interacting n- histone proteins. Dysfunction of this highly inter connected machineries disturb the cellular homoeostasis, and thereby causes several diseases. As we advance in our knowledge of chromatin function and also disease mechanisms in more details, their causal relationship is becoming more evident. This has lead to the identification of chromatin function as target for new generation therapeutics.
Child Protection in England, 1960–2000 : Expertise, Experience, and Emotion
Explores how children, parents, and survivors reshaped the politics of child protection in late twentieth-century England. Activism by these groups, often manifested in small voluntary organisations, drew upon and constructed an expertise grounded in experience and emotion that supported, challenged, and subverted medical, social work, legal, and political authority. New forms of experiential and emotional expertise were manifested in politics – through consultation, voting, and lobbying – but also in the reshaping of everyday life, and in new partnerships formed between voluntary spokespeople and media. While becoming subjects of, and agents in, child protection politics over the late twentieth century, children, parents, and survivors also faced barriers to enacting change, and the book traces how long-standing structural hierarchies, particularly around gender and age, mediated and inhibited the realisation of experiential and emotional expertise.
Chaos in Structural Mechanics
This volume introduces and reviews novel theoretical approaches to modeling strongly nonlinear behaviour of either individual or interacting structural mechanical units such as beams, plates and shells or composite systems thereof.
Catastrophic Events Caused by Cosmic Objects
Many times all of us could hear from mass media that an asteroid approached and swept past the Earth. Such an asteroid or comet will inevitably strike the planet some day. This volume considers hazards due to collisions with cosmic objects, particularly in light of recent investigations of impacts by the authors. Each chapter written by an expert contains an overview of an aspect and new findings in the field. The main hazardous effects – cratering, shock, aerial and seismic waves, fires, ejection of dust and soot, tsunami are described and numerically estimated. Numerical simulations of impacts and impact consequences have received much attention in the book. Fairly small impacting objects 50 -100 m in diameter pose a real threat to humanity and their influence on the atmosphere and ionosphere is emphasized.
Building a Data Warehouse : With Examples in SQL Server
The book is organized as follows. In the beginning of this book (chapters 1 through 6), you learn how to build a data warehouse, for example, defining the architecture, understanding the methodology, gathering the requirements, designing the data models, and creating the databases. Then in chapters 7 through 10, you learn how to populate the data warehouse, for example, extracting from source systems, loading the data stores, maintaining data quality, and utilizing the metadata. After you populate the data warehouse, in chapters 11 through 15, you explore how to present data to users using reports and multidimensional databases and how to use the data in the data warehouse for business intelligence, customer relationship management, and other purposes. Chapters 16 and 17 wrap up the book: After you have built your data warehouse, before it can be released to production, you need to test it thoroughly. After your application is in production, you need to understand how to administer data warehouse operation.
Brands and Consumers : A Research Overview
This short-form book provides a comprehensive overview of research evidence on several core branding topics whilst acting as a catalyst for advancing future research and informing business practice. The book represents a timely compendium on popular topics in branding and aims to be a valuable addition to knowledge in branding. The book focuses on reviewing research in branding and brand management, and proposes areas for expanding research in the field.
Brain thoughts recognition
Humans controlling machines with their minds may sound like something from a scifi movie, but it’s becoming a reality through brain-computer interfaces BCI. Where BCI technology allows a human brain and an external device to talk to each other—to exchange signals. It gives humans the ability to directly control machines, without the physical constraints of the body. There are two ways to implement the BCI: Noninvasive tools often use sensors applied on or near the head to track and record brain activity, or Invasive BCI would require surgery. Electronic devices would need to be implanted beneath the skull, directly into the brain, to target specific sets of neurons. In order to implement a non-invasive BCI in a mobile phone, this study developed a mobile application to help paralyzed people who do not have the ability to use their phones to spend their basic daily needs, such as using the keyboard and interacting with PDF, etc.
Blind Speech Separation
This is the first book to provide a cutting edge reference to the fascinating topic of blind source separation (BSS) for convolved speech mixtures. Through contributions by the foremost experts on the subject, the book provides an up-to-date account of research findings, explains the underlying theory, and discusses potential applications. The individual chapters are designed to be tutorial in nature with specific emphasis on an in-depth treatment of state of the art techniques. Blind Speech Separation is divided into three parts:Part 1 presents overdetermined or critically determined BSS. Here the main technology is independent component analysis (ICA). ICA is a statistical method for extracting mutually independent sources from their mixtures. Part 2 addresses underdetermined BSS, where there are fewer microphones than source signals. Here, the sparseness of speech sources is very useful; we can utilize time-frequency diversity, where sources are active in different regions of the time-frequency plane.Part 3 presents monaural BSS where there is only one microphone. Here, we can separate a mixture by using the harmonicity and temporal structure of the sources. We can build a probabilistic framework by assuming a source model, and separate a mixture by maximizing the a posteriori probability of the sources.
Biophysical Aspects of Transmembrane Signaling
Transmembrane signaling is one of the most significant cell biological events in the life and death of cells in general and lymphocytes in particular. Until recently biochemists and biophysicists were not accustomed to thinking of these processes from the side of a high number of complex biochemical events and an equally high number of physical changes at molecular and cellular levels at the same time. Both types of researchers were convinced that their findings are the most decisive, having higher importance than the findings of the other scientist population. Both casts were wrong. Life, even at cellular level, has a number of interacting physical and biochemical mechanisms, which finally build up the creation of an "excited" cell that will respond to particular signals from the outer or inner world.
Bernoulli potential in superconductors : How the electrostatic field helps to understand superconductivity
The motion of electrons in superconductors seems to defy our imagination based on daily experience with Newtonian mechanics. This book shows that the classical concepts, such as the balance of forces acting on electrons, are useful for understanding superconductivity. The electrostatic field plays a natural part in this balance as it mediates forces between electrons at long distances. Due to its classical interpretation, the theory presented in this book is suitable for introductory courses.
Beginning JBoss Seam : From novice to professional
Reacting to the popularity of Java 2.0 Enterprise Edition™ alternatives such as Ruby on Rails and the enterprise Spring Framework, Red Hat JBoss®, Inc. developed JBoss® Seam, a new open-source lightweight Java™ EE 5-based contextual application development framework. Beginning JBoss® Seam: From Novice to Professional gets you started as the first book on this popular framework.
Bargaining Power Effects in Financial Contracting : A Joint Analysis of Contract Type and Placement Mode Choices
The aim of this dissertation is to examine bargaining power effects in financial contracting. In particular power effects on firms' choices of contract type (debt vs. equity) and placement mode (public offering vs. private placement)
Autonomic communication ; Vol. 3854 : 2nd International IFIP Workshop, WAC 2005, Athens, Greece, October 2-5, 2005, Revised Selected Papers
The Second IFIP Workshop on Autonomic Communication (WAC 2005) took place on October 2–5, 2005, IFIP TC6 provided scientific sponsorship through Working Groups IFIP WG6. 6 (Management of Networks and Distributed Systems) and IFIP WG6. 3 (Performance of Communication Systems). The workshop was organized at a time when the – yet to be well defined – field of autonomic communication (AC) is attracting the interest of both the scientific community and the research funding organizations. The latter is manifested, on one hand, by the numerous recent relevant research exploratory forums, workshop panels, preliminary forward-looking position papers, research outlooks and frameworks and, on the other hand, by the commitment of the FET program of the European Commission in Europe to funding long-term research in this area for the next four years.
