Description: The report will provide a brief overview of major themes for women and ICTs, including issues for girls versus women; the ICT workforce; and opportunities versus the threat of ICTs for women s lives. The report will discuss as well the issue of women and Sciences and Technologies. Several policy recommendations will be drawn, amongst which The economic opportunities women can bring to development through ICTs will not be realized unless policies for all mainstream efforts take gender considerations into account. Policy makers should host forums that allow gender experts to debate the issues and arrive at a diversity of perspectives and recommendations that recognize the complexity of the issues and their impact on socio economic development. Policy is needed to ensure that investment in ICTs contributes to more equitable and sustainable development for all.

Description: Despite the apparent activity in the field, the ever increasing rate of development of new engineering materials required to meet advanced technological needs poses fresh challenges in the field of constitutive modelling. The complex behaviour of such materials demands a closer interaction between numerical analysts and material scientists in order to produce thermodynamically consistent models which provide a response in keeping with fundamental micromechanical principles and experimental observations. This necessity for collaboration is further highlighted by the continuing remarkable developments in computer hardware which makes the numerical simulation of complex deformation responses increasingly possible.

Description: It is widely anticipated that autonomous vehicles will have a transformational impact on military forces and will play a key role in many future force structures. As a result, many tasks have already been identified that unmanned systems could undertake more readily than humans. However, for this to occur, such systems will need to be agile, versatile, persistent, reliable, survivable and lethal. This will require many of the vehicles ‘cognitive’ or higher order functions to be more fully developed, whereas to date only the ‘component’ or physical functions have been successfully automated and deployed.

Description: The book contains ten chapters as follows, Prepare Knowledge, Regression and Self-regression Models with Fuzzy Coefficients; Regression and Self-regression Models with Fuzzy Variables, Fuzzy Input/output Model, Fuzzy Cluster Analysis and Fuzzy Recognition, Fuzzy Linear Programming, Fuzzy Geometric Programming, Fuzzy Relative Equation and Its Optimizing, Interval and Fuzzy Differential Equations and Interval and Fuzzy Functional and Their Variation.

It can not only be used as teaching materials or reference books for under-graduates in higher education, master graduates and doctor graduates in the courses of applied mathematics, computer science, artificial intelligence, fuzzy information process and automation, operations research, system science and engineering, and the like, but also serves as a reference book for researchers in these fields, particularly, for researchers in soft science.

Description: This research book contains a sample of most recent research in the area of intelligent autonomous systems. The contributions include:

General aspects of intelligent autonomous systems
Design of intelligent autonomous robots
Biped robots
Robot for stair-case navigation

Description: Semantics in Adaptive and Personalised Services, initially strikes one as a specific and perhaps narrow domain. Yet, a closer examination of the term reveals much more. On one hand there is the issue of semantics. Nowadays, this most often refers to the use of OWL, RDF or some other XML based ontology description language in order to represent the entities of problem. Still, semantics may also very well refer to the consideration of the meanings and concepts, rather than arithmetic measures, regardless of the representation used. On the other hand, there is the issue of adaptation, i.e. automated re-configuration based on some context.

Description: Robust Nano-Computing focuses on various issues of robust nano-computing, defect-tolerance design for nano-technology at different design abstraction levels. It addresses both redundancy- and configuration-based methods as well as fault detecting techniques through the development of accurate computation models and tools. The contents present an insightful view of the ongoing researches on nano-electronic devices, circuits, architectures, and design methods, as well as provide promising directions for future research.

Description: The increasing complexity of our world demands new perspectives on the role of technology in human decision making. We need new technology to cope with the increasingly complex and information-rich nature of our modern society. This is particularly true for critical environments such as crisis management and traffic management, where humans need to engage in close collaborations with artificial systems to observe and understand the situation and respond in a sensible way. The book Interactive Collaborative Information Systems addresses techniques that support humans in situations in which complex information handling is required and that facilitate distributed decision-making.

Description: The book gives an introduction to metaheuristics for students and practitioners. It requires no prior knowledge of the field, as the basic concepts are developed step by step from the bottom up using the knapsack problem and therefore allowing the user to concentrate on the main ideas of metaheuristics. The concepts are then expanded to concrete algorithms, which are described in detail. Then a systematization of the algorithms is established and compared with existing classification schemes from literature. The last part of the book deals with the application of popular metaheuristics to two optimization problems from the field of production and logistics, namely the Job Shop Scheduling and the Vehicle Routing Problem, based on examples.