Despite decades of research, developing software that is fit for purpose, developed on time, and within budget remains a challenge. Many researchers have advocated the use of artificial intelligence techniques such as knowledge-based systems, neural networks, and data mining as a way of addressing these difficulties. ""Artificial Intelligence Applications for Improved Software Engineering Development: New Prospects"" provides an overview of useful techniques in artificial intelligence for future software development along with critical assessment for further advancement. A compendium of latest industry findings, this premier reference source offers researchers, academicians, and practitioners developmental ideas within the field.

Video games have become an increasingly ubiquitous part of society due to the proliferation and use of mobile devices. Video Games and Creativity explores research on the relationship between video games and creativity with regard to play, learning, and game design. It answers such questions as: Can video games be used to develop or enhance creativity? Is there a place for video games in the classroom? What types of creativity are needed to develop video games? While video games can be sources of entertainment, the role of video games in the classroom has emerged as an important component of improving the education system. The research and development of game-based learning has revealed the power of using games to teach and promote learning. In parallel, the role and importance of creativity in everyday life has been identified as a requisite skill for success.

This book highlights how real-time kernels work, using Micrium s C/OS-III as a reference. The book consists of two parts: Part I describes real-time kernels in generic terms, while Part II provides practical examples using NXP s LPC1768 Microcontroller, based on the ARM Cortex M3(rev 2) architecture. A companion evaluation board (Keil MCB1700) and IDE (Keil MDK Evaluation Version) enable the reader to quickly and easily evaluate the microcontroller, tools and RTOS. A range of examples are included, providing a unique hands-on experience, and leading to a faster and better understanding of the concepts presented in the book.

This book is written for serious embedded systems programmers, consultants, hobbyists, and students interested in understanding the inner workings of a real-time kernel. C/OS-III is not just a great learning platform, but also a full commercial-grade software package, ready to be part of a wide range of products.

C/OS-III is a highly portable, ROMable, scalable, preemptive real-time, multitasking kernel designed specifically to address the demanding requirements of today s embedded systems. C/OS-III is the successor to the highly popular C/OS-II real-time kernel but can use most of C/OS-II s ports with minor modifications. Some of the features of C/OS-III are:

Preemptive multitasking with round-robin scheduling of tasks at the same priority
Supports and unlimited number of tasks and other kernel objects
Rich set of services: semaphores, mutual exclusion semaphores with full priority inheritance, event flags, message queues, timers, fixed-size memory block management, and more.
Built-in performance measurements

This book discusses efficient prediction techniques for the current state-of-the-art High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, focusing on the compression of a wide range of video signals, such as 3D video, Light Fields and natural images. The authors begin with a review of the state-of-the-art predictive coding methods and compression technologies for both 2D and 3D multimedia contents, which provides a good starting point for new researchers in the field of image and video compression. New prediction techniques that go beyond the standardized compression technologies are then presented and discussed. In the context of 3D video, the authors describe a new predictive algorithm for the compression of depth maps, which combines intra-directional prediction, with flexible block partitioning and linear residue fitting. New approaches are described for the compression of Light Field and still images, which enforce sparsity constraints on linear models. The Locally Linear Embedding-based prediction method is investigated for compression of Light Field images based on the HEVC technology. A new linear prediction method using sparse constraints is also described, enabling improved coding performance of the HEVC standard, particularly for images with complex textures based on repeated structures. Finally, the authors present a new, generalized intra-prediction framework for the HEVC standard, which unifies the directional prediction methods used in the current video compression standards, with linear prediction methods using sparse constraints. Experimental results for the compression of natural images are provided, demonstrating the advantage of the unified prediction framework over the traditional directional prediction modes used in HEVC standard.

This book provides comprehensive coverage of the modern methods for geometric problems in the computing sciences. It also covers concurrent topics in data sciences including geometric processing, manifold learning, Google search, cloud data, and R-tree for wireless networks and BigData. The author investigates digital geometry and its related constructive methods in discrete geometry, offering detailed methods and algorithms. The book is divided into five sections: basic geometry; digital curves, surfaces and manifolds; discretely represented objects; geometric computation and processing; and advanced topics. Chapters especially focus on the applications of these methods to other types of geometry, algebraic topology, image processing, computer vision and computer graphics. Digital and Discrete Geometry: Theory and Algorithms targets researchers and professionals working in digital image processing analysis, medical imaging (such as CT and MRI) and informatics, computer graphics, computer vision, biometrics, and information theory. Advanced-level students in electrical engineering, mathematics, and computer science will also find this book useful as a secondary text book or reference. Praise for this book: This book does present a large collection of important concepts, of mathematical, geometrical, or algorithmical nature, that are frequently used in computer graphics and image processing. These concepts range from graphs through manifolds to homology. Of particular value are the sections dealing with discrete versions of classic continuous notions. The reader finds compact definitions and concise explanations that often appeal to intuition, avoiding finer, but then necessarily more complicated, arguments... As a first introduction, or as a reference for professionals working in computer graphics or image processing, this book should be of considerable value." - Prof. Dr. Rolf Klein, University of Bonn.

Healthcare and well-being have captured the attention of established software companies, start-ups, and investors. Software is starting to play a central role for addressing the problems of the aging society and the escalating cost of healthcare services. Enablers of such digital health are a growing number of sensors for sensing the human body and communication infrastructure for remote meetings, data sharing, and messaging. The challenge that lies in front of us is how to effectively make use of these capabilities, for example to empower patients and to free the scarce resources of medical personnel. Requirements engineering is the process by which the capabilities of a software product are aligned with stakeholder needs and a shared understanding between the stakeholders and development team established. This book provides guide for what to look for and do when inquiring and specifying software that targets healthcare and well-being, helping readers avoid the pitfalls of the highly regulated and sensible healthcare domain are and how they can be overcome. This book brings together the knowledge of 22 researchers, engineers, lawyers, and CEOs that have experience in the development of digital health solutions. It represents a unique line-up of best practices and recommendations of how to engineer requirements for digital health. In particular the book presents: * The area of digital health, e-health, and m-health * Best practice for requirements engineering based on evidence from a large number of projects * Practical step-by-step guidelines, examples, and lessons-learned for working with laws, regulations, ethical issues, interoperability, user experience, security, and privacy * How to put these many concerns together for engineering the requirements of a digital health solution and for scaling a digital health product For anybody who intends to develop software for digital health, this book is an introduction and reference with a wealth of actionable insights. For students interested in understanding how to apply software to healthcare, the text introduces key topics and guides further studies with references to important literature.

Agile is broken. Most Agile transformations struggle. According to an Allied Market Research study, "63% of respondents stated the failure of agile implementation in their organizations." The problems with Agile start at the top of most organizations with executive leadership not getting what agile is or even knowing the difference between success and failure in agile. Agile transformation is a journey, and most of that journey consists of people learning and trying new approaches in their own work. An agile organization can make use of coaches and training to improve their chances of success. But even then, failure remains because many Agile ideas are oversimplifications or interpreted in an extreme way, and many elements essential for success are missing. Coupled with other ideas that have been dogmatically forced on teams, such as "agile team rooms", and "an overall inertia and resistance to change in the Agile community," the Agile movement is ripe for change since its birth twenty years ago. "Agile 2" represents the work of fifteen experienced Agile experts, distilled into Agile 2: The Next Iteration of Agile by seven members of the team. Agile 2 values these pairs of attributes when properly balanced: thoughtfulness and prescription; outcomes and outputs, individuals and teams; business and technical understanding; individual empowerment and good leadership; adaptability and planning. With a new set of Agile principles to take Agile forward over the next 20 years, Agile 2 is applicable beyond software and hardware to all parts of an agile organization including "Agile HR", "Agile Finance", and so on. Like the original "Agile", "Agile 2", is just a set of ideas - powerful ideas. To undertake any endeavor, a single set of ideas is not enough. But a single set of ideas can be a powerful guide.

This handbook provides a unique and in-depth survey of the current state-of-the-art in software engineering, covering its major topics, the conceptual genealogy of each subfield, and discussing future research directions. Subjects include foundational areas of software engineering (e.g. software processes, requirements engineering, software architecture, software testing, formal methods, software maintenance) as well as emerging areas (e.g., self-adaptive systems, software engineering in the cloud, coordination technology). Each chapter includes an introduction to central concepts and principles, a guided tour of seminal papers and key contributions, and promising future research directions. The authors of the individual chapters are all acknowledged experts in their field and include many who have pioneered the techniques and technologies discussed. Readers will find an authoritative and concise review of each subject, and will also learn how software engineering technologies have evolved and are likely to develop in the years to come. This book will be especially useful for researchers who are new to software engineering, and for practitioners seeking to enhance their skills and knowledge.

An open process of restandardization, conducted by the IEEE, has led to the definitions of the new VHDL standard. The changes make VHDL safer, more portable, and more powerful. VHDL also becomes bigger and more complete. The canonical simulator of VHDL is enriched by new mechanisms, the predefined environment is more complete, and the syntax is more regular and flexible. Discrepancies and known bugs of VHDL'87 have been fixed. However, the new VHDL'92 is compatible with VHDL'87, with some minor exceptions. This book presents the new VHDL'92 for the VHDL designer. New features are explained and classified. Examples are provided, each new feature is given a rationale and its impact on design methodology, and performance is analyzed. Where appropriate, pitfalls and traps are explained. The VHDL designer should quickly be able to find the feature needed to evaluate the benefits it brings, to modify previous VHDL'87 code to make it more efficient, more portable, and more flexible. This text should be a useful update for all VHDL designers and managers involved in electronic design.

Python Passive Network Mapping: P2NMAP is the first book to reveal a revolutionary and open source method for exposing nefarious network activity. The "Heartbleed" vulnerability has revealed significant weaknesses within enterprise environments related to the lack of a definitive mapping of network assets. In Python Passive Network Mapping, Chet Hosmer shows you how to effectively and definitively passively map networks. Active or probing methods to network mapping have traditionally been used, but they have many drawbacks - they can disrupt operations, crash systems, and - most importantly - miss critical nefarious activity. You require an accurate picture of the environments you protect and operate in order to rapidly investigate, mitigate, and then recover from these new attack vectors. This book gives you a deep understanding of new innovations to passive network mapping, while delivering open source Python-based tools that can be put into practice immediately. Python Passive Network Mapping is for practitioners, forensic investigators, IT teams, and individuals who work together when performing incident response and investigating potential damage, or are examining the impacts of new malware threats. Those defending critical infrastructures will have a special interest in this book, as active or probing methods of network mapping are rarely used within these environments as any resulting impacts can be disastrous. Python Passive Network Mapping is ideally suited for use as a text in a variety of academic programs to expose and engage students in the art of passively mapping enterprise networks, with the added benefit of providing exposure to open source Python solutions.

This book highlights some of the unique aspects of spatio-temporal graph data from the perspectives of modeling and developing scalable algorithms. The authors discuss in the first part of this book, the semantic aspects of spatio-temporal graph data in two application domains, viz., urban transportation and social networks. Then the authors present representational models and data structures, which can effectively capture these semantics, while ensuring support for computationally scalable algorithms. In the first part of the book, the authors describe algorithmic development issues in spatio-temporal graph data. These algorithms internally use the semantically rich data structures developed in the earlier part of this book. Finally, the authors introduce some upcoming spatio-temporal graph datasets, such as engine measurement data, and discuss some open research problems in the area. This book will be useful as a secondary text for advanced-level students entering into relevant fields of computer science, such as transportation and urban planning. It may also be useful for researchers and practitioners in the field of navigational algorithms.

This volume collects contributions written by different experts in honor of Prof. Jaime Munoz Masque. It covers a wide variety of research topics, from differential geometry to algebra, but particularly focuses on the geometric formulation of variational calculus; geometric mechanics and field theories; symmetries and conservation laws of differential equations, and pseudo-Riemannian geometry of homogeneous spaces. It also discusses algebraic applications to cryptography and number theory. It offers state-of-the-art contributions in the context of current research trends. The final result is a challenging panoramic view of connecting problems that initially appear distant.

This book addresses Software-Defined Radio (SDR) baseband processing from the computer architecture point of view, providing a detailed exploration of different computing platforms by classifying different approaches, highlighting the common features related to SDR requirements and by showing pros and cons of the proposed solutions. It covers architectures exploiting parallelism by extending single-processor environment (such as VLIW, SIMD, TTA approaches), multi-core platforms distributing the computation to either a homogeneous array or a set of specialized heterogeneous processors, and architectures exploiting fine-grained, coarse-grained, or hybrid reconfigurability.

This book summarizes the results of Design Thinking Research carried out at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, USA and at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. Offering readers a closer look at Design Thinking, its innovation processes and methods, the book covers topics ranging from how to design ideas, methods and technologies, to creativity experiments and wicked problem solutions, to creative collaboration in the real world, and the interplay of designers and engineers. But the topics go beyond this in their detailed exploration of Design Thinking and its use in IT systems engineering fields, or even from a management perspective. The authors show how these methods and strategies actually work in companies, introduce new technologies and their functions, and demonstrate how Design Thinking can influence such unexpected topics as marriage. Furthermore, readers will learn how special-purpose Design Thinking can be used to solve wicked problems in complex fields. Thinking and devising innovations are fundamentally and inherently human activities - so is Design Thinking. Accordingly, Design Thinking is not merely the result of special courses nor of being gifted or trained: it's a way of dealing with our environment and improving techniques, technologies and life.

Pattern Recognition on Oriented Matroids covers a range of innovative problems in combinatorics, poset and graph theories, optimization, and number theory that constitute a far-reaching extension of the arsenal of committee methods in pattern recognition. The groundwork for the modern committee theory was laid in the mid-1960s, when it was shown that the familiar notion of solution to a feasible system of linear inequalities has ingenious analogues which can serve as collective solutions to infeasible systems. A hierarchy of dialects in the language of mathematics, for instance, open cones in the context of linear inequality systems, regions of hyperplane arrangements, and maximal covectors (or topes) of oriented matroids, provides an excellent opportunity to take a fresh look at the infeasible system of homogeneous strict linear inequalities - the standard working model for the contradictory two-class pattern recognition problem in its geometric setting. The universal language of oriented matroid theory considerably simplifies a structural and enumerative analysis of applied aspects of the infeasibility phenomenon. The present book is devoted to several selected topics in the emerging theory of pattern recognition on oriented matroids: the questions of existence and applicability of matroidal generalizations of committee decision rules and related graph-theoretic constructions to oriented matroids with very weak restrictions on their structural properties; a study (in which, in particular, interesting subsequences of the Farey sequence appear naturally) of the hierarchy of the corresponding tope committees; a description of the three-tope committees that are the most attractive approximation to the notion of solution to an infeasible system of linear constraints; an application of convexity in oriented matroids as well as blocker constructions in combinatorial optimization and in poset theory to enumerative problems on tope committees; an attempt to clarify how elementary changes (one-element reorientations) in an oriented matroid affect the family of its tope committees; a discrete Fourier analysis of the important family of critical tope committees through rank and distance relations in the tope poset and the tope graph; the characterization of a key combinatorial role played by the symmetric cycles in hypercube graphs. Contents Oriented Matroids, the Pattern Recognition Problem, and Tope Committees Boolean Intervals Dehn-Sommerville Type Relations Farey Subsequences Blocking Sets of Set Families, and Absolute Blocking Constructions in Posets Committees of Set Families, and Relative Blocking Constructions in Posets Layers of Tope Committees Three-Tope Committees Halfspaces, Convex Sets, and Tope Committees Tope Committees and Reorientations of Oriented Matroids Topes and Critical Committees Critical Committees and Distance Signals Symmetric Cycles in the Hypercube Graphs

This book reviews the algorithms for processing geometric data, with a practical focus on important techniques not covered by traditional courses on computer vision and computer graphics. Features: presents an overview of the underlying mathematical theory, covering vector spaces, metric space, affine spaces, differential geometry, and finite difference methods for derivatives and differential equations; reviews geometry representations, including polygonal meshes, splines, and subdivision surfaces; examines techniques for computing curvature from polygonal meshes; describes algorithms for mesh smoothing, mesh parametrization, and mesh optimization and simplification; discusses point location databases and convex hulls of point sets; investigates the reconstruction of triangle meshes from point clouds, including methods for registration of point clouds and surface reconstruction; provides additional material at a supplementary website; includes self-study exercises throughout the text.

Traditional machining has many limitations in today's technology-driven world, which has caused industrial professionals to begin implementing various optimization techniques within their machining processes. The application of methods including machine learning and genetic algorithms has recently transformed the manufacturing industry and created countless opportunities in non-traditional machining methods. Significant research in this area, however, is still considerably lacking. Machine Learning Applications in Non-Conventional Machining Processes is a collection of innovative research on the advancement of intelligent technology in industrial environments and its applications within the manufacturing field. While highlighting topics including evolutionary algorithms, micro-machining, and artificial neural networks, this book is ideally designed for researchers, academicians, engineers, managers, developers, practitioners, industrialists, and students seeking current research on intelligence-based machining processes in today's technology-driven market.

Compiled by an experienced practitioner in the field, this book contains definitions of the major terms used in Reliability Engineering and Software Assessment. Approximately 2000 definitions have been carefully selected from standards and literature published by leading institutions such as the IEEE and IEC. Alternative definitions of the same term are given where relevant, enabling the reader to compare and contrast, thereby giving useful insights into different aspects of the same term. There is also extensive cross-referencing to make the book easy to use and practical.
This book will provide an invaluable reference book for anyone working in the fields of reliability engineering or software assessment but should be of particular interest to industrial researchers and practitioners, members of standards committees, reliability consultants, students on Software Quality courses, technical authors and sub-editors.

This book describes simple to complex ASIC design practical scenarios using Verilog. It builds a story from the basic fundamentals of ASIC designs to advanced RTL design concepts using Verilog. Looking at current trends of miniaturization, the contents provide practical information on the issues in ASIC design and synthesis using Synopsys DC and their solution. The book explains how to write efficient RTL using Verilog and how to improve design performance. It also covers architecture design strategies, multiple clock domain designs, low-power design techniques, DFT, pre-layout STA and the overall ASIC design flow with case studies. The contents of this book will be useful to practicing hardware engineers, students, and hobbyists looking to learn about ASIC design and synthesis.