A novel, interdisciplinary exploration of the relative contributions of rigidity and flexibility in the adoption, maintenance, and evolution of technical traditions. Techniques can either be used in rigid, stereotypical ways or in flexibly adaptive ways, or in some combination of the two. The Evolution of Techniques, edited by Mathieu Charbonneau, addresses the impacts of both flexibility and rigidity on how techniques are used, transformed, and reconstructed, at varying social and temporal scales. The multidisciplinary contributors demonstrate the important role of the varied learning contexts and social configurations involved in the transmission, use, and evolution of techniques. They explore the diversity of cognitive, behavioral, sociocultural, and ecological mechanisms that promote and constrain technical flexibility and rigidity, proposing a deeper picture of the enablers of, and obstacles to, technical transmission and change. In line with the extended evolutionary synthesis, the book proposes a more inclusive and materially grounded conception of technical evolution in terms of promiscuous, dynamic, and multidirectional causal processes. Offering new evidence and novel theoretical perspectives, the contributors deploy a diversity of methods, including ethnographies, field and laboratory experiments, cladistics and phylogenetic tree building, historiography, and philosophical analysis. Examples of the wide range of topics covered include field experiments with potters from five cultures, stability and change in Paleolithic toolmaking, why children lack flexibility when making tools, and cultural techniques in nonhuman animals. The volume’s three thematic sections are: · Timescales of technical rigidity and flexibility · Rigid copying to flexible reconstruction · Exogenous factors of technical rigidity and flexibility The volume closes with a discussion by philosopher Kim Sterelny. Contributors Rita Astuti, Adam Howell Boyette, Blandine Bril, Josep Call, Mathieu Charbonneau, Arianna Curioni, Nicola Cutting, Bert De Munck, György Gergely, Anne-Lise Goujon, Ildikó Király, Catherine Lara, Sébastien Manem, Luke McEllin, Helena Miton, Giulio Ongaro, Sarah Pope-Caldwell, Valentine Roux, Manon Schweinfurth, Dan Sperber, Kim Sterelny, Dietrich Stout, James W. A. Strachan, Sadie Tenpas

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of 12 international workshops held in Tallinn, Estonia, in conjunction with the 10th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2012, in September 2012. The 12 workshops comprised Adaptive Case Management and Other Non-Workflow Approaches to BPM (ACM 2012), Business Process Design (BPD 2012), Business Process Intelligence (BPI 2012), Business Process Management and Social Software (BPMS2 2012), Data- and Artifact-Centric BPM (DAB 2012), Event-Driven Business Process Management (edBPM 2012), Empirical Research in Business Process Management (ER-BPM 2012), Process Model Collections (PMC 2012), Process-Aware Logistics Systems (PALS 2012), Reuse in Business Process Management (rBPM 2012), Security in Business Processes (SBP 2012), and Theory and Applications of Process Visualization (TAProViz 2012). The 56 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 141 submissions.

Provides a broad sample of current information processing applications Includes examples of successful applications that will encourage practitioners to apply the techniques described in the book to real-life problems

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 10th IFIP WG 8.1 Conference on the Practice of Enterprise Modeling held in November 2017 in Leuven, Belgium. The conference was created by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 8.1 to offer a forum for knowledge transfer and experience sharing between the academic and practitioner communities. The 20 full papers and 4 short papers accepted were carefully reviewed and selected from 70 submissions. They include research results, practitioner/experience reports and work-in-progress papers and were presented in 8 sessions covering diverse topics related to enterprise modelling and its application in practice.

This book presents several intelligent approaches for tackling and solving challenging practical problems facing those in the petroleum geosciences and petroleum industry. Written by experienced academics, this book offers state-of-the-art working examples and provides the reader with exposure to the latest developments in the field of intelligent methods applied to oil and gas research, exploration and production. It also analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of each method presented using benchmarking, whilst also emphasizing essential parameters such as robustness, accuracy, speed of convergence, computer time, overlearning and the role of normalization. The intelligent approaches presented include artificial neural networks, fuzzy logic, active learning method, genetic algorithms and support vector machines, amongst others. Integration, handling data of immense size and uncertainty, and dealing with risk management are among crucial issues in petroleum geosciences. The problems we have to solve in this domain are becoming too complex to rely on a single discipline for effective solutions and the costs associated with poor predictions (e.g. dry holes) increase. Therefore, there is a need to establish a new approach aimed at proper integration of disciplines (such as petroleum engineering, geology, geophysics and geochemistry), data fusion, risk reduction and uncertainty management. These intelligent techniques can be used for uncertainty analysis, risk assessment, data fusion and mining, data analysis and interpretation, and knowledge discovery, from diverse data such as 3-D seismic, geological data, well logging, and production data. This book is intended for petroleum scientists, data miners, data scientists and professionals and post-graduate students involved in petroleum industry.

Artificial economics aims to provide a generative approach to understanding problems in economics and social sciences. It is based on the consistent use of agent-based models and computational techniques. It encompasses a rich variety of techniques that generalize numerical analysis, mathematical programming, and micro-simulations. The peer-reviewed contributions in this volume address applications of artificial economics to markets and trading, auctions, networks, management, industry sectors, macroeconomics, and demographics and culture.

The two-volume set LNAI 6922 and LNAI 6923 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence, ICCCI 2011, held in Gdynia, Poland, in September 2011. The 112 papers in this two volume set presented together with 3 keynote speeches were carefully reviewed and selected from 300 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge management, machine learning and applications, autonomous and collective decision-making, collective computations and optimization, Web services and semantic Web, social networks and computational swarm intelligence and applications.