Advances in artificial intelligence, sensor computing, robotics, and mobile systems are making autonomous systems a reality. At the same time, the influence of edge computing is leading to more distributed architectures incorporating more autonomous elements. The flow of information is critical in such environments, but the real time, distributed nature of the system components complicates the data protection mechanisms. Policy-based management has proven useful in simplifying the complexity of management in domains like networking, security, and storage; it is expected that many of those benefits would carry over to the task of managing big data and autonomous systems. This book aims at providing an overview of recent work and identifying challenges related to the design of policy-based approaches for managing big data and autonomous systems. An important new direction explored in the book is to make the major elements of the system self-describing and self-managing. This would lead to architectures where policy mechanisms are tightly coupled with the system elements. In such integrated architectures, we need new models for information assurance, traceability of information, and better provenance on information flows. In addition when dealing with devices with actuation capabilities and, thus, being able to make changes to physical spaces, safety is critical. With an emphasis on policy-based mechanisms for governance of data security and privacy, and for safety assurance, the papers in this volume follow three broad themes: foundational principles and use-cases for the autonomous generation of policies; safe autonomy; policies and autonomy in federated environments.

This book provides an overview of Federated Learning and how it can be used to build real-world AI-enabled applications. Real-world AI applications frequently have training data distributed in many different locations, with data at different sites having different properties and different formats. In many cases, data movement is not permitted due to security concerns, bandwidth, cost or regulatory restriction. Under these conditions, techniques of federated learning can enable creation of practical applications. Creating practical applications requires implementation of the cycle of learning from data, inferring from data, and acting based on the inference. This book will be the first one to cover all stages of the Learn-Infer-Act cycle, and presents a set of patterns to apply federation to all stages. Another distinct feature of the book is the use of real-world applications with an approach that discusses all aspects that need to be considered in an operational system, including handling of data issues during federation, maintaining compliance with enterprise security policies, and simplifying the logistics of federated AI in enterprise contexts. The book considers federation from a manner agnostic to the actual AI models, allowing the concepts to be applied to all varieties of AI models. This book is probably the first one to cover the space of enterprise AI-based applications in a holistic manner.

The two-volume set LNAI 12084 and 12085 constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 24th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, PAKDD 2020, which was due to be held in Singapore, in May 2020. The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 135 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 628 submissions. The papers present new ideas, original research results, and practical development experiences from all KDD related areas, including data mining, data warehousing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, databases, statistics, knowledge engineering, visualization, decision-making systems, and the emerging applications. They are organized in the following topical sections: recommender systems; classification; clustering; mining social networks; representation learning and embedding; mining behavioral data; deep learning; feature extraction and selection; human, domain, organizational and social factors in data mining; mining sequential data; mining imbalanced data; association; privacy and security; supervised learning; novel algorithms; mining multi-media/multi-dimensional data; application; mining graph and network data; anomaly detection and analytics; mining spatial, temporal, unstructured and semi-structured data; sentiment analysis; statistical/graphical model; multi-source/distributed/parallel/cloud computing.

The LNCS journal Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems focuses on data management, knowledge discovery, and knowledge processing, which are core and hot topics in computer science. Since the 1990s, the Internet has become the main driving force behind application development in all domains. An increase in the demand for resource sharing (e.g., computing resources, services, metadata, data sources) across different sites connected through networks has led to an evolution of data- and knowledge-management systems from centralized systems to decentralized systems enabling large-scale distributed applications providing high scalability. This, the 43rd issue of Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems, contains five revised selected regular papers. Topics covered include classification tasks, machine learning algorithms, top-k queries, business process redesign and a knowledge capitalization framework.

In this book, a risk management approach starts off by discussing important issues related to managing supply chain disruption risks from various perspectives during VUCA times. It explores the essence and principles relating to managing these risks and provides the framework and multi-goal model groups for managing such unknown-unknown risks and subsequent disruptions at a global scale. The book explores and presents the latest developments across different emerging topics in supply chain risk and disruption management. These include (i) an overview of supply chain risk, and disruption management tools, techniques, and approaches, (ii) a review on uncertainty modeling for decentralized supply chain systems, (iii) supply chain deep uncertainties and risks - the 'new normal', (iv) emergent technologies for supply chain risk and disruption management, (v) supply chain resilience strategies for times of unprecedented uncertainty, (vi) the role of blockchain in developing supply chain resilience against disruptions, (vii) a qualitative study on supply chain risk management adopting blockchain technology, (viii) assessment of risks and risk management for agriculture supply chain, (ix) resilience of agri-food supply chains: Australian developments after a decade of supply and demand shocks, (x) prioritization of risks in the pharmaceutical supply chains (xi) improving medical supply chain disruption management with the blockchain technology, and (xii) impacts of resilience practices on supply chain sustainability. The book contributes significantly to the growing body of knowledge concerning the theory and practice of managing supply chain risks and disruptions in strategic management, operations and supply chain, and sustainability literature. It presents contemporary, innovative and latest developments in applying smart management tools, techniques and approaches for managing supply chain risk and disruption and future-proofing supply chains to become agile, resilient and sustainable.

The book “Advances in Information and Communication Networks - Proceedings of the 2022 Future of Information and Communication Conference (FICC)” aims in presenting the latest research advances, sharing expert knowledge and exchanging ideas with the common goal of shaping the future of Information and Communication. The conference attracted 402 submissions, of which, 131 submissions (including six poster papers) have been selected through a double-blind review process by an international panel of expert referees. This book discusses on aspects of Communication, Data Science, Ambient Intelligence, Networking, Computing, Security and Internet of Things, from classical to intelligent scope. The intention is to help academic pioneering researchers, scientists, industrial engineers, and students become familiar with and stay abreast of the ever-changing technology surrounding their industry. We hope that readers find the volume interesting and valuable; it gathers chapters addressing state-of-the-art intelligent methods and techniques for solving real world problems along with a vision of the future research.