Bøker utgitt av Springer International Publishing AG

Humans have always dreamed of automating laborious physical and intellectual tasks, but the latter has proved more elusive than naively suspected. Seven decades of systematic study of Artificial Intelligence have witnessed cycles of hubris and despair. The successful realization of General Intelligence (evidenced by the kind of cross-domain flexibility enjoyed by humans) will spawn an industry worth billions and transform the range of viable automation tasks.The recent notable successes of Machine Learning has lead to conjecture that it might be the appropriate technology for delivering General Intelligence. In this book, we argue that the framework of machine learning is fundamentally at odds with any reasonable notion of intelligence and that essential insights from previous decades of AI research are being forgotten. We claim that a fundamental change in perspective is required, mirroring that which took place in the philosophy of science in the mid 20th century. We propose a framework for General Intelligence, together with a reference architecture that emphasizes the need for anytime bounded rationality and a situated denotational semantics. We given necessary emphasis to compositional reasoning, with the required compositionality being provided via principled symbolic-numeric inference mechanisms based on universal constructions from category theory.¿ Details the pragmatic requirements for real-world General Intelligence.¿ Describes how machine learning fails to meet these requirements.¿ Provides a philosophical basis for the proposed approach.¿ Provides mathematical detail for a reference architecture.¿ Describes a research program intended to address issues of concern in contemporary AI.The book includes an extensive bibliography, with ~400 entries covering the history of AI and many related areas of computer science and mathematics.The target audience is the entire gamut of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning researchers and industrial practitioners. There are a mixture of descriptive and rigorous sections, according to the nature of the topic. Undergraduate mathematics is in general sufficient. Familiarity with category theory is advantageous for a complete understanding of the more advanced sections, but these may be skipped by the reader who desires an overall picture of the essential conceptsThis is an open access book.

Do Member States of the EU have a free hand in drafting Accession Treaties, or are there legal constraints on their primary law-making powers in this regard? That is the main question this book addresses. It argues that such constraints do exist, and seeks to identify them, thereby providing a number of insights into the nature of the EU¿s legal order. The point of departure as well as the main focus of the study is the proposed permanent safeguard clause (PSC) on the free movement of persons in the Negotiating Framework for Turkey. Legal provisions, rules, principles and norms that might constrain Member States in this regard are identified with reference to the PSC.The book examines constraints on Member States stemming from three sources of EU law: Association Law, based on the existing legal framework built on the EEC-Turkey Association Agreement (Part I); EU Enlargement Law, comprised of past practice and existing EU rules on enlargement (Part II); and the foundationsof EU Constitutional Law (Part III), which constrain Member States whenever they act within the scope of Union law both as primary and secondary lawmakers. Part III reveals what the Court of Justice of the EU considers to be the essence or the ¿very foundations¿ of the Union¿s legal order, which it protects against encroachment. This is similar to what some constitutional courts do to protect the ¿inner unity¿ or ¿basic structure¿ of their constitutions.The findings of this book can be applied to the accession of any candidate state. It also sheds light on important implications for future treaty amendments, and for identifying possible limits to differentiated integration.

In the present as in the past, the dead have been deployed to promote visions of identity, as well as ostensibly wider human values. Through a series of case studies from ancient Egypt through prehistoric, historic, and present-day Europe, this book discusses what is constant and what is locally and historically specific in our ways of interacting with the remains of the dead, their objects, and monuments. Postmortem interaction encompasses not only funerary rituals and intergenerational engagement with forebears, but also concerns encounters with the dead who died centuries and millennia ago. Drawing from a variety of disciplines such as archaeology, bioarchaeology, literary studies, ancient Egyptian philology, and sociocultural anthropology, this volume provides an interdisciplinary account of the ways in which the dead are able to transcend temporal distances and engender social relationships. Until quite recently, literary sciences and archaeology were generally regarded asincommensurable in their aims, methodologies, and source material. Although archaeologists and literary critics have been increasingly willing to borrow concepts and terminology from the other discipline, this book is one examples of a genuinely collaborative endeavor.This is an open access book.

This book reflects the cutting edge in ecostylistic approaches to nature, the environment and sustainability as represented in contemporary non-literary discourse. Firstly, the book presents the ecolinguistic and stylistic terms and theories applied in this ecostylistic analysis (ecosophy, beneficial, ambivalent and destructive discourses; and foregrounding, point of view, metaphor), and reviews the most recent literature in the field of ecostylistics. Secondly, the book examines the occurrences of five marker words (nature, environment, ecosystem, ecology, sustainability) on the websites of five environmental organisations and agencies (Forestry England, Greenpeace International, National Park Service, Navdanya International, World Wide Fund for Nature). The main research purpose of this study is to identify beneficial discourses in the environet and to investigate the beneficial ecostylistic strategies utilised to produce them. Above all, this book reminds us humans that we do notstand apart from nature: we are a part of it. The book will be of interest to scholars of stylistics, ecolinguistics and ecocriticism, as well as scholars of discourse analysis, environmental communication and environmental humanities.

This handbook aims to bridge the gap between the fields of positive psychology and the psychology of religion and spirituality. It is the authoritative guide to the intersections among religion, spirituality, and positive psychology and includes the following sections: (1) historical and theoretical considerations, (2) methodological considerations, (3) cultural considerations, (4) developmental considerations, (5) empirical research on happiness and well-being in relation to religion and spirituality, (6) empirical research on character strengths and virtues in relation to religion and spirituality, (7) clinical and applied considerations, and (8) field unification and advancement. Leading positive psychologists and psychologists of religion/spirituality have coauthored the chapters, drawing on expertise from their respective fields. The handbook is useful for social and clinical scientists, practitioners in helping professions, practitioners in religious and spiritual fields, andstudents of psychology and religion/spirituality.This is an open access book.

This book surveys the science at a semipopular, Scientific American-level. It is even-handed with regard to competing directions of research and philosophical positions. It is hard to get even two people to agree on anything, yet a million billion water molecules can suddenly and abruptly coordinate to lock themselves into an ice crystal or liberate one another to billow outwards as steam. The marvelous self-organizing capacity of matter is one of the central and deepest puzzles of physics, with implications for all the natural sciences. Physicists in the past century have found a remarkable diversity of phases of matter¿and equally remarkable commonalities within that diversity. The pace of discovery has, if anything, only quickened in recent years with the appreciation of quantum phases of matter and so-called topological order. The study of seemingly humdrum materials has made contact with the more exotic realm of quantum gravity, as theorists realize that the spacetime continuummay itself be a phase of some deeper and still unknown constituents. These developments flesh out the sometimes vague concept of the emergence¿how exactly it is that complexity begets simplicity.

Bayes Factors for Forensic Decision Analyses with R provides a self-contained introduction to computational Bayesian statistics using R. With its primary focus on Bayes factors supported by data sets, this book features an operational perspective, practical relevance, and applicability¿keeping theoretical and philosophical justifications limited. It offers a balanced approach to three naturally interrelated topics:Probabilistic Inference - Relies on the core concept of Bayesian inferential statistics, to help practicing forensic scientists in the logical and balanced evaluation of the weight of evidence.Decision Making - Features how Bayes factors are interpreted in practical applications to help address questions of decision analysis involving the use of forensic science in the law.Operational Relevance - Combines inference and decision, backed up with practical examples and complete sample code in R, including sensitivity analyses and discussion on how to interpret results in context.Over the past decades, probabilistic methods have established a firm position as a reference approach for the management of uncertainty in virtually all areas of science, including forensic science, with Bayes' theorem providing the fundamental logical tenet for assessing how new information¿scientific evidence¿ought to be weighed. Central to this approach is the Bayes factor, which clarifies the evidential meaning of new information, by providing a measure of the change in the odds in favor of a proposition of interest, when going from the prior to the posterior distribution. Bayes factors should guide the scientist's thinking about the value of scientific evidence and form the basis of logical and balanced reporting practices, thus representing essential foundations for rational decision making under uncertainty.This book would be relevant to students, practitioners, and applied statisticiansinterested in inference and decision analyses in the critical field of forensic science. It could be used to support practical courses on Bayesian statistics and decision theory at both undergraduate and graduate levels, and will be of equal interest to forensic scientists and practitioners of Bayesian statistics for driving their evaluations and the use of R for their purposes.This book is Open Access.

This book provides an introduction to fundamental methods and techniques of algebra over ordered fields. It is a revised and updated translation of the classic textbook Einführung in die reelle Algebra. Beginning with the basics of ordered fields and their real closures, the book proceeds to discuss methods for counting the number of real roots of polynomials. Followed by a thorough introduction to Krull valuations, this culminates in Artin's solution of Hilbert's 17th Problem. Next, the fundamental concept of the real spectrum of a commutative ring is introduced with applications. The final chapter gives a brief overview of important developments in real algebra and geometry¿as far as they are directly related to the contents of the earlier chapters¿since the publication of the original German edition. Real Algebra is aimed at advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students who have a good grounding in linear algebra, field theory and ring theory. It also provides a carefully written reference for specialists in real algebra, real algebraic geometry and related fields.