Current companies and communities of practice are involved in intensive networking and collaborative systems by a great variety of electronic relations and collaborative interactions. This has resulted in entangled systems that need to be managed efficiently and in an autonomous way, thus facing many issues and challenges. The extensive research produced in this book will help virtual organizations to exploit latest and powerful technologies based on Grid and Wireless infrastructures as well as Cloud computing in order to alleviate complex issues and challenges arisen in networking and collaborative systems, in terms of collaborative applications, resource management, mobility, and security and system resilience. The ultimate aim of the book is to stimulate research that leads to the creation of responsive environments for networking and, at longer-term, the development of adaptive, secure, mobile, and intuitive intelligent systems for collaborative work and learning. Academic researchers, professionals and practitioners in the field will be inspired and put in practice the ideas and experiences proposed in the book in order to evaluate them for their specific research and work.

This book provides the latest research findings, and discusses, from both theoretical and practical perspectives, innovative research methods and development techniques related to intelligent social networks and collaborative systems, intelligent networking systems, mobile collaborative systems and secure intelligent cloud systems. It also presents the synergies among various paradigms in such a multi-disciplinary field of intelligent collaborative systems. With the rapid development of the Internet, we are experiencing a shift from the traditional sharing of information and applications as the main purpose of the Web to an emergent paradigm, which locates people at the very centre of networks and exploits the value of individuals’ connections, relations and collaboration. Social networks are also playing a major role in the dynamics and structure of intelligent Web-based networking and collaborative systems. Virtual campuses, virtual communities and organizations strongly leverage intelligent networking and collaborative systems by means of a great variety of formal and informal electronic relations, such as business-to-business, peer-to-peer and various types of online collaborative learning interactions, including the emerging e-learning systems. This has resulted in entangled systems that need to be managed efficiently and autonomously. In addition, the latest, powerful technologies based on grid and wireless infrastructure as well as cloud computing are currently enhancing collaborative and networking applications significantly, but are also facing new issues and challenges. The principal purpose of the research and development community is to stimulate research that will lead to the creation of responsive environments for networking and, in the longer term, the development of adaptive, secure, mobile, and intuitive intelligent systems for collaborative work and learning.

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are metaheuristics that learn from natural collective behavior and are applied to solve optimization problems in domains such as scheduling, engineering, bioinformatics, and finance. Such applications demand acceptable solutions with high-speed execution using finite computational resources. Therefore, there have been many attempts to develop platforms for running parallel EAs using multicore machines, massively parallel cluster machines, or grid computing environments. Recent advances in general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) have opened up this possibility for parallel EAs, and this is the first book dedicated to this exciting development. The three chapters of Part I are tutorials, representing a comprehensive introduction to the approach, explaining the characteristics of the hardware used, and presenting a representative project to develop a platform for automatic parallelization of evolutionary computing (EC) on GPGPUs. The 10 chapters in Part II focus on how to consider key EC approaches in the light of this advanced computational technique, in particular addressing generic local search, tabu search, genetic algorithms, differential evolution, swarm optimization, ant colony optimization, systolic genetic search, genetic programming, and multiobjective optimization. The 6 chapters in Part III present successful results from real-world problems in data mining, bioinformatics, drug discovery, crystallography, artificial chemistries, and sudoku. Although the parallelism of EAs is suited to the single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD)-based GPU, there are many issues to be resolved in design and implementation, and a key feature of the contributions is the practical engineering advice offered. This book will be of value to researchers, practitioners, and graduate students in the areas of evolutionary computation and scientific computing.

Context-aware ranking is an important task with many applications. E.g. in recommender systems items (products, movies, ...) and for search engines webpages should be ranked. In all these applications, the ranking is not global (i.e. always the same) but depends on the context. Simple examples for context are the user for recommender systems and the query for search engines. More complicated context includes time, last actions, etc. The major problem is that typically the variable domains (e.g. customers, products) are categorical and huge, the observations are very sparse and only positive events are observed. In this book, a generic method for context-aware ranking as well as its application are presented. For modelling a new factorization based on pairwise interactions is proposed and compared to other tensor factorization approaches. For learning, the `Bayesian Context-aware Ranking' framework consisting of an optimization criterion and algorithm is developed. The second main part of the book applies this general theory to the three scenarios of item, tag and sequential-set recommendation. Furthermore extensions of time-variant factors and one-class problems are studied. This book generalizes and builds on work that has received the `WWW 2010 Best Paper Award', the `WSDM 2010 Best Student Paper Award' and the `ECML/PKDD 2009 Best Discovery Challenge Award'.

This book addresses the major issues in the Web data management related to technologies and infrastructures, methodologies and techniques as well as applications and implementations. Emphasis is placed on Web engineering and technologies, Web graph managing, searching and querying and the importance of social Web.