Amir Hussain

Willard Gurdon Oxtoby

This contributed volume examines in detail the major Western religious traditions, namely Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Islam, and religions of the ancient world. The text traces each tradition in depth from its origins, through its development, to the religion's meaning and practicein today's society. Comprehensive and accessible, the new third edition offers a thorough and engaging introduction to the Western faiths.

Western Traditions

World Religions

"There has never been an America without Muslims"--so begins Amir Hussain, one of the most important scholars and teachers of Islam in America. Hussain, who is himself an American Muslim, contends that Muslims played an essential role in the creation and cultivation of the United States. Memories of 9/11 and the rise of global terrorism fuel concerns about American Muslims. The fear of American Muslims in part stems from the stereotype that all followers of Islam are violent extremists who want to overturn the American way of life. Inherent to this stereotype is the popular misconception that Islam is a new religion to America. In Muslims and the Making of America Hussain directly addresses both of these stereotypes. Far from undermining America, Islam and American Muslims have been, and continue to be, important threads in the fabric of American life. Hussain chronicles the history of Islam in America to underscore the valuable cultural influence of Muslims on American life. He then rivets attention on music, sports, and culture as key areas in which Muslims have shaped and transformed American identity. America, Hussain concludes, would not exist as it does today without the essential contributions made by its Muslim citizens.

Muslims and the Making of America

Igor Aleksander

Vassilis Cutsuridis

Allan Kardec Barros

Leslie S. Smith

Ron Chrisley

Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems 2008 (June 24-27, 2008; São Luís, Brazil) brought together leading scientists and engineers who use analytic, syntactic and computational methods both to understand the prodigious processing properties of biological systems and, specifically, of the brain, and to exploit such knowledge to advance computational methods towards ever higher levels of cognitive competence. This book includes the papers presented at four major symposia: Part I - Cognitive Neuroscience Part II - Biologically Inspired Systems Part III - Neural Computation Part IV - Models of Consciousness.

Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems 2008

Kaizhu Huang

Rui Zhang

Qiu-Feng Wang

The purpose of this edited volume is to provide a comprehensive overview on the fundamentals of deep learning, introduce the widely-used learning architectures and algorithms, present its latest theoretical progress, discuss the most popular deep learning platforms and data sets, and describe how many deep learning methodologies have brought great breakthroughs in various applications of text, image, video, speech and audio processing. Deep learning (DL) has been widely considered as the next generation of machine learning methodology. DL attracts much attention and also achieves great success in pattern recognition, computer vision, data mining, and knowledge discovery due to its great capability in learning high-level abstract features from vast amount of data. This new book will not only attempt to provide a general roadmap or guidance to the current deep learning methodologies, but also present the challenges and envision new perspectives which may lead to further breakthroughs in this field. This book will serve as a useful reference for senior (undergraduate or graduate) students in computer science, statistics, electrical engineering, as well as others interested in studying or exploring the potential of exploiting deep learning algorithms. It will also be of special interest to researchers in the area of AI, pattern recognition, machine learning and related areas, alongside engineers interested in applying deep learning models in existing or new practical applications.

Deep Learning: Fundamentals, Theory and Applications

Antonio Chella

Carlos Hernández

Ricardo Sanz

Jaime Gómez Ramirez

Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems - BICS 2010 aims to bring together leading scientists and engineers who use analytic and synthetic methods both to understand the astonishing processing properties of biological systems and specifically of the brain, and to exploit such knowledge to advance engineering methods to build artificial systems with higher levels of cognitive competence. BICS is a meeting point of brain scientists and cognitive systems engineers where cross-domain ideas are fostered in the hope of getting emerging insights on the nature, operation and extractable capabilities of brains. This multiple approach is necessary because the progressively more accurate data about the brain is producing a growing need of a quantitative understanding and an associated capacity to manipulate this data and translate it into engineering applications rooted in sound theories. BICS 2010 is intended for both researchers that aim to build brain inspired systems with higher cognitive competences, and for life scientists who use and develop mathematical and engineering approaches for a better understanding of complex biological systems like the brain. Four major interlaced focal symposia are planned for this conference and these are organized into patterns that encourage cross-fertilization across the symposia topics. This emphasizes the role of BICS as a major meeting point for researchers and practitioners in the areas of biological and artificial cognitive systems. Debates across disciplines will enrich researchers with complementary perspectives from diverse scientific fields. BICS 2010 will take place July 14-16, 2010, in Madrid, Spain.

Brain-Inspired Cognitive Systems 2010

From Brains to Systems

Mohamed Chetouani

Bruno Gas

Maurice Milgram

Jean-Luc Zarader

This intriguing book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the International Conference on Non-Linear Speech Processing, NOLISP 2007, held in Paris, France, in May 2007. The 24 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on nonlinear and non-conventional techniques, speech synthesis, speaker recognition, speech recognition, and many other subjects.

International Conference on Non-Linear Speech Processing, NOLISP 2007 Paris, France, May 22-25, 2007 Revised Selected Papers

Advances in Nonlinear Speech Processing

Anna Esposito

Maria Marinaro

Raffaele Martone

This volume brings together the peer-reviewed contributions of the participants at the COST 2102 and euCognition International Training School on “Multimodal Signals: C- nitive and Algorithmic Issues” held in Vietri sul Mare, Salerno, Italy, April 22 –26, 2008. The school was sponsored by COST (European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research, www.cost.esf.org) in the domain of Information and Communi- tion Technologies (ICT) for disseminating the advances of the research activities developed within Action 2102: “Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication” (www.cost.esf.org/domains_actions/ict/Actions/Verbal_and_Non- verbal _Communication) and by euCognition: The European Network for Advancement of Artificial Cognitive Systems (www.euCognition.org). COST Action 2102, in its second year of life, brought together about 60 European and 6 overseas scientific laboratories whose aim is to develop interactive dialogue systems and intelligent virtual avatars graphically embodied in a 2D and/or 3D int- active virtual world, able to interact intelligently with the environment, other avatars, and particularly with human users. The main theme of the school was to investigate the mathematical and psycholo- cal tools for modelling human–machine interaction through access to a graded series of tasks for measuring the amount of adjustment (as well as intelligence and achie- ment) needed for introducing new concepts in the information communication te- nology domain in order to develop adaptive, socially enabled and human-centered automatic systems able to serve remote applications in medicine, learning, care, re- bilitation, and for accessibility to work, employment, and information.

COST Action 2102 and euCognition International School Vietri sul Mare, Italy, April 21-26, 2008, Revised Selected and Invited Papers

Multimodal Signals: Cognitive and Algorithmic Issues

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the COST Action 2102 and euCognition supported international school on Multimodal Signals: 'Cognitive and Algorithmic Issues' held in Vietri sul Mare, Italy, in April 2008. The 34 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from participants’ contributions and invited lectures given at the workshop. The volume is organized in two parts; the first on Interactive and Unsupervised Multimodal Systems contains 14 papers. The papers deal with the theoretical and computational issue of defining algorithms, programming languages, and determinist models to recognize and synthesize multimodal signals. These are facial and vocal expressions of emotions, tones of voice, gestures, eye contact, spatial arrangements, patterns of touch, expressive movements, writing patterns, and cultural differences, in anticipation of the implementation of intelligent avatars and interactive dialogue systems that could be exploited to improve user access to future telecommunication services. The second part of the volume, on Verbal and Nonverbal Communication Signals, presents 20 original studies devoted to the modeling of timing synchronisation between speech production, gestures, facial and head movements in human communicative expressions and on their mutual contribution for an effective communication.

Mirjana Ivanovic

The 4th International Conference on Electronic, Communications and Networks (CECNet2014) inherits the fruitfulness of the past three conferences and lays a foundation for the forthcoming next year in Shanghai. CECNet2014 was hosted by Hubei University of Science and Technology, China, with the main objective of providing a comprehensive global foru

Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Electronics, Communications and Networks (CECNET IV), Beijing, China, 12-15 December 2014

Electronics, Communications and Networks IV

Cheng-Lin Liu

Jinchang Ren

Jiangbin Zheng

Bin Luo

Huimin Zhao

Xinbo Zhao

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Advances in Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems, BICS 2018, held in Xi’an, China, in July 2018. The 83 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 137 submissions. The papers were organized in topical sections named: neural computation; biologically inspired systems; image recognition: detection, tracking and classification; data analysis and natural language processing; and applications.

9th International Conference, BICS 2018, Xi'an, China, July 7-8, 2018, Proceedings

Advances in Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems

Roy C. Amore

Willard Oxtoby

Now in its fifth edition, this engaging, contributed survey of religions in the Western world - namely Judaism, Christianity, Islam, ancient religions, Indigenous traditions, and new religious movements - explores each tradition in depth from its origins, through its development, to thereligion's meaning and practice in contemporary society.

Anton Nijholt

Nick Campbell

Carl Vogel

The themes of the papers presented in this book emphasize theoretical and practical issues for modelling human-machine interaction, ranging from the attempt in describing “the spacing and orientation in co-present interaction” to the effort for developing multimodal interfaces, collecting and analysing interaction data and emergent behaviour as well as analysing the use of nonverbal and pragmatic elements of exchanges, implementing discourse control and virtual agents and using active listening in computer speech processing.

Second COST 2102 International Training School, Dublin, Ireland, March 23-27, 2009, Revised Selected Papers

Development of Multimodal Interfaces: Active Listening and Synchrony

Erik Cambria

Soujanya Poria

This latest volume in the series, Socio-Affective Computing, presents a set of novel approaches to analyze opinionated videos and to extract sentiments and emotions. Textual sentiment analysis framework as discussed in this book contains a novel way of doing sentiment analysis by merging linguistics with machine learning. Fusing textual information with audio and visual cues is found to be extremely useful which improves text, audio and visual based unimodal sentiment analyzer. This volume covers the three main topics of: textual preprocessing and sentiment analysis methods; frameworks to process audio and visual data; and methods of textual, audio and visual features fusion. The inclusion of key visualization and case studies will enable readers to understand better these approaches. Aimed at the Natural Language Processing, Affective Computing and Artificial Intelligence audiences, this comprehensive volume will appeal to a wide readership and will help readers to understand key details on multimodal sentiment analysis.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Listen to any news broadcast today and the message comes through loud and clear: Islam is a religion of violence and behind every Muslim there lurks a potential terrorist. Islam is a threat to values of the Christian West. They are like oil and water. Clearly, they don't mix. Oil & Water: Two Faiths One God confronts these popular perceptions head-on. With keen insight and gentle understanding, it explores the differences between Christianity and Islam, as well as the many things these two enduring faith traditions hold in common - including, first and foremost, their belief in and desire to be faithful to the one, true God; their shared roots and scripture (from the Jewish faith); and the spiritual values of peace and social justice. Written for Christians by Muslim world-religions scholar Amir Hussain, the book is divided into two parts. Part 1, provides an overview of the Islamic faith and of the lives of Muslims in North America today. Chapters focus on the place and identity of Muslims in society, as well as on the importance and role of Muhammad, the Qur'an, and basic beliefs and practices (The Five Pillars of Islam). Having provided a foundation for understanding, the book moves on, in Part 2, to explore key points for dialogue today, including issues of violence and jihad, the roles of women and men, and the mystical tradition within Islam. The final two chapters look at interfaith dialogue and the practical aspects of being good "neighbours." In all of this, the book invites the reader to a place of reconciliation, to a place where the truth and value of each of these great faith traditions can be recognized and honoured by the other. In the end, the metaphor of oil and water is an interesting one for the reality of conflict and the hope for reconciliation between Islam and Christianity today.

Two Faiths : One God

Oil and Water

This volume presents a knowledge-based approach to concept-level sentiment analysis at the crossroads between affective computing, information extraction, and common-sense computing, which exploits both computer and social sciences to better interpret and process information on the Web. Concept-level sentiment analysis goes beyond a mere word-level analysis of text in order to enable a more efficient passage from (unstructured) textual information to (structured) machine-processable data, in potentially any domain. Readers will discover the following key novelties, that make this approach so unique and avant-garde, being reviewed and discussed: • Sentic Computing's multi-disciplinary approach to sentiment analysis-evidenced by the concomitant use of AI, linguistics and psychology for knowledge representation and inference • Sentic Computing’s shift from syntax to semantics-enabled by the adoption of the bag-of-concepts model instead of simply counting word co-occurrence frequencies in text • Sentic Computing's shift from statistics to linguistics-implemented by allowing sentiments to flow from concept to concept based on the dependency relation between clauses This volume is the first in the Series Socio-Affective Computing edited by Dr Amir Hussain and Dr Erik Cambria and will be of interest to researchers in the fields of socially intelligent, affective and multimodal human-machine interaction and systems.

A Common-Sense-Based Framework for Concept-Level Sentiment Analysis

Sentic Computing

Ranjan Satapathy

The abundance of text available in social media and health-related forums and blogs have recently attracted the interest of the public health community to use these sources for opinion mining. This book presents a lexicon-based approach to sentiment analysis in the bio-medical domain, i.e., WordNet for Medical Events (WME). This book gives an insight in handling unstructured textual data and converting it to structured machine-processable data in the bio-medical domain. The readers will discover the following key novelties: 1) development of a bio-medical lexicon: WME expansion and WME enrichment with additional features.; 2) ensemble of machine learning and computational creativity; 3) development of microtext analysis techniques to overcome the inconsistency in social communication. It will be of interest to researchers in the fields of socially-intelligent human-machine interaction and biomedical text mining

Techniques, Tools, and Applications

Sentiment Analysis in the Bio-Medical Domain

John G. Taylor

The perception-action cycle is the circular flow of information that takes place between the organism and its environment in the course of a sensory-guided sequence of behaviour towards a goal. Each action causes changes in the environment that are analyzed bottom-up through the perceptual hierarchy and lead to the processing of further action, top-down through the executive hierarchy, toward motor effectors. These actions cause new changes that are analyzed and lead to new action, and so the cycle continues. The Perception-action cycle: Models, architectures and hardware book provides focused and easily accessible reviews of various aspects of the perception-action cycle. It is an unparalleled resource of information that will be an invaluable companion to anyone in constructing and developing models, algorithms and hardware implementations of autonomous machines empowered with cognitive capabilities. The book is divided into three main parts. In the first part, leading computational neuroscientists present brain-inspired models of perception, attention, cognitive control, decision making, conflict resolution and monitoring, knowledge representation and reasoning, learning and memory, planning and action, and consciousness grounded on experimental data. In the second part, architectures, algorithms, and systems with cognitive capabilities and minimal guidance from the brain, are discussed. These architectures, algorithms, and systems are inspired from the areas of cognitive science, computer vision, robotics, information theory, machine learning, computer agents and artificial intelligence. In the third part, the analysis, design and implementation of hardware systems with robust cognitive abilities from the areas of mechatronics, sensing technology, sensor fusion, smart sensor networks, control rules, controllability, stability, model/knowledge representation, and reasoning are discussed.

Amir Hussain

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