This timely review volume summarizes the state-of-the-art developments in nature-inspired algorithms and applications with the emphasis on swarm intelligence and bio-inspired computation. Topics include the analysis and overview of swarm intelligence and evolutionary computation, hybrid metaheuristic algorithms, bat algorithm, discrete cuckoo search, firefly algorithm, particle swarm optimizati…
Canada is regularly presented as a country where liberalism has ensured freedom and equality for all. Yet with the expansion of settlers into the First Nations territories that became southern Alberta and BC, liberalism proved to be an exclusionary rather than inclusionary force. Between 1877 and 1927, government officials, police officers, church representatives, ordinary settlers, and many ot…
Angela Wanhalla begins her story in Maitapapa, Taieri, New Zealand, the mixed-descent community where her great-grandparents, John Brown and Mabel Smith, were born. As In/visible Sight takes shape, a community emerges from the records, re-casting history and identity in the present. Drawing on the experiences of mixed-Maori/White families, Wanhalla examines the early history of southern New Zea…
Sarah Carter reveals the pioneering efforts of the government, legal, and religious authorities to impose the “one man, one woman” model of marriage upon Mormons and Aboriginal people in Western Canada. This lucidly written, richly researched book revises what we know about marriage and the gendered politics of late 19th century reform, shifts our understanding of Aboriginal history during …
This volume is devoted to interactive and iterative processes of decision-making– I2 Fuzzy Decision Making, in brief. Decision-making is inherently interactive. Fuzzy sets help realize human-machine communication in an efficient way by facilitating a two-way interaction in a friendly and transparent manner. Human-centric interaction is of paramount relevance as a leading guiding design princi…
At the place known as Head-Smashed-In in southwestern Alberta, Aboriginal people practiced a form of group hunting for nearly 6,000 years before European contact. The large communal bison traps of the Plains were the single greatest food-getting method ever developed in human history. Hunters, working with their knowledge of the land and of buffalo behaviour, drove their quarry over a cliff and…
This book is devoted to the demands of research and industrial centers for diagnostics, monitoring and decision making systems that result from the increasing complexity of automation and systems, the need to ensure the highest level of reliability and safety, and continuing research and the development of innovative approaches to fault diagnosis. The contributions combine domains of engineerin…
This book focuses on emerging technologies in the field of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) namely efficient information dissemination between vehicles, infrastructures, pedestrians and public transportation systems. It covers the state-of-the-art of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), with centralized and decentralized (Peer-to-Peer) communication architectures, considering several ap…
Laparoscopic colectomy has been introduced in the early 90ies as a new technique with proven improvement in short and long term outcome. Despite significant patient benefits the overall adoption rate remains low. On the other hand significant more advanced techniques such as single incision laparoscopy, robotics and transanal access surgery have been introduced in the last several years and are…
Amer-European settlement of the Great Plains transformed bountiful Native soil into pasture and cropland, distorting the prairie ecosystem as it was understood and used by the peoples who originally populated the land. Settlers justified this transformation with the unexamined premise of deficiency, according to which the Great Plains region was inadequate in flora and fauna and the region lack…