This monograph contains the advances achieved based on the content of our previous monograph published in 2011. In other words, the present monograph can be considered as "Part II" containing new results accomplished in the last decade. These were published in several reputed international journals based on the concept of natural time discussed in detail in our earlier monograph. The analysis in natural time enables the study of the dynamical evolution of a complex system and identifieswhen the system enters a critical stage. A wide range of applications are discussed, such as the cases of environmental extreme events-disasters and sudden cardiac death. More light is shed on changes of natural time features before major earthquakes like the 2011 M9 Tohoku earthquake in Japan and the 2017 M8.2 Chiapas earthquake in Mexico. Hence, natural time analysis plays a key role in predicting impending catastrophic events in general with a primary audienceResearchers and Academics in Physics, Earth Sciences, and Medicine.

This book deals with the theory and the applications of a new time domain, termed natural time domain, that has been forwarded by the authors almost a decade ago (P.A. Varotsos, N.V. Sarlis and E.S. Skordas, Practica of Athens Academy 76, 294-321, 2001; Physical Review E 66, 011902, 2002). In particular, it has been found that novel dynamical features hidden behind time series in complex systems can emerge upon analyzing them in this new time domain, which conforms to the desire to reduce uncertainty and extract signal information as much as possible. The analysis in natural time enables the study of the dynamical evolution of a complex system and identifies when the system enters a critical stage. Hence, natural time plays a key role in predicting impending catastrophic events in general. Relevant examples of data analysis in this new time domain have been published during the last decade in a large variety of fields, e.g., Earth Sciences, Biology and Physics. The book explains in detail a series of such examples including the identification of the sudden cardiac death risk in Cardiology, the recognition of electric signals that precede earthquakes, the determination of the time of an impending major mainshock in Seismology, and the analysis of the avalanches of the penetration of magnetic flux into thin films of type II superconductors in Condensed Matter Physics. In general, this book is concerned with the time-series analysis of signals emitted from complex systems by means of the new time domain and provides advanced students and research workers in diverse fields with a sound grounding in the fundamentals of current research work on detecting (long-range) correlations in complex time series. Furthermore, the modern techniques of Statistical Physics in time series analysis, for example Hurst analysis, the detrended fluctuation analysis, the wavelet transform etc., are presented along with their advantages when natural time domain is employed.

The two-volume set LNCS 10704 and 10705 constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Multimedia Modeling, MMM 2018, held in Bangkok, Thailand, in February 2018. Of the 185 full papers submitted, 46 were selected for oral presentation and 28 for poster presentation; in addition, 5 papers were accepted for Multimedia Analytics: Perspectives, Techniques, and Applications, 12 extended abstracts for demonstrations ,and 9 accepted papers for Video Browser Showdown 2018. All papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 185 submissions.