This book contains best selected research papers presented at ICTCS 2023: Eighth International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for Competitive Strategies. The conference will be held in Jaipur, India during 8 – 9 December 2023. The book covers state-of-the-art as well as emerging topics pertaining to ICT and effective strategies for its implementation for engineering and managerial applications. This book contains papers mainly focused on ICT for computation, algorithms and data analytics and IT security. The work is presented in three volumes.

This book offers an introduction to the technical foundations of discrimination and equity issues in insurance models, catering to undergraduates, postgraduates, and practitioners. It is a self-contained resource, accessible to those with a basic understanding of probability and statistics. Designed as both a reference guide and a means to develop fairer models, the book acknowledges the complexity and ambiguity surrounding the question of discrimination in insurance. In insurance, proposing differentiated premiums that accurately reflect policyholders' true risk—termed "actuarial fairness" or "legitimate discrimination"—is economically and ethically motivated. However, such segmentation can appear discriminatory from a legal perspective. By intertwining real-life examples with academic models, the book incorporates diverse perspectives from philosophy, social sciences, economics, mathematics, and computer science. Although discrimination has long been a subject of inquiry in economics and philosophy, it has gained renewed prominence in the context of "big data," with an abundance of proxy variables capturing sensitive attributes, and "artificial intelligence" or specifically "machine learning" techniques, which often involve less interpretable black box algorithms.

This book is a collection of proceedings of the International Conference on Mechatronics and Intelligent Robotics (ICMIR2018), held in Kunming, China during May 19–20, 2018. It consists of 155 papers, which have been categorized into 6 different sections: Intelligent Systems, Robotics, Intelligent Sensors & Actuators, Mechatronics, Computational Vision and Machine Learning, and Soft Computing.

This Festschrift volume contains the proceedings of the conference Mathematical Methods in Computer Science, MMICS 2008, which was held during December 17-19, 2008, in Karlsruhe, Germany, in memory of Thomas Beth. The themes of the conference reflected the many interests of Thomas Beth. Although, these interests might seem diverse, mathematical methods and especially algebra as a language constituted the common denominator of all of his scientific achievements.

The field of quantum information science has seen tremendous progress over the last several years, with advances in both hardware development and novel algorithms. This Special Issue has endeavored to capture some of the technical advances in this rapidly changing field.

Many approaches have already been proposed for classification and modeling in the literature. These approaches are usually based on mathematical mod­ els. Computer systems can easily handle mathematical models even when they are complicated and nonlinear (e.g., neural networks). On the other hand, it is not always easy for human users to intuitively understand mathe­ matical models even when they are simple and linear. This is because human information processing is based mainly on linguistic knowledge while com­ puter systems are designed to handle symbolic and numerical information. A large part of our daily communication is based on words. We learn from various media such as books, newspapers, magazines, TV, and the Inter­ net through words. We also communicate with others through words. While words play a central role in human information processing, linguistic models are not often used in the fields of classification and modeling. If there is no goal other than the maximization of accuracy in classification and model­ ing, mathematical models may always be preferred to linguistic models. On the other hand, linguistic models may be chosen if emphasis is placed on interpretability.

This book is a compilation of a selected subset of research articles presented at the Eighth INFORMS Computing Society Conference, held in Chandler, Arizona, from January 8 to 10, 2003. The articles in this book represent the diversity and depth of the interface between ORiMS (operations research and the management sciences) and CS/AI (computer science and artificial intelligence ). This volume starts with two papers that represent the reflective and integrative thinking that is critical to any scientific discipline.

This tutorial volume presents a coherent and well-balanced introduction to the validation of stochastic systems; it is based on a GI/Dagstuhl research seminar. Supervised by the seminar organizers and volume editors, established researchers in the area as well as graduate students put together a collection of articles competently covering all relevant issues in the area. The lectures are organized in topical sections on: modeling stochastic systems, model checking of stochastic systems, representing large state spaces, deductive verification of stochastic systems.

Intended for both researchers and practitioners, this book will be a valuable resource for studying and applying recent robust statistical methods. It contains up-to-date research results in the theory of robust statistics.

The major goal of this book is to present the techniques of top-down program design and verification of program correctness hand-in-hand. It thus aims to give readers a new way of looking at algorithms and their design, synthesizing ten years of research in the process. It provides many examples of program and proof development with the aid of a formal and informal treatment of Hoare's method of invariants. Modem widely accepted control structures and data structures are explained in detail, together with their formal definitions, as a basis for their use in the design of correct algorithms.

Mathematica is today's most advanced technical computing system, featuring a rich programming environment, two-and three-dimensional graphics capabilities and hundreds of sophisticated, powerful programming and mathematical functions using state-of-the-art algorithms. Combined with a user-friendly interface and a complete mathematical typesetting system, Mathematica offers an intuitive, easy-to-handle environment of great power and utility.

Combinatorial (or discrete) optimization is one of the most active fields in the interface of operations research, computer science, and applied math­ ematics. Combinatorial optimization problems arise in various applications, including communications network design, VLSI design, machine vision, air­ line crew scheduling, corporate planning, computer-aided design and man­ ufacturing, database query design, cellular telephone frequency assignment, constraint directed reasoning, and computational biology. Furthermore, combinatorial optimization problems occur in many diverse areas such as linear and integer programming, graph theory, artificial intelligence, and number theory.

When I compare the books on expert systems in my library with the production expert systems I know of, I note that there are few good books on building expert systems in Prolog. Of course, the set of actual production systems is a little small for a valid statistical sample, at least at the time and place of this writing - here in Gennany, and in the first days of 1989. But there are at least some systems I have seen running in real life commercial and industrial environments, and not only at trade shows. I can observe the most impressive one in my immediate neighborhood. It is installed in the Telephone Shop of the Gennan Federal PTT near the Munich National Theater, and helps configure telephone systems and small PBXs for mostly private customers. It has a neat, graphical interface, and constructs and prices an individual telephone installation interactively before the very eyes of the customer. The hidden features of the system are even more impressive. It is part of an expert system network with a distributed knowledge base that will grow to about 150 installations in every Telephone Shop throughout Gennany. Each of them can be updated individually overnight via Teletex to present special offers or to adapt the selection process to the hardware supplies currently available at the local ware­ houses.