Information and communication technologies can provide new paradigms in healthcare provision. In particular, new Pervasive Healthcare technologies can revolutionise the dynamics of healthcare, enabling people to remain at home for longer, at lower costs to health and welfare organisations.

This book reveals how pervasive healthcare technologies can be designed in conjunction with users and carers, as well as exploring the application of novel methods and technologies.

Web-based Support Systems (WSS) are an emerging multidisciplinary research area in which one studies the support of human activities with the Web as the common platform, mediumandinterface.TheInternetaffectseveryaspectofourmodernlife. Moving support systems to online is an increasing trend in many research domains. One of the goals of WSS research is to extend the human physical limitation of information processing in the information age. Research on WSS is motivated by the challenges and opportunities arising from the Internet. The availability, accessibility and ?exibility of information as...

Comprised of the main results from the IST CrossWork project, this book presents key innovations in the use of advanced information technology to support dynamic organizations in modern day industrial supply chains and business service networks.

The success of the World Wide Web depends on the ability of users to store, p- cess and retrieve digital information regardless of distance boundaries, languages and domains of knowledge. The universality and ?exibility of the World Wide Web have also enabled the rapid growth of a variety of new services and applications based on human-machine interaction. The semantics of exchanged information and services should be useful not only for human to human communications, but also in that machines would be able to understand and automatically process web content. Semanticsgive well-de?nedmeaningto...

Multi-database mining has been recognized recently as an important and strategically essential area of research in data mining. In this book, we discuss various issues regarding the systematic and efficient development of multi-database mining applications. It explains how systematically one could prepare data warehouses at different branches. As appropriate multi-database mining technique is essential to develop better applications. Also, the efficiency of a multi-database mining application could be improved by processing more patterns in the application. A faster algorithm could also play...

As depicted in David Lodge's celebrated novel Small World, the perceived size of our world experienced a progressive decrease as jet airplanes became affordable to ever greater shares of the earth's population. Yet, the really dramatic shrinking had to wait until the mid-1990s, when Internet became widespread and the information age stopped being an empty buzzword. But small is not necessarily beautiful. We now live in a global village and, alas, some (often very powerful) voices state that we ought not expect any more privacy in it. Should this be true, we would have created our own...

Written by the primary developer of the jHepWork data analysis framework, this practical book, complete with dozens of code snippets, is a reliable reference source that enables readers to lay the foundation for data-analysis applications using Java scripting.

Robot intelligence has become a major focus of intelligent robotics. Recent innovation in computational intelligence including fuzzy learning, neural networks, evolutionary computation and classical Artificial Intelligence provides sufficient theoretical and experimental foundations for enabling robots to undertake a variety of tasks with reasonable performance. This book reflects the recent advances in the field from an advanced knowledge processing perspective; there have been attempts to solve knowledge based information explosion constraints by integrating computational intelligence in...

This book covers all the basic concepts of business intelligence and performance management including strategic support, business applications, methodologies and technologies from the field, and thoroughly explores the benefits, issues and challenges of each.

Many organizations have an urgent need of mining their multiple databases inherently distributed in branches (distributed data). In particular, as the Web is rapidly becoming an information flood, individuals and organizations can take into account low-cost information and knowledge on the Internet when making decisions. How to efficiently identify quality knowledge from different data sources has become a significant challenge. This challenge has attracted a great many researchers including the au- thors who have developed a local pattern analysis, a new strategy for dis- covering some kinds...