Canadian Semantic Web
This book covers a variety of well known topics of interest to practitioners in industry and research scientists. The range of topics includes languages, tools and methodologies for the semantic Web, semantic Web-based ontology management and engineering, semantic Web services, practical applications of the semantic Web techniques, artificial intelligence methods and tools for the semantic Web, software agents on the semantic Web, visualization and modeling of the semantic Web. The goal of this book is to provide a state-of-the-art review of the research as well as to introduce topics of interest to experts.
Business Unusual : Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience
This book reveals the psychology behind how we feel about businesses, their communications and their leaders in a digital world. From understanding the new dynamics shaping online behaviour, to the evolving expectations driving employees and consumers, Business Unusual will teach you how to build a resilient business - one that is built on trust, an engaged and fulfilled workforce, and the brand values that can empower you to craft resonant communications and relationships.
Built on value : The Huawei philosophy of finance management
This book presents the concept of value as the central component to success and longevity of the global ICT industry player, Huawei. It provides examples of how Huawei focuses on customers to pursue sustainable and profitable growth rather than focusing on capital market valuation, which is a familiar scenario among Western companies. It is the business departments that are the creators of value for Huawei, whereas the finance department is tasked to provide support and services to those business departments and oversee their operations during the value creation process. The book illustrates how Huawei Finance sets rules, allocates resources, and builds centers of expertise all over the world to address future uncertainties. Huawei Finance adopts three types of centralized vertical management from the top down: treasury, accounting, and auditing. It does not transfer such central authority down to lower levels, but rather delegates all other authority to business organizations across all levels. This management model represents the focus of this book.
Branch-and-Bound Applications in Combinatorial Data Analysis
There are a variety of combinatorial optimization problems that are relevant to the examination of statistical data. Combinatorial problems arise in the clustering of a collection of objects, the seriation (sequencing or ordering) of objects, and the selection of variables for subsequent multivariate statistical analysis such as regression. The options for choosing a solution strategy in combinatorial data analysis can be overwhelming. Because some problems are too large or intractable for an optimal solution strategy, many researchers develop an over-reliance on heuristic methods to solve all combinatorial problems. However, with increasingly accessible computer power and ever-improving methodologies, optimal solution strategies have gained popularity for their ability to reduce unnecessary uncertainty. In this monograph, optimality is attained for nontrivially sized problems via the branch-and-bound paradigm.
Bird species : How they arise, modify and vanish
The average person can name more bird species than they think, but do we really know what a bird “species” is? This open access book takes up several fascinating aspects of bird life to elucidate this basic concept in biology. From genetic and physiological basics to the phenomena of bird song and bird migration, it analyzes various interactions of birds – with their environment and other birds. Lastly, it shows imminent threats to birds in the Anthropocene, the era of global human impact.This book brings together various disciplines involved in observing bird species come into existence, modify, and vanish. It is a rich resource for bird enthusiasts who want to understand various processes at the cutting edge of current research in more detail. At the same time it offers students the opportunity to see primarily unconnected, but booming big-data approaches such as genomics and biogeography meet in a topic of broad interest. Lastly, the book enables conservationists to better understand the uncertainties surrounding “species” as entities of protection.
Bioeconomic modelling and valuation of exploited marine ecosystems
This book offers an environmental-economic analysis of exploited ecosystems with a clear policy orientation. The study tries to move beyond traditional economic fishery analysis in two respects. First, several theoretical and numerical models are offered that combine economic and ecological descriptions of fisheries. These models give special attention to spatial processes as well as to combining exploitation and conservation objectives. Second, valuation and stakeholder concerns are addressed in empirical analyses employing both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The latter is done by using advanced methods of monetary valuation. In addition, the first part of the book presents short, introductory overviews of integrated assessment, economic modeling of fishery management, and incorporating uncertainty in fisheries analysis.
Bidding Strategies in Agent-Based Continuous Double Auctions
Presents a new bidding strategy for agents to adopt in CDAs and propose tools to enhance the performance of existing bidding strategies in CDAs. The superior performance of the new bidding strategy as well as the tools presented in this book are illustrated through extensive experiments.
Benefit/Cost-Driven Software Development : With Benefit Points and Size Points
This book presents a set of basic techniques for estimating the benefit of IT development projects and portfolios. It also offers methods for monitoring how much of that estimated benefit is being achieved during projects. Readers can then use these benefit estimates together with cost estimates to create a benefit/cost index to help them decide which functionalities to send into construction and in what order. This allows them to focus on constructing the functionality that offers the best value for money at an early stage.
Becoming virtual : Knowledge management and transformation of the distributed organization
This book examines the capabilities needed to transform a globally distributed organization into a virtual organization (an organization that exists and operates across time and distance with the support of global communications technologies such as the Internet). It introduces techniques for definition of goals for virtualization, for monitoring progress toward virtualization and for studying the impact of virtualization on social uncertainty, knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer, organizational memory, transactive memory, communities of practice and organizational commitment, power and control. These techniques are applied in an extended case study of a development aid organization's attempts to use knowledge management for virtualization over a two year period. The multidisciplinary team of authors examines virtualization from points of view ranging from the organizational to the technological to the sociological and psychological.
Bayesian networks and Influence diagrams : A guide to construction and analysis
Probabilistic networks, also known as Bayesian networks and influence diagrams, have become one of the most promising technologies in the area of applied artificial intelligence, offering intuitive, efficient, and reliable methods for diagnosis, prediction, decision making, classification, troubleshooting, and data mining under uncertainty. Bayesian Networks and Influence Diagrams: A Guide to Construction and Analysis provides a comprehensive guide for practitioners who wish to understand, construct, and analyze intelligent systems for decision support based on probabilistic networks. Intended primarily for practitioners, this book does not require sophisticated mathematical skills or deep understanding of the underlying theory and methods nor does it discuss alternative technologies for reasoning under uncertainty.
Bayesian Networks and Decision Graphs
Probabilistic graphical models and decision graphs are powerful modeling tools for reasoning and decision making under uncertainty. As modeling languages they allow a natural specification of problem domains with inherent uncertainty, and from a computational perspective they support efficient algorithms for automatic construction and query answering. This includes belief updating, finding the most probable explanation for the observed evidence, detecting conflicts in the evidence entered into the network, determining optimal strategies, analyzing for relevance, and performing sensitivity analysis. The book introduces probabilistic graphical models and decision graphs, including Bayesian networks and influence diagrams.It contians two parts. The first part focuses on probabilistic graphical models. Compared with the previous book, the new edition also includes a thorough description of recent extensions to the Bayesian network modeling language, advances in exact and approximate belief updating algorithms, and methods for learning both the structure and the parameters of a Bayesian network. The second part deals with decision graphs, and in addition to the frameworks described in the previous edition, it also introduces Markov decision processes and partially ordered decision problems.
Average-Cost Control of Stochastic Manufacturing Systems
This book is concerned with hierarchical control of manufacturing systems under uncertainty. It focuses on system performance measured in long-run average cost criteria, exploring the relationship between control problems with a discounted cost and that with a long-run average cost in connection with hierarchical control. A new theory is articulated that shows that hierarchical decision making in the context of a goal-seeking manufacturing system can lead to a near optimization of its objective. The approach in the book considers manufacturing systems in which events occur at different time scales.
Autonomous Navigation in Dynamic Environments
The purpose of this book is to address the challenging problem of Autonomous Navigation in Dynamic Environments, and to present new ideas and approaches in this newly emerging technical domain. The book surveys the state-of-the-art, discusses in detail various related challenging technical aspects, and addresses upcoming technologies in this field. The aim of the book is to establish a foundation for a broad class of mobile robot mapping and navigation methodologies for indoor, outdoor, and exploratory missions.Three main topics located on the cutting edge of the state of the art are addressed, from both the theoretical and technological point of views: Dynamic world understanding and modelling for safe navigation, Obstacle avoidance and motion planning in dynamic environments, and Human-robot physical interactions. Several models and approaches are proposed for solving problems such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) in dynamic environments, Mobile obstacle detection and tracking, World state estimation and motion prediction, Safe navigation in dynamic environments, Motion planning in dynamic environments, Robust decision making under uncertainty, and Human-Robot physical interactions.
Automatic Differentiation : Applications, Theory, and Implementations
This collection covers the state of the art in automatic differentiation theory and practice. Practitioners and students will learn about advances in automatic differentiation techniques and strategies for the implementation of robust and powerful tools. Computational scientists and engineers will benefit from the discussion of applications, which provide insight into effective strategies for using automatic differentiation for design optimization, sensitivity analysis, and uncertainty quantification.
Assessment and future directions of nonlinear model predictive control
Thepastthree decadeshaveseenrapiddevelopmentin the areaofmodelpred- tive control with respect to both theoretical and application aspects. Over these 30 years, model predictive control for linear systems has been widely applied, especially in the area of process control. However, today’s applications often require driving the process over a wide region and close to the boundaries of - erability, while satisfying constraints and achieving near-optimal performance. Consequently, the application of linear control methods does not always lead to satisfactory performance, and here nonlinear methods must be employed. This is one of the reasons why nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) has - joyed signi?cant attention over the past years,with a number of recent advances on both the theoretical and application frontier. Additionally, the widespread availability and steadily increasing power of today’s computers, as well as the development of specially tailored numerical solution methods for NMPC, bring thepracticalapplicabilityofNMPCwithinreachevenforveryfastsystems.This has led to a series of new, exciting developments, along with new challenges in the area of NMPC.
Artificial intelligence techniques in hydrology and water resources management
The sustainable management of water cycles is crucial in the context of climate change and global warming. It involves managing global, regional, and local water cycles, as well as urban, agricultural, and industrial water cycles, to conserve water resources and their relationships with energy, food, microclimates, biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and anthropogenic activities. Hydrological modeling is indispensable for achieving this goal, as it is essential for water resources management and the mitigation of natural disasters. In recent decades, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques in hydrology and water resources management has led to notable advances. In the face of hydro-geo-meteorological uncertainty, AI approaches have proven to be powerful tools for accurately modeling complex, nonlinear hydrological processes and effectively utilizing various digital and imaging data sources, such as ground gauges, remote sensing tools, and in situ Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
Arabic and Chinese Handwriting Recognition ; SACH 2006 Summit College Park, MD, USA, September 27-28, 2006 Selected Papers
Cheriet provides an overview of the problems of Arabic recognition and how systems can use natural language processing techniques to correct errors in lexicon-based systems.
Applied Research in Uncertainty Modeling and Analysis
For a long time uncertainty has been considered synonymous with random, stochastic, statistic, or probabilistic. Since the early sixties views on uncertainty have become more heterogeneous. In the past forty years numerous tools that model uncertainty, above and beyond statistics, have been proposed by several engineers and scientists. The tool/method to model uncertainty in a specific context should really be chosen by considering the features of the phenomenon under consideration, not independent of what is known about the system and what causes uncertainty. In this fascinating overview of the field, the authors provide broad coverage of uncertainty analysis/modeling and its application. Applied Research in Uncertainty Modeling and Analysis presents the perspectives of various researchers and practitioners on uncertainty analysis and modeling outside their own fields and domain expertise. Rather than focusing explicitly on theory, the authors use real-world examples to demonstrate the strength of the chosen methodology. Applied Research in Uncertainty Modeling and Analysis concentrates on general aspects of uncertainty, modeling, and methods, and focuses on various applications, included Biomedical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Structural Engineering, and Transportation Engineering.
Applied Civil Engineering Risk Analysis
Povides readers with the tools needed to determine the probability of failure, and when multiplied by the consequences of failure, illustrates how to assess the risk of civil engineering problems. Presenting methods for quantifying uncertainty that exists in engineering analysis and design, with an emphasis on fostering more accurate analysis and design.
Analyzing uncertainty in civil engineering
This volume addresses the issue of uncertainty in civil engineering from design to construction. Failures do occur in practice. Attributing them to a residual system risk or a faulty execution of the project does not properly cover the range of causes. A closer scrutiny of the adopted design, the engineering model, the data, the soil-construction-interaction and the model assumptions is required. Usually, the uncertainties in initial and boundary conditions are abundant. Current engineering practice often leaves these issues aside, despite the fact that new scientific tools have been developed in the past decades that allow a rational description of uncertainties of all kinds, from model uncertainty to data uncertainty. It is the aim of this volume to have a critical look at current engineering risk concepts in order to raise awareness of uncertainty in numerical computations, shortcomings of a strictly probabilistic safety concept, geotechnical models of failure mechanisms and their implications for construction management, execution, and the juristic question of responsibility. In addition, a number of the new procedures for modelling uncertainty are explained.



















