From the Publisher:
A valuable reference for the novice as well as for the expert who needs a wider scope of coverage within the area of cryptography, this book provides easy and rapid access of information and includes more than 200 algorithms and protocols; more than 200 tables and figures; more than 1,000 numbered definitions, facts, examples, notes, and remarks; and over 1,250 significant references, including brief comments on each paper.

Handbook of Applied Cryptography

Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

A comprehensive and self-contained introduction to Gaussian processes, which provide a principled, practical, probabilistic approach to learning in kernel machines. Gaussian processes (GPs) provide a principled, practical, probabilistic approach to learning in kernel machines. GPs have received increased attention in the machine-learning community over the past decade, and this book provides a long-needed systematic and unified treatment of theoretical and practical aspects of GPs in machine learning. The treatment is comprehensive and self-contained, targeted at researchers and students in machine learning and applied statistics. The book deals with the supervised-learning problem for both regression and classification, and includes detailed algorithms. A wide variety of covariance (kernel) functions are presented and their properties discussed. Model selection is discussed both from a Bayesian and a classical perspective. Many connections to other well-known techniques from machine learning and statistics are discussed, including support-vector machines, neural networks, splines, regularization networks, relevance vector machines and others. Theoretical issues including learning curves and the PAC-Bayesian framework are treated, and several approximation methods for learning with large datasets are discussed. The book contains illustrative examples and exercises, and code and datasets are available on the Web. Appendixes provide mathematical background and a discussion of Gaussian Markov processes.

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Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning

This survey provides an overview of higher-order tensor decompositions, their applications, and available software. A tensor is a multidimensional or $N$-way array. Decompositions of higher-order tensors (i.e., $N$-way arrays with $N \geq 3$) have applications in psycho-metrics, chemometrics, signal processing, numerical linear algebra, computer vision, numerical analysis, data mining, neuroscience, graph analysis, and elsewhere. Two particular tensor decompositions can be considered to be higher-order extensions of the matrix singular value decomposition: CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposes a tensor as a sum of rank-one tensors, and the Tucker decomposition is a higher-order form of principal component analysis. There are many other tensor decompositions, including INDSCAL, PARAFAC2, CANDELINC, DEDICOM, and PARATUCK2 as well as nonnegative variants of all of the above. The N-way Toolbox, Tensor Toolbox, and Multilinear Engine are examples of software packages for working with tensors.

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Tensor Decompositions and Applications

I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

Most measurements of human electrical activity contain large amounts of electrical heart activity (electrocardiogram, ECG). Whenever other sources of lower energy are of interest, a need arises to eliminate this ECG. Some applications allow a frequency domain operation (e.g. gastro-intestinal slow wave detection), or even a time domain operation (e.g. blanking of QRS complex of an ECG). Usually none of these methods are adequate. The proposed method uses a totally different approach, in this sense that it manipulates geometrically all measurements at the same time. It decomposes the measurements on the basis of an oriented energy, by means of the singular value decomposition. After an introduction to the problem and a definition of some useful concepts, the basic idea of the method is presented in a low dimensional geometrical example, and generalized to higher dimensions. It is shown that the method can easily be applied under realistic clinical conditions. A discussion is given about : the influence of noise; considerations on correlations between source signals; number and location of electrodes; certain dynamical problems like interference. Results on real data are given, in order to illustrate and verify the main features of the method : the multidimensional approach to the estimation of equivalent dipole vector sources; the insensitivity of ECG elimination quality to actual electrode positions; the minimal rank representation of the source signals and the resulting signal to noise ratio improvement; 50 Hz or 60 Hz interference elimination.

Extraction of weak bioelectrical signals by means of singular value decomposition

With the recent success of the Internet, security has become a real issue. One of the main goals of security can be outlined as defining an mechanism to control the access to files and applications. Over the last years, we have been implementing such a scheme that enforces a role based access control mechanism in a distributed computing environment. This work was done in the framework of the EC-RACE project SESAME. At the same time, there was a lot of work done by ECMA (European Computer Manufacturers Association) to represent the users’ credentials. Our conclusion is that enforcing such a scheme is both realistic and renders the whole system more manageable and auditable.

Role Based Access Control in Distributed Systems

A neural network approach is proposed for the automated classification of the normal and abnormal EGG. Two learning algorithms, the quasi-Newton and the scaled conjugate gradient method for the multilayer feedforward neural networks (MFNN), are introduced and compared with the error backpropagation algorithm. The configurations of the MFNN are determined by experiment. The raw EGG data, its power spectral data, and its autoregressive moving average (ARMA) modelling parameters are used as the input to the MFNN and compared with each other. Three indexes (the percent correct, sumsquared error and complexity per iteration) are used to evaluate the performance of each learning algorithm. The results show that the scaled conjugate gradient algorithm performs best, in that it is robust and provides a super-linear convergence rate. The power spectral representation and the ARMA modelling parameters of the EGG are found to be better types of the input to the network for this specific application, both yielding a percent correctness of 95% on the test set. Although the results are focused on the classification of the EGG, this paper should provide useful information for the classification of other biomedical signals.

Joos Vandewalle

Papers

Extraction of weak bioelectrical signals by means of singular value decomposition

Role Based Access Control in Distributed Systems

Classification of normal and abnormal electrogastrograms using multilayer feedforward neural networks

Sailplane: a simulated annealing based CAD-tool for the analysis of limit-cycle behaviour

Visualizing high dimensional datasets using parallel coordinaties : application to gene prioritization