Intelligent information and database systems are two closely related and we- established subfields of modern computer science. They focus on the integration of artificial intelligence and classic database technologies in order to create the class of next generation information systems. The major target of this new gene- tion of systems is to provide end-users with intelligent behavior: simple and/or advanced learning, problem solving, uncertain and certain reasoning, se- organization, cooperation, etc. Such intelligent abilities are implemented in classic information systems to make them autonomous and user oriented, in particular when advanced problems of multimedia information and knowledge discovery, access, retrieval and manipulation are to be solved in the context of large, distr- uted and heterogeneous environments. It means that intelligent knowledge-based information and database systems are used to solve basic problems of large coll- tions management, carry out knowledge discovery from large data collections, reason about information under uncertain conditions, support users in their for- lation of complex queries etc. Topics discussed in this volume include but are not limited to the foundations and principles of data, information, and knowledge models, methodologies for intelligent information and database systems analysis, design, implementation, validation, maintenance and evolution.

Quality is not a fixed or universal property of software; it depends on the context and goals of its stakeholders. Hence, when you want to develop a high-quality software system, the first step must be a clear and precise specification of quality. Yet even if you get it right and complete, you can be sure that it will become invalid over time. So the only solution is continuous quality control: the steady and explicit evaluation of a product's properties with respect to its updated quality goals. This book guides you in setting up and running continuous quality control in your environment. Starting with a general introduction on the notion of quality, it elaborates what the differences between process and product quality are and provides definitions for quality-related terms often used without the required level of precision. On this basis, the work then discusses quality models as the foundation of quality control, explaining how to plan desired product qualities and how to ensure they are delivered throughout the entire lifecycle. Next it presents the main concepts and techniques of continuous quality control, discussing the quality control loop and its main techniques such as reviews or testing. In addition to sample scenarios in all chapters, the book is rounded out by a dedicated chapter highlighting several applications of different subsets of the presented quality control techniques in an industrial setting. The book is primarily intended for practitioners working in software engineering or quality assurance, who will benefit by learning how to improve their current processes, how to plan for quality, and how to apply state-of-the-art quality control techniques. Students and lecturers in computer science and specializing in software engineering will also profit from this book, which they can use in practice-oriented courses on software quality, software maintenance and quality assurance.

For introductory courses in Engineering and Computer Science. Teach your students to program and design user interfaces using Excel 2007. Introduction to VBA for Excel is an introductory text that is designed to instruct engineering and science students on how to develop programs using VBA within the Microsoft Excel environment. It is written for students at all levels and does not assume any previous programming experience.

This textbook provides an accessible introduction to the most important features of Fortran 2008. Features: presents a complete discussion of all the basic features needed to write complete Fortran programs; makes extensive use of examples and case studies to illustrate the practical use of features of Fortran 08, and supplies simple problems for the reader; provides a detailed exploration of control constructs, modules, procedures, arrays, character strings, data structures and derived types, pointer variables, and object-oriented programming; includes coverage of such major new features in Fortran 08 as coarrays, submodules, parameterized derived types, and derived-type input and output; highlights the topic of modules as the framework for organizing data and procedures for a Fortran program; investigates the excellent input/output facilities available in Fortran; contains appendices listing the many intrinsic procedures and providing a brief informal syntax specification for the language.

This book presents watermarking algorithms derived from signal processing methods such as wavelet transform, matrix decomposition and cosine transform to address the limitations of current technologies. For each algorithm, mathematical foundations are explained with analysis conducted to evaluate performances on robotness and efficiency. Combining theories and practice, it is suitable for information security researchers and industrial engineers.

Managing Complexity is the first book that clearly defines the concept of Complexity, explains how Complexity can be measured and tuned, and describes the seven key features of Complex Systems: 1. Connectivity 2. Autonomy 3. Emergency 4. Nonequilibrium 5. Non-linearity 6. Self-organisation 7. Co-evolution The thesis of the book is that complexity of the environment in which we work and live offers new opportunities and that the best strategy for surviving and prospering under conditions of complexity is to develop adaptability to perpetually changing conditions. An effective method for designing adaptability into business processes using multi-agent technology is presented and illustrated by several extensive examples, including adaptive, real-time scheduling of taxis, see-going tankers, road transport, supply chains, railway trains, production processes and swarms of small space satellites. Additional case studies include adaptive servicing of the International Space Station; adaptive processing of design changes of large structures such as wings of the largest airliner in the world; dynamic data mining, knowledge discovery and distributed semantic processing.Finally, the book provides a foretaste of the next generation of complex issues, notably, The Internet of Things, Smart Cities, Digital Enterprises and Smart Logistics.

Making the most ef?cient use of computer systems has rapidly become a leading topic of interest for the computer industry and its customers alike. However, the focus of these discussions is often on single, isolated, and speci?c architectural and technological improvements for power reduction and conservation, while ignoring the fact that power ef?ciency as a ratio of performance to power consumption is equally in?uenced by performance improvements and architectural power red- tion. Furthermore, ef?ciency can be in?uenced on all levels of today's system hi- archies from single cores all the way to distributed Grid environments. To improve execution and power ef?ciency requires progress in such diverse ?elds as program optimization, optimization of program scheduling, and power reduction of idling system components for all levels of the system hierarchy. Improving computer system ef?ciency requires improving system performance and reducing system power consumption. To research and reach reasonable conc- sions about system performance we need to not only understand the architectures of our computer systems and the available array of code transformations for p- formance optimizations, but we also need to be able to express this understanding in performance models good enough to guide decisions about code optimizations for speci?c systems. This understanding is necessary on all levels of the system hierarchy from single cores to nodes to full high performance computing (HPC) systems, and eventually to Grid environments with multiple systems and resources.

This book focuses on recent research in modern optimization and its implications in control and data analysis. This book is a collection of papers from the conference "Optimization and Its Applications in Control and Data Science" dedicated to Professor Boris T. Polyak, which was held in Moscow, Russia on May 13-15, 2015. This book reflects developments in theory and applications rooted by Professor Polyak's fundamental contributions to constrained and unconstrained optimization, differentiable and nonsmooth functions, control theory and approximation. Each paper focuses on techniques for solving complex optimization problems in different application areas and recent developments in optimization theory and methods. Open problems in optimization, game theory and control theory are included in this collection which will interest engineers and researchers working with efficient algorithms and software for solving optimization problems in market and data analysis. Theoreticians in operations research, applied mathematics, algorithm design, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and software engineering will find this book useful and graduate students will find the state-of-the-art research valuable.

Beginning computing students often finish the introduction to programming course without having had exposure to various system tools, without knowing how to optimize program performance and without understanding how programs interact with the larger computer system. Adam Hoover's "System Programming with C and Unix" introduces students to commonly used system tools (libraries, debuggers, system calls, shells and scripting languages) and then explains how to utilize these tools to optimize program development. The text also examines lower level data types with an emphasis on memory and understanding how and why different data types are used.

This edited book presents scientific results of the 12th International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence Research, Management and Applications (SERA 2014) held on August 31 - September 4, 2014 in Kitakyushu, Japan. The aim of this conference was to bring together researchers and scientists, businessmen and entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, computer users, and students to discuss the numerous fields of computer science and to share their experiences and exchange new ideas and information in a meaningful way. Research results about all aspects (theory, applications and tools) of computer and information science, and to discuss the practical challenges encountered along the way and the solutions adopted to solve them. This publication captures 17 of the conference's most promising papers.

This volume explains how advances in computer technology will augment communication in person-to-person, organizational, and educational settings. It describes the convergence of virtual reality and group decision support, and how these will serve educational and organizational effectiveness. Contributors--experts from business and academia--examine what the computing/communications world will look like in the near future, what the specific needs of various industries will be, and how innovations will fit into organizations and society.

These three topics are addressed with attention to the following questions: What will be the size of initial and future markets for advanced computer and communications technology? What will be the future computing environment in manufacturing operations, in the executive suite, in the office, in the field and on the road, at the point of service, for the computer-integrated enterprise, at home, in the school, and in the global marketplace?

This book presents advances in alternative swarm development that have proved to be effective in several complex problems. Swarm intelligence (SI) is a problem-solving methodology that results from the cooperation between a set of agents with similar characteristics. The study of biological entities, such as animals and insects, manifesting social behavior has resulted in several computational models of swarm intelligence. While there are numerous books addressing the most widely known swarm methods, namely ant colony algorithms and particle swarm optimization, those discussing new alternative approaches are rare. The focus on developments based on the simple modification of popular swarm methods overlooks the opportunity to discover new techniques and procedures that can be useful in solving problems formulated by the academic and industrial communities. Presenting various novel swarm methods and their practical applications, the book helps researchers, lecturers, engineers and practitioners solve their own optimization problems.

Dynamically Reconfigurable Systems is the first ever to focus on the emerging field of Dynamically Reconfigurable Computing Systems. While programmable logic and design-time configurability are well elaborated and covered by various texts, this book presents a unique overview over the state of the art and recent results for dynamic and run-time reconfigurable computing systems.

Reconfigurable hardware is not only of utmost importance for large manufacturers and vendors of microelectronic devices and systems, but also a very attractive technology for smaller and medium-sized companies. Hence, Dynamically Reconfigurable Systems also addresses researchers and engineers actively working in the field and provides them with information on the newest developments and trends in dynamic and run-time reconfigurable systems.

From the reviews of the 1st edition:

"This book provides a comprehensive and detailed account of different topics in algorithmic 3-dimensional topology, culminating with the recognition procedure for Haken manifolds and including the up-to-date results in computer enumeration of 3-manifolds. Originating from lecture notes of various courses given by the author over a decade, the book is intended to combine the pedagogical approach of a graduate textbook (without exercises) with the completeness and reliability of a research monograph...

All the material, with few exceptions, is presented from the peculiar point of view of special polyhedra and special spines of 3-manifolds. This choice contributes to keep the level of the exposition really elementary.

In conclusion, the reviewer subscribes to the quotation from the back cover: "the book fills a gap in the existing literature and will become a standard reference for algorithmic 3-dimensional topology both for graduate students and researchers."

Zentralblatt fur Mathematik 2004

For this 2nd edition, new results, new proofs, and commentaries for a better orientation of the reader have been added. In particular, in Chapter 7 several new sections concerning applications of the computer program "3-Manifold Recognizer" have been included. "

A formal method is not the main engine of a development process, its contribution is to improve system dependability by motivating formalisation where useful. This book summarizes the results of the DEPLOY research project on engineering methods for dependable systems through the industrial deployment of formal methods in software development. The applications considered were in automotive, aerospace, railway, and enterprise information systems, and microprocessor design. The project introduced a formal method, Event-B, into several industrial organisations and built on the lessons learned to provide an ecosystem of better tools, documentation and support to help others to select and introduce rigorous systems engineering methods. The contributing authors report on these projects and the lessons learned. For the academic and research partners and the tool vendors, the project identified improvements required in the methods and supporting tools, while the industrial partners learned about the value of formal methods in general. A particular feature of the book is the frank assessment of the managerial and organisational challenges, the weaknesses in some current methods and supporting tools, and the ways in which they can be successfully overcome. The book will be of value to academic researchers, systems and software engineers developing critical systems, industrial managers, policymakers, and regulators.

Although recognized as a key to the design process, prototyping often falls victim to budget cuts, deadlines, or lack of access to sophisticated tools. This can lead to sloppy and ineffective prototypes or the abandonment of them altogether. Rather than lose this important step, people are turning to Microsoft Excel(r) to create effective, simple, and inexpensive prototypes. Conveniently, the software is available to nearly everyone, and most are proficient in its basic functionality.
Effective Prototyping with Excel offers how-to guidance on how everyone can use basic Excel skills to create prototypes ranging from narrative wire frames to hi-fidelity prototypes. A wide array of software design problems and business demands are solved via practical step-by-step examples and illustrations.
Step-by-step guide to prototyping with a simple and affordable tool nearly everyone already has on their desktop.
Quickly and easily allows web and software designers to explore usability, design alternatives, and test theories prior to starting production.
Perfect companion to Effective Prototyping for Software Makers with the same author team and full-color treatment, useful case studies, and hands-on exercises."

This book describes the benefits that emerge when the fields of constraint programming and concurrency meet. On the one hand, constraints can be used in concurrency theory to increase the conciseness and the expressive power of concurrent languages from a pragmatic point of view. On the other hand, problems modeled by using constraints can be solved faster and more efficiently using a concurrent system. Both directions are explored providing two separate lines of development. Firstly the expressive power of a concurrent language is studied, namely Constraint Handling Rules, that supports constraints as a primitive construct. The features of this language which make it Turing powerful are shown. Then a framework is proposed to solve constraint problems that is intended to be deployed on a concurrent system. For the development of this framework the concurrent language Jolie following the Service Oriented paradigm is used. Based on this experience, an extension to Service Oriented Languages is also proposed in order to overcome some of their limitations and to improve the development of concurrent applications.