Deformable Avatars

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Nils J. Nilsson

Intelligent agents are employed as the central characters in this introductory text. Beginning with elementary reactive agents, Nilsson gradually increases their cognitive horsepower to illustrate the most important and lasting ideas in AI. Neural networks, genetic programming, computer vision, heuristic search, knowledge representation and reasoning, Bayes networks, planning, and language understanding are each revealed through the growing capabilities of these agents. A distinguishing feature of this text is in its evolutionary approach to the study of AI. This book provides a refreshing and motivating synthesis of the field by one of AI's master expositors and leading researches.

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Xiang Sean Zhou, Yong Rui, Thomas S. Huang

Exploration of Visual Data presents latest research efforts in the area of content-based exploration of image and video data. The main objective is to bridge the semantic gap between high-level concepts in the human mind and low-level features extractable by the machines. The two key issues emphasized are "content-awareness" and "user-in-the-loop". The authors provide a comprehensive review on algorithms for visual feature extraction based on color, texture, shape, and structure, and techniques for incorporating such information to aid browsing, exploration, search, and streaming of image and video data. They also discuss issues related to the mixed use of textual and low-level visual features to facilitate more effective access of multimedia data. Exploration of Visual Data provides state-of-the-art materials on the topics of content-based description of visual data, content-based low-bitrate video streaming, and latest asymmetric and nonlinear relevance feedback algorithms, which to date are unpublished.

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Witold Pedrycz

Granular Computing is concerned with constructing and processing carried out at the level of information granules. Using information granules, we comprehend the world and interact with it, no matter which intelligent endeavor this may involve. The landscape of granular computing is immensely rich and involves set theory (interval mathematics), fuzzy sets, rough sets, random sets linked together in a highly synergetic environment. This volume is a first comprehensive treatment of this emerging paradigm and embraces its fundamentals, underlying methodological framework, and a sound algorithmic environment. The panoply of applications covered includes system identification, telecommunications, linguistics and music processing. Written by experts in the field, this volume will appeal to all developing intelligent systems, either working at the methodological level or interested in detailed system realization.

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Ming Li, Akira Maruoka (eds

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Algorithmic Learning Theory, ALT'97, held in Sendai, Japan, in October 1997. The volume presents 26 revised full papers selected from 42 submissions. Also included are three invited papers by leading researchers. Among the topics addressed are PAC learning, learning algorithms, inductive learning, inductive inference, learning from examples, game-theoretical aspects, decision procedures, language learning, neural algorithms, and various other aspects of computational learning theory.