Now students can master the nuances of Microsoft (R) Office quickly with ILLUSTRATED MICROSOFT (R) OFFICE 2019 & OFFICE 365 ADVANCED, part of today's popular Illustrated Series. This focused, user-friendly approach uses a proven two-page layout that allows students to work through an entire task without turning the page. Clear Learning Outcomes outline the skills for each lesson, while large full-color screen images reflect exactly what students see on their own computers. Each module begins with a brief overview of the principles covered in the lesson and introduces a real-world case scenario to engage students and reinforce critical skills to make them successful in their educational and professional careers. In addition, MindTap and updated SAM (Skills Assessment Manager) online resources are available to guide additional study and ensure successful results.

The Year of the Raven reaches new heights on dark wings! With a few years under its collective belt, the Hearthstone team needed to find an edge: sharper and more striking than a corvid's beak. In The Art of Hearthstone, Volume IV: Year of the Raven, the designers, engineers, and artists of the smash-hit digital card game pour their cunning into innovative design changes, remarkable animated art, and all-new transmedia content. From the haunted lands of Gilneas in The Witchwood soaring to the laboratories of Outland in The Boomsday Project and touching down to the lively arena of Rastakhan's Rumble, the Year of the Raven has something unique for everyone. Fly alongside the Hearthstone team's creative genius (or madness?) to learn how it was done!

"JDBC Metadata, MySQL, and Oracle Recipes" is the only book that focuses on metadata or annotation-based code recipes for JDBC API for use with Oracle and MySQL. It continues where the authors other book, "JDBC Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach," leaves off.

This edition is also a Java EE 5-compliant book, perfect for lightweight Java database development. And it provides cut-and-paste code templates that can be immediately customized and applied in each developer's application development.

This book provides insight and enhanced appreciation of analysis, modeling and control of dynamic systems. The reader is assumed to be familiar with calculus, physics and some programming skills. It might develop the reader's ability to interpret physical significance of mathematical results in system analysis. The book also prepares the reader for more advanced treatment of subsequent knowledge in the automatic control field. Learning objectives are performance-oriented, using for this purpose interactive MATLAB and SIMULINK software tools. It presents realistic problems in order to analyze, design and develop automatic control systems. Learning with computing tools can aid theory and help students to think, analyze and reason in meaningful ways. The book is also complemented with classroom slides and MATLAB and SIMULINK exercise files to aid students to focus on fundamental concepts treated.

Multimedia data comprising of images, audio and video is becoming increasingly common. The decreasing costs of consumer electronic devices such as digital cameras and digital camcorders, along with the ease of transportation facilitated by the Internet, has lead to a phenomenal rise in the amount of multimedia data generated and distributed. Given that this trend of increased use of multimedia data is likely to accelerate, there is an urgent need for providing a clear means of capturing, storing, indexing, retrieving, analyzing and summarizing such data. Content-based access to multimedia data is of primary importance since it is the natural way by which human beings interact with such information. To facilitate the content-based access of multimedia information, the first step is to derive feature measures from these data so that a feature space representation of the data content can be formed. This can subsequently allow for mapping the feature space to the symbol space (semantics) either automatically or through human intervention. Thus, signal to symbol mapping, useful for any practical system, can be successfully achieved. Perspectives on Content-Based Multimedia Systems provides a comprehensive set of techniques to tackle these important issues. This book offers detailed solutions to a wide range of practical problems in building real systems by providing specifics of three systems built by the authors. While providing a systems focus, it also equips the reader with a keen understanding of the fundamental issues, including a formalism for content-based multimedia database systems, multimedia feature extraction, object-based techniques, signature-based techniques and fuzzy retrieval techniques. The performance evaluation issues of practical systems is also explained. This book brings together essential elements of building a content-based multimedia database system in a way that makes them accessible to practitioners in computer science and electrical engineering. It can also serve as a textbook for graduate-level courses.

Mastering modelling, and in particular numerical models, is becoming a crucial and central question in modern computational mechanics. Various tools, able to quantify the quality of a model with regard to another one taken as the reference, have been derived. Applied to computational strategies, these tools lead to new computational methods which are called "adaptive." The present book is concerned with outlining the state of the art and the latest advances in both these important areas.

Papers are selected from a Workshop (Cachan 17-19 September 1997) which is the third of a series devoted to Error Estimators and Adaptivity in Computational Mechanics. The Cachan Workshop dealt with latest advances in adaptive computational methods in mechanics and their impacts on solving engineering problems. It was centered too on providing answers to simple questions such as: what is being used or can be used at present to solve engineering problems? What should be the state of art in the year 2000? What are the new questions involving error estimators and their applications?

Continued progress in Speech Technology in the face of ever-increasing demands on the performance levels of applications is a challenge to the whole speech and language science community. Robust recognition and understanding of spontaneous speech in varied environments, good comprehensibility and naturalness of expressive speech synthesis are goals that cannot be achieved without a change of paradigm. This book argues for interdisciplinary communication and cooperation in problem-solving in general, and discusses the interaction between speech and language engineering and phonetics in particular. With a number of reports on innovative speech technology research as well as more theoretical discussions, it addresses the practical, scientific and sometimes the philosophical problems that stand in the way of cross-disciplinary collaboration and illuminates some of the many possible ways forward.

Audience: Researchers and professionals in speech technology and computational linguists.

Make Excel work for you Excel 2019 All-In-One For Dummies offers eight books in one!! It is completely updated to reflect the major changes Microsoft is making to Office with the 2019 release. From basic Excel functions, such as creating and editing worksheets, to sharing and reviewing worksheets, to editing macros with Visual Basic, it provides you with a broad scope of the most common Excel applications and functions--including formatting worksheets, setting up formulas, protecting worksheets, importing data, charting data, and performing statistical functions. The book covers importing data, building and editing worksheets, creating formulas, generating pivot tables, and performing financial functions, what-if scenarios, database functions, and Web queries. More advanced topics include worksheet sharing and auditing, performing error trapping, building and running macros, charting data, and using Excel in conjunction with Microsoft Power BI (Business Intelligence) to analyze, model, and visualize vast quantities of data from a variety of local and online sources. Get familiar with Worksheet design Find out how to work with charts and graphics Use Excel for data management, analysis, modeling, and visualization Make sense of macros and VBA If you're a new or inexperienced user looking to spend more time on your projects than trying to figure out how to make Excel work for you, this all-encompassing book makes it easy!

E-business standards can better adapt to the changing needs of tomorrow's networked organizations by applying information communication technologies today. ""Information Communication Technology Standardization for E-Business Sectors: Integrating Supply and Demand Factors"" studies the nature, relevance, and quality of standards involved with ICTs and the impact they have on businesses. This ""Premier Reference Source"" discusses the dynamics and mutual impact of factors that condition demand for standards and supply.

The Programmer's Hierarchical Interactive Graphics System (PHIGS) is a computer-graphics standard defining an interface between an application program and a computer-graphics system. PHIGS has been actively under development since 1980. Much of this development has been performed by Technical Committee X3H3 under the American National Standard Institute (ANSI) procedures. PHIGS is also an international standard sponsored by the United States and developed by the international computer-graphics committee, ISO TC97/SC21/WG2. In addition, PHIGS has been selected as the graphics extension to the X-window standard and as part of the Intel i860 P.A.X. standard. The PHIGS standard has received wide acceptance throughout the computer graphics industry. PHIGS libraries are available on most of the high performance three-dimensional graphics platforms. These include IBM, DEC, HP, Sun, Alliant, Stardent, and Silicon Graphics. Despite this acceptance, there are few texts that provide the software engineer with an overview of the standard. The only currently available PHIGS references are in the form of the ANSI functional description, technical papers, and device-specific PHIGS to the novice PHIGS programmer."

Resource Management for Distributed Multimedia Systems addresses the problems and challenges of handling several continuous- media data streams in networked multimedia environments. The work demonstrates how resource management mechanisms can be integrated into a stream handling system. The resulting system includes functions for Quality of Service (QoS) calculations, scheduling, determination of resource requirements, and methods to reduce resource requirements. The work explains the following: a suitable system architecture and resource management scheme that allows for the provision and enforcement of QoS guarantee, resource scheduling mechanisms for CPU and buffer space, mechanisms to measure and collect resource requirements, methods to extend resource management to future scenarios by allowing the reservation of resources in advance and offering sealing mechanisms. . Resource Management for Distributed Multimedia Systems is a comprehensive view of resource management for a broad technical audience that includes computer scientists and engineers involved in developing multimedia applications.

The widespread use of high-speed networks has made the global distribution of digital media contents readily available in an instant. As a result, data hiding was created in an attempt to control the distribution of these copies by verifying or tracking the media signals picked up from copyright information, such as the author or distributor ID. Multimedia Information Hiding Technologies and Methodologies for Controlling Data presents the latest methods and research results in the emerging field of Multimedia Information Hiding (MIH). This comprehensive collection is beneficial to all researchers and engineers working globally in this field and aims to inspire new graduate-level students as they explore this promising field.

Today, e-businesses are adopting pervasive computing with passion but at the same time aware of the operational, ethical, legal, and financial risks involved in it. ""Risk Assessment and Management in Pervasive Computing: Operational, Legal, Ethical, and Financial Perspectives"" examines the implications of pervasive computing from operational, legal, and ethical perspectives so that current and future e-business managers can make responsible decisions about where, when, and how to use this technology. Containing 19 chapters from an international pool of leading experts and field practitioners, this unmatched resource will enhance the awareness of emerging and global issues in e-business risk management.

Several studies have been made to determine the effectiveness of information and communication technologies within small business enterprises, but the focus on e-readiness assessments have been very limited. ""Digital Economies: SMEs and E-Readiness"" provides valuable insights into the current state of the digital economy and the ability of SMEs to leverage information and communication technologies in overcoming their position in the global business market. This innovative collection provides vital information for developing strategic objectives and frameworks that promote economic growth, infrastructure development, capacity building, and educational training.

Machine learning methods are now an important tool for scientists, researchers, engineers and students in a wide range of areas. This book is written for people who want to adopt and use the main tools of machine learning, but aren't necessarily going to want to be machine learning researchers. Intended for students in final year undergraduate or first year graduate computer science programs in machine learning, this textbook is a machine learning toolkit. Applied Machine Learning covers many topics for people who want to use machine learning processes to get things done, with a strong emphasis on using existing tools and packages, rather than writing one's own code. A companion to the author's Probability and Statistics for Computer Science, this book picks up where the earlier book left off (but also supplies a summary of probability that the reader can use). Emphasizing the usefulness of standard machinery from applied statistics, this textbook gives an overview of the major applied areas in learning, including coverage of:* classification using standard machinery (naive bayes; nearest neighbor; SVM)* clustering and vector quantization (largely as in PSCS)* PCA (largely as in PSCS)* variants of PCA (NIPALS; latent semantic analysis; canonical correlation analysis)* linear regression (largely as in PSCS)* generalized linear models including logistic regression* model selection with Lasso, elasticnet* robustness and m-estimators* Markov chains and HMM's (largely as in PSCS)* EM in fairly gory detail; long experience teaching this suggests one detailed example is required, which students hate; but once they've been through that, the next one is easy* simple graphical models (in the variational inference section)* classification with neural networks, with a particular emphasis onimage classification* autoencoding with neural networks* structure learning

This volume contains papers presented at the NATO sponsored Advanced Research Workshop on "Software for Parallel Computation" held at the University of Calabria, Cosenza, Italy, from June 22 to June 26, 1992. The purpose of the workshop was to evaluate the current state-of-the-art of the software for parallel computation, identify the main factors inhibiting practical applications of parallel computers and suggest possible remedies. In particular it focused on parallel software, programming tools, and practical experience of using parallel computers for solving demanding problems. Critical issues relative to the practical use of parallel computing included: portability, reusability and debugging, parallelization of sequential programs, construction of parallel algorithms, and performance of parallel programs and systems. In addition to NATO, the principal sponsor, the following organizations provided a generous support for the workshop: CERFACS, France, C.I.R.A., Italy, C.N.R., Italy, University of Calabria, Italy, ALENIA, Italy, The Boeing Company, U.S.A., CISE, Italy, ENEL - D.S.R., Italy, Alliant Computer Systems, Bull RN Sud, Italy, Convex Computer, Digital Equipment Corporation, Rewlett Packard, Meiko Scientific, U.K., PARSYTEC Computer, Germany, TELMAT Informatique, France, Thinking Machines Corporation.

Continued progress in Speech Technology in the face of ever-increasing demands on the performance levels of applications is a challenge to the whole speech and language science community. Robust recognition and understanding of spontaneous speech in varied environments, good comprehensibility and naturalness of expressive speech synthesis are goals that cannot be achieved without a change of paradigm. This book argues for interdisciplinary communication and cooperation in problem-solving in general, and discusses the interaction between speech and language engineering and phonetics in particular. With a number of reports on innovative speech technology research as well as more theoretical discussions, it addresses the practical, scientific and sometimes the philosophical problems that stand in the way of cross-disciplinary collaboration and illuminates some of the many possible ways forward.

Audience: Researchers and professionals in speech technology and computational linguists.

Photorealistic rendering strives to generate images from computer modeled scenes with an image quality as close to real life as possible. A major issue in rendering is simulation of local and global light reflection in a scene. Both ray tracing and radiosity algorithms capture only some of the possible light reflection phenomena. Recently developed two-pass algorithms combine the ray tracing and radiosity approaches and are able to capture the whole range of light reflection. This book is a collection of papers discussing the latest developments, including a new range of improvements, in stochastic sampling strategies, radiosity form factor calculation, and parallel processing for ray tracing and radiosity. A number of papers on rendering applications in interior design, lighting design, and remote sensing conclude the volume. The contributions are revised versions of papers originally presented at the Second Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, held in Barcelona, Spain, in May 1991. The book fully reflects the state of the art in rendering and presentsa wide variety of novel techniques. It will interest researchers and students in computer graphics, as well as designers who want to apply rendering techniques for realistic simulation in lighting design, interior design, and architecture.

Researchers develop simulation models that emulate real-world situations. While these simulation models are simpler than the real situation, they are still quite complex and time consuming to develop. It is at this point that metamodeling can be used to help build a simulation study based on a complex model. A metamodel is a simpler, analytical model, auxiliary to the simulation model, which is used to better understand the more complex model, to test hypotheses about it, and provide a framework for improving the simulation study. The use of metamodels allows the researcher to work with a set of mathematical functions and analytical techniques to test simulations without the costly running and re-running of complex computer programs. In addition, metamodels have other advantages, and as a result they are being used in a variety of ways: model simplification, optimization, model interpretation, generalization to other models of similar systems, efficient sensitivity analysis, and the use of the metamodel's mathematical functions to answer questions about different variables within a simulation study.

Document imaging is a new discipline in applied computer science. It is building bridges between computer graphics, the world of prepress and press, and the areas of color vision and color reproduction. The focus of this book is of special relevance to people learning how to utilize and integrate such available technology as digital printing or short run color, how to make use of CIM techniques for print products, and how to evaluate related technologies that will become relevant in the next few years. This book is the first to give a comprehensive overview of document imaging, the areas involved, and how they relate. For readers with a background in computer graphics it gives insight into all problems related to putting information in print, a field only very thinly covered in textbooks on computer graphics.

The third volume of The Art of Hearthstone chronicles the artistic achievements that infused the Year of the Mammoth with charm, character, and beauty. Through vivid illustrations and behind-the-scenes interviews with artists and game designers, The Art of Hearthstone draws back the curtain to a massive creative undertaking, showing how a huge team came together to deliver one of Hearthstone's most impressive years ever.