bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Morphology and Computation
Authors: Sproat Richard 
Published: December 2018

This book provides the first broad yet thorough coverage of issues in morphological theory.
This book provides the first broad yet thorough coverage of issues in morphological theory. It includes a wide array of techniques and systems in computational morphology (including discussion of their limitations), and describes some unusual applications. Sproat motivates the study of computational morphology by arguing that a computational natural language system, such as a parser or a generator, must incorporate a model of morphology. He discusses a range of applications for programs with knowledge of morphology, some of which are not generally found in the literature. Sproat then provides an overview of some of the basic descriptive facts about morphology and issues in theoretical morphology and (lexical) phonology, as well as psycholinguistic evidence for human processing of morphological structure. He takes up the basic techniques that have been proposed for doing morphological processing and discusses at length various systems (such as DECOMP and KIMMO) that incorporate part or all of those techniques, pointing out the inadequacies of such systems from both a descriptive and a computational point of view. He concludes by touching on interesting peripheral areas such as the analysis of complex nominals in English, and on the main contributions of Rumelhart and McClelland's connectionism to the computational analysis of words.
Bradford Books imprint
Neural Smithing
Authors: Reed Russell , Marks Robert J 
Published: December 2018

Artificial neural networks are nonlinear mapping systems whose structure is loosely based on principles observed in the nervous systems of humans and animals. The basic idea is that massive systems of simple units linked together in appropriate ways can generate many complex and interesting behaviors. This book focuses on the subset of feedforward artificial neural networks called multilayer perceptrons (MLP). These are the mostly widely used neural networks, with applications as diverse as finance (forecasting), manufacturing (process control), and science (speech and image recognition).
This book presents an extensive and practical overview of almost every aspect of MLP methodology, progressing from an initial discussion of what MLPs are and how they might be used to an in-depth examination of technical factors affecting performance. The book can be used as a tool kit by readers interested in applying networks to specific problems, yet it also presents theory and references outlining the last ten years of MLP research.
Bradford Books imprint
Online Stochastic Combinatorial Optimization
Authors: Van Hentenryck Pascal , Bent Russell 
Published: December 2018

A framework for online decision making under uncertainty and time constraints, with online stochastic algorithms for implementing the framework, performance guarantees, and demonstrations of a variety of applications.
Online decision making under uncertainty and time constraints represents one of the most challenging problems for robust intelligent agents. In an increasingly dynamic, interconnected, and real-time world, intelligent systems must adapt dynamically to uncertainties, update existing plans to accommodate new requests and events, and produce high-quality decisions under severe time constraints. Such online decision-making applications are becoming increasingly common: ambulance dispatching and emergency city-evacuation routing, for example, are inherently online decision-making problems; other applications include packet scheduling for Internet communications and reservation systems. This book presents a novel framework, online stochastic optimization, to address this challenge. This framework assumes that the distribution of future requests, or an approximation thereof, is available for sampling, as is the case in many applications that make either historical data or predictive models available. It assumes additionally that the distribution of future requests is independent of current decisions, which is also the case in a variety of applications and holds significant computational advantages. The book presents several online stochastic algorithms implementing the framework, provides performance guarantees, and demonstrates a variety of applications. It discusses how to relax some of the assumptions in using historical sampling and machine learning and analyzes different underlying algorithmic problems. And finally, the book discusses the framework's possible limitations and suggests directions for future research.
Organisms and Artifacts
Authors: Lewens Tim 
Published: December 2018

In Organisms and Artifacts, Tim Lewens investigates the analogical use of the language of design in evolutionary biology. Uniquely among the natural sciences, biology uses descriptive and explanatory terms more suited to artifacts than organisms. When biologists discuss, for example, the purpose of the panda's thumb and look for functional explanations for organic traits, they borrow from a vocabulary of intelligent design that Darwin's findings could have made irrelevant over a hundred years ago. Lewens argues that examining the analogy between the processes of evolution and the processes by which artifacts are created—looking at organisms as analogical artifacts—sheds light on explanations of the form of both organic and inorganic objects. He argues further that understanding the analogy is important for what it can tell us not only about biology but about technology and philosophy.
In the course of his argument, Lewens discusses issues of interest to philosophers of biology, biologists, philosophers of mind, and students of technology. These issues include the pitfalls of the design-based thinking of adaptationism, the possible conflict between selection explanations and developmental explanations, a proposed explanation of biological function, and prospects for an informative evolutionary model of technological change. Emerging from these discussions is an explanation of the use of the vocabulary of intelligence and intention in biology that does not itself draw on the ideas of intelligent design, which will be of interest in the ongoing debate over intelligent design creationism.
Bradford Books imprint
Panpsychism in the West
Authors: Skrbina David 
Published: December 2018

In Panpsychism in the West, the first comprehensive study of the subject, David Skrbina argues for the importance of panpsychism—the theory that mind exists, in some form, in all living and nonliving things—in consideration of the nature of consciousness and mind. Despite the recent advances in our knowledge of the brain and the increasing intricacy and sophistication of philosophical discussion, the nature of mind remains an enigma. Panpsychism, with its conception of mind as a general phenomenon of nature, uniquely links being and mind. More than a theory of mind, it is a meta-theory—a statement about theories of mind rather than a theory in itself. Panpsychism can parallel almost every current theory of mind; it simply holds that, no matter how one conceives of mind, such mind applies to all things. In addition, panpsychism is one of the most ancient and enduring concepts of philosophy, beginning with its pre-historical forms, animism and polytheism. Its adherents in the West have included important thinkers from the very beginning of Greek philosophy through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the present.
Skrbina argues that panpsychism is long overdue for detailed treatment, and with this book he proposes to add impetus to the discussion of panpsychism in serious philosophical inquiries. After a brief discussion of general issues surrounding philosophy of mind, he traces the panpsychist views of specific philosophers, from the ancient Greeks and early Renaissance naturalist philosophers through the likes of William James, Josiah Royce, and Charles Sanders Peirce—always with a strong emphasis on the original texts. In his concluding chapter, "A Panpsychist World View," Skrbina assesses panpsychist arguments and puts them in a larger context. By demonstrating that there is panpsychist thinking in many major philosophers, Skrbina offers a radical challenge to the modern worldview, based as it is on a mechanistic cosmos of dead, insensate matter. Panpsychism in the West will be the standard work on this topic for years to come.
Pricing the Priceless
Authors: Newhouse Joseph P. 
Published: December 2018

The health care industry differs from most other industries in that medical pricing is primarily administered by the government and private insurers and in that it uses several types of contracts. Providers may receive a fixed sum for all necessary services within a given period of time, for the necessary services to treat a given condition, or for each specific service. The industry is changing dramatically, offering many natural experiments to aid understanding of the economics of pricing for health care.
In Pricing the Priceless, Joseph Newhouse explains the different pricing systems and how they affect resource allocation and efficiency, focusing on the efficiency of pricing. He also discusses larger issues of equity, fair distribution of burden, and social justice. Although most of the examples are American-based, the same issues arise in all medical care financing and delivery systems, and the theories and models are general enough to apply to many institutional contexts. The topics include Medicare, managed care, the contemporary integration of health insurance and medical care, the management of moral hazard and stinting, uncertainty and risk aversion, the demand for health insurance, agency relationships, information disparities, regulation, and supply-side and demand-side selection.
Reasoning about Rational Agents
Authors: Wooldridge Michael 
Published: December 2018

This book focuses on the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model of rational agents, which recognizes the primacy of beliefs, desires, and intentions in rational action.
One goal of modern computer science is to engineer computer programs that can act as autonomous, rational agents; software that can independently make good decisions about what actions to perform on our behalf and execute those actions. Applications range from small programs that intelligently search the Web buying and selling goods via electronic commerce, to autonomous space probes. This book focuses on the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model of rational agents, which recognizes the primacy of beliefs, desires, and intentions in rational action. The BDI model has three distinct strengths: an underlying philosophy based on practical reasoning in humans, a software architecture that is implementable in real systems, and a family of logics that support a formal theory of rational agency.The book introduces a BDI logic called LORA (Logic of Rational Agents). In addition to the BDI component, LORA contains a temporal component, which allows one to represent the dynamics of how agents and their environments change over time, and an action component, which allows one to represent the actions that agents perform and the effects of the actions. The book shows how LORA can be used to capture many components of a theory of rational agency, including such notions as communication and cooperation.
The Shape of Actions
Authors: Collins Harry , Kusch Martin 
Published: December 2018

What can humans do? What can machines do? How do humans delegate actions to machines? In this book, Harry Collins and Martin Kusch combine insights from sociology and philosophy to provide a novel answer to these increasingly important questions.The authors begin by distinguishing between two basic types of intentional behavior, which they call polimorphic actions and mimeomorphic actions. Polimorphic actions (such as writing a love letter) are ones that community members expect to vary with social context. Mimeomorphic actions (such a swinging a golf club) do not vary. Although machines cannot act, they can mimic mimeomorphic actions. Mimeomorphic actions are thus the crucial link between what humans can do and what machines can do.
Following a presentation of their detailed categorization of actions, the authors apply their approach to a broad range of human-machine interactions and to learning. Key examples include bicycle riding and the many varieties of writing machines. They also show how their theory can be used to explain the operation of organizations such as restaurants and armies. Finally, they look at a historical case—the technological development of the air pump—applying their categorization of actions to the processes of mechanization and automation. Automation, they argue, can occur only where what we want to bring about can be brought about through mimeomorphic action.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
Authors: Walsh Vincent , Pascual-Leone Alvaro 
Published: December 2018

The mainstays of brain imaging techniques have been positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and event-related potentials (ERPs). These methods all record direct or indirect measures of brain activity and correlate the activity patterns with behavior. But to go beyond the correlations established by these techniques and prove the necessity of an area for a given function, cognitive neuroscientists need to be able to reverse engineer the brain—i.e., to selectively remove components from information processing and assess their impact on the output.
This book is about transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a technique that emerged during the same period as neuroimaging and has made it possible to reverse engineer the human brain's role in behavioral and cognitive functions. The subject areas that can be studied using TMS run the gamut of cognitive psychology—attention, perception, awareness, eye movements, action selection, memory, plasticity, language, numeracy, and priming. The book presents an overview of historical attempts at magnetic brain stimulation, ethical considerations of the technique's use, basic technical and practical information, the results of numerous TMS studies, and a discussion of the future of TMS in the armamentarium of cognitive neuropsychology.
Bradford Books imprint
Truth from Trash
Authors: Thornton Christopher J. 
Published: December 2018

Chris Thornton makes the compelling claim that learning is not a passive discovery operation but an active process involving creativity on the part of the learner.
This study of learning in autonomous agents offers a bracing intellectual adventure. Chris Thornton makes the compelling claim that learning is not a passive discovery operation but an active process involving creativity on the part of the learner. Although theorists of machine learning tell us that all learning methods contribute some form of bias and thus involve a degree of creativity, Thornton carries the idea much further. He describes an incremental process, recursive relational learning, in which the results of one learning step serve as the basis for the next. Very high-level recodings are then substantially the creative artifacts of the learner's own processing. Lower-level recodings are more "objective" in that their properties are more severely constrained by the source data. Thornton sees consciousness as a process at the outer fringe of relational learning, just prior to the onset of creativity. According to this view, we cannot assume consciousness to be an exclusively human phenomenon, but rather the expected feature of any cognitive mechanism able to engage in extended flights of relational learning.
Thornton presents key background material in an entertaining manner, using extensive mental imagery and a minimum of mathematics. Anecdotes and dialogue add to the text's informality.
Bradford Books imprint
Quantum Computing Without Magic
Authors: Meglicki Zdzislaw 
Published: December 2018

How quantum computing is really done: a primer for future quantum device engineers.
This text offers an introduction to quantum computing, with a special emphasis on basic quantum physics, experiment, and quantum devices. Unlike many other texts, which tend to emphasize algorithms, Quantum Computing Without Magic explains the requisite quantum physics in some depth, and then explains the devices themselves. It is a book for readers who, having already encountered quantum algorithms, may ask, “Yes, I can see how the algebra does the trick, but how can we actually do it?” By explaining the details in the context of the topics covered, this book strips the subject of the “magic” with which it is so often cloaked. Quantum Computing Without Magic covers the essential probability calculus; the qubit, its physics, manipulation and measurement, and how it can be implemented using superconducting electronics; quaternions and density operator formalism; unitary formalism and its application to Berry phase manipulation; the biqubit, the mysteries of entanglement, nonlocality, separability, biqubit classification, and the Schroedinger's Cat paradox; the controlled-NOT gate, its applications and implementations; and classical analogs of quantum devices and quantum processes. Quantum Computing Without Magic can be used as a complementary text for physics and electronic engineering undergraduates studying quantum computing and basic quantum mechanics, or as an introduction and guide for electronic engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists, or scholars in these fields who are interested in quantum computing and how it might fit into their research programs.
Game Sound
Authors: Collins KC 
Published: December 2018

An examination of the many complex aspects of game audio, from the perspectives of both sound design and music composition.
A distinguishing feature of video games is their interactivity, and sound plays an important role in this: a player's actions can trigger dialogue, sound effects, ambient sound, and music. And yet game sound has been neglected in the growing literature on game studies. This book fills that gap, introducing readers to the many complex aspects of game audio, from its development in early games to theoretical discussions of immersion and realism. In Game Sound, KC Collins draws on a range of sources—including composers, sound designers, voice-over actors and other industry professionals, Internet articles, fan sites, industry conferences, magazines, patent documents, and, of course, the games themselves—to offer a broad overview of the history, theory, and production practice of video game audio. Game Sound has two underlying themes: how and why games are different from or similar to film or other linear audiovisual media; and technology and the constraints it has placed on the production of game audio.
Collins focuses first on the historical development of game audio, from penny arcades through the rise of home games and the recent rapid developments in the industry. She then examines the production process for a contemporary game at a large game company, discussing the roles of composers, sound designers, voice talent, and audio programmers; considers the growing presence of licensed intellectual property (particularly popular music and films) in games; and explores the function of audio in games in theoretical terms. Finally, she discusses the difficulties posed by nonlinearity and interactivity for the composer of game music.
Prudence and Pressure
Authors: Tsuya Noriko O. , Wang Feng , Alter George , Lee James Z. 
Published: December 2018

A study of human reproduction and social organization in preindustrial communities that reveals important similarities between Europe and Asia.
This pioneering study reconceptualizes the impact of social organizations, economic conditions, and human agency on human reproduction in preindustrial communities in Europe and Asia. Unlike previous studies, in which Asia is measured by European standards, Prudence and Pressure develops a Eurasian perspective.
Drawing on rich new data and the tools of event-history analysis, the authors challenge the accepted Eurocentric Malthusian view that attributes “prudence” (smaller families due to late marriage) to the preindustrial West and “pressure” (high mortality due to overpopulation) to the East, showing instead important similarities between Europe and Asia in human motivation and population behavior.
The authors analyze age, gender, family and household, kinship, social class and power, religion, culture, and economic resources in order to compare reproductive strategies and outcomes. They reveal underlying similarities between East and West in two major components of the reproductive regime—marriage and childbearing—and offer evidence showing that preindustrial reproduction was motivated and governed by human agency at least as much as by human biology.
Prudence and Pressure is part of a large-scale interdisciplinary effort to use new data and methods to re-examine the Malthusian paradigm of population growth. It represents a significant advance in the fields of historical demography, history, and sociology.
The Locative Syntax of Experiencers
Authors: Landau Idan 
Published: December 2018

A new account of the peculiar syntax of psychological verbs argues that experiencers are grammaticalized as locative phrases.
Experiencers—grammatical participants that undergo a certain psychological change or are in such a state—are grammatically special. As objects (John scared Mary; loud music annoys me), experiencers display two peculiar clusters of nonobject properties across different languages: their syntax is often typical of oblique arguments and their semantic scope is typical of subjects. In The Locative Syntax of Experiencers, Idan Landau investigates this puzzling correlation and argues that experiencers are syntactically coded as (mental) locations. Drawing on results from a range of languages and theoretical frameworks, Landau examines the far-reaching repercussions of this simple claim. Landau shows that all experiencer objects are grammaticalized as locative phrases, introduced by a dative/locative preposition. “Bare” experiencer objects are in fact oblique, too, the preposition being null. This preposition accounts for the oblique psych(ological) properties, attested in case alternations, cliticization, resumption, restrictions on passive formation, and so on. As locatives, object experiencers may undergo locative inversion, giving rise to the common phenomenon of quirky experiencers. When covert, this inversion endows object experiencers with wide scope, attested in control, binding, and wh-quantifier interactions. Landau's synthesis thus provides a novel solution to some of the oldest puzzles in the generative study of psychological verbs. The Locative Syntax of Experiencers offers the most comprehensive description of the syntax of psychological verbs to date, documenting their special properties in more than twenty languages. Its basic theoretical claim is readily translatable into alternative frameworks. Existing accounts of psychological verbs either consider very few languages or fail to incorporate other theoretical frameworks; this study takes a broader perspective, informed by findings of four decades of research