This book contains the articles from the international conference 11th Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps 2016 (WSOM 2016), held at Rice University in Houston, Texas, 6-8 January 2016. WSOM is a biennial international conference series starting with WSOM'97 in Helsinki, Finland, under the guidance and direction of Professor Tuevo Kohonen (Emeritus Professor, Academy of Finland). WSOM brings together the state-of-the-art theory and applications in Competitive Learning Neural Networks: SOMs, L...

The U.S. healthcare system is now spending many millions of dollars to improve "patient safety" and "inter-professional practice." Nevertheless, an estimated 100,000 patients still succumb to preventable medical errors or infections every year. How can health care providers reduce the terrible financial and human toll of medical errors and injuries that harm rather than heal? Beyond the Checklist argues that lives could be saved and patient care enhanced by adapting the re...

“How can it be that in 2008, a checked bag on an airline flight is still exponentially safer than a patient in an American hospital?  Simply put, one industry has learned the realities of what it takes to make a human system safe, and the other has not.  So what does it take to dramatically improve patient safety and service quality?  It takes a host of new and different (and sometimes radical) methods centered on supporting the people on the front lines – t...

Artificial neural networks are most suitable for solving problems that are complex, ill-defined, highly nonlinear, of many and different variables, and/or stochastic. Such problems are abundant in medicine, in finance, in security and beyond.This volume covers the basic theory and architecture of the major artificial neural networks. Uniquely, it presents 18 complete case studies of applications of neural networks in various fields, ranging from cell-shape classification to micro-trading i...

This book focuses on computational intelligence techniques and their applications — fast-growing and promising research topics that have drawn a great deal of attention from researchers over the years. It brings together many different aspects of the current research on intelligence technologies such as neural networks, support vector machines, fuzzy logic and evolutionary computation, and covers a wide range of applications from pattern recognition and system modeling, to intelligent cont...

New breakthrough thinking in organizational learning, leadership, and changeContinuous improvement, understanding complex systems, and promoting innovation are all part of the landscape of learning challenges today's companies face. Amy Edmondson shows that organizations thrive, or fail to thrive, based on how well the small groups within those organizations work. In most organizations, the work that produces value for customers is carried out by teams, and increas...

Providing a broad but in-depth introduction to neural network and machine learning in a statistical framework, this book provides a single, comprehensive resource for study and further research. All the major popular neural network models and statistical learning approaches are covered with examples and exercises in every chapter to develop a practical working understanding of the content.Each of the twenty-five chapters includes state-of-the-art descriptions and important research...

Provides an in-depth and even treatment of the three pillars of computational intelligence and how they relate to one anotherThis book covers the three fundamental topics that form the basis of computational intelligence: neural networks, fuzzy systems, and evolutionary computation. The text focuses on inspiration, design, theory, and practical aspects of implementing procedures to solve real-world problems. While other books in the three fields that comprise compu...

Generate faster, better results—using less capital and fewer resources!Toyota, Alcoa, Pratt & Whitney, and the U.S. Navy's Nuclear Power Program operate in vastly different worlds, but they have one thing in common. Each of these organizations generates constant, almost automatic operational self-improvements at rates faster, durations longer, and breadths wider than any of its competitors.Excellence in operational management is the single element separatin...

Markov decision process (MDP) models are widely used for modeling sequential decision-making problems that arise in engineering, economics, computer science, and the social sciences. Many real-world problems modeled by MDPs have huge state and/or action spaces, giving an opening to the curse of dimensionality and so making practical solution of the resulting models intractable. In other cases, the system of interest is too complex to allow explicit specification of some of the MDP model pa...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Design, Modeling, and Evaluation of Cyber Physical Systems, CyPhy 2015, held as part of ESWeek 2015, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in October 2015.The 10 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 13 submissions. They broadly interpret, from a diverse set of disciplines, the modeling, simulation, and evaluation of cyber-physical systems.

Redefining Airmanship offers the first concrete model of the abstract ideal of "airmanship," and gives the reader step-by-step guidance for self-appraisal and improvement in the areas of flight proficiency, teamwork, and good judgment in crisis situations. The author, Major Anthony Kern, draws on his extensive flight and crew-training experience in the US Air Force, but his model is invaluable for all pilots, whether military, recreational, or commercial. "Kern's work is a breakthrough, an...