4 zettabytes (4 billion terabytes) of data generated in 2013, 44 zettabytes predicted for 2020 and 185 zettabytes for 2025. These figures are staggering and perfectly illustrate this new era of data deluge. Data has become a major economic and social challenge. The speed of processing of these data is the weakest link in a computer system: the storage system. It is therefore crucial to optimize this operation. During the last decade, storage systems have experienced a major revolution: the advent of flash memory. Flash Memory Integration: Performance and Energy Issues contributes to a better understanding of these revolutions. The authors offer us an insight into the integration of flash memory in computer systems, their behavior in performance and in power consumption compared to traditional storage systems. The book also presents, in their entirety, various methods for measuring the performance and energy consumption of storage systems for embedded as well as desktop/server computer systems. We are invited on a journey to the memories of the future.

This book contains extended and revised versions of the best papers that were p- sented during the 16th edition of the IFIP/IEEE WG10.5 International Conference on Very Large Scale Integration, a global System-on-a-Chip Design & CAD conference. The 16th conference was held at the Grand Hotel of Rhodes Island, Greece (October 13-15, 2008). Previous conferences have taken place in Edinburgh, Trondheim, V- couver, Munich, Grenoble, Tokyo, Gramado, Lisbon, Montpellier, Darmstadt, Perth, Nice and Atlanta. VLSI-SoC 2008 was the 16th in a series of international conferences sponsored by IFIP TC 10 Working Group 10.5 and IEEE CEDA that explores the state of the art and the new developments in the field of VLSI systems and their designs. The purpose of the conference was to provide a forum to exchange ideas and to present industrial and research results in the fields of VLSI/ULSI systems, embedded systems and - croelectronic design and test.

The Handbook of Research on Non-Functional Properties for Service-Oriented Systems: Future Directions unites different approaches and methods used to describe, map, and use non-functional properties and service level agreements. This handbook, which will be useful for both industry and academia, provides an overview of existing research and also sets clear directions for future work.

The book presents contributions on statistical models and methods applied, for both data science and SDGs, in one place. Measuring and controlling data of SDGs, data driven measurement of progress needs to be distributed to stakeholders. In this situation, the techniques used in data science, specially, in the big data analytics, play an important role rather than the traditional data gathering and manipulation techniques. This book fills this space through its twenty contributions. The contributions have been selected from those presented during the 7th International Conference on Data Science and Sustainable Development Goals organized by the Department of Statistics, University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh; and cover topics mainly on SDGs, bioinformatics, public health, medical informatics, environmental statistics, data science and machine learning. The contents of the volume would be useful to policymakers, researchers, government entities, civil society, and nonprofit organizations for monitoring and accelerating the progress of SDGs.

This book emphasizes methods, techniques and tools that can be used by typical software engineers in everyday projects. As the very popular UML language contains an assertion language (OCL), this language is presented and discussed with relation to other currently available assertion techniques. Currently these techniques are more widely used in late design and implementation phases. Here their role in analysis is emphasized. Assertion and scenario techniques are then combined into a single methodological framework. Finally a prototyping oriented model based on this framework is developed which helps to make sure that software fulfills user requirements.

This volume, the 6th volume in the DRUMS Handbook series, is part of the after math of the successful ESPRIT project DRUMS (Defeasible Reasoning and Un certainty Management Systems) which took place in two stages from 1989-1996. In the second stage (1993-1996) a work package was introduced devoted to the topics Reasoning and Dynamics, covering both the topics of 'Dynamics of Rea soning', where reasoning is viewed as a process, and 'Reasoning about Dynamics', which must be understood as pertaining to how both designers of and agents within dynamic systems may reason about these systems. The present volume presents work done in this context. This work has an emphasis on modelling and formal techniques in the investigation of the topic "Reasoning and Dynamics," but it is not mere theory that occupied us. Rather research was aimed at bridging the gap between theory and practice. Therefore also real-life applications of the modelling techniques were considered, and we hope this also shows in this volume, which is focused on the dynamics of reasoning processes. In order to give the book a broader perspective, we have invited a number of well-known researchers outside the project but working on similar topics to contribute as well. We have very pleasant recollections of the project, with its lively workshops and other meetings, with the many sites and researchers involved, both within and outside our own work package."

This book gives an overview of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs), adapts related search algorithms and consistency algorithms for applications to multi-agent systems, and consolidates recent research devoted to cooperation in such systems. The techniques introduced are applied to various problems in multi-agent systems. Among the new approaches is a hybrid-type algorithm for weak-commitment search combining backtracking and iterative improvement; also, an extension of the basic CSP formalization called partial CSP is introduced in order to handle over-constrained CSPs.The book is written for advanced students and professionals interested in multi-agent systems or, more generally, in distributed artificial intelligence and constraint satisfaction. Researchers active in the area will appreciate this book as a valuable source of reference.

"An Introduction to XML Query Processing and Keyword Search" systematically and comprehensively covers the latest advances in XML data searching. It presents an extensive overview of the current query processing and keyword search techniques on XML data, including XML labeling schemes, indexing, processing on order and un-order XML tree patterns, XML query optimization, results estimation, and XML keyword searches, which are elaborated in separate chapters. Graduate students and researchers in the field of XML data searching will find this book an invaluable resource. Prof. Jiaheng Lu is an associate professor at Renmin University of China's School of Information.

Collaborative Networks A Tool for Promoting Co-creation and Innovation The collaborative networks paradigm offers powerful socio-organizational mec- nisms, supported by advanced information and communication technologies for p- moting innovation. This, in turn, leads to new products and services, growth of better customer relationships, establishing better project and process management, and building higher-performing consortia. By putting diverse entities that bring different perspectives, competencies, practices, and cultures, to work together, collaborative networks develop the right environment for the emergence of new ideas and more efficient, yet practical, solutions. This aspect is particularly important for small and medium enterprises which typically lack critical mass and can greatly benefit from participation in co-innovation networks. However, larger organizations also benefit from the challenges and the diversity found in collaborative ecosystems. In terms of research, in addition to the trend identified in previous years toward a sounder consolidation of the theoretical foundation in this discipline, there is now a direction of developments more focused on modeling and reasoning about new c- laboration patterns and their contribution to value creation. "Soft issues," including social capital, cultural aspects, ethics and value systems, trust, emotions, behavior, etc. continue to deserve particular attention in terms of modeling and reasoning. Exploi- tion of new application domains such as health care, education, and active aging for retired professionals also help identify new research challenges, both in terms of m- eling and ICT support development.

Recent advances in electronic and computer technologies have paved the way for the proliferation of ubiquitous computing and innovative applications that incorporate these technologies. This proceedings book describes these new and innovative technologies, and covers topics like Ubiquitous Communication and Networks, Security Systems, Smart Devices and Applications, Cloud and Grid Systems, Service-oriented and Web Service Computing, Embedded Hardware and Image Processing and Multimedia.

Recent growth in knowledge management concepts has played a vital role in the improvement of organizational performance. These knowledge management approaches have been influential in achieving the goal of efficient production of software development processes. Knowledge-Based Processes in Software Development focuses on the inherent issues to help practitioners in gaining understanding of software development processes. The best practices highlighted in this publication will be essential to software professionals working in the industry as well as students and researchers in the domain of software engineering in order to successfully employ knowledge management procedures.

The first book to provide an integrative presentation of the issues, challenges and success of designing, building and using agent applications. The chapters presented are written by internationally leading authorities in the field, with a general audience in mind. The result is a unique overview of agent technology applications, ranging from an introduction to the technical foundations to reports on dealing with specific agent systems in practice.

The book offers a detailed guide to temporal ordering, exploring open problems in the field and providing solutions and extensive analysis. It addresses the challenge of automatically ordering events and times in text. Aided by TimeML, it also describes and presents concepts relating to time in easy-to-compute terms. Working out the order that events and times happen has proven difficult for computers, since the language used to discuss time can be vague and complex. Mapping out these concepts for a computational system, which does not have its own inherent idea of time, is, unsurprisingly, tough. Solving this problem enables powerful systems that can plan, reason about events, and construct stories of their own accord, as well as understand the complex narratives that humans express and comprehend so naturally. This book presents a theory and data-driven analysis of temporal ordering, leading to the identification of exactly what is difficult about the task. It then proposes and evaluates machine-learning solutions for the major difficulties. It is a valuable resource for those working in machine learning for natural language processing as well as anyone studying time in language, or involved in annotating the structure of time in documents.

"Structured Finance: The Object Orientated Approach" is aimed at both the finance and IT professionals involved in the structured finance business with the intention of sharing common concepts and language within the industry. The financial community (structurers, pricers and risk managers) view structured products as collections of objects under the so-called "replicating portfolio" paradigm. The IT community use object oriented programming (OOP) techniques to improve the software updating and maintenance process. For them structured products are collections of objects as well. Despite use of the same "object" concept, it looks like communication between these different professional functions has been problematic. Recently, construction of standard data structures known as FpML has begun to lay out a common definition of objects, at least for "plain vanilla" derivatives, both between IT and financial people and across different market players. Along this line, this book builds upon the concept of "object" to provide frontier treatment of structured finance issues relevant to both communities engaged in building, pricing and hedging products and people engaged in designing and up-dating the corresponding software.

"Structured Finance: The Object Orientated Approach" will enable you to:

decompose a structured product in elementary constituent financial "objects" and risk factors ("replicating portfolio") understand the basics of object oriented programming (OOP) applied to the design of structured cash flows "objects" build your own "objects" and to understand FpML data structures available for standard products gauge risk exposures of the "objects" in structured products to: risk factors, their volatilities and the correlation among them (which factor are you long/short? Are you long/short volatility? Are you long/short correlation?) update your risk management system to accommodate structured products with non linear exposures and to design "objects" to represent, price and hedge, counterparty risk

System-on-Chip Methodologies & Design Languages brings together a selection of the best papers from three international electronic design language conferences in 2000. The conferences are the Hardware Description Language Conference and Exhibition (HDLCon), held in the Silicon Valley area of USA; the Forum on Design Languages (FDL), held in Europe; and the Asia Pacific Chip Design Language (APChDL) Conference. The papers cover a range of topics, including design methods, specification and modeling languages, tool issues, formal verification, simulation and synthesis. The results presented in these papers will help researchers and practicing engineers keep abreast of developments in this rapidly evolving field.

Commutative Algebra, Singularities and Computer Algebra presents current trends in commutative algebra, algebraic combinatorics, singularity theory and computer algebra, and highlights the interaction between these disciplines. Contributions by leading international mathematicians thoroughly discuss topics in: modules theory, integrally closed ideals and determinantal ideals, singularities in projective spaces and Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity, Groebner and SAGBI basis, and the use of the computer packages Bergman, CoCoA and SINGULAR.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 11th IFIP WG 6.11 Conference on e-Business, e-Services and e-Society, I3E 2011, held in Kaunas, Lithuania, in October 2011. The 25 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: e-government and e-governance, e-services, digital goods and products, e-business process modeling and re-engineering, innovative e-business models and implementation, e-health and e-education, and innovative e-business models.

One of the most important reasons for the current intensity of interest in agent technology is that the concept of an agent, as an autonomous system capable of interacting with other agents in order to satisfy its design objectives, is a natural one for software designers. Just as we can understand many systems as being composed of essentially passive objects, which have a state and upon which we can perform operations, so we can understand many others as being made up of interacting semi-autonomous agents. This book brings together revised versions of papers presented at the First International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2000, held in Limerick, Ireland, in conjunction with ICSE 2000, and several invited papers. As a comprehensive and competent overview of agent-oriented software engineering, the book addresses software engineers interested in the new paradigm and technology as well as research and development professionals active in agent technology.

This book presents a powerful new language and methodology for programming complex reactive systems in a scenario-based manner. The language is live sequence charts (LSCs), a multimodal extension of sequence charts and UML's sequence diagrams, used in the past mainly for requirements. The methodology is play-in/play-out, an unusually convenient means for specifying inter-object scenario-based behavior directly from a GUI or an object model diagram, with the surprising ability to execute that behavior, or those requirements, directly. The language and methodology are supported by a fully implemented tool – the Play-Engine – which is attached to the book in CD form.   The design of reactive systems is one of the most challenging problems in computer science. This books starts with a critical insight to explain the difficulty of this problem: there is a fundamental gap between the scenario-based way in which people think about such systems and the state-based way in which these systems are implemented. The book then offers a radical proposal to bridge this gap by means of playing scenarios. Systems can be specified by playing in scenarios and implemented by means of a Play-Engine that plays out scenarios. This idea is carried out and developed, lucidly, formally and playfully, to its fullest. The result is a compelling proposal, accompanied by a prototype software engine, for reactive systems design, which is bound to cause a splash in the software-engineering community. Moshe Y. Vardi, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA Scenarios are a primary exchange tool in explaining system behavior to others, but their limited expressive power never made them able to fully describe systems, thus limiting their use. The language of Live Sequence Charts (LSCs) presented in this beautifully written book achieves this goal, and the attached Play-Engine software makes these LSCs really come alive. This is undoubtedly a key breakthrough that will start long-awaited and exciting new directions in systems specification, synthesis, and analysis. Gérard Berry, Esterel Technologies and INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, France The approach of David Harel and Rami Marelly is a fascinating way of combining prototyping techniques with techniques for identifying behavior and user interfaces. Manfred Broy, Technical University of Munich, Germany

Genetic Programming Theory and Practice IV was developed from the fourth workshop at the University of Michigan's Center for the Study of Complex Systems to facilitate the exchange of ideas and information related to the rapidly advancing field of Genetic Programming (GP). The text provides a cohesive view of the issues facing both practitioners and theoreticians, and examines the synergy between GP theory and application. The foremost international researchers and practitioners in the GP arena contributed to the volume, exploring application areas including chemical process control, circuit design, financial data mining and bioinformatics, to name just a few. This volume is the result of an extensive dialog between GP theoreticians and practitioners, and is a unique and indispensable tool for both academics and industry professionals involved in GP, evolutionary computation, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Learn to write C++ programs by interfacing a computer to a wide range of popular and fundamental real-world technologies.

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Object relationships in modern software systems are becoming increasingly numerous and complex, and program errors due to violations of object relationships are difficult to detect. Programmers need new tools that allow them to explore objects in a large system more efficiently and to detect broken object relationships instantaneously. Such tools incorporate approaches used in such areas as data visualization, pattern matching and extraction, database querying, active databases, and rule-based programming. The query-based debugging approach developed by the author of this book is another powerful yet efficient tool to be added to the developer's tool chest. Advanced Debugging Methods presents practice and tools for debugging computer programs. This book proposes new powerful approaches that simplify the daunting task of debugging complex software systems. Although debugging has been addressed in numerous research papers, many of its methods have yet to be explored in a book-length format. This book helps to fill this gap by presenting an overview of existing debugging tools with motivating examples and case studies, as well as presenting new, state-of-the-art debugging methods. Advanced Debugging Methods will be of use to software developers looking for tools to be applied in cutting edge practice; system architects looking at the relationship between software design and debugging; tools and programming language researchers looking for new ideas in run-time tool implementation as well as detailed descriptions of advanced implementations; and university professors and graduate students who will use this book as supplementary reading for graduate courses in programming tools, language implementation, and advanced object-oriented systems. Advanced Debugging Methods is also a handy reference of currently existing debugging methodologies as well as a springboard for cutting-edge research to simplify the difficult task of debugging and to facilitate the development of more robust software systems.

xv From the Old to the New xvii Acknowledgments xxi 1 Verilog - A Tutorial Introduction 1 Getting Started 2 A Structural Description 2 Simulating the binaryToESeg Driver 4 Creating Ports For the Module 7 Creating a Testbench For a Module 8 11 Behavioral Modeling of Combinational Circuits Procedural Models 12 Rules for Synthesizing Combinational Circuits 13 14 Procedural Modeling of Clocked Sequential Circuits Modeling Finite State Machines 15 Rules for Synthesizing Sequential Systems 18 Non-Blocking Assignment ("

For over a decade, software process improvement (SPI) has been promoted as an approach to improve systematically the way software is developed and managed. Mostly this research and the relevant experience reports have been focussed on large software companies.

Conradi and his co-authors have collected the main results from four Norwegian industrial research and development projects on SPI carried out between 1996 and 2005, which, in contrast to other treatments, concentrated on small- and medium-sized companies, typically characterized by fast-changing environments and processes. The presentation is organized in five sections: general principles and methods of SPI, knowledge management for SPI, process modelling and electronic process guides, estimation methods, and object-oriented and component-based systems. A spectrum of empirical methods has been used, e.g. case studies, large-scale experiments, surveys and interviews, and action research.

The book mainly targets researchers and graduate students in (empirical) software engineering, and software professionals working in development or quality assurance.

Object-oriented design methods are commonplace in computing systems development, but are often dismissed as 'boxes & arrows'. If systems developers are to gain full advantage from such methods, they should be able to achieve designs that are not merely the subject of heated argument, but can be improved by careful, rigorous & machine-supported analysis.

This book describes an object-oriented design approach that combines the benefits of abstract modelling with the analytic power of formal methods, to give designs that can be rigorously validated & assured with automated support.

Aimed at software architects, designers & developers as well as computer scientists, no prior knowledge of formal methods is assumed. The elements of functional modelling are introduced using numerous examples & exercises, industrial case studies & experience reports. Industry-strength tools support the text. Go to www.vdmbook.com to download free-of-charge VDMTools Lite, which gives the possibility to try out examples from the book