The importance of benchmarking in the service sector is well recognized as it helps in continuous improvement in products and work processes. Through benchmarking, companies have strived to implement best practices in order to remain competitive in the product- market in which they operate. However studies on benchmarking, particularly in the software development sector, have neglected using multiple variables and therefore have not been as comprehensive. Information Theory and Best Practices in the IT Industry fills this void by examining benchmarking in the business of software development and studying how it is affected by development process, application type, hardware platforms used, and many other variables. Information Theory and Best Practices in the IT Industry begins by examining practices of benchmarking productivity and critically appraises them. Next the book identifies different variables which affect productivity and variables that affect quality, developing useful equations that explaining their relationships. Finally these equations and findings are applied to case studies. Utilizing this book, practitioners can decide about what emphasis they should attach to different variables in their own companies, while seeking to optimize productivity and defect density.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th Latin American Symposium on Theoretical Informatics, LATIN 2014, held in Montevideo, Uruguay, in March/April 2014. The 65 papers presented together with 5 abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 192 submissions. The papers address a variety of topics in theoretical computer science with a certain focus on complexity, computational geometry, graph drawing, automata, computability, algorithms on graphs, algorithms, random structures, complexity on graphs, analytic combinatorics, analytic and enumerative combinatorics, approximation algorithms, analysis of algorithms, computational algebra, applications to bioinformatics, budget problems and algorithms and data structures.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services, GECON 2014, held in Cardiff, UK, in September 2014. The 8 revised full papers and 7 paper-in-progress presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 24 submissions. The presentation sessions that have been set up are: Cloud Adoption, Work in Progress on Market Dynamics, Cost Optimization, Work in Progress on Pricing, Contracts and Service Selection and Economic Aspects of Quality of Service.

Semidefinite programs constitute one of the largest classes of optimization problems that can be solved with reasonable efficiency - both in theory and practice. They play a key role in a variety of research areas, such as combinatorial optimization, approximation algorithms, computational complexity, graph theory, geometry, real algebraic geometry and quantum computing. This book is an introduction to selected aspects of semidefinite programming and its use in approximation algorithms. It covers the basics but also a significant amount of recent and more advanced material.

There are many computational problems, such as MAXCUT, for which one cannot reasonably expect to obtain an exact solution efficiently, and in such case, one has to settle for approximate solutions. For MAXCUT and its relatives, exciting recent results suggest that semidefinite programming is probably the ultimate tool. Indeed, assuming the Unique Games Conjecture, a plausible but as yet unproven hypothesis, it was shown that for these problems, known algorithms based on semidefinite programming deliver the best possible approximation ratios among all polynomial-time algorithms.

This book follows the "semidefinite side" of these developments, presenting some of the main ideas behind approximation algorithms based on semidefinite programming. It develops the basic theory of semidefinite programming, presents one of the known efficient algorithms in detail, and describes the principles of some others. It also includes applications, focusing on approximation algorithms."

Fine pitch high lead count integrated circuit packages represent a dramatic change from the conventional methods of assembling electronic components to a printed interconnect circuit board. To some, these FPTpackages appear to bean extension of the assembly technology called surface mount or SMT. Many of us who have spent a significant amount of time developing the process and design techniques for these fine pitchpackages haveconcluded that these techniquesgobeyondthose commonly useed for SMT. In 1987 the presentauthor, convincedofthe uniqueness ofthe assembly and design demands ofthese packages, chaired ajoint committee where the members agreed to use fine pitch technology (FPT) as the defining term for these demands. The committee was unique in several ways, one being that it was the first time three U. S. standards organizations, the IPC (Lincolnwood, IL), theEIA(Washington, D. C. ),and theASTM (Philadelphia),cametogether tocreate standards before a technology was in high demand. The term fine pitch technology and its acronym FPT have since become widely accepted in the electronics industry. The knowledge of the terms and demands of FPT currently exceed the usage of FPT packaged components, but this is changing rapidly because of the size, performance, and cost savings of FPT. I have resisted several past invitations to write other technical texts. However, I feel there are important advantages and significant difficulties to be encountered with FPT.

As one of the most comprehensive machine learning texts around, this book does justice to the field's incredible richness, but without losing sight of the unifying principles. Peter Flach's clear, example-based approach begins by discussing how a spam filter works, which gives an immediate introduction to machine learning in action, with a minimum of technical fuss. Flach provides case studies of increasing complexity and variety with well-chosen examples and illustrations throughout. He covers a wide range of logical, geometric and statistical models and state-of-the-art topics such as matrix factorisation and ROC analysis. Particular attention is paid to the central role played by features. The use of established terminology is balanced with the introduction of new and useful concepts, and summaries of relevant background material are provided with pointers for revision if necessary. These features ensure Machine Learning will set a new standard as an introductory textbook.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Swarm Intelligence Based Optimization, ICSIBO 2014, held in Mulhouse, France, in May 2014. The 20 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. Topics of interest presented and discussed in the conference focuses on the theoretical progress of swarm intelligence metaheuristics and their applications in areas such as: theoretical advances of swarm intelligence metaheuristics, combinatorial, discrete, binary, constrained, multi-objective, multi-modal, dynamic, noisy, and large-scale optimization, artificial immune systems, particle swarms, ant colony, bacterial foraging, artificial bees, fireflies algorithm, hybridization of algorithms, parallel/distributed computing, machine learning, data mining, data clustering, decision making and multi-agent systems based on swarm intelligence principles, adaptation and applications of swarm intelligence principles to real world problems in various domains.

Scientific Workflow has seen massive growth in recent years as science becomes increasingly reliant on the analysis of massive data sets and the use of distributed resources. The workflow programming paradigm is seen as a means of managing the complexity in defining the analysis, executing the necessary computations on distributed resources, collecting information about the analysis results, and providing means to record and reproduce the scientific analysis.

Workflows for e-Science presents an overview of the current state of the art in the field. It brings together research from many of leading computer scientists in the workflow area and provides real world examples from domain scientists actively involved in e-Science. The computer science topics addressed in the book provide a broad overview of active research focusing on the areas of workflow representations and process models, component and service-based workflows, standardization efforts, workflow frameworks and tools, and problem solving environments and portals.

The topics covered represent a broad range of scientific workflow and will be of interest to a wide range of computer science researchers, domain scientists interested in applying workflow technologies in their work, and engineers wanting to develop workflow systems and tools. As such Workflows for e-Science is an invaluable resource for potential or existing users of workflow technologies and a benchmark for developers and researchers.

Ian Taylor is Lecturer in Computer Science at Cardiff University, and coordinator of Triana activities at Cardiff. He is the author of "From P2P to Web Services and Grids," also published by Springer.

Ewa Deelman is a Research Assistant Professor at the USC Computer Science Department and a Research Team Leader at the Center for Grid Technologies at the USC Information Sciences Institute.

Dennis Gannon is a professor of Computer Science in the School of Informatics at Indiana University. He is also Science Director for the Indiana Pervasive Technology Labs..

Dr Shields is a research associate at Cardiff and one of two lead developers for the Triana project.

These contributions, written by the foremost international researchers and practitioners of Genetic Programming (GP), explore the synergy between theoretical and empirical results on real-world problems, producing a comprehensive view of the state of the art in GP. Topics in this volume include: evolutionary constraints, relaxation of selection mechanisms, diversity preservation strategies, flexing fitness evaluation, evolution in dynamic environments, multi-objective and multi-modal selection, foundations of evolvability, evolvable and adaptive evolutionary operators, foundation of injecting expert knowledge in evolutionary search, analysis of problem difficulty and required GP algorithm complexity, foundations in running GP on the cloud - communication, cooperation, flexible implementation, and ensemble methods. Additional focal points for GP symbolic regression are: (1) The need to guarantee convergence to solutions in the function discovery mode; (2) Issues on model validation; (3) The need for model analysis workflows for insight generation based on generated GP solutions - model exploration, visualization, variable selection, dimensionality analysis; (4) Issues in combining different types of data. Readers will discover large-scale, real-world applications of GP to a variety of problem domains via in-depth presentations of the latest and most significant results.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Energy Minimization Methods in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, EMMCVPR 2015, held in Hong Kong, China, in January 2015. The 36 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on discrete and continuous optimization; image restoration and inpainting; segmentation; PDE and variational methods; motion, tracking and multiview reconstruction; statistical methods and learning; and medical image analysis.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 22nd International Symposium on Graph Drawing, GD 2014, held in Wurzburg, Germany, in September 2014. The 41 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 72 submissions. The back matter of the book also contains 2 page poster papers presented at the conference. The contributions are organized in topical sections named: planar subgraphs; simultaneous embeddings; applications; contact representations; k-planar graphs; crossing minimization; level drawings; theory; fixed edge directions; drawing under constraints; clustered planarity; and greedy graphs.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 5th International Workshop, COSADE 2014, held in Paris, France, in April 2014. The 20 revised full papers presented together with two invited talks were carefully selected from 51 submissions and collect truly existing results in cryptographic engineering, from concepts to artifacts, from software to hardware, from attack to countermeasure.

Certification and Security in Inter-Organizational E-Services presents the proceedings of CSES 2004 - the 2nd International Workshop on Certification and Security in Inter-Organizational E-Services held within IFIP WCC in August 2004 in Toulouse, France. Certification and security share a common technological basis in the reliable and efficient monitoring of executed and running processes; they likewise depend on the same fundamental organizational and economic principles. As the range of services managed and accessed through communication networks grows throughout society, and given the legal value that is often attached to data treated or exchanged, it is critical to be able to certify the network transactions and ensure that the integrity of the involved computer-based systems is maintained. This collection of papers documents several important developments, and offers real-life application experiences, research results and methodological proposals of direct interest to systems experts and users in governmental, industrial and academic communities.

The Euclidean shortest path (ESP) problem asks the question: what is the path of minimum length connecting two points in a 2- or 3-dimensional space? Variants of this industrially-significant computational geometry problem also require the path to pass through specified areas and avoid defined obstacles.

This unique text/reference reviews algorithms for the exact or approximate solution of shortest-path problems, with a specific focus on a class of algorithms called rubberband algorithms. Discussing each concept and algorithm in depth, the book includes mathematical proofs for many of the given statements. Suitable for a second- or third-year university algorithms course, the text enables readers to understand not only the algorithms and their pseudocodes, but also the correctness proofs, the analysis of time complexities, and other related topics.

Topics and features: provides theoretical and programming exercises at the end of each chapter; presents a thorough introduction to shortest paths in Euclidean geometry, and the class of algorithms called rubberband algorithms; discusses algorithms for calculating exact or approximate ESPs in the plane; examines the shortest paths on 3D surfaces, in simple polyhedrons and in cube-curves; describes the application of rubberband algorithms for solving art gallery problems, including the safari, zookeeper, watchman, and touring polygons route problems; includes lists of symbols and abbreviations, in addition to other appendices.

This hands-on guide will be of interest to undergraduate students in computer science, IT, mathematics, and engineering. Programmers, mathematicians, and engineers dealing with shortest-path problems in practical applications will also find the book a useful resource.

Designing Sorting Networks: A New Paradigm provides an in-depth guide to maximizing the efficiency of sorting networks, and uses 0/1 cases, partially ordered sets and Haase diagrams to closely analyze their behavior in an easy, intuitive manner.
This book also outlines new ideas and techniques for designing faster sorting networks using Sortnet, and illustrates how these techniques were used to design faster 12-key and 18-key sorting networks through a series of case studies.
Finally, it examines and explains the mysterious behavior exhibited by the fastest-known 9-step 16-key network. Designing Sorting Networks: A New Paradigm is intended for advanced-level students, researchers and practitioners as a reference book. Academics in the fields of computer science, engineering and mathematics will also find this book invaluable.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems, TACAS 2015, which took place in London, UK, in April 2015, as part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2015. The 45 papers included in this volume, consisting of 27 research papers, 2 case-study papers, 7 regular tool papers and 9 tool demonstration papers, were carefully reviewed and selected from 164 submissions. In addition, the book contains one invited contribution. The papers have been organized in topical sections on hybrid systems; program analysis; verification and abstraction; tool demonstrations; stochastic models; SAT and SMT; partial order reduction, bisimulation, and fairness; competition on software verification; parameter synthesis; program synthesis; program and runtime verification; temporal logic and automata and model checking.

This book is intended to support ISPF application programmers to become professional in the smart programming of ISPF applications using the REXX language. The contents are presented in a modular manner to suit reading with heterogeneous ISPF programming knowledge. The following topics are covered: Introduction to the programming language REXX as well as to ISPF programming, data processing in ISPF applications, use of messages, panels, skeletons, tables, ISPF variables and an introduction to creating and applying edit macros. Each theme is vividly illustrated by programming examples. The Smart ISPF Utilities contain some very useful programming aids that are often useful when programming ISPF applications. The book serves as a textbook as well as a manual for daily work. Many cross-references are included as well as an extensive index. Moreover, the author gives many helpful hints and tips on smart ISPF programming practices. The Smart ISPF Utilities contain many useful programming aids.

Temporal Information Systems in Medicine introduces the engineering of information systems for medically-related problems and applications. The chapters are organized into four parts; fundamentals, temporal reasoning & maintenance in medicine, time in clinical tasks, and the display of time-oriented clinical information. The chapters are self-contained with pointers to other relevant chapters or sections in this book when necessary. Time is of central importance and is a key component of the engineering process for information systems. This book is designed as a secondary text or reference book for upper -undergraduate level students and graduate level students concentrating on computer science, biomedicine and engineering. Industry professionals and researchers working in health care management, information systems in medicine, medical informatics, database management and AI will also find this book a valuable asset.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th European Conference on Genetic Programming, EuroGP 2015, held in Copenhagen, Spain, in April 2015 co-located with the Evo 2015 events, EvoCOP, Evo MUSART and Evo Applications. The 12 revised full papers presented together with 6 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected form 36 submissions. The wide range of topics in this volume reflects the current state of research in the field. Thus, we see topics as diverse as semantic methods, recursive programs, grammatical methods, coevolution, Cartesian GP, feature selection, initialisation procedures, ensemble methods and search objectives; and applications including text processing, cryptography, numerical modelling, software parallelisation, creation and optimisation of circuits, multi-class classification, scheduling and artificial intelligence.

This book provides the reader with the mathematical framework required to fully explore the potential of small quantum information processing devices. As decoherence will continue to limit their size, it is essential to master the conceptual tools which make such investigations possible. A strong emphasis is given to information measures that are essential for the study of devices of finite size, including Renyi entropies and smooth entropies. The presentation is self-contained and includes rigorous and concise proofs of the most important properties of these measures. The first chapters will introduce the formalism of quantum mechanics, with particular emphasis on norms and metrics for quantum states. This is necessary to explore quantum generalizations of Renyi divergence and conditional entropy, information measures that lie at the core of information theory. The smooth entropy framework is discussed next and provides a natural means to lift many arguments from information theory to the quantum setting. Finally selected applications of the theory to statistics and cryptography are discussed. The book is aimed at graduate students in Physics and Information Theory. Mathematical fluency is necessary, but no prior knowledge of quantum theory is required.

This book is dedicated to Prof. Dr. Heinz Gerhauser on the occasion of his retirement both from the position of Executive Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS and from the Endowed Chair of Information Technologies with a Focus on Communication Electronics (LIKE) at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg. Heinz Gerhauser's vision and entrepreneurial spirit have made the Fraunhofer IIS one of the most successful and renowned German research institutions. He has been Director of the Fraunhofer IIS since 1993, and under his leadership it has grown to become the largest of Germany's 60 Fraunhofer Institutes, a position it retains to this day, currently employing over 730 staff. Likely his most important scientific as well as application-related contribution was his pivotal role in the development of the mp3 format, which would later become a worldwide success. The contributions to this Festschrift were written by both Fraunhofer IIS staff and external project team members in appreciation of Prof. Dr. Gerhauser's lifetime academic achievements and his inspiring leadership at the Fraunhofer IIS. The papers reflect the broad spectrum of the institute's research activities and are grouped into sections on circuits, information systems, visual computing, and audio and multimedia. They provide academic and industrial researchers in fields like signal processing, sensor networks, microelectronics, and integrated circuits with an up-to-date overview of research results that have a huge potential for cutting-edge industrial applications.

Among the group of physics honors students huddled in 1957 on a Colorado mountain watching Sputnik bisect the heavens, one young scientist was destined, three short years later, to become a key player in America s own top-secret spy satellite program. One of our era s most prolific mathematicians, Karl Gustafson was given just two weeks to write the first US spy satellite s software. The project would fundamentally alter America s Cold War strategy, and this autobiographical account of a remarkable academic life spent in the top flight tells this fascinating inside story for the first time.

Gustafson takes you from his early pioneering work in computing, through fascinating encounters with Nobel laureates and Fields medalists, to his current observations on mathematics, science and life. He tells of brushes with death, being struck by lightning, and the beautiful women who have been a part of his journey."

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 4th International ICST Conference on Sensor Systems and Software, S-Cube 2013, held in Lucca, Italy, 2013. The 8 revised full papers and 2 invited papers presented cover contributions on different technologies for wireless sensor networks, including security protocols, middleware, analysis tools and frameworks.

The LNCS journal Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems focuses on data management, knowledge discovery and knowledge processing, which are core and hot topics in computer science. Since the 1990s, the Internet has become the main driving force behind application development in all domains. An increase in the demand for resource sharing across different sites connected through networks has led to an evolution of data- and knowledge-management systems from centralized systems to decentralized systems enabling large-scale distributed applications providing high scalability. Current decentralized systems still focus on data and knowledge as their main resource. Feasibility of these systems relies basically on P2P (peer-to-peer) techniques and the support of agent systems with scaling and decentralized control. Synergy between grids, P2P systems and agent technologies is the key to data- and knowledge-centered systems in large-scale environments. This, the 17th issue of Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems, contains extended and revised versions of five papers, selected from the 24 full and 8 short papers presented at the 15th International Conference on Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery, DaWaK 2013, held in Prague, The Czech Republic, in August 2013. Of the five papers, two cover data warehousing aspects related to query processing optimization in advanced platforms, specifically Map Reduce and parallel databases, and three cover knowledge discovery, specifically the causal network inference problem, dimensionality reduction, and the quality-of-pattern-mining task.

This proceedings is a representation of decades of reasearch, teaching and application in the field. Image Processing, Fusion and Information Technology areas, Digital radio Communication, Wimax, Electrical engg, VLSI approach to processor design, embedded systems design are dealt in detail through models and illustrative techniques.