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

Volume 55 covers some particularly hot topics. Linda Harasim writes about education and the Web in "The Virtual University: A State of the Art." She discusses the issues that will need to be addressed if online education is to live up to expectations. Neville Holmes covers a related subject in his chapter "The Net, the Web, and the Children." He argues that the Web is an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, development and highlights the division between the rich and the poor within and across nations. Continuing the WWW theme, George Mihaila, Louqa Raschid, and Maria-Esther Vidal look at the problems of using the Web and finding the information you want.
Naren Ramakrishnan and Anath Grama discuss another aspect of finding relevant information in large databases in their contribution. They discuss the algorithms, techniques, and methodologies for effective application of scientific data mining.
Returning to the Web theme, Ross Anderson, Frank Stajano, and Jong-Hyeon Lee address the issue of security policies. Their survey of the most significant security policy models in the literature shows how security may mean different things in different contexts.
John Savage, Alan Selman, and Carl Smith take a step back from the applications and address how theoretical computer science has had an impact on practical computing concepts. Finally, Yuan Taur takes a step even further back and discusses the development of the computer chip.
Thus, Volume 55 takes us from the very fundamentals of computer science-the chip-right to the applications and user interface with the Web.

Throughout time, scientists have looked to nature in order to understand and model solutions for complex real-world problems. In particular, the study of self-organizing entities, such as social insect populations, presents a new opportunity within the field of artificial intelligence. >Emerging Research on Swarm Intelligence and Algorithm Optimization discusses current research analyzing how the collective behavior of decentralized systems in the natural world can be applied to intelligent system design. Discussing the application of swarm principles, optimization techniques, and key algorithms being used in the field, this publication serves as an essential reference for academicians, upper-level students, IT developers, and IT theorists.

Process calculi are among the most successful models of concurrent systems. Various behavior equivalences between processes are central notions in CCS (calculus of communicating systems) and other process calculi. In the real applications, specification and implementation are described as two processes, and correctness of programs is treated as a certain behavior equivalence between them. The purpose of this book is to establish a theory of approximate correctness and infinite evolution of concurrent programs by employing some notions and tools from point-set topology. This book is restricted to CCS for simplicity, but the main idea also applies to some other process calculi. The concept of bisimulation limits, useful for the understanding and analysis of infinite evolution of processes, is introduced. In addition, the notions of near bisimulations and bisimulation indexes, suitable in describing approximate correctness of concurrent programs, are proposed. The book will be of particular interest to researchers in the fields of theoretical computer science, especially theory of concurrency and hybrid systems, and graduate students in related disciplines. It will also be valuable to practical system designers developing concurrent and/or real-time systems.

This book brings together research on numerical methods adapted for Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). It explains recent efforts to adapt classic numerical methods, including solution of linear equations and FFT, for massively parallel GPU architectures. This volume consolidates recent research and adaptations, covering widely used methods that are at the core of many scientific and engineering computations. Each chapter is written by authors working on a specific group of methods; these leading experts provide mathematical background, parallel algorithms and implementation details leading to reusable, adaptable and scalable code fragments. This book also serves as a GPU implementation manual for many numerical algorithms, sharing tips on GPUs that can increase application efficiency. The valuable insights into parallelization strategies for GPUs are supplemented by ready-to-use code fragments. Numerical Computations with GPUs targets professionals and researchers working in high performance computing and GPU programming. Advanced-level students focused on computer science and mathematics will also find this book useful as secondary text book or reference.

Over the past two decades, software engineering has come a long way from object-based to object-oriented to component-based design and development. Invasive software composition is a new technique that unifies and extends recent software engineering concepts like generic programming, aspect-oriented development, architecture systems, or subject-oriented development. To improve reuse, this new method regards software components as grayboxes and integrates them during composition. Building on a minimal set of program transformations, composition operator libraries can be developed that parameterize, extend, connect, mediate, and aspect-weave components. The book is centered around the JAVA language and the freely available demonstrator library COMPOST. It provides a wealth of materials for researchers, students, and professional software architects alike.

Despite differing origins, constraint programming and mathematical programming are beginning to merge. Constraint programming has grown out of the logic programming community as part of an effort to embed constraints in a programming language. Mathematical programming, a much older field, is rooted in the mathematics of optimization. Because these two areas have complementary strengths, there are ongoing efforts to integrate the two.Constraint and Integer Programming presents some of the basic ideas of constraint programming and mathematical programming, explores approaches to integration, brings us up to date on heuristic methods, and attempts to discern future directions in this fast-moving field.
Constraint and Integer Programming is organized as follows: Chapter 1 is a high level overview of the main concepts of Constraint Programming (CP) and Integer Programming (IP) used in the book. Chapter 2 informally introduces integration methods describing and classifying the main works in the field. Chapter 3 outlines a unifying framework which involves the main concepts of CP and IP, underlining similarities and differences, and stating the basis for possible integrations. Chapter 4 describes global constraints as a vehicle for integrating IP concepts in CP in a transparent way for the user. Chapter 5 presents various ways to integrate relaxations in Constraint Programming focussing on global constraints. Chapter 6 presents hybrid solvers and Chapter 7 outlines Column Generation and its integration in Constraint Programming. Chapter 8 examines randomization and problem structure as a basis for understanding the intrinsic difficulty of the combinatorial problems. Chapter 9 studies the use of local search and meta-heuristics in CP. Chapter 10 is devoted to open perspectives and future directions.

This book presents the latest research findings and state-of-the-art solutions on optimization techniques and provides new research direction and developments. Both the theoretical and practical aspects of the book will be much beneficial to experts and students in optimization and operation research community. It selects high quality papers from The International Conference on Optimization: Techniques and Applications (ICOTA2013). The conference is an official conference series of POP (The Pacific Optimization Research Activity Group; there are over 500 active members). These state-of-the-art works in this book authored by recognized experts will make contributions to the development of optimization with its applications.

The growing demand for high quality, safety, and security of software systems can only be met by rigorous application of formal methods during software design. Tools for formal methods in general, however, do not provide a sufficient level of automatic processing. This book methodically investigates the potential of first-order logic automated theorem provers for applications in software engineering.Illustrated by complete case studies on verification of communication and security protocols and logic-based component reuse, the book characterizes proof tasks to allow an assessment of the provers capabilities. Necessary techniques and extensions, e.g., for handling inductive and modal proof tasks, or for controlling the prover, are covered in detail. The book demonstrates that state-of-the-art automated theorem provers are capable of automatically handling important tasks during the development of high-quality software and it provides many helpful techniques for increasing practical usability of the automated theorem prover for successful applications.

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.

Soft City Culture and Technology: The Betaville Project discusses the complete cycle of conception, development, and deployment of the Betaville platform.

Betaville is a massively participatory online environment for distributed 3D design and development of proposals for changes to the built environment an experimental integration of art, design, and software development for the public realm. Through a detailed account of Betaville from a Big Crazy Idea to a working "deep social medium," the author examines the current conditions of performance and accessibility of hardware, software, networks, and skills that can be brought together into a new form of open public design and deliberation space, for and spanning and integrating the disparate spheres of art, architecture, social media, and engineering.

Betaville is an ambitious enterprise, of building compelling and constructive working relationships in situations where roles and disciplinary boundaries must be as agile as the development process of the software itself. Through a considered account and analysis of the interdependencies between Betaville's project design, development methods, and deployment, the reader can gain a deeper understanding of the potential socio-technical forms of New Soft Cities: blended virtual-physical worlds, whose "public works" must ultimately serve and succeed as massively collaborative works of art and infrastructure."

This book contains the research on modeling bodies, cloth and character based adaptation performed during the last 3 years at MIRALab at the University of Geneva. More than ten researchers have worked together in order to reach a truly 3D Virtual Try On. What we mean by Virtual Try On is the possibility of anyone to give dimensions on her predefined body and obtain her own sized shape body, select a 3D cloth and see oneself animated in Real-Time, walking along a catwalk. Some systems exist today but are unable to adapt to body dimensions, have no real-time animation of body and clothes. A truly system on the web of Virtual Try On does not exist so far. This book is an attempt to explain how to build a 3D Virtual Try On system which is now very much in demand in the clothing industry. To describe this work, the book is divided into five chapters. The first chapter contains a brief historical background of general deformation methods. It ends with a section on the 3D human body scanner systems that are used both for rapid p- totyping and statistical analyses of the human body size variations.

Cyberspace security is a critical subject of our times.

On the one hand the development of Internet, mobile communications, distributed computing, computer software and databases storing essential enterprise information has helped to conduct business and personal communication between individual people. On the other hand it has created many opportunities for abuse, fraud and expensive damage. This book is a selection of the best papers presented at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop dealing with the Subject of Cyberspace Security and Defense. The level of the individual contributions in the volume is advanced and suitable for senior and graduate students, researchers and technologists who wish to get some feeling of the state of the art in several sub-disciplines of Cyberspace security.

Several papers provide a broad-brush description of national security issues and brief summaries of technology states. These papers can be read and appreciated by technically enlightened managers and executives who want to understand security issues and approaches to technical solutions. An important question of our times is not "Should we do something for enhancing our digital assets security," the question is "How to do it."

The design process of embedded systems has changed substantially in recent years. One of the main reasons for this change is the pressure to shorten time-to-market when designing digital systems. To shorten the product cycles, programmable processes are used to implement more and more functionality of the embedded system. Therefore, nowadays, embedded systems are very often implemented by heterogeneous systems consisting of ASICs, processors, memories and peripherals. As a consequence, the research topic of hardware/software co-design, dealing with the problems of designing these heterogeneous systems, has gained great importance. Hardware/Software Co-design for Data Flow Dominated Embedded Systems introduces the different tasks of hardware/software co-design including system specification, hardware/software partitioning, co-synthesis and co-simulation. The book summarizes and classifies state-of-the-art co-design tools and methods for these tasks. In addition, the co-design tool COOL is presented which solves the co-design tasks for the class of data-flow dominated embedded systems. In Hardware/Software Co-design for Data Flow Dominated Embedded Systems the primary emphasis has been put on the hardware/software partitioning and the co-synthesis phase and their coupling. In contrast to many other publications in this area, a mathematical formulation of the hardware/software partitioning problem is given. This problem formulation supports target architectures consisting of multiple processors and multiple ASICs. Several novel approaches are presented and compared for solving the partitioning problem, including an MILP approach, a heuristic solution and an approach based on geneticalgorithms. The co-synthesis phase is based on the idea of controlling the system by means of a static run-time scheduler implemented in hardware. New algorithms are introduced which generate a complete set of hardware and software specifications required to implement heterogeneous systems. All of these techniques are described in detail and exemplified. Hardware/Software Co-design for Data Flow Dominated Embedded Systems is intended to serve students and researchers working on hardware/software co-design. At the same time the variety of presented techniques automating the design tasks of hardware/software systems will be of interest to industrial engineers and designers of digital systems. From the foreword by Peter Marwedel: Niemann's method should be known by all persons working in the field. Hence, I recommend this book for everyone who is interested in hardware/software co-design.

Researches and developers of simulation models state that the Java program ming language presents a unique and significant opportunity for important changes in the way we develop simulation models today. The most important characteristics of the Java language that are advantageous for simulation are its multi-threading capabilities, its facilities for executing programs across the Web, and its graphics facilities. It is feasible to develop compatible and reusable simulation components that will facilitate the construction of newer and more complex models. This is possible with Java development environments. Another important trend that begun very recently is web-based simulation, i.e., and the execution of simulation models using Internet browser software. This book introduces the application of the Java programming language in discrete-event simulation. In addition, the fundamental concepts and prac tical simulation techniques for modeling different types of systems to study their general behavior and their performance are introduced. The approaches applied are the process interaction approach to discrete-event simulation and object-oriented modeling. Java is used as the implementation language and UML as the modeling language. The first offers several advantages compared to C++, the most important being: thread handling, graphical user interfaces (QUI) and Web computing. The second language, UML (Unified Modeling Language) is the standard notation used today for modeling systems as a collection of classes, class relationships, objects, and object behavior."

PREVIOUS EDITIONThis textbook introduces the "Fundamentals of Multimedia", addressing real issues commonly faced in the workplace. The essential concepts are explained in a practical way to enable students to apply their existing skills to address problems in multimedia. Fully revised and updated, this new edition now includes coverage of such topics as 3D TV, social networks, high-efficiency video compression and conferencing, wireless and mobile networks, and their attendant technologies. Features: presents an overview of the key concepts in multimedia, including color science; reviews lossless and lossy compression methods for image, video and audio data; examines the demands placed by multimedia communications on wired and wireless networks; discusses the impact of social media and cloud computing on information sharing and on multimedia content search and retrieval; includes study exercises at the end of each chapter; provides supplementary resources for both students and instructors at an associated website.

The book provides a platform for dealing with the flaws and failings of the soft computing paradigm through different manifestations. The different chapters highlight the necessity of the hybrid soft computing methodology in general with emphasis on several application perspectives in particular. Typical examples include (a) Study of Economic Load Dispatch by Various Hybrid Optimization Techniques, (b) An Application of Color Magnetic Resonance Brain Image Segmentation by Para Optimus LG Activation Function, (c) Hybrid Rough-PSO Approach in Remote Sensing Imagery Analysis, (d) A Study and Analysis of Hybrid Intelligent Techniques for Breast Cancer Detection using Breast Thermograms, and (e) Hybridization of 2D-3D Images for Human Face Recognition. The elaborate findings of the chapters enhance the exhibition of the hybrid soft computing paradigm in the field of intelligent computing.

This text helps the reader generate clear, effective documentation that is tailored to the information requirements of the end-user. Written for technical writers and their managers, quality assurance experts, and software engineers, the book describes a user-centered information design method (UCID) that should help ensure documentation conveys significant information for the user. The UCID shows how to: integrate the four major information components of a software system - user interface labels, messages, online and printed documentation; make sure these elements work together to improve usability; deploy iterative design and prototyping procedures that minimize flaws and save time and money; and guide technical writers effectively.

As the first book devoted to relational data mining, this coherently written multi-author monograph provides a thorough introduction and systematic overview of the area. The first part introduces the reader to the basics and principles of classical knowledge discovery in databases and inductive logic programming; subsequent chapters by leading experts assess the techniques in relational data mining in a principled and comprehensive way; finally, three chapters deal with advanced applications in various fields and refer the reader to resources for relational data mining.This book will become a valuable source of reference for R&D professionals active in relational data mining. Students as well as IT professionals and ambitioned practitioners interested in learning about relational data mining will appreciate the book as a useful text and gentle introduction to this exciting new field.

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.

Templates are used to generate all kinds of text, including computer code. The last decade, the use of templates gained a lot of popularity due to the increase of dynamic web applications. Templates are a tool for programmers, and implementations of template engines are most times based on practical experience rather than based on a theoretical background.

This book reveals the mathematical background of templates and shows interesting findings for improving the practical use of templates.

First, a framework to determine the necessary computational power for the template metalanguage is presented. The template metalanguage does not need to be Turing-complete to be useful. A non-Turing-complete metalanguage enforces separation of concerns between the view and model.

Second, syntactical correctness of all languages of the templates and generated code is ensured. This includes the syntactical correctness of the template metalanguage and the output language. Third, case studies show that the achieved goals are applicable in practice. It is even shown that syntactical correctness helps to prevent cross-site scripting attacks in web applications.

The target audience of this book is twofold. The first group exists of researcher interested in the mathematical background of templates. The second group exists of users of templates. This includes designers of template engines on one side and programmers and web designers using templates on the other side"

This book provides a comprehensive and practically minded introduction into serious games for law enforcement agencies. Serious games offer wide ranging benefits for law enforcement with applications from professional trainings to command-level decision making to the preparation for crises events. This book explains the conceptual foundations of virtual and augmented reality, gamification and simulation. It further offers practical guidance on the process of serious games development from user requirements elicitation to evaluation. The chapters are intended to provide principles, as well as hands-on knowledge to plan, design, test and apply serious games successfully in a law enforcement environment. A diverse set of case studies showcases the enormous variety that is possible in serious game designs and application areas and offers insights into concrete design decisions, design processes, benefits and challenges. The book is meant for law enforcement professionals interested in commissioning their own serious games as well as game designers interested in collaborative pedagogy and serious games for the law enforcement and security sector.