Business Systems and Knowledge Modelling Lab

Human Centered e-Business focuses on analysis, design and development of human-centered e-business systems. The applications described in this book, among other aspects facilitate e-business analysis from a business professional’s perspective and human-centered system design from a system development perspective. The book illustrates the benefits of the human-centered approach in intelligent e-sales recruitment application, integrating data mining technology with decision support model for profiling transaction behaviour of internet banking customers, user-centered context dependent data organization using XML, knowledge management, optimizing the search process through human evaluation in an intelligent interactive multimedia application and multimedia-based user-centered interface design. The applications described in the book employ a range of internet and soft computing technologies.
This timely book will be of enormous interest to researchers and practitioners in information technology and to business professionals involved with customer relationship management, knowledge management, e-banking and human resource management.

Intelligent Multimedia & Multi-Agent Systems is about building successful intelligent systems. The book adopts a human-centered approach and considers various pragmatic issues and problems in areas like intelligent systems, software engineering, multimedia databases, electronic commerce, data mining, enterprise modelling and human-computer interaction for developing a human-centered virtual machine.
The authors describe the ontology of the human-centered virtual machine with the help of enabling theories from cognitive science (e.g., situated cognition, distributed cognition), psychology (e.g., activity theory), and workplace (e.g., work-centered and socio-technical frameworks) and philosophy (e.g., semiotic theory). The ontology is described in terms of four components, namely, activity-centered analysis component, problem-solving adapter component, transformation agent component and multimedia based interpretation component. These four components capture the external and internal planes of the system development spectrum. They integrate the physical, social and organizational reality on the external plane with stakeholder goals, tasks and incentives, and organization culture on the internal plane.The human-centered virtual machine and its four components are used for developing intelligent multimedia multi-agent systems in areas like medical decision support and health informatics, e-health, e-commerce, face detection and annotation, sales recruitment. The applications in these areas help to expound various aspects of the human-centered virtual machine including, human-centered domain modelling, distributed intelligence and communication, perceptual and cognitive task modelling, component-based software development, and multimedia based data modeling. Further, the applications described in the book employ various intelligent technologies like neural networks, fuzzy logic and knowledge based systems, software engineering artefacts like agents and objects, internet technologies like XML and multimedia artifacts like image, audio, video and text.

Engineering Intelligent Hybrid Multi-Agent Systems is about building intelligent hybrid systems. Included is coverage of applications and design concepts related to fusion systems, transformation systems and combination systems. These applications are in areas involving hybrid configurations of knowledge-based systems, case-based reasoning, fuzzy systems, artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms, and in knowledge discovery and data mining. Through examples and applications a synergy of these subjects is demonstrated.
A multi-agent architectural theory for engineering intelligent associative hybrid systems is introduced. The architectural theory is described at both the task structure level and the computational level. This problem solving architecture is relevant for developing knowledge agents and information agents. An enterprise-wide system modelling framework is outlined to facilitate forward and backward integration of systems developed in the knowledge, information, and data engineering layers of an organization. In the modelling process, agent oriented analysis, design and reuse aspects of software engineering are developed and discussed.

Design Of Intelligent Multi-Agent Systems. The ongoing transition of Intelligent Systems Research and in particular the agent-based research into the real world has resulted in the emergence of new phenomena distinct from the traditional logic-centered approach. This book focuses on those new trends in design and evolution of the agent technology such as humanization, architectures and learning in agents. “Design of Intelligent Multi-Agent systems” presents the application of soft computing agents to complex real world problems in distributed environments, humanization of the agents and optimization of their performance.