The book is inspired by the third seminar in a cycle connected to the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the Politecnico di Milano (July 2013). "Educating by Image. Teaching Styles vs Learning Styles" was the motto of this meeting. The contributions (coming from lectures, the poster session, interviews and round table) aim to propose an updated look at visual education, highlighting how d…
The book presents recent advances in nature-inspired computing, giving a special emphasis to control systems applications. It reviews different techniques used for simulating physical, chemical, biological or social phenomena at the purpose of designing robust, predictive and adaptive control strategies. The book is a collection of several contributions, covering either more general approaches …
This timely review book summarizes the state-of-the-art developments in nature-inspired optimization algorithms and their applications in engineering. Algorithms and topics include the overview and history of nature-inspired algorithms, discrete firefly algorithm, discrete cuckoo search, plant propagation algorithm, parameter-free bat algorithm, gravitational search, biogeography-based algorith…
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the International Conference on Nature of Computation and Communication, ICTCC 2014, held in November 2014 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The 34 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from over 100 submissions. The papers cover formal methods for self-adaptive systems and discuss natural appr…
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2015, held in Passau, Germany, in June 2015. The 18 full papers, 15 short papers, 14 poster and demonstration papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 100 submissions. The papers cover the following topics: information extraction…
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the Third IAPR TC3 Workshop on Pattern Recognition of Social Signals in Human-Computer-Interaction, MPRSS 2014, held in Stockholm, Sweden, in August 2014, as a satellite event of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition, ICPR 2014. The 14 revised papers presented focus on pattern recognition, machine learning …
This book is an excellent introduction to multiword expressions. It provides a unique, comprehensive and up-to-date overview of this exciting topic in computational linguistics. The first part describes the diversity and richness of multiword expressions, including many examples in several languages. These constructions are not only complex and arbitrary, but also much more frequent than one…
This book presents state-of-the-art computational attention models that have been successfully tested in diverse application areas and can build the foundation for artificial systems to efficiently explore, analyze, and understand natural scenes. It gives a comprehensive overview of the most recent computational attention models for processing visual and acoustic input. It covers the biological…
The book offers a modern, comprehensive, and holistic view of natural gas seepage, defined as the visible or invisible flow of gaseous hydrocarbons from subsurface sources to Earth’s surface. Beginning with definitions, classifications for onshore and offshore seepage, and fundamentals on gas migration mechanisms, the book reports the latest findings for the global distribution of gas seepage…