1.1. INTRODUCTION Plastic covering, either framed or floating, is now used worldwide to protect crops from unfavorable growing conditions, such as severe weather and insects and birds. Protected cultivation in the broad sense, including mulching, has been widely spread by the innovation of plastic films. Paper, straw, and glass were the main materials used before the era of plastics. Utilization of plastics in agriculture started in the developed countries and is now spreading to the developing countries. Early utilization of plastic was in cold regions, and plastic was mainly used for protection from the cold. Now plastic is used also for protection from wind, insects and diseases. The use of covering techniques started with a simple system such as mulching, then row covers and small tunnels were developed, and finally plastic houses. Floating mulch was an exception to this sequence: it was introduced rather recently, although it is a simple structure. New development of functional and inexpensive films triggered widespread use of floating mulch. Table 1.1. The use a/plastic mulch in the world (after Jouet, 2001).

Studies of surfaces and interactions between dissimilar materials or phases are vital for modern technological applications. Computer simulation methods are indispensable in such studies and this book contains a substantial body of knowledge about simulation methods as well as the theoretical background for performing computer experiments and analyzing the data.

The book is self-contained, covering a range of topics from classical statistical mechanics to a variety of simulation techniques, including molecular dynamics, Langevin dynamics and Monte Carlo methods. A number of physical systems are considered, including fluids, magnets, polymers, granular media, and driven diffusive systems. The computer simulation methods considered include both standard and accelerated versions. The simulation methods are clearly related to the fundamental principles of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Mining Web Data, WEBKDD 2001 held in San Francisco, CA, USA in August 2001.The seven revised full papers went through two rounds of reviewing an improvement. The book addresses key issues in mining Web log data for e-commerce. The papers are devoted to predicting user access, recommender systems and access modeling, and acquiring and modeling data and patterns.

This volume summarizes the results of a priority program launched by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) called KONDISK-Dynamics and Control of Systems with Mixed Continuous and Discrete Dynamics. The program was motivated by the need for a more comprehensive approach to hybrid systems both in the computer science and the control engineering communities. Technical systems nowadays are composed of physical components with mostly continuous dynamics and computerized control systems where the reaction to discrete events plays a major role, implemented in Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), Distributed Control Systems (DCSs) or real-time computer systems. Several practical examples of systems with mixed continuous-discrete dynamics are presented, such as a conveyor belt, an annealing furnace, a membranous filtration process, a titration plant, a diesel engine, robotic arms, a chemical reactor, tank systems, or an aircraft elevator system.

Arti?cialLifehascomealongway. Sincetheinceptionofthe?eldabout16years ago with a seminal workshop at the Santa Fe Institute, the ?eld has developed quickly. Itsinterdisciplinaryrootshavebeenbothablessingandacurse. Critical people would say that nothing was new in the ideas of Arti?cial Life, since many other disciplines had addressed the very same questions, though probably under di?erent names. Other critics would state that the di?culty of interacting in an interdisciplinary way with colleagues from so many other and divergent ?elds would be so great that true progress could not come from such an enterprise, as those involved would be too busy understanding - or misunderstanding - each other. Admirers, on the other hand, would speak of a bold new attack on the most fascinating questions of science with this new approach. Others would say that new perspectives were opened by the questions the area of Arti?cial Life askedsopointedly. Forthoseinvolvedinthise?ortoversomeyears, ithasalways been very interesting and fascinating to work on these questions. From our discussions it also seems that Arti?cial Life is beginning to become mainstream. Evolutionarybiology, computationalandsystemsbiology, andc- putational social science, to name a few, are disciplines bene?tting from ideas hedgedinArti?cialLife. This, plusthesuccessofopen-endedevolutionarygames in the entertainment industry, the sensibility achieved with decades of work - hind us in arti?cial evolutionary approaches with ?xed ?tness measures, and the development of technology towards a networked, asynchronous, world of inter- tingentities, haveallconspiredtopreparethe?oorforAliferesearchcominginto its own. Notably the concept of emergence of new qualities from the interaction of entities without this quality has been a huge success in recent y

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International SPIN Workshop on Model Checking Software, held in Grenoble, France in April 2002 as a satellite event of ETAPS 2002.The 10 revised full research papers presented together with the abstracts of four invited papers or tutorials, three reports on work in progress, three invited industrial presentations, and four SPIN model checking tool descriptions were carefully reviewed and selected from 20 submissions. The book presents state-of-the-art results on the analysis and verifications of distributed and concurrent systems using the SPIN model checker as one of the most powerful and popular such system.

The refereed proceedings of the 4th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context, CONTEXT 2003, held in Stanford, CA, USA in June 2003. The 31 full papers and 15 short papers presented were carefully reviewed, selected, and revised for inclusion in the book. The papers presented deal with the interdisciplinary topic of modeling and using context from various points of view, ranging through cognitive science, formal logic, artifical intelligence, computational intelligence, philosophical and psychological aspects, and information processing. Highly general philosophical and theoretical issues are complemented by specific applications in various fields.

The book is a state-of-the-art overview on high performance computing (HPC) activities to solve scientific and/or engineering problems on supercomputers. This topic has evolved to a key technology playing an important role in determining, or at least shaping, future research and development activities in many branches of industry. The main topics include the development of advanced numerical methods, parallel computing techniques, grid generation, and visualization. Applications of these techniques are directed to fluid dynamics, turbulence, combustion and porous media related flows, computational structural dynamics, material sciences, chemical engineering, dynamic systems, optimal control, and optimization of electronic circuits. The book includes 44 contributions from renowned international experts in the field of HPC and its applications.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the Second International Conference on Computers and Games, CG 2001, held in Hamamatsu, Japan in October 2000. The 23 revised full papers presented together with two invited contributions and five reviews were carefully refereed and selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on search and strategies, learning and pattern acquisition, theory and complexity issues, and further experiments on game; the reviews presented are on computer language games, computer Go, intelligent agents for computer games, RoboCup, and computer Shogi.

On behalf of the ICES 2001 Conference Committee, it is our pleasure to present to you the proceedings of the fourth International Conference on Evolvable S- tems: From Biology to Hardware, ICES 2001, held in Tokyo, Japan, on 3-5 - tober 2001, addressing the latest developments and discussing challenges facing the ?eld of evolvable systems. The idea of evolving machines, whose origins can be traced back to the - bernetics movement of the 1940s and the 1950s, has recently re-emerged in the form of the nascent ?eld of bio-inspired systems and evolvable hardware. Foll- ing the workshop, Towards Evolvable Hardware, which took place in Lausanne, Switzerland, in October 1995, the First International Conference on Evolvable Systems: From Biology to Hardware (ICES96), was held at the Electrotech- cal Laboratory (MITI), Tsukuba, Japan, in October 1996. The second and the third International Conferences on Evolvable Systems: From Biology to Ha- ware (ICES98 and ICES 2000) were respectively held in Lausanne in September 1998, and in Edinburgh in April 2000. Following the success of these past events, ICES 2001 was dedicated to the promotion and advancement of all aspects of evolvable systems, including ha- ware, software, algorithms, and applications. By bringing together researchers who use biologically inspired concepts to implement real systems in arti?cial - telligence, arti?cial life, robotics, VLSI design, and related domains, ICES 2001 reunited this burgeoning community.

In this book several concepts with respect to the development and reusability of multimedia content in web-based learning systems are introduced. More specifically, the development of a component-based framework that enables developers to employ reusable software components enhanced with metadata, creating complete instructional visualizations for a given subject and integrating these visualizations in an appropriate learning context, is discussed. Two activities for making stand-alone visualizations group-aware are addressed: transparent sharing of the same instructional visualization with diverse views in a moderated session, and organization of interactions in the shared workspace. No other work has addressed the issue of transparent collaboration based on instructional visualizations enhanced with metadata in such a way. The CD-ROM contains all the interactive learning modules as well as the content of the book in HTML format.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Process Algebra and Performance Modeling and Probabilistic Methods in Verification, PAPM-PROBMIV 2001, held in Aachen, Germany in September 2001.
The 12 revised full papers presented together with one invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 23 submissions. Among the topics addressed are model representation, model checking, probabilistic systems analysis, refinement, Markov chains, random variables, stochastic timed systems, Max-Plus algebra, process algebra, system modeling, and the Mobius modeling framework.

The book contains 16 papers and one invited talk presenting the latest research in computer animation and simulation. Special focus is given on the modelling and animation of complex phenomena. This includes the modelling of virtual creatures-from their body-parts to the control of their behaviour-and the nomination of natural phenomena such as water, smoke, fire, and vegetation.

Geometric Modelling is concerned with the computer aided design, manipulation, storage and transmission of geometric shape. It provides fundamental techniques to different areas of application as CAD/CAM, computer graphics, scientific visualization, and virtual Reality. 20 papers presented by leading experts give a state-of-the-art survey of the following topics: surface design and fairing; multiresolution models; reverse engineering; solid modelling; constrained based modelling.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects, AMDO 2002, held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain in November 2002.The 21 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. Among the topics addressed are geometric and physical deformable objects, motion analysis, articulated models and animation, visualization of deformable models, 3D recovery from motion, single or multiple human motion analysis and synthesis, applications of deformable models and motion analysis, face tracking, recovery and recognition models.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry, ACRI 2002, held in Geneva, Switzerland in October 2002.The 31 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from around 50 submissions. The topics covered range from theoretical issues to applications in various fields, including lattice gases, pattern recognition, cryptography, and authentication. Less known models receive attention as well, such as probabilistic, asynchronous, and multi-level automata. Among novel applications and models are highway traffic, population and growth dynamics, environmental applications, and collective intelligence.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2002, held in Tampere, Finland in October 2002.The 30 revised full papers presented with abstracts of various invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from close to 130 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on semantics and meta-models, principles of ontology, web environments, theory and methods, methods and tools, applications for practice, applying ontology in conceptual modeling, applying ontology in coneptual modeling, systems and data integration, quality assessment, and XML and object systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2001, held in Tokohama, Japan, in November 2001.The 45 revised full papers presented together with three keynote presentations were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 197 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on spatial databases, spatio-temporal databases, XML, information modeling, database design, data integration, data warehouse, UML, conceptual models, systems design, method reengineering and video databases, workflows, web information systems, applications, and software engineering.

This special volume collects invited articles by participants of the Third International Workshop on Methods for Macromolecular Modeling, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Oct. 12-14, 2000. Leading developers of methods for biomolecular simulations review advances in Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics methods, free energy computational methods, fast electrostatics (particle-mesh Ewald and fast multipole methods), mathematics, and molecular neurobiology, nucleic acid simulations, enzyme reactions, and other essential applications in biomolecular simulations. A Perspectives article by the editors assesses the directions and impact of macromolecular modeling research, including genomics and proteomics. These reviews and original papers by applied mathematicians, theoretical chemists, biomedical researchers, and physicists are of interest to interdisciplinary research students, developers and users of biomolecular methods in academia and industry.

What should be every software organization's primary goal? Managing Software Quality. Producing and sustaining the high quality of products and processes in evolutionary systems are at the core of software engineering, and it is only through a comprehensive measurement program that a successful outcome can be assured. Cost and budget limitations, schedule due dates, all represent systems engineering constraints which impinge on the degree to which software development and maintenance professional can achieve maximum quality. Richard Nance and James Arthur's guide to managing software quality goes beyond the usual answers to the "why" and "what" questions generally provided in the standards documents. They not only look at the "how to" in their focus of the measurement of software quality, but also come up with specific suggestions to the pressing needs of practising software engineers, quality assurance engineers and software and project managers."This is one of the few books in this area that addresses the 'quality' aspect based upon the important aspect of documentation. In addition, the book provides a basis for not only the software manager concerned with measurement implementation, but also the researcher in identifying the current state of the art and practice. This will be a key reference guide for anyone that is concerned with developing quality software."(William H Farr, PhD, Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division)About the Authors: Research motivated by problems arising in large, complex software systems is what stimulates Richard Nance. His collaboration with the U.S. Navy on major software-intensive programs spans over 30 years. James Arthur is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech.

This book is devoted to investigating and developing the synergy between software engineering for multi-agent systems and agent-based social simulation; it originates from the Second International Workshop on Multi-Agend-Based Simulation, MABS 2000, held in Boston, MA, USA in July 2000, in conjunction with ICAMS 2000. Besides the thoroughly revised full papers accepted for presentation at the workshop, two invited papers and an introductory survey by one of the volume editors have been added in order to round off the scope and achieve complete coverage of all relevant topics. The book competently surveys the state of the art in the area by offering topical sections on model design issues, applications, simulating social relations and processes, and formal approaches.

Why is the question of the di?erence between living and non-living matter - tellectually so attractive to the man of the West? Where are our dreams about our own ability to understand this di?erence and to overcome it using the ?rmly established technologies rooted? Where are, for instance, the cultural roots of the enterprises covered nowadays by the discipline of Arti?cial Life? Cont- plating such questions, one of us has recognized [6] the existence of the eternal dream of the man of the West expressed, for example, in the Old Testament as follows: . . . the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being (Genesis, 2. 7). This is the dream about the workmanlike act of the creation of Adam from clay, about the creation of life from something non-living, and the con?dence in the magic power of technologies. How has this dream developed and been converted into a reality, and how does it determine our present-day activities in science and technology? What is this con?dence rooted in? Then God said: "Let us make man in our image. . . " (Genesis, 1. 26). Man believes in his own ability to repeat the Creator's acts, to change ideas into real things, because he believes he is godlike. This con?dence is - using the trendy Dawkins' term - perhaps the most important cultural meme of the West.

Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) are adaptive systems inspired by the biological immune system and applied to problem solving. This book provides an accessible introduction that will be suitable for anyone who is beginning to study or work in this area. It gives a clear definition of an AIS, sets out the foundations of the topic (including basic algorithms), and analyses how the immune system relates to other biological systems and processes. No prior knowledge of immunology is needed - all the essential background information is covered in the introductory chapters.Key features of the book include:- A discussion of AIS in the context of Computational Intelligence;- Case studies in Autonomous Navigation, Computer Network Security, Job-Shop Scheduling and Data Analysis =B7 An extensive survey of applications;- A framework to help the reader design and understand AIS;- A web site with additional resources including pseudocodes for immune algorithms, and links to related sites.Written primarily for final year undergraduate and postgraduate students studying Artificial Intelligence, Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Computing, this book will also be of interest to industrial and academic researchers working in related areas.

Seventeen papers report on the latest scientific advances in the fields of immersive projection technology and virtual environments. The main topics included here are human computer interaction (user interfaces, interaction techniques), software developments (virtual environment applications, rendering techniques), and input/output devices.

This book is the third official archival publication devoted to RoboCup and documents the achievements presented at the Third Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences, Robo-Cup-99, held in Stockholm, Sweden in July/August 1999. The book presents the following parts
- Introductory overview and survey
- Research papers of the champion teams and scientific award winners
- Technical papers presented at the RoboCup-99 Workshop
- Team description of a large number of participating teams.
This book is mandatory reading for the rapidly growing RoboCup community as well as a valuable source or reference and inspiration for R&D professionals interested in multi-agent systems, distributed artificial intelligence, and intelligent robotics.