There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

THE DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF EXPERIMENTS. By Oscar Kempthorne. New York, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1952. 631 pp. $8.50. This book by a teacher of statistics (as well as a consultant for \"experimenters\") is a comprehensive study of the philosophical background for the statistical design of experiment. It is necessary to have some facility with algebraic notation and manipulation to be able to use the volume intelligently. The problems are presented from the theoretical point of view, without such practical examples as would be helpful for those not acquainted with mathematics. The mathematical justification for the techniques is given. As a somewhat advanced treatment of the design and analysis of experiments, this volume will be interesting and helpful for many who approach statistics theoretically as well as practically. With emphasis on the \"why,\" and with description given broadly, the author relates the subject matter to the general theory of statistics and to the general problem of experimental inference. MARGARET J. ROBERTSON

The Design and Analysis of Experiments

Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

We will review some of the major results in random graphs and some of the more challenging open problems. We will cover algorithmic and structural questions. We will touch on newer models, including those related to the WWW.

Random graphs

to be done in this area. Face recognition is a problem that scarcely clamoured for attention before the computer age but, having surfaced, has involved a wide range of techniques and has attracted the attention of some fine minds (David Mumford was a Fields Medallist in 1974). This singular application of mathematical modelling to a messy applied problem of obvious utility and importance but with no unique solution is a pretty one to share with students: perhaps, returning to the source of our opening quotation, we may invert Duncan's earlier observation, 'There is an art to find the mind's construction in the face!'.

Linear and nonlinear waves, by G. B. Whitham. Pp.636. £50. 1999. ISBN 0 471 35942 4 (Wiley).

This book reviews current design paths for soft sensors, and guides readers in evaluating different choices. The book presents case studies resulting from collaborations between the authors and industrial partners. The solutions presented, some of which are implemented on-line in industrial plants, are designed to cope with a wide range of applications from measuring system backup and what-if analysis through real-time prediction for plant control to sensor diagnosis and validation.

Soft Sensors for Monitoring and Control of Industrial Processes (Advances in Industrial Control)

Soft Sensors for Monitoring and Control of Industrial Processes

We consider a set of mobile agents in a two dimensional space, each one of them carrying a chaotic oscillator, and discuss the related synchronization issues under the framework of time-variant networks. In particular, we show that, as far as the time scale for the motion of the agents is much shorter than that of the associated dynamical systems, the global behavior can be characterized by a scaled all-to-all Laplacian matrix, and the synchronization conditions depend on the agent density on the plane.

Synchronization of moving chaotic agents.

Chaos and random signals share the property of long term unpredictable irregular behavior and broad band spectrum. The aim of this paper is not to distinguish between random and chaotic dynamics, nor to show the use of chaos, but to focus attention on how chaos and noise help order to arise from disorder It means to investigate the effect of the introduction of either deterministic chaotic or random sequences in different types of phenomena. In particular the results related to different applications, self-organization in arrays of locally coupled systems in which a chaotic dissymmetry is present, chaos driven optimization strategies, pattern formation in Drosophila embryos and some new topics on game theory are treated with the aim to investigate the subject: "does chaos work better than noise?".

Alessandro Rizzo

Papers

Soft Sensors for Monitoring and Control of Industrial Processes (Advances in Industrial Control)

Soft Sensors for Monitoring and Control of Industrial Processes

Synchronization of moving chaotic agents.

Does chaos work better than noise

IoT-aided robotics applications