Proceedings of Evolang IX, the 9th International Conference on the Evolution of Language.The Evolang conferences are the leading international conferences for new findings in the study of the origins and evolution of language. They attract a multidisciplinary audience. The proceedings are an important resource for researchers in the field.

This volume comprises refereed papers and abstracts of the 10th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANGX), held in Vienna on 14-17th April 2014. As the leading international conference in the field, the biennial EVOLANG meeting is characterised by an invigorating, multidisciplinary approach to the origins and evolution of human language, and brings together researchers from many subject areas, including anthropology, archaeology, biology, cognitive science, computer science, genetics, linguistics, neuroscience, palaeontology, primatology and psychology.For this 10th conference, the proceedings will include a special perspectives section featuring prominent researchers reflecting on the history of the conference and its impact on the field of language evolution since the inaugural EVOLANG conference in 1996.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 7th IFIP TC 6 International Workshop on Self-Organizing Systems, IWSOS 2013, held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, in May 2013. The 11 revised full papers and 9 short papers presented were carefully selected from 35 paper submissions. The papers are organized in following topics: design and analysis of self-organizing and self-managing systems, inspiring models of self-organization in nature and society, structure, characteristics and dynamics of self-organizing networks, self-organization in techno-social systems, self-organized social computation and self-organized communication systems.

This volume collects a selection of contributions which has been presented at the 23rd Italian Workshop on Neural Networks, the yearly meeting of the Italian Society for Neural Networks (SIREN). The conference was held in Vietri sul Mare, Salerno, Italy during May 23-24, 2013. The annual meeting of SIREN is sponsored by International Neural Network Society (INNS), European Neural Network Society (ENNS) and IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS). The book – as well as the workshop- is organized in two main components, a special session and a group of regular sessions featuring different aspects and point of views of artificial neural networks, artificial and natural intelligence, as well as psychological and cognitive theories for modeling human behaviors and human machine interactions, including Information Communication applications of compelling interest.

This book provides concise and cutting-edge reviews in astrobiology, a young and still emerging multidisciplinary field of science that addresses the fundamental questions of how life originated and diversified on Earth, whether life exists beyond Earth, and what is the future for life on Earth. Readers will find coverage of the latest understanding of a wide range of fascinating topics, including, for example, solar system formation, the origins of life, the history of Earth as revealed by geology, the evolution of intelligence on Earth, the implications of genome data, insights from extremophile research, and the possible existence of life on other planets within and beyond the solar system. Each chapter contains a brief summary of the current status of the topic under discussion, sufficient references to enable more detailed study, and descriptions of recent findings and forthcoming missions or anticipated research. Written by leading experts in astronomy, planetary science, geoscience, chemistry, biology, and physics, this insightful and thought-provoking book will appeal to all students and scientists who are interested in life and space.

Proceedings of Evolang IX, the 9th International Conference on the Evolution of Language. The Evolang conferences are the leading international conferences for new findings in the study of the origins and evolution of language. They attract a multidisciplinary audience. The proceedings are an important resource for researchers in the field.

Knowledge of chimpanzees in the wild has expanded dramatically in recent years. This comprehensive volume, edited by Martin Muller, Richard Wrangham, and David Pilbeam, brings together scientists who are leading a revolution to discover and explain what is unique about humans, by studying their closest living relatives. Their observations and conclusions have the potential to transform our understanding of human evolution. Chimpanzees offer scientists an unmatched view of what distinguishes humanity from its apelike ancestors. Based on evidence from the hominin fossil record and extensive morphological, developmental, and genetic data, Chimpanzees and Human Evolution makes the case that the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans was chimpanzee-like. It most likely lived in African rainforests around eight million years ago, eating fruit and walking on its knuckles. Readers will learn why chimpanzees are a better model for the last common ancestor than bonobos, gorillas, or orangutans. A thorough chapter-by-chapter analysis reveals which key traits we share with chimpanzees and which appear to be distinctive to Homo sapiens, and shows how understanding chimpanzees helps us account for the evolution of human uniqueness. Traits surveyed include social behaviors and structures, mating systems, diet, hunting practices, tool use, culture, cognition, and communication. Edited by three of primatology’s most renowned experts, with contributions from 32 scholars drawing on decades of field research, Chimpanzees and Human Evolution provides readers with detailed up-to-date information on what we can infer about our chimpanzee-like ancestors and points the way forward for the next generation of discoveries.

Provides a dynamic network model of grammar that explains how linguistic structure is shaped by language use.

This book uses recent computational models to explore issues related to language and cognition.

Languages carry information. To fulfil this purpose, they employ a multitude of coding strategies. This book explores a core property of linguistic coding – called lexical diversity. Parallel text corpora of overall more than 1800 texts written in more than 1200 languages are the basis for computational analyses. Different measures of lexical diversity are discussed and tested, and Shannon’s measure of uncertainty – the entropy – is chosen to assess differences in the distributions of words. To further explain this variation, a range of descriptive, explanatory, and grouping factors are considered in a series of statistical models. The first category includes writing systems, word-formation patterns, registers and styles. The second category includes population size, non-native speaker proportions and language status. Grouping factors further elicit whether the results extrapolate across – or are limited to – specific language families and areas. This account marries information-theoretic methods with a complex systems framework, illustrating how languages adapt to the varying needs of their users. It sheds light on the puzzling diversity of human languages in a quantitative, data driven and reproducible manner.