Open source textbook - Chapter 6 outline

The outline of chapter 6 of the open-source textbook "Intelligent Information Systems" is now available online here. Chapter 6 is entitled "Fuzzy Inference and Defuzzification" and covers the basic principles of fuzzy inference and defuzzification of fuzzy values into crisp values.

Previous posts about other chapters are:

Chapter 1: Introduction to Intelligent Information Systems
Chapter 2: Simple and Linear Transformations
Chapter 3: Non-Linear Transformations, Fourier and Wavelet Transformations
Chapter 4: Crisp Rule Based Systems
Chaper 5: Fuzzy Sets and Fuzzification


Please make any comments in the comments section of this post, or email contactATmike.watts.net.nz.

Open source textbook - Chapter 5 outline

The outline of chapter 5 of the open-source textbook "Intelligent Information Systems" is now available online here. Chapter 5 is entitled "Fuzzy Sets and Fuzzification" and covers the basic principles of fuzzy sets, fuzzy membership functions and fuzzification of crisp data.

Previous posts about other chapters are:

Chapter 1: Introduction to Intelligent Information Systems
Chapter 2: Simple and Linear Transformations
Chapter 3: Non-Linear Transformations, Fourier and Wavelet Transformations
Chapter 4: Crisp Rule Based Systems

Please make any comments in the comments section of this post, or email contactATmike.watts.net.nz.

Open source textbook - Chapter 4 outline

The outline of chapter 4 of the open-source textbook "Intelligent Information Systems" is now available online here. Chapter 4 is entitled "Crisp Rule Based Systems" and covers rule based production systems.

Previous posts about other chapters are:

Chapter 1: Introduction to Intelligent Information Systems
Chapter 2: Simple and Linear Transformations
Chapter 3: Non-Linear Transformations, Fourier and Wavelet Transformations

Please make any comments in the comments section of this post, or email contactATmike.watts.net.nz.

Open source textbook - Chapter 3 outline

The outline of Chapter 3 of the open-source textbook "Intelligent Information Systems" is now available online. Chapter 3 is entitled "Non-Linear Transformations, Fourier and Wavelet Transformation" . My previous post about the outline of Chapter 1, "Introduction to Intelligent Information Systems", is here while the post about Chapter 2, "Simple and Linear Transformations", is here.

If you have any comments or suggestions about this chapter outline, please make them in the comments on this blog, or email me at contactATmike.watts.net.nz.

Open source textbook - Chapter 2 outline

The outline of Chapter 2 of the open-source textbook "Intelligent Information Systems" is now available online. Chapter 2 is entitled "Simple and Linear Transformations" and is intended to be a brief overview of some of the data processing techniques that can be used to prepare data before it is modeled with computational intelligence techniques. My previous post about the outline of Chapter 1, "Introduction to Intelligent Information Systems", is here.

As always, you comments and suggestions are requested and valued.

Open source textbook - Chapter 1 outline

Following on from my post last week about the updated outline for my open-source textbook "Intelligent Information Systems", I've made the outline of Chapter 1 "Introduction to Intelligent Information Systems" available online.

As always, comments and suggestions are most welcome!

An experiment in open-source textbooks 2

In an earlier post, I described how I'm working on an open source textbook about Intelligent Information Systems.

While progress has been slower than I would have liked (mainly due to my relocating permanently to my native New Zealand), I have been able to digest the suggestions made in the comments on my previous post. As a result, I've made the second outline of this textbook available here.

I've also investigated several different licensing schemes, and it looks like I'll be going with one of the Creative Commons licenses. I'm looking at making the LaTeX source and PDF files freely available online, while retaining the print rights.

Any comments on the outline, or my licensing plan, will be gratefully received!

An experiment in open-source textbooks 2

To further put my money where my mouth is, in regards to my support for open source textbooks, I'm following up Monday's post by making the outline of my open source textbook, Intelligent Information Systems, available online. The outline is in PDF format, and is available at the following address:

http://mike.watts.net.nz/IIS_Outline.pdf

Readers are encouraged to comment on the outline via the comments section of this blog - I want to hear your opinions!

WCCI 2012 Panel Session on Computational Intelligence in Education and University Curricula

The following panel session at WCCI 2012 is organised by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society's Curriculum Subcommittee (which I happen to serve on), and will be held Thursday, June 14, 4:10-5:10pm.

Chairs: Robert Kozma and Jennie Si

Panelists: Haibo He, Janusz Kaczprzyk, Jim Keller, Luis Magdalena, Marios Polycarpou, Lipo Wang

Computational Intelligence is a relatively new research field. A lot of educational materials have been created in various fields of CI in the past decades. However, due to the field's relatively youth, its fundamental achievements has not been organized into a comprehensive curriculum yet. It is crucial for the development of the field to have high-quality educational materials on the state of art of CI. This allows attracting and educating talented and enthusiastic students and documenting the progress in the field. The panel will discuss various areas of CI education, including existing databases and course materials, online resources and video lectures, development of new textbooks, open-source software, and others. Various recommendations for future actions will be discussed as well.

An experiment in open-source textbooks

I am thinking of writing a textbook. Actually, I'm working on three at the moment, one of which is a research monograph, but the one that it most relevant to this post is tentatively titled Intelligent Information Systems, and will cover neural networks, fuzzy systems and evolutionary algorithms at an undergraduate level. I also expect it would be useful for researchers from other disciplines who want to apply methods in computational intelligence to their own research, and to software engineers who want to solve real-world problems with computational intelligence.

In line with this post, I am seriously considering making Intelligent Information Systems available as an open-source textbook. But before I do, I need some encouragement. So I'm asking you, my dear readers, to encourage me. If you think you would assign an open-source textbook on this topic to a class, or that you would buy a self-published textbook, let me know in the comments. If you could see yourself contributing some other way, let me know, too.

It's up to you good folk to push me to do this!

Open source textbooks

The principle of Open Source Software (OSS) has been established for a long time. The Linux OS (or GNU/Linux, for the purists out there) made the idea of freely giving away software and source code respectable. Concerns about the quality of the software, and whether or not companies could make money from open source, have all been washed away over the years. OSS tends to be more stable, has bugs fixed faster, and evolves faster than commercial software. Also, companies have been making money from OSS for years: Red Hat being just one example.

In this pod cast transcript Steven Cherry from IEEE Spectrum talks with Richard Baraniuk of Rice University about Open Source Textbooks (OST). Baraniuk has founded the Connexions platform, a platform for developing open source textbooks.

I can think of several objections to the idea of OST, but I believe that, in common with OSS, these objections are not insurmountable problems:

Firstly, there is the issue of quality control. When an author submits a book proposal to a publisher, the publisher will send the outline and a sample chapter to reviewers. But, the reviewers tend to be people the author knows, as unlike anonymous peer review of journal articles, a textbook author can often nominate the reviewers of their proposal.

Secondly, there is the issue of formatting the book. If you use an authoring system like LaTeX, formatting a book isn't really that hard (certainly easier than formatting a book in Word). Publishers tend to only provide an author with a template, anyway.

Thirdly, advertising the book. This seems to vary fairly widely between different publishers, with some putting a lot of effort into it, and others doing much less. With the reach that the Internet provides people now, I don't see advertising as a large issue. If you have a blog, website, or networking profile (and I think that a serious academic should have all of these), you can advertise your book there. If you can afford it, you can buy some ads through Google or one of the other advertising services. It takes a bit of work, but not as much as writing the book in the first place.

Fourthly, producing the book. If you are going entirely for a soft-copy, open-source approach, that's not a problem: just whack the book up on a website, and let people download it. If you want to sell hard copies, then you can go with a publishing-on-demand (POD) service like lulu.com. Using POD has the advantage that you don't need to pay for inventory before you can start selling copies. That is, while most traditional publishers like to produce the hard copies themselves, they also like to print several thousand copies, and then sell them. With POD, copies are printed as they are sold. No inventory, so no big pile of books (money!) sitting in a warehouse where they might get sold later on. If the publisher doesn't decide to kill the book, or sell the lot off at a loss, or just pulp them.

Finally, money! Traditional publishers take a big chunk of the sale price of a book for themselves: around 90%, or more. Combined with the relatively small number of copies that most textbooks sell, an author isn't going to make a lot of money from the exercise (there are exceptions, but it's a pretty long tail: most textbook authors will make very little money, and just a few will make a lot). If you publish open-source, then there are other ways of making money from the book - advertising on the website you host it on, soliciting donations, and selling hard copies via POD services, which tend to give larger shares to the authors. For an early-career author like myself, the biggest problem I face isn't missing out on a royalty cheque, it's obscurity.

I've come to realise that, in common with the problems with academic journal publishers, textbook publishers really don't add that much value. Sure, there is the cachet associated with publishing with certain publishers, just as there is with publishing with certain journals, but is that enough of a reason to put up with their disadvantages?

An OST system like Connexions also solve most of the objections I listed above: material that is submitted to Connexions is subject to peer review, it is becoming well-established as a place to go to for OST, and they sell hard copies. I really do think that, just as open access journals are the future for publishing papers, open source textbooks are the future of textbooks, and that within a generation (certainly within my working lifetime) we will see traditional text book publishers diminish in importance.

Is Connexions to OST as Source Forge is to OSS? Would you spend money to buy a hard-copy of an OST textbook? Would you contribute money in other ways to support the work of an OST author? Would you assign an OST as a class textbook?