Environmental Informatics

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have relevant positive and negative impacts on environmental sustainability on various levels: First-order effects such as increasing electronic waste streams; second-order effects such as improved energy-efficiency of production; third-order effects such as a product-to-service shift in consumption or rebound effects in transport. In the simulation study described in this article, all known relevant effects on all three levels were modeled using a System Dynamics approach in combination with scenario techniques and expert consultations. The prospective study for the European Union with a time-horizon until 2020 revealed great potential for ICT-supported energy management and for a structural change towards a less material-intensive economy, but strong rebound effects in the transport sector whenever ICT applications lead to time or cost savings for transport.

The proper system for evaluating the learning achievement of students is the key to realizing the purpose
of education. In recent years, several methods have been presented for applying the fuzzy set theory in
the educational grading systems. In this paper, we propose a method for the evaluation of students’
answerscripts using a fuzzy system. The proposed system applies fuzzification, fuzzy inference, and
defuzzification in considering the difficulty, the importance and the complexity of questions. The transparency,
objectivity, and easy implementation of the proposed fuzzy system provide a useful way to
automatically evaluate students’ achievement in a more reasonable and fairer manner.
 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Information Systems (IS) play a central part in all aspects of our world, from science, medicine, and engineering, to industry, business, law, politics, government, arts, culture, society, health, operational support in daily life, surveillance of infrastructure and environment, and homeland protection and national security. Without proper security precautions, IS are prone to unexpected and intolerable side effects, such as leakage of operational and confidential data, identity theft and unauthorized access, and possibly modification of private data, services, and systems. Security services are required in order to guarantee information security and protection of privacy, such as data confidentiality, data authentication, anonymity, entity authentication, non-repudiation of origin and receipt, access control, protection against denial of service and phishing, and secure processing and deletion of data. In a nutshell, dependable and trustworthy security solutions based on strong cryptography are needed.

"Networks are mathematically directed (in practical applications also undirected) graphs and a graph is a one-dimensional abstract complex, i.e., a topological space. Network theory focuses on various topological structures and properties, dynamic properties, and functionality-topology relationship, etc. There are some common mathematical foundations, theories and methodology for network analysis, in which graph theory, statistics, and operational research, etc., are the fundamental sciences of network analysis. Various emerging biological networks, at both micro- and macro- levels, will provide numerous sources for the development of general network theory and methodology and also facilitate the development of theory and methodology of biological networks.

Biological network analysis is a fast moving science. Many core scientific issues, for example, ecological structure, co-evolution, co-extinction and biodiversity conservation in ecology, and cancer development and metabolic regulation in health science, etc., are expected to be addressed by network approaches and network analysis. Network analysis is becoming the core methodology to treat complex biological systems. As the fast development of this area, more and more papers on biological networks are published.

At present explosive numbers of quality papers on biological networks are being published each year. The initiation of the journal, Network Biology, will provide a public and unified platform for the publication of these studies. From this integrated and unique journal, researchers, university teachers and students will thoroughly have an in-depth and complete insight on knowledge, methodology and recent advances of biological networks.

In the view of system dynamics, biological networks are always self-organized systems with emergent, autonomous and adaptive properties. Their dynamics can be represented by agent-based modeling, individual-based modeling and some other methodologies like neural network modeling. Therefore, agent-based modeling, individual-based modeling, self-organization of biological systems, and neural network modeling, etc., fall into the aims and scope of the journal, Network Biology.

The NETWORK BIOLOGY (ISSN 2220-8879) is an open access, peer-reviewed online journal that considers scientific articles in all different areas of network biology. It is the transactions of the International Society of Network Biology.It dedicates to the latest advances in network biology. The goal of this journal is to keep a record of the state-of-the-art research and promote the research work in these fast moving areas. The topics to be covered by Network Biology include, but are not limited to:

•Theories, algorithms and programs of network analysis
•Innovations and applications of biological networks
•Dynamics, optimization and control of biological networks
•Ecological networks, food webs and natural equilibrium
•Co-evolution, co-extinction, biodiversity conservation
•Metabolic networks, protein-protein interaction networks, biochemical reaction networks, gene networks, transcriptional regulatory networks, cell cycle networks, phylogenetic networks, network motifs
•Physiological networks
•Network regulation of metabolic processes, human diseases and ecological systems
•Social networks, epidemiological networks
•System complexity, self-organized systems, emergence of biological systems, agent-based modeling, individual-based modeling, neural network modeling, and other network-based modeling, etc.
We are also interested in short communications that clearly address a specific issue or completely present a new ecological network, food web, or metabolic or gene network, etc.

Authors can submit their works to the email box of this journal, networkbiology@iaees.org. All manuscripts submitted to this journal must be previously unpublished and may not be considered for publication elsewhere at any time during review period of this journal. Authors are asked to read Author Guidelines before submitting manuscripts.

In addition to free submissions from authors around the world, special issues are also accepted. The organizer of a special issue can collect submissions (yielded from a research project, a research group, etc.) on a specific research topic, or submissions of a scientific conference for publication of special issue.

Network Biology 
ISSN 2220-8879
URL: http://www.iaees.org/publications/journals/nb/online-version.asp
RSS feed: http://www.iaees.org/publications/journals/nb/rss.xml
E-mail: networkbiology@iaees.org
Editor-in-Chief: WenJun Zhang"

In this paper, we have described a solution for supporting independent living of the elderly by means of equipping their home with a simple sensor network to monitor their behaviour. Standard home automation sensors including movement sensors and door entry point sensors are used. By monitoring the sensor data, important information regarding any anomalous behaviour will be identified. Different ways of visualizing large sensor data sets and representing them in a format suitable for clustering the abnormalities are also investigated. In the latter part of this paper, recurrent neural networks are used to predict the future values of the activities for each sensor. The predicted values are used to inform the caregiver in case anomalous behaviour is predicted in the near future. Data collection, classification and prediction are investigated in real home environments with elderly occupants suffering from dementia.

A positive economic and social development including the preservation of the environment is a precondition to the development of our societies and eEnvironment will play the important role. The Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions COM(2008) 46 final: Towards a Shared Environmental
Information System (SEIS) provides the political, organization and technical basis for the eEnvironment, thus that any citizen to be informed about environmental matters and to use this information for active participation in decision making. The group Go4: the Directorate-General (DG) Environment; the European Environment Agency (EEA); the Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat) and the Joint Research Centre (JRC), controls the development of the SEIS. It collaborates with Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) initiative, which represents a concerted effort to bring data and information providers together with users, so they can better understand each other and make environmental and security-related information available to the people who need it through new enhanced services.
There is one duty of the TOWARDS eENVIRONMENT conference formulated in its subtitle Opportunities of SEISand SISE: Integrating Environmental Knowledge in Europe to build a SEIS, a system, which integrates information on air quality, freshwater, climate effects, nature conservation, waste management and all the important issues,where especially DG Environment and EEA deal with in an multidisciplinary manner. The framework of the SISE could support to build SEIS. The SISE is an ICT research vision for real-time connectivity between multiple environmental resources which would allow seamless cross-system search, as well as cross-border, multi-scale, multi-disciplinary data acquisition, pooling and sharing. Furthermore, it would allow for service-chaining on the Web, thereby stimulating data integration into innovative value-added Web services, which needs SEIS.