The book 'BiLBIQ: A biologically inspired Robot with walking and rolling locomotion' deals with implementing a locomotion behavior observed in the biological archetype Cebrennus villosus to a robot prototype whose structural design needs to be developed. The biological sample is investigated as far as possible and compared to other evolutional solutions within the framework of nature's inventions. Current achievements in robotics are examined and evaluated for their relation and relevance to the robot prototype in question. An overview of what is state of the art in actuation ensures the choice of the hardware available and most suitable for this project. Through a constant consideration of the achievement of two fundamentally different ways of locomotion with one and the same structure, a robot design is developed and constructed taking hardware constraints into account. The development of a special leg structure that needs to resemble and replace body elements of the biological archetype is a special challenge to be dealt with. Finally a robot prototype was achieved, which is able to walk and roll - inspired by the spider Cebrennus villosus.

This book deals with the problem of finding suitable languages that can represent specific classes of Petri nets, the most studied and widely accepted model for distributed systems. Hence, the contribution of this book amounts to the alphabetization of some classes of distributed systems. The book also suggests the need for a generalization of Turing computability theory. It is important for graduate students and researchers engaged with the concurrent semantics of distributed communicating systems. The author assumes some prior knowledge of formal languages and theoretical computer science.

Grids, P2P and Services Computing, the 12th volume of the CoreGRID series, is based on the CoreGrid ERCIM Working Group Workshop on Grids, P2P and Service Computing in Conjunction with EuroPar 2009. The workshop will take place August 24th, 2009 in Delft, The Netherlands. Grids, P2P and Services Computing, an edited volume contributed by well-established researchers worldwide, will focus on solving research challenges for Grid and P2P technologies. Topics of interest include: Service Level Agreement, Data & Knowledge Management, Scheduling, Trust and Security, Network Monitoring and more. Grids are a crucial enabling technology for scientific and industrial development. This book also includes new challenges related to service-oriented infrastructures. Grids, P2P and Services Computing is designed for a professional audience composed of researchers and practitioners within the Grid community industry. This volume is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science.

Genetic programming (GP) is a popular heuristic methodology of program synthesis with origins in evolutionary computation. In this generate-and-test approach, candidate programs are iteratively produced and evaluated. The latter involves running programs on tests, where they exhibit complex behaviors reflected in changes of variables, registers, or memory. That behavior not only ultimately determines program output, but may also reveal its `hidden qualities' and important characteristics of the considered synthesis problem. However, the conventional GP is oblivious to most of that information and usually cares only about the number of tests passed by a program. This `evaluation bottleneck' leaves search algorithm underinformed about the actual and potential qualities of candidate programs. This book proposes behavioral program synthesis, a conceptual framework that opens GP to detailed information on program behavior in order to make program synthesis more efficient. Several existing and novel mechanisms subscribing to that perspective to varying extent are presented and discussed, including implicit fitness sharing, semantic GP, co-solvability, trace convergence analysis, pattern-guided program synthesis, and behavioral archives of subprograms. The framework involves several concepts that are new to GP, including execution record, combined trace, and search driver, a generalization of objective function. Empirical evidence gathered in several presented experiments clearly demonstrates the usefulness of behavioral approach. The book contains also an extensive discussion of implications of the behavioral perspective for program synthesis and beyond.

This book describes new algorithms and ideas for making effective decisions under constraints, including applications in control engineering, manufacturing (how to optimally determine the production level), econometrics (how to better predict stock market behavior), and environmental science and geosciences (how to combine data of different types). It also describes general algorithms and ideas that can be used in other application areas. The book presents extended versions of selected papers from the annual International Workshops on Constraint Programming and Decision Making (CoProd'XX) from 2013 to 2016. These workshops, held in the US (El Paso, Texas) and in Europe (Wurzburg, Germany, and Uppsala, Sweden), have attracted researchers and practitioners from all over the world. It is of interest to practitioners who benefit from the new techniques, to researchers who want to extend the ideas from these papers to new application areas and/or further improve the corresponding algorithms, and to graduate students who want to learn more - in short, to anyone who wants to make more effective decisions under constraints.

The information infrastructure - comprising computers, embedded devices, networks and software systems - is vital to operations in every sector: inf- mation technology, telecommunications, energy, banking and ?nance, tra- portation systems, chemicals, agriculture and food, defense industrial base, public health and health care, national monuments and icons, drinking water and water treatment systems, commercial facilities, dams, emergency services, commercial nuclear reactors, materials and waste, postal and shipping, and government facilities. Global business and industry, governments, indeed - ciety itself, cannot function if major components of the critical information infrastructure are degraded, disabled or destroyed. This book, Critical Infrastructure Protection III, is the third volume in the annualseriesproducedbyIFIP WorkingGroup11.10onCriticalInfrastructure Protection, an active international community of scientists, engineers, prac- tioners and policy makers dedicated to advancing research, development and implementation e?orts related to critical infrastructure protection. The book presents original research results and innovative applications in the area of infrastructure protection. Also, it highlights the importance of weaving s- ence, technology and policy in crafting sophisticated, yet practical, solutions that will help secure information, computer and network assets in the various critical infrastructure sectors. This volume contains seventeen edited papers from the Third Annual IFIP Working Group 11.10 International Conference on Critical Infrastructure P- tection, held at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, March 23-25, 2009. The papers were refereed by members of IFIP Working Group 11.10 and other internationally-recognized experts in critical infrastructure protection.

To deal with the flexible architectures and evolving functionalities of complex modern systems, the agent metaphor and agent-based computing are often the most appropriate software design approach. As a result, a broad range of special-purpose design processes has been developed in the last several years to tackle the challenges of these specific application domains. In this context, in early 2012 the IEEE-FIPA Design Process Documentation Template SC0097B was defined, which facilitates the representation of design processes and method fragments through the use of standardized templates, thus supporting the creation of easily sharable repositories and facilitating the composition of new design processes.

Following this standardization approach, this book gathers the documentations of some of the best-known agent-oriented design processes. After an introductory section, describing the goal of the book and the existing IEEE FIPA standard for design process documentation, thirteen processes (including the widely known Open UP, the de facto standard in object-oriented software engineering) are documented by their original creators or other well-known scientists working in the field. As a result, this is the first work to adopt a standard, unified descriptive approach for documenting different processes, making it much easier to study the individual processes, to rigorously compare them, and to apply them in industrial projects.While there are a few books on the market describing the individual agent-oriented design processes, none of them presents all the processes, let alone in the same format. With this handbook, for the first time, researchers as well as professional software developers looking for an overview as well as for detailed and standardized descriptions of design processes will find a comprehensive presentation of the most important agent-oriented design processes, which will be an invaluable resource when developing solutions in various application areas.

..".the perfect companion to "Programming Massively Parallel Processors" by Hwu & Kirk." -Nicolas Pinto, Research Scientist at Harvard & MIT, NVIDIA Fellow 2009-2010

Graphics processing units (GPUs) can do much more than render graphics. Scientists and researchers increasingly look to GPUs to improve the efficiency and performance of computationally-intensive experiments across a range of disciplines.

"GPU Computing Gems: Emerald Edition" brings their techniques to you, showcasing GPU-based solutions including: Black hole simulations with CUDAGPU-accelerated computation and interactive display of molecular orbitalsTemporal data mining for neuroscienceGPU -based parallelization for fast circuit optimizationFast graph cuts for computer visionReal-time stereo on GPGPU using progressive multi-resolution adaptive windowsGPU image demosaicingTomographic image reconstruction from unordered lines with CUDAMedical image processing using GPU -accelerated ITK image filters"41 more chapters" of innovative GPU computing ideas, written to be accessible to researchers from any domain

"GPU Computing Gems: Emerald Edition" is the first volume in Morgan Kaufmann's Applications of GPU Computing Series, offering the latest insights and research in computer vision, electronic design automation, emerging data-intensive applications, life sciences, medical imaging, ray tracing and rendering, scientific simulation, signal and audio processing, statistical modeling, and video / image processing.
Covers the breadth of industry from scientific simulation and electronic design automation to audio / video processing, medical imaging, computer vision, and moreMany examples leverage NVIDIA's CUDA parallel computing architecture, the most widely-adopted massively parallel programming solutionOffers insights and ideas as well as practical "hands-on" skills you can immediately put to use

Programming in Scala is the definitive book on Scala, the popular language for the Java platform that blends object-oriented and functional programming concepts into a unique and powerful tool for developers. The fifth edition has been updated to cover new features up to, and including, Scala version 3.0. The Scala language has been exploding in popularity in recent years. More than 54,000 copies of Programming in Scala have been sold since the first edition was published in 2008.

A principal aim of computer graphics is to generate images that look as real as photographs. Realistic computer graphics imagery has however proven to be quite challenging to produce, since the appearance of materials arises from complicated physical processes that are difficult to analytically model and simulate, and image-based modeling of real material samples is often impractical due to the high-dimensional space of appearance data that needs to be acquired.

This book presents a general framework based on the inherent coherency in the appearance data of materials to make image-based appearance modeling more tractable. We observe that this coherence manifests itself as low-dimensional structure in the appearance data, and by identifying this structure we can take advantage of it to simplify the major processes in the appearance modeling pipeline. This framework consists of two key components, namely the coherence structure and the accompanying reconstruction method to fully recover the low-dimensional appearance data from sparse measurements. Our investigation of appearance coherency has led to three major forms of low-dimensional coherence structure and three types of coherency-based reconstruction upon which our framework is built.

This coherence-based approach can be comprehensively applied to all the major elements of image-based appearance modeling, from data acquisition of real material samples to user-assisted modeling from a photograph, from synthesis of volumes to editing of material properties, and from efficient rendering algorithms to physical fabrication of objects. In this book we present several techniques built on this coherency framework to handle various appearance modeling tasks both for surface reflections and subsurface scattering, the two primary physical components that generate material appearance. We believe that coherency-based appearance modeling will make it easier and more feasible for practitioners to bring computer graphics imagery to life.

This book is aimed towards readers with an interest in computer graphics. In particular, researchers, practitioners and students will benefit from this book by learning about the underlying coherence in appearance structure and how it can be utilized to improve appearance modeling. The specific techniques presented in our manuscript can be of value to anyone who wishes to elevate the realism of their computer graphics imagery. For understanding this book, an elementary background in computer graphics is assumed, such as from an introductory college course or from practical experience with computer graphics.

The development of software system with acceptable level of reliability and quality within available time frame and budget becomes a challenging objective. This objective could be achieved to some extent through early prediction of number of faults present in the software, which reduces the cost of development as it provides an opportunity to make early corrections during development process. The book presents an early software reliability prediction model that will help to grow the reliability of the software systems by monitoring it in each development phase, i.e. from requirement phase to testing phase. Different approaches are discussed in this book to tackle this challenging issue. An important approach presented in this book is a model to classify the modules into two categories (a) fault-prone and (b) not fault-prone. The methods presented in this book for assessing expected number of faults present in the software, assessing expected number of faults present at the end of each phase and classification of software modules in fault-prone or no fault-prone category are easy to understand, develop and use for any practitioner. The practitioners are expected to gain more information about their development process and product reliability, which can help to optimize the resources used.

In his rich and varied career as a mathematician, computer scientist, and educator, Jacob T. Schwartz wrote seminal works in analysis, mathematical economics, programming languages, algorithmics, and computational geometry. In this volume of essays, his friends, students, and collaborators at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences present recent results in some of the fields that Schwartz explored: quantum theory, the theory and practice of programming, program correctness and decision procedures, dextrous manipulation in Robotics, motion planning, and genomics. In addition to presenting recent results in these fields, these essays illuminate the astonishingly productive trajectory of a brilliant and original scientist and thinker.

"Computer and Information Sciences" is a unique and comprehensive review of advanced technology and research in the field of Information Technology. It provides an up to date snapshot of research in Europe and the Far East (Hong Kong, Japan and China) in the most active areas of information technology, including Computer Vision, Data Engineering, Web Engineering, Internet Technologies, Bio-Informatics and System Performance Evaluation Methodologies.

Software Life Cycle Models. Objectoriented Concepts and Modeling. Formal Specification and Verification. Design Methodologies and Specifications. Programming and Coding. Programming Tools. Declarative Programming. Automatic Program Synthesis and Reuse. Program Verification and Testing. Software Maintenance. Advanced Programming Environments. Other Selected Topics. Index.

Collaboration among individuals - from users to developers - is central to modern software engineering. It takes many forms: joint activity to solve common problems, negotiation to resolve conflicts, creation of shared definitions, and both social and technical perspectives impacting all software development activity. The difficulties of collaboration are also well documented. The grand challenge is not only to ensure that developers in a team deliver effectively as individuals, but that the whole team delivers more than just the sum of its parts.

The editors of this book have assembled an impressive selection of authors, who have contributed to an authoritative body of work tackling a wide range of issues in the field of collaborative software engineering. The resulting volume is divided into four parts, preceded by a general editorial chapter providing a more detailed review of the domain of collaborative software engineering. Part 1 is on "Characterizing Collaborative Software Engineering," Part 2 examines various "Tools and Techniques," Part 3 addresses organizational issues, and finally Part 4 contains four examples of "Emerging Issues in Collaborative Software Engineering."

As a result, this book delivers a comprehensive state-of-the-art overview and empirical results for researchers in academia and industry in areas like software process management, empirical software engineering, and global software development. Practitioners working in this area will also appreciate the detailed descriptions and reports which can often be used as guidelines to improve their daily work.

William J. Karnowski is a construction worker by day and poet by night. His spirit is married to the earth. He worked as a laborer, a mason tender, finisher, gandydancer, therapy aide, boat builder, ironworker, draftsman, and now owns a construction company with his brother Dave. "I thought to myself, "Self, if the geese can go south, then, why can't we?" It never did take me very long to make a decision, especially if it involved a motorcycle." Bill has traveled the length of the Oregon Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, and to the Great Smokies and back in the sports car that he built. He built his house, makes his furniture, and writes poetry on his farm at Laclede, Kansas. "I find it is satisfying to get my hands and brain involved in everything I do." "Check it out. I twist a few tails along the way."

Validation and verification is an area of software engineering that has been around since the early stages of program development, especially one of its more known areas: testing. Testing, the dynamic side of validation and verification (V&V), has been complemented with other, more formal techniques of software engineering, and so the static verification - traditional in formal methods - has been joined by model checking and other techniques. ""Verification, Validation and Testing in Software Engineering"" offers thorough coverage of many valuable formal and semiformal techniques of V&V. It explores, depicts, and provides examples of different applications in V&V that produce many areas of software development - including real-time applications - where V&V techniques are required.

The first course in software engineering is the most critical. Education must start from an understanding of the heart of software development, from familiar ground that is common to all software development endeavors. This book is an in-depth introduction to software engineering that uses a systematic, universal kernel to teach the essential elements of all software engineering methods. This kernel, Essence, is a vocabulary for defining methods and practices. Essence was envisioned and originally created by Ivar Jacobson and his colleagues, developed by Software Engineering Method and Theory (SEMAT) and approved by The Object Management Group (OMG) as a standard in 2014. Essence is a practice-independent framework for thinking and reasoning about the practices we have and the practices we need. Essence establishes a shared and standard understanding of what is at the heart of software development. Essence is agnostic to any particular method, lifecycle independent, programming language independent, concise, scalable, extensible, and formally specified. Essence frees the practices from their method prisons. The first part of the book describes Essence, the essential elements to work with, the essential things to do and the essential competencies you need when developing software. The other three parts describe more and more advanced use cases of Essence. Using real but manageable examples, it covers the fundamentals of Essence and the innovative use of serious games to support software engineering. It also explains how current practices such as user stories, use cases, Scrum, and micro-services can be described using Essence, and illustrates how their activities can be represented using the Essence notions of cards and checklists. The fourth part of the book offers a vision how Essence can be scaled to support large, complex systems engineering. Essence is supported by an ecosystem developed and maintained by a community of experienced people worldwide. From this ecosystem, professors and students can select what they need and create their own way of working, thus learning how to create ONE way of working that matches the particular situation and needs.

This book provides a general overview of multiple instance learning (MIL), defining the framework and covering the central paradigms. The authors discuss the most important algorithms for MIL such as classification, regression and clustering. With a focus on classification, a taxonomy is set and the most relevant proposals are specified. Efficient algorithms are developed to discover relevant information when working with uncertainty. Key representative applications are included. This book carries out a study of the key related fields of distance metrics and alternative hypothesis. Chapters examine new and developing aspects of MIL such as data reduction for multi-instance problems and imbalanced MIL data. Class imbalance for multi-instance problems is defined at the bag level, a type of representation that utilizes ambiguity due to the fact that bag labels are available, but the labels of the individual instances are not defined. Additionally, multiple instance multiple label learning is explored. This learning framework introduces flexibility and ambiguity in the object representation providing a natural formulation for representing complicated objects. Thus, an object is represented by a bag of instances and is allowed to have associated multiple class labels simultaneously. This book is suitable for developers and engineers working to apply MIL techniques to solve a variety of real-world problems. It is also useful for researchers or students seeking a thorough overview of MIL literature, methods, and tools.

The focus of this book is on three influential cognitive motives: achievement, affiliation, and power motivation. Incentive-based theories of achievement, affiliation and power motivation are the basis for competence-seeking behaviour, relationship-building, leadership, and resource-controlling behaviour in humans. In this book we show how these motives can be modelled and embedded in artificial agents to achieve behavioural diversity. Theoretical issues are addressed for representing and embedding computational models of motivation in rule-based agents, learning agents, crowds and evolution of motivated agents. Practical issues are addressed for defining games, mini-games or in-game scenarios for virtual worlds in which computer-controlled, motivated agents can participate alongside human players. The book is structured into four parts: game playing in virtual worlds by humans and agents; comparing human and artificial motives; game scenarios for motivated agents; and evolution and the future of motivated game-playing agents. It will provide game programmers, and those with an interest in artificial intelligence, with the knowledge required to develop diverse, believable game-playing agents for virtual worlds.

This book examines how and why collaborative quality assurance techniques, particularly pair programming and peer code review, affect group cognition and software quality in agile software development teams. Prior research on these extremely popular but also costly techniques has focused on isolated pairs of developers and ignored the fact that they are typically applied in larger, enduring teams. This book is one of the first studies to investigate how these techniques depend on and influence the joint cognitive accomplishments of entire development teams rather than individuals. It employs theories on transactive memory systems and functional affordances to provide answers based on empirical research. The mixed-methods research presented includes several in-depth case studies and survey results from more than 500 software developers, team leaders, and product managers in 81 software development teams. The book's findings will advance IS research and have explicit implications for developers of code review tools, information systems development teams, and software development managers.

"Distributed Programming: Theory and Practice" presents a practical and rigorous method to develop distributed programs that correctly implement their specifications. The method also covers how to write specifications and how to use them. Numerous examples such as bounded buffers, distributed locks, message-passing services, and distributed termination detection illustrate the method. Larger examples include data transfer protocols, distributed shared memory, and TCP network sockets.

"Distributed Programming: Theory and Practice" bridges the gap between books that focus on specific concurrent programming languages and books that focus on distributed algorithms. Programs are written in a "real-life" programming notation, along the lines of Java and Python with explicit instantiation of threads and programs.Students and programmers will see these as programs and not "merely" algorithms in pseudo-code. The programs implement interesting algorithms and solve problems that are large enough to serve as projects in programming classes and software engineering classes. Exercises and examples are included at the end of each chapter with on-line access to the solutions.

"Distributed Programming: Theory and Practice "is designed as an advanced-level text book for students in computer science and electrical engineering. Programmers, software engineers and researchers working in this field will also find this book useful."

This monograph describes the latest advances in discriminative learning methods for biometric recognition. Specifically, it focuses on three representative categories of methods: sparse representation-based classification, metric learning, and discriminative feature representation, together with their applications in palmprint authentication, face recognition and multi-biometrics. The ideas, algorithms, experimental evaluation and underlying rationales are also provided for a better understanding of these methods. Lastly, it discusses several promising research directions in the field of discriminative biometric recognition.