This book constitutes the proceedings of the First International Conference on Complex Computational Ecosystems, CCE 2023, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, during April 25–27, 2023. The 16 full papers and the 4 keynote abstracts included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 46 submissions. They explore trans-disciplinary challenges that crossed theoretical questions with empirical observations of multi-level and multi-modal computational ecosystems.

This new edition also treats smart materials and artificial life. A new chapter on information and computational dynamics takes up many recent discussions in the community.

This book brings to readers thirteen chapters with contributions to the benefits of using IoT and Cloud Computing to agro-ecosystems from a multi-disciplinary perspective. IoT and Cloud systems have prompted the development of a Cloud digital ecosystem referred to as Cloud-to-thing continuum computing. The key success of IoT computing and the Cloud digital ecosystem is that IoT can be integrated seamlessly with the physical environment and therefore has the potential to leverage innovative services in agro-ecosystems. Areas such as ecological monitoring, agriculture, and biodiversity constitute a large area of potential application of IoT and Cloud technologies. In contrast to traditional agriculture systems that have employed aggressive policies to increase productivity, new agro-ecosystems aim to increase productivity but also achieve efficiency and competitiveness in modern sustainable agriculture and contribute, more broadly, to the green economy and sustainable food-chain industry. Fundamental research as well as concrete applications from various real-life scenarios, such as smart farming, precision agriculture, green agriculture, sustainable livestock and sow farming, climate threat, and societal and environmental impacts, is presented. Research issues and challenges are also discussed towards envisioning efficient and scalable solutions to agro-ecosystems based on IoT and Cloud technologies. Our fundamental belief is that we can collectively trigger a new revolution that will transition agriculture into an equable system that not only feeds the world, but also contributes to mitigating the climate change and biodiversity crises that our historical actions have triggered.

Ecological Informatics is defined as the design and application of computational techniques for ecological analysis, synthesis, forecasting and management. The book provides an introduction to the scope, concepts and techniques of this newly emerging discipline. It illustrates numerous applications of Ecological Informatics for stream systems, river systems, freshwater lakes and marine systems as well as image recognition at micro and macro scale. Case studies focus on applications of artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic and adaptive agents to current ecological management issues such as toxic algal blooms, eutrophication, habitat degradation, conservation of biodiversity and sustainable fishery.

Computing and information and communications technology (ICT) has dramatically changed how we work and live, has had profound effects on nearly every sector of society, has transformed whole industries, and is a key component of U.S. global leadership. A fundamental driver of advances in computing and ICT has been the fact that the single-processor performance has, until recently, been steadily and dramatically increasing year over years, based on a combination of architectural techniques, semiconductor advances, and software improvements. Users, developers, and innovators were able to depend on those increases, translating that performance into numerous technological innovations and creating successive generations of ever more rich and diverse products, software services, and applications that had profound effects across all sectors of society. However, we can no longer depend on those extraordinary advances in single-processor performance continuing. This slowdown in the growth of single-processor computing performance has its roots in fundamental physics and engineering constraints-multiple technological barriers have converged to pose deep research challenges, and the consequences of this shift are deep and profound for computing and for the sectors of the economy that depend on and assume, implicitly or explicitly, ever-increasing performance. From a technology standpoint, these challenges have led to heterogeneous multicore chips and a shift to alternate innovation axes that include, but are not limited to, improving chip performance, mobile devices, and cloud services. As these technical shifts reshape the computing industry, with global consequences, the United States must be prepared to exploit new opportunities and to deal with technical challenges. The New Global Ecosystem in Advanced Computing: Implications for U.S. Competitiveness and National Security outlines the technical challenges, describe the global research landscape, and explore implications for competition and national security.

This descriptive, practical guide explains how to build a commercially impactful, operationally effective and technically robust IoT ecosystem that takes advantage of the IoT revolution and drives business growth in the consumer IoT as well as industrial internet spaces. With this book, executives, business managers, developers and decision-makers are given the tools to make more informed decisions about IoT solution development, partner eco-system design, and the monetization of products and services. Security and privacy issues are also addressed. Readers will explore the design guidelines and technology choices required to build commercially viable IoT solutions, but also uncover the various monetization and business modeling for connected products.

The book consists of 31 chapters in which the authors deal with multiple aspects of modeling, utilization and implementation of semantic methods for knowledge management and communication in the context of human centered computing. It is assumed that the modern human centered computing requires the intensive application of these methods as well as effective integration with multiple techniques of computational collective intelligence. The book is organized in four parts devoted to the presentation of utilization of knowledge processing in agent and multiagent systems, application of computational collective intelligence to knowledge management, models for collectives of intelligent agents, and models and environments tailored directly to human-centered computing. All chapters in the book discuss theoretical and practical issues related to various models and aspects of computational techniques for semantic methods, which are currently studied and developed in many academic and industry centers over the world. The editors hope that the book can be useful for graduate and PhD students of computer science, as well as for mature academics, researchers and practitioners interested in developing of modern methods for representation, processing and distribution of knowledge in the context of human centered computing and by means of computer based information systems. It is the hope of the editors that readers of this volume can find in all chosen chapters many inspiring ideas and influential practical examples, as well as use them in their current and future work.

The five-volume set LNCS 3980-3984 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications, ICCSA 2006. The volumes present a total of 664 papers organized according to the five major conference themes: computational methods, algorithms and applications high performance technical computing and networks advanced and emerging applications geometric modelling, graphics and visualization information systems and information technologies. This is Part I.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, few people could deny the reality of global change. But while most alarm has been over increasing temperatures, other changes are occurring in precipitation patternsÑvariations that may be due in part to global warming but also to factors such as changes in atmospheric circulation and land surfaces. This volume provides a central source of information about this newly emerging area of global change research. It presents ongoing investigations into the responses of plant communities and ecosystems to the experimental manipulation of precipitation in a variety of field settingsÑparticularly in the western and central United States, where precipitation is already scarce or variable. By exploring methods that can be used to predict responses of ecosystems to changes in precipitation regimes, it demonstrates new approaches to global change research and highlights the importance of precipitation regimes in structuring ecosystems. The contributors first document the importance of precipitation, soil characteristics, and soil moisture to plant life. They then focus on the roles of precipitation amount, seasonality, and frequency in shaping varied terrestrial ecosystems: desert, sagebrush steppe, oak savanna, tall- and mixed-grass prairie, and eastern deciduous forest. These case studies illustrate many complex, tightly woven, interactive relationships among precipitation, soils, and plantsÑrelationships that will dictate the responses of ecosystems to changes in precipitation regimes. The approaches utilized in these chapters include spatial comparisons of vegetation structure and function across different ecosytems; analyses of changes in plant architecture and physiology in response to temporal variation in precipitation; experiments to manipulate water availability; and modeling approaches that characterize the relationships between climate variables and vegetation types. All seek to assess vegetation responses to major shifts in climate that appear to be occurring at present and may become the norm in the future. As the first volume to discuss and document current and cutting-edge concepts and approaches to research into changing precipitation regimes and terrestrial ecosystems, this book shows the importance of developing reliable predictions of the precipitation changes that may occur with global warming. These studies clearly demonstrate that patterns of environmental variation and the nature of vegetation responses are complex phenomena that are only beginning to be understood, and that these experimental approaches are critical for our understanding of future change.

During the past twenty years, a broad spectrum of theories and methods have been developed in physics, chemistry and molecular biology to explain structure formation in complex systems. These methods have been applied to many different fields such as economics, sociology and town planning, and this book reflects the interdisciplinary nature of complexity and self-organisation. The main focus is on the emergence of collective phenomena from individual or microscopic interactions. Presents a wide-ranging overview from fundamental aspects of the evolution of complexity, to applications in biology, ecology, sociology, economics, and urban structure formation.