Preface

Being an automotive enthusiast and hobbyist, there is a saying around the race track that speed isn't everything, it's just most everything. Similar sentiments can be said about MAT‐ LAB. MATLAB isn't everything to a practicing engineer, it's just most everything. MATLAB is an indispensable asset for scientists, researchers, and engineers. The richness of the MAT‐ LAB computational environment combined with an integrated development environment (IDE) and straightforward interface, toolkits, and simulation and modeling capabilities, cre‐ ates a research and development tool that has no equal. The book is written for a wide range of users including students, practicing engineers, researchers, and scientists. The diversity of the applications throughout the book shows the wide-ranging capability of MATLAB to per‐ form technical computational efforts in support of research, development and engineering.

The common, central theme amongst all the book chapters contained in this book is MAT‐ LAB. As you will notice, MATLAB is used by vast array of researchers, engineers, and stu‐ dents from many different types of organizations ranging from academia, government, and industry. The book chapters range on a variety of topics including:


From quick code prototyping to full blown deployable applications, MATLAB stands as a de facto development language and environment serving the technical needs of a wide range of users. This is clearly demonstrated throughout the book and in some instances the results may not have been possible without the use of MATLAB.

As a collection of diverse applications, each book chapter presents a novel application and use of MATLAB for a specific result. I am thankful to each author for their diligence and high-level of technical effort presented in each book chapter. It has been my pleasure to serve as your book editor.

Although open access publishing is not fully accepted by the scientific community as a whole, I believe great benefit is provided by providing a great opportunity for researchers and engineers to share their technical efforts within the technical community without some of the hindrances presented by more traditional publishing avenues.

Finally, I want to take this opportunity to thank InTech for their patience in working with me on this project and on many of occasions, patiently leading me though the various steps

of the development process of this book. It is with great pleasure, that I present to you a book on MATLAB applications that I believe you will find very interesting and helpful to your research efforts.

> **Kelly Bennett** Research Engineer U.S. Army Research Laboratory,Sensors and Electron Devices Directorate, Adelphi, MD, USA

**Section 1**

**Social Networking Applications**

**Social Networking Applications**

of the development process of this book. It is with great pleasure, that I present to you a book on MATLAB applications that I believe you will find very interesting and helpful to

U.S. Army Research Laboratory,Sensors and Electron Devices Directorate,

**Kelly Bennett** Research Engineer

Adelphi, MD, USA

your research efforts.

X Preface

**Chapter 1**

**Knowledge Discovery and Information Extraction on the**

**Open Internet Using MATLAB and Amazon Web Services**

The popularity of social networking has allowed access to staggering amounts of unique data, which has created new possibilities for data analysis and exploitation. Such data has proven useful in marketing, decision making, destabilizing terrorist networks, behavior evolution,

Increased usage of social networking sites has also been observed during events related to natural disasters; significant political, sporting, and social events; and other crises. Twitter users provide status updates through tweets. Since tweets are typically short and always less than 140 characters, they may need to undergo additional analysis to provide contextual clues. Applying traditional natural language processing algorithms on such data is challenging. Before making use of this data, it must first be extracted, processed and analyzed appropriately

According to a 2011 study from the International Data Corporation (IDC)–a marketing firm specializing in information technology and other consumer technologies–unstructured data, that is, data that does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner, is growing at a faster rate than structured data. Within the next decade, unstructured

A large driving factor in the increase in unstructured data is social networking data, such as tweets. It is estimated that more than 80 percent of all potentially useful data is unstructured [2].

> © 2014 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

**(AWS)**

Kelly Bennett and James Robertson

and determining future social trends [1].

using certain algorithms and theories.

data will account for 90 percent of all data created.

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/58895

**1. Introduction**

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

**Chapter 1**
