The book provides strong evidence that research on the cognitive processes from arithmetic thought to algebraic thought should take into consideration the socio-cultural context. It is an important contribution to the literature on linguistic structure in comparative studies related to Chinese student mathematics learning. This book not only makes a great contribution to research in mathematics education, the findings of this study also addressed insightful approaches and thoughts of understanding the development of algebraic thinking in cultural contexts for classroom teachers. Using written Chinese language from different theoretical references provided wonderful approaches for understanding student algebra cognitive development in a different way and calls educators for to pay special attention to an epistemological and linguistic view of algebraic development. The findings inform classroom teachers that the cultural context plays an important role in student learning mathematics. A typical analysis of the cognitive dimension involved in some in the historical and cultural contexts is a great resource for classroom teachers. I really enjoyed reading this book and learned a lot from its compelling analysis. Shuhua An, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Program in Mathematics Education, California State University, Long Beach

The book provides strong evidence that research on the cognitive processes from arithmetic thought to algebraic thought should take into consideration the socio-cultural context. It is an important contribution to the literature on linguistic structure in comparative studies related to Chinese student mathematics learning. This book not only makes a great contribution to research in mathematics education, the findings of this study also addressed insightful approaches and thoughts of understanding the development of algebraic thinking in cultural contexts for classroom teachers. Using written Chinese language from different theoretical references provided wonderful approaches for understanding student algebra cognitive development in a different way and calls educators for to pay special attention to an epistemological and linguistic view of algebraic development. The findings inform classroom teachers that the cultural context plays an important role in student learning mathematics. A typical analysis of the cognitive dimension involved in some in the historical and cultural contexts is a great resource for classroom teachers. I really enjoyed reading this book and learned a lot from its compelling analysis. Shuhua An, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Program in Mathematics Education, California State University, Long Beach

The book provides strong evidence that research on the cognitive processes from arithmetic thought to algebraic thought should take into consideration the socio-cultural context. It is an important contribution to the literature on linguistic structure in comparative studies related to Chinese student mathematics learning. This book not only makes a great contribution to research in mathematics education, the findings of this study also addressed insightful approaches and thoughts of understanding the development of algebraic thinking in cultural contexts for classroom teachers. Using written Chinese language from different theoretical references provided wonderful approaches for understanding student algebra cognitive development in a different way and calls educators for to pay special attention to an epistemological and linguistic view of algebraic development. The findings inform classroom teachers that the cultural context plays an important role in student learning mathematics. A typical analysis of the cognitive dimension involved in some in the historical and cultural contexts is a great resource for classroom teachers. I really enjoyed reading this book and learned a lot from its compelling analysis. Shuhua An, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Program in Mathematics Education, California State University, Long Beach

This volume contains the papers presented at the International Conference on Mathematics Ed-ucation in a Connected World held from September 16-21, 2015 in Catania, Italy. The Con-ference was organized by The Mathematics Education for the Future Project – an international educational project founded in 1986.

Wireless Sensor Network Technologies for Information Explosion Era The amount and value of information available due to rapid spread of information technology is exploding. Typically, large enterprises have approximately a petabyte of operational data stored in hundreds of data repositories supporting thousands of applications. Data storage volumes grow in excess of 50% annually. This growth is expected to continue due to vast proliferation of existing infor- tion systems and the introduction of new data sources. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) represent one of the most notable examples of such new data sources. In recent few years, various types of WSNs have been deployed and the amount of information generated by wireless sensors increases rapidly. The information - plosion requires establishing novel data processing and communication techniques for WSNs. This volume aims to cover both theoretical and practical aspects - lated to this challenge, and it explores directions for future research to enable ef- cient utilization of WSNs in the information-explosion era. The book is organized in three main parts that consider (1) technical issues of WSNs, (2) the integration of multiple WSNs, and (3) the development of WSNs systems and testbeds for conducting practical experiments. Each part consists of three chapters.

This book presents new algorithms for reinforcement learning, a form of machine learning in which an autonomous agent seeks a control policy for a sequential decision task. Since current methods typically rely on manually designed solution representations, agents that automatically adapt their own representations have the potential to dramatically improve performance. This book introduces two novel approaches for automatically discovering high-performing representations. The first approach synthesizes temporal difference methods, the traditional approach to reinforcement learning, with evolutionary methods, which can learn representations for a broad class of optimization problems. This synthesis is accomplished by customizing evolutionary methods to the on-line nature of reinforcement learning and using them to evolve representations for value function approximators. The second approach automatically learns representations based on piecewise-constant approximations of value functions. It begins with coarse representations and gradually refines them during learning, analyzing the current policy and value function to deduce the best refinements. This book also introduces a novel method for devising input representations. This method addresses the feature selection problem by extending an algorithm that evolves the topology and weights of neural networks such that it evolves their inputs too. In addition to introducing these new methods, this book presents extensive empirical results in multiple domains demonstrating that these techniques can substantially improve performance over methods with manual representations.

"Future Internet" is a worldwide hot topic. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for business development and social interactions. However, the immense growth of the Internet has resulted in additional stresses on its architecture, resulting in a network difficult to monitor, understand, and manage due to its huge scale in terms of connected devices and actors (end users, content providers, equipment vendors, etc). This book presents and discusses the ongoing initiatives and experimental facilities for the creation of new Future Internet Architectures using alternative approaches like Clean Slate and Incremental improvements: It considers several possible internet network use scenarios that include seamless mobility, ad hoc networks, sensor networks, internet of things and new paradigms like content and user centric networks.

The increasing complexity of our world demands new perspectives on the role of technology in decision making. Human decision making has its li- tations in terms of information-processing capacity. 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 tra?c management, where humans need to engage in close collaborations with arti?cial systems to observe and understand the situation and respond in a sensible way. We believe that close collaborations between humans and arti?cial systems will become essential and that the importance of research into Interactive Collaborative Information Systems (ICIS) is self-evident. Developments in information and communication technology have ra- cally changed our working environments. The vast amount of information available nowadays and the wirelessly networked nature of our modern so- ety open up new opportunities to handle di?cult decision-making situations such as computer-supported situation assessment and distributed decision making. To make good use of these new possibilities, we need to update our traditional views on the role and capabilities of information systems. The aim of the Interactive Collaborative Information Systems project is to develop techniques that support humans in complex information en- ronments and that facilitate distributed decision-making capabilities. ICIS emphasizes the importance of building actor-agent communities: close c- laborations between human and arti?cial actors that highlight their comp- mentary capabilities, and in which task distribution is ?exible and adaptive.

Intelligent information and database systems are two closely related and we- established subfields of modern computer science. They focus on the integration of artificial intelligence and classic database technologies in order to create the class of next generation information systems. The major target of this new gene- tion of systems is to provide end-users with intelligent behavior: simple and/or advanced learning, problem solving, uncertain and certain reasoning, se- organization, cooperation, etc. Such intelligent abilities are implemented in classic information systems to make them autonomous and user oriented, in particular when advanced problems of multimedia information and knowledge discovery, access, retrieval and manipulation are to be solved in the context of large, distr- uted and heterogeneous environments. It means that intelligent knowledge-based information and database systems are used to solve basic problems of large coll- tions management, carry out knowledge discovery from large data collections, reason about information under uncertain conditions, support users in their for- lation of complex queries etc. Topics discussed in this volume include but are not limited to the foundations and principles of data, information, and knowledge models, methodologies for intelligent information and database systems analysis, design, implementation, validation, maintenance and evolution.

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. This could be the network and device context, the application context or the user context; we refer to the latter case as personalization. From a different perspective, there is the issue of the point of view from which to examine the topic. There is the point of view of tools, referring to the algorithms and software tools one can use, the point of view of the methods, referring to the abstract methodologies and best practices one can follow, as well as the point of view of applications, referring to successful and pioneering case studies that lead the way in research and innovation. Or at least so we thought. Based on the above reasoning, the editors identified key researchers and practitioners in each of the aforementioned categories and invited them to contribute a corresponding work to this book. However, as the authors’ contributions started to arrive, the editors also started to realize that although these categories participate in each chapter to different degrees, none of them can ever be totally obsolete from them. Moreover, it seems that theory and methods are inherent in the development of tools and applications and inversely the application is also inherent in the motivation and presentation of tools and methods.