This book was written and prepared at ICA (Applied Computational Intelligence
Laboratory) at PUC-Rio (Pontifical Catholic University), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Many people at ICA helped to make this book possible. We would like to express our deep gratitude to them in this effort.
Firstly, thanks are due to people who contributed to this book in different sections with the results of their research work; these are (in alphabetical order): Rodrigo M.L.A. Costa, Maíra Ferreira de Noronha, Cristina Santini, Hélio Takahiro Sinohara,and Moisés Henrique Szwarcman.
We are also deeply indebted to our undergraduate and postgraduate students
Carlos Augusto Louzada Costa, Paulo Henrique Dargam, Lucas Ferraz, Laércio
Brito Gonçalves, and Karla Tereza Figueiredo Leite who spent days of work
formatting text, drawing figures, correcting typing, and so on.
We would like to extend our thanks to the editors for their support and
comprehension.
We also would like to acknowledge a series of grants received from Brazilian
funding agencies: CAPES, CNPq, and FAPERJ, which allowed us in many ways to
write this book.
In this book we have included many citations from other published work, as well
as parts of our own published papers. We would like to acknowledge all permissions
received from their editors to use their material in this book.
Finally, we would like to thank our institution PUC-Rio University and the
Department of Electric Engineering for their support.