Meta-Algorithmics: Patterns for Robust, Low Cost, High Quality Systems

The confluence of cloud computing, parallelism and advanced machine intelligence approaches has created a world in which the optimum knowledge system will usually be architected from the combination of two or more knowledge-generating systems. There is a need, then, to provide a reusable, broadly-applicable set of design patterns to empower the intelligent system architect to take advantage of this opportunity.

This book explains how to design and build intelligent systems that are optimized for changing system requirements (adaptability), optimized for changing system input (robustness), and optimized for one or more other important system parameters (e.g., accuracy, efficiency, cost). It provides an overview of traditional parallel processing which is shown to consist primarily of task and component parallelism; before introducing meta-algorithmic parallelism which is based on combining two or more algorithms, classification engines or other systems.

Key features:

• Explains the entire roadmap for the design, testing, development, refinement, deployment and statistics-driven optimization of building systems for intelligence
• Offers an accessible yet thorough overview of machine intelligence, in addition to having a strong image processing focus
• Contains design patterns for parallelism, especially meta-algorithmic parallelism - simply conveyed, reusable and proven effective that can be readily included in the toolbox of experts in analytics, system architecture, big data, security and many other science and engineering disciplines
• Connects algorithms and analytics to parallelism, thereby illustrating a new way of designing intelligent systems compatible with the tremendous changes in the computing world over the past decade
• Discusses application of the approaches to a wide number of fields; primarily, document understanding, image understanding, biometrics and security printing
• Companion website contains sample code and data sets

Steven J. Simske, Hewlett-Packard Labs, Colorado, USA
Dr Simske is currently Director of the Document Ecosystem Lab, at Hewlett-Packard Labs, Colorado, USA. He has been working in algorithms, imaging, machine learning and classification for the past 20 years. As an engineer at HP Labs, he has designed, developed and shipped products associated with a very broad array of domains--document understanding, image segmentation and understanding, speech recognition, medical signal processing and imaging, biometrics, natural language processing, surveillance, optical character recognition, security analytics and security printing. The advantages of systematic meta-algorithmic approaches to the robustness, accuracy, cost and/or other system features which is the focus of the book has been evident across these domains. Dr. Simske is an HP Fellow, IS&T Fellow and IEEE Senior Member. He has published 300 articles and book chapters; and holds 45 US Patents primarily in the areas of classification, machine learning, and large system design and development.