Complexity in landscape ecology
Interactions matter. To understand the distributions of plants and animals in a landscape you need to understand how they interact with each other, and with their environment. The resulting networks of interactions make ecosystems highly complex. Recent research on complexity and artificial life provides many new insights about patterns and processes in landscapes and ecosystems. This book provides the first overview of that work for general readers. It covers such topics as connectivity, criticality, feedback, and networks, as well as their impact on the stability and predictability of ecosystem dynamics. With over 60 years of research experience of both ecology and complexity, the authors are uniquely qualified to provide a new perspective on traditional ecology.
Complexity in chemistry, biology, and ecology
This book, written by an international team of experts, introduces the reader to various aspects of complexity theory and its applications. It illustrates the latest trends in science to go beyond the mechanistic Newtonian view of the world by shifting the focus to self-organization, adaptation, and emergent phenomena. The authors discuss these properties of complex systems in biology, ecology and chemistry along with the structure and interconnectedness of the "layers" of complexity. The qualitative description is complemented by a discussion of methods for complexity quantification. Networks are covered in detail as a universal language of the complex world.
Complex Scheduling
This book deals with such complex scheduling problems and methods to solve them. It consists of three parts: The ?rst part (Chapters 1 and 2) contains a description of basic scheduling models with applications and an introduction into discrete optimization (covering complexity, shortest path algorithms, linear programming, network ?ow algorithms and general optimization methods). In the second part (Chapter 3) resource-constrained project scheduling problems are considered. Especially, methods like constraint propagation, branch-a- bound algorithms and heuristic procedures are described. Furthermore, lower bounds and general objective functions are discussed.
Complex Engineered Systems : Science Meets Technology
This volume examines the difficulties that arise in creating highly complex engineered systems and new approaches that are being adopted. Topics addressed range from the formal representation and classification of distributed networked systems to revolutionary engineering practices inspired by biological evolution. By bringing together the latest research in Complex Engineered Systems, this book sheds light on the current state and future course of this emerging field.
Complex Dynamics in Communication Networks
Computer and communication networks are among society's most important infrastructures. The internet, in particular, is a giant global network of networks without central control or administration. It is a paradigm of a complex system, where complexity may arise from different sources: topological structure, network evolution, connection and node diversity, or dynamical evolution. The present volume is the first book entirely devoted to the new and emerging field of nonlinear dynamics of TCP/IP networks. It addresses both scientists and engineers working in the general field of communication networks.
Complex Computing-Networks : Brain-like and Wave-oriented Electrodynamic Algorithms
This book uniquely combines new advances in the electromagnetic and the circuits&systems theory. It integrates both fields regarding computational aspects of common interest. Emphasized subjects are those methods which mimic brain-like and electrodynamic behaviour; among these are cellular neural networks, chaos and chaotic dynamics, attractor-based computation and stream ciphers.
Complex and Adaptive Dynamical Systems : A Primer
We are living in an ever more complex world, an epoch where human actions can accordingly acquire far-reaching potentialities. Complex and adaptive dynamical systems are ubiquitous in the world surrounding us and require us to adapt to new realities and the way of dealing with them. This primer has been developed with the aim of conveying a wide range of "commons-sense" knowledge in the field of quantitative complex system science at an introductory level, providing an entry point to this both fascinating and vitally important subject.
Competence Assessment in Dementia
The increasing proportion of demented elderly in populations, debates over patient's rights and autonomy, and the growing body of knowledge on dementia has inspired the European Dementia Consensus Network to regard competence assessment in dementia as an important topic of debate.
Communities of practice to actively manage best practices
Stefano Borzillo examines a large variety of CoPs by means of six success factors and identifies three basic types: innovating strategic, operational excellence, and social and productive space CoPs.
Communities and Technologies 2005 ; Proceedings of the Second Communities and Technologies Conference, Milano 2005
This book includes 23 papers dealing with the impact of modern information and communication technologies that support a wide variety of communities: local communities, virtual communities, and communities of practice, such as knowledge communities and scientific communities. The volume is the result of the second multidisciplinary "Communities and Technologies Conference", a major event in this emerging research field. The various chapters discuss how communities are affected by technologies, and how understanding of the way that communities function can be used in improving information systems design. This state of the art overview will be of interest to computer and information scientists, social scientists and practitioners alike.
Communicative figurations : Transforming communications in times of deep mediatization
This open access volume is about how to research the influence of our changing media environment. Today, there is not one single medium that is the driving force of change. With the spreading of various technical communication media such as mobile phone and internet platforms, we are confronted with a media manifold of deep mediatization. But how can we investigate its transformative capability? This book answers this question by taking a non-media-centric perspective, researching the various figurations of collectivities and organizations humans are involved in. The first part of the book outlines a fundamental understanding of the changing media environment of deep mediatization and its transformative capacity. The second part focuses on collectivities and movements: communities in the city, critical social movements, maker, online gaming groups and networked groups of young people. The third part moves institutions and organizations into the foreground, discussing the transformation of journalism, religion, politics, and education, whilst the fourth and final part is dedicated to methodologies and perspectives.
Communications and Networking : An Introduction
Communications and Networking: An Introduction provides a clear and easy to follow treatment of the subject, written specifically for undergraduates who have no previous experience in the field. The author takes a step by step approach, with examples and exercises designed to give the reader increased confidence in using and understanding communications systems. Topics covered include communications technologies, networking models and standards, local area and wide area networks, network protocols, TCP/IP-based networks and network management.
Communications and Multimedia Security ; Vol.4237 ; 10th IFIP TC-6 TC 11 International Conference, CMS 2006, Heraklion Crete, Greece, October 19-21, 2006, Proceedings
Scientists, managers, and politicians all over the world havedesignedandarecurrently implementing systematicapproachesto network and information security, most of which are underlined by the principle: there is much more room for improvement and research. Along the lines of encouraging and catalyzing research in the area of c- munications and multimedia security, it is our great pleasure to present the proceedings of the 10th IFIP TC-6 TC-11 Conference on Communications and MultimediaSecurity(CMS2006), we sought a balanced program containing presentations on various aspects of secure c- munication and multimedia systems.
Communications and Multimedia Security ; Vol. 3677 ; 9th IFIP TC-6 TC-11 International Conference, CMS 2005, Salzburg, Austria, September 19-21, 2005, Proceedings
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th IFIP Ti6 Ti11 International Conference on Communications and Multimedia Security, CMS 2005, held in Salzburg, Austria in September 2005. The 28 revised full papers and 13 two-page abstracts presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 143 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on applied cryptography, DRM and e-commerce, media encryption, multimedia security, privacy, biometrics and access control, network security, mobile security, and XML security.
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
Climatic Change and its Impacts : An Overview Focusing on Switzerland
This book focuses upon climate processes, variability and change and applies the general principles related to these issues, particularly in Switzerland. Although a small country, Switzerland is characterized by complex topography where climatic processes are often enhanced due to the presence of the Alps. In addition, there is a remarkable density of observational data in both the natural and social sciences that enable a comprehensive assessment of climate processes, their long-term trends and their impacts. This book is intended for students from the undergraduate level onwards and researchers interested in climate issues specific to the alpine region.
Climate Change and Energy Pathways for the Mediterranean : Workshop Proceedings, Cyprus
This the workshop proceedings present an overview of the implications of climate change for the eastern Mediterranean and the impact of climate change response on regional economic activity, particularly in the hydrocarbon industry.
Classification and Modeling with Linguistic Information Granules : Advanced Approaches to Linguistic Data Mining
Many approaches have already been proposed for classification and modeling in the literature. These approaches are usually based on mathematical mod els. Computer systems can easily handle mathematical models even when they are complicated and nonlinear (e.g., neural networks). On the other hand, it is not always easy for human users to intuitively understand mathe matical models even when they are simple and linear. This is because human information processing is based mainly on linguistic knowledge while com puter systems are designed to handle symbolic and numerical information. A large part of our daily communication is based on words. We learn from various media such as books, newspapers, magazines, TV, and the Inter net through words. We also communicate with others through words. While words play a central role in human information processing, linguistic models are not often used in the fields of classification and modeling. If there is no goal other than the maximization of accuracy in classification and modeling, mathematical models may always be preferred to linguistic models. On the other hand, linguistic models may be chosen if emphasis is placed on interpretability.
Classification and Learning Using Genetic Algorithms : Applications in Bioinformatics and Web Intelligence
This book provides a unified framework that describes how genetic learning can be used to design pattern recognition and learning systems. The book is unique in the sense of describing how a search technique, the genetic algorithm, can be used for pattern classification mainly through approximating decision boundaries, and it demonstrates the effectiveness of the genetic classifiers vis-à-vis several widely used classifiers, including neural networks. It provides a balanced mixture of theories, algorithms and applications, and in particular results from the bioinformatics and Web intelligence domains.
Classification and Clustering for Knowledge Discovery
This book covers recent advances in unsupervised and supervised data analysis methods in Computational Intelligence for knowledge discovery. In its first part the book provides a collection of recent research on distributed clustering, self organizing maps and their recent extensions. If labeled data or data with known associations are available, we may be able to use supervised data analysis methods, such as classifying neural networks, fuzzy rule-based classifiers, and decision trees. Therefore this book presents a collection of important methods of supervised data analysis. "Classification and Clustering for Knowledge Discovery" also includes variety of applications of knowledge discovery in health, safety, commerce, mechatronics, sensor networks, and telecommunications.



















