This book presents an exciting new synthesis of directed and undirected, discrete and continuous graphical models. Combining elements of Bayesian networks and Markov random fields, the newly introduced hybrid random fields are an interesting approach to get the best of both these worlds, with an added promise of modularity and scalability. The authors have written an enjoyable book---rigorous in the treatment of the mathematical background, but also enlivened by interesting and original historical and philosophical perspectives.
-- Manfred Jaeger, Aalborg Universitet

The book not only...

Did you ever read something on a book, felt the need to comment, took up a pencil and scribbled something on the books' text'? If you did, you just annotated a book. But that process has now become something fundamental and revolutionary in these days of computing. Annotation is all about adding further information to text, pictures, movies and even to physical objects. In practice, anything which can be identified either virtually or physically can be annotated.

In this book, we will delve into what makes annotations, and analyse their significance for the future evolutions of the...

The first notable feature of this book is its innovation: Computational intelligence (CI), a fast evolving area, is currently attracting lots of researchers' attention in dealing with many complex problems. At present, there are quite a lot competing books existing in the market. Nevertheless, the present book is markedly different from the existing books in that it presents new paradigms of CI that have rarely mentioned before, as opposed to the traditional CI techniques or methodologies employed in other books. During the past decade, a number of new CI algorithms are...

Pattern recognition in data is a well known classical problem that falls under the ambit of data analysis. As we need to handle different data, the nature of patterns, their recognition and the types of data analyses are bound to change. Since the number of data collection channels increases in the recent time and becomes more diversified, many real-world data mining tasks can easily acquire multiple databases from various sources. In these cases, data mining becomes more challenging for several essential reasons. We may encounter sensitive data originating from different sources - those...

This book presents recent research in mobile learning and advanced user interfaces. It is shown how the combination of these fields can result in personalized educational software that meets the requirements of state-of-the-art mobile learning software. This book provides a framework that is capable of incorporating the software technologies, exploiting a wide range of their current advances and additionally investigating ways to go even further by providing potential solutions to future challenges. The presented approach uses the well-known Object-Oriented method in order to address these...

With the proliferation of social media and on-line communities in networked world a large gamut of data has been collected and stored in databases. The rate at which such data is stored is growing at a phenomenal rate and pushing the classical methods of data analysis to their limits. This book presents an integrated framework of recent empirical and theoretical research on social network analysis based on a wide range of techniques from various disciplines like data mining, social sciences, mathematics, statistics, physics, network science, machine learning with visualization techniques...