Computational inference is based on an approach to statistical methods that uses modern computational power to simulate distributional properties of estimators and test statistics. This book describes computationally intensive statistical methods in a unified presentation, emphasizing techniques, such as the PDF decomposition, that arise in a wide range of methods.

This book provides a comprehensive and concrete illustration of time series analysis focusing on the state-space model, which has recently attracted increasing attention in a broad range of fields. The major feature of the book lies in its consistent Bayesian treatment regarding whole combinations of batch and sequential solutions for linear Gaussian and general state-space models: MCMC and Kalman/particle filter. The reader is given insight on flexible modeling in modern time series analysis. The main topics of the book deal with the state-space model, covering extensively, from introductory and exploratory methods to the latest advanced topics such as real-time structural change detection. Additionally, a practical exercise using R/Stan based on real data promotes understanding and enhances the reader's analytical capability.

Before use, standard ERP systems such as SAP R/3 need to be customized to meet the concrete requirements of the individual enterprise. This book provides an overview of the process models, methods, and tools offered by SAP and its partners to support this complex and time-consuming process. It begins by characterizing the foundations of the latest ERP systems from both a conceptual and technical viewpoint, whereby the most important components and functions of SAP R/3 are described. The main part of the book then goes on to present the current methods and tools for the R/3 implementation based on newer process models (roadmaps).

Information visualization offers a way to reveal hidden patterns in a visual presentation and allows users to seek information from a visual perspective. Readers of this book will gain an in-depth understanding of the current state of information retrieval visualization. They will be introduced to existing problems along with technical and theoretical findings. The book also provides practical details for the implementation of an information retrieval visualization system.

Looking to become more efficient using Unity? How to Cheat in Unity 5 takes a no-nonsense approach to help you achieve fast and effective results with Unity 5. Geared towards the intermediate user, HTC in Unity 5 provides content beyond what an introductory book offers, and allows you to work more quickly and powerfully in Unity. Packed full with easy-to-follow methods to get the most from Unity, this book explores time-saving features for interface customization and scene management, along with productivity-enhancing ways to work with rendering and optimization. In addition, this book features a companion website at www.alanthorn.net, where you can download the book's companion files and also watch bonus tutorial video content. Learn bite-sized tips and tricks for effective Unity workflows Become a more powerful Unity user through interface customization Enhance your productivity with rendering tricks, better scene organization and more Better understand Unity asset and import workflows Learn techniques to save you time and money during development

Both the way we look at data, through a DBMS, and the nature of data we ask a DBMS to manage have drastically evolved over the last decade, moving from text to images (and to sound to a lesser extent). Visual representations are used extensively within new user interfaces. Powerful visual approaches are being experimented for data manipulation, including the investigation of three dimensional display techniques. Similarly, sophisticated data visualization techniques are dramatically improving the understanding of the information extracted from a database. On the other hand, more and more applications use images as basic data or to enhance the quality and richness of data manipulation services. Image management has opened a wide area of new research topics in image understanding and analysis. The IFIP 2.6 Working Group on Databases strongly believes that a significant mutual enrichment is possible by confronting ideas, concepts and techniques supporting the work of researcher and practitioners in the two areas of visual interfaces to DBMS and DBMS management of visual data. For this reason, IFIP 2.6 has launched a series of conferences on Visual Database Systems. The first one has been held in Tokyo, 1989. VDB-2 was held in Budapest, 1991. This conference is the third in the series. As the preceding editions, the conference addresses researchers and practitioners active or interested in user interfaces, human-computer communication, knowledge representation and management, image processing and understanding, multimedia database techniques and computer vision.

This textbook covers the theoretical backgrounds and practical aspects of image, video and audio feature expression, e.g., color, texture, edge, shape, salient point and area, motion, 3D structure, audio/sound in time, frequency and cepstral domains, structure and melody. Up-to-date algorithms for estimation, search, classification and compact expression of feature data are described in detail. Concepts of signal decomposition (such as segmentation, source tracking and separation), as well as composition, mixing, effects, and rendering, are discussed. Numerous figures and examples help to illustrate the aspects covered. The book was developed on the basis of a graduate-level university course, and most chapters are supplemented by problem-solving exercises. The book is also a self-contained introduction both for researchers and developers of multimedia content analysis systems in industry.

SISDEP a (TM)95 provides an international forum for the presentation of state-of-the-art research and development results in the area of numerical process and device simulation. Continuously shrinking device dimensions, the use of new materials, and advanced processing steps in the manufacturing of semiconductor devices require new and improved software. The trend towards increasing complexity in structures and process technology demands advanced models describing all basic effects and sophisticated two and three dimensional tools for almost arbitrarily designed geometries. The book contains the latest results obtained by scientists from more than 20 countries on process simulation and modeling, simulation of process equipment, device modeling and simulation of novel devices, power semiconductors, and sensors, on device simulation and parameter extraction for circuit models, practical application of simulation, numerical methods, and software.

Content-based multimedia retrieval is a challenging research field with many unsolved problems. This monograph details concepts and algorithms for robust and efficient information retrieval of two different types of multimedia data: waveform-based music data and human motion data. It first examines several approaches in music information retrieval, in particular general strategies as well as efficient algorithms. The book then introduces a general and unified framework for motion analysis, retrieval, and classification, highlighting the design of suitable features, the notion of similarity used to compare data streams, and data organization.

Instructional quality can make or break the learning experience, especially in digital environments where the expressional nuances of interpersonal communication are lost. The most effective distance education instructors and experts are those who recognize the educational needs of students and are able to address those needs through creative use of the technological tools available to them. Identification, Evaluation, and Perceptions of Distance Education Experts explores the current and future trends, needs, and priorities that affect the development of distance education in a postmodern world. This premier reference work will be of significance to those interested in online learning, teaching and training, communication, and education across multiple sectors such as universities, colleges, schools, profit/non-profit e-organizations, and e-commerce.

Each Student Book and ActiveBook have has clearly laid out pages with a range of supportive features to aid learning and teaching: Getting to know your unit sections ensure learners understand the grading criteria and unit requirements. Getting ready for Assessment sections focus on preparation for external assessment with guidance for learners on what to expect. Hints and tips will help them prepare for assessment and sample answers are provided for a range of question types including, short and long answer questions, all with a supporting commentary. Learners can also prepare for internal assessment using this feature. A case study of a learner completing the internal assessment for that unit covering 'How I got started', 'How I brought it all together' and 'What I got from the experience'. Pause Point feature provide opportunities for learners to self-evaluate their learning at regular intervals. Each Pause Point point feature gives learners a Hint or Extend option to either revisit and reinforce the topic or to encourage independent research or study skills. Case Study and Theory into Practice features enable development of problem-solving skills and place the theory into real life situations learners could encounter. Assessment Activity/Practice provide scaffolded assessment practice activities that help prepare learners for assessment. Within each assessment practice activity, a Plan, Do and Review section supports learners' formative assessment by making sure they fully understand what they are being asked to do, what their goals are and how to evaluate the task and consider how they could improve. Dedicated Think Future pages provide case studies from the industry, with a focus on aspects of skills development that can be put into practice in a real work environment and further study.

Soft computing represents a collection of techniques, such as neural networks, evolutionary computation, fuzzy logic, and probabilistic reasoning. As - posed to conventional "hard" computing, these techniques tolerate impre- sion and uncertainty, similar to human beings. In the recent years, successful applications of these powerful methods have been published in many dis- plines in numerous journals, conferences, as well as the excellent books in this book series on Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing. This volume is dedicated to recent novel applications of soft computing in multimedia processing. The book is composed of 21 chapters written by experts in their respective fields, addressing various important and timely problems in multimedia computing such as content analysis, indexing and retrieval, recognition and compression, processing and filtering, etc. In the chapter authored by Guan, Muneesawang, Lay, Amin, and Lee, a radial basis function network with Laplacian mixture model is employed to perform image and video retrieval. D. Androutsos, P. Androutsos, Plataniotis, and Venetsanopoulos investigate color image indexing and retrieval within a small-world framework. Wu and Yap develop a framework of fuzzy relevance feedback to model the uncertainty of users' subjective perception in image retrieval.

This book compares existing soil erosion models and determines their suitability for predicting the impacts of global change upon soil erosion. The common datasets used for the evaluation are drawn from both temperate and semi-arid areas; they represent 73 site-years of data from seven sites in three countries. Six field-scale erosion models are evaluated; five of these are continuous-simulation types (GLEAMS, EPIC, CSEP, MEDRUSH and WEPP), the other is event-based (EUROSERM). After an introduction, the results of the model evaluation exercise are presented. Subsequent sections deal with weaknesses or omissions in current modelling approaches, descriptions of specific erosion models, and potential or actual model applications.

A collection of surveys and research papers on mathematical software and algorithms. The common thread is that the field of mathematical applications lies on the border between algebra and geometry. Topics include polyhedral geometry, elimination theory, algebraic surfaces, Gröbner bases, triangulations of point sets and the mutual relationship. This diversity is accompanied by the abundance of available software systems which often handle only special mathematical aspects. This is why the volume also focuses on solutions to the integration of mathematical software systems. This includes low-level and XML based high-level communication channels as well as general frameworks for modular systems.

Water Resource Modeling and Computational Technologies, Seventh Edition provides the reader with a comprehensive overview of the applications that computational techniques have in various sectors of water resource engineering. The book explores applications of recent modeling and computational techniques in various sectors of water resource engineering, including hydroinformatics, irrigation engineering, climate change, hydrologic forecasting, floods, droughts, image processing, GIS, water quality, aquifer mapping, basin scale modeling, computational fluid dynamics, numerical modeling of surges and groundwater flow, river engineering, optimal reservoir operation, multipurpose projects, and water resource management. As such, this is a must read for hydrologists, civil engineers and water resource managers.

In the same way that infrastructures such as transportation, electricity, sewage, and water supply are widely assumed to be integrators of urban spaces, information infrastructures are assumed to be integrators of information spaces. With the advent of Web 2.0 and new types of information infrastructures such as online social networks and smart mobile platforms, a more in-depth understanding of the various rights to access, use, develop, and modify information infrastructure resources is necessary. Perspectives and Implications for the Development of Information Infrastructures aims at addressing this need by offering a fresh new perspective on information infrastructure development. It achieves this by drawing on and adapting theory that was initially developed to study natural resource commons arrangements such as inshore fisheries, forests, irrigation systems, and pastures, while placing great emphasis on the complex problems and social dilemmas that often arise in the negotiations.

The advent of multimedia technology is creating a number of new problems in the fields of computer and communication systems. Perhaps the most important of these problems in communication, and certainly the most interesting, is that of designing networks to carry multimedia traffic, including digital audio and video, with acceptable quality. The main challenge in integrating the different services needed by the different types of traffic into the same network (an objective that is made worthwhile by its obvious economic advantages) is to satisfy the performance requirements of continuous media applications, as the quality of audio and video streams at the receiver can be guaranteed only if bounds on delay, delay jitters, bandwidth, and reliability are guaranteed by the network. Since such guarantees cannot be provided by traditional packet-switching technology, a number of researchers and research groups during the last several years have tried to meet the challenge by proposing new protocols or modifications of old ones, to make packet-switching networks capable of delivering audio and video with good quality while carrying all sorts of other traffic. The focus of this book is on HeiTS (the Heidelberg Transport System), and its contributions to integrated services network design. The HeiTS architecture is based on using the Internet Stream Protocol Version 2 (ST-II) at the network layer. The Heidelberg researchers were the first to implement ST-II. The author documents this activity in the book and provides thorough coverage of the improvements made to the protocol. The book also includes coverage of HeiTP as used in error handling, error control, congestion control, and the full specification of ST2+, a new version of ST-II. The ideas and techniques implemented by the Heidelberg group and their coverage in this volume apply to many other approaches to multimedia networking.

This book addresses the changing role of networks and the evolving structure of an Infrastructure Superhighway. The requirements for leadership in telecommunications are reviewed from different viewpoints: Network operators, equipment manufacturers, software developers and user organizations. Emphasis is placed on multimedia and what multimedia solutions would mean to telephone utilities and endusers. Based on extensive research undertaken in Europe, US and Japan, Dimitris Chorafas identifies new domains of applications, presents the breakthroughs which have currently been achieved and outlines the systems solutions necessary to fruitfully exploit new technology.

Manufacturing and operations management paradigms are evolving toward more open and resilient spaces where innovation is driven not only by ever-changing customer needs but also by agile and fast-reacting networked structures. Flexibility, adaptability and responsiveness are properties that the next generation of systems must have in order to successfully support such new emerging trends. Customers are being attracted to be involved in Co-innovation Networks, as - proved responsiveness and agility is expected from industry ecosystems. Renewed production systems needs to be modeled, engineered and deployed in order to achieve cost-effective solutions. BASYS conferences have been developed and organized as a forum in which to share visions and research findings for innovative sustainable and knowledge-based products-services and manufacturing models. Thus, the focus of BASYS is to discuss how human actors, emergent technologies and even organizations are integrated in order to redefine the way in which the val- creation process must be conceived and realized. BASYS 2010, which was held in Valencia, Spain, proposed new approaches in automation where synergies between people, systems and organizations need to be fully exploited in order to create high added-value products and services. This book contains the selection of the papers which were accepted for presentation at the BASYS 2010 conference, covering consolidated and emerging topics of the conference scope.

This book identifies institutional mechanisms that can be used to promote consumer confidence in direct online sales with businesses (B2C e-commerce). It argues that enhancing the access to justice in a multidimensional sense can potentially offer an effective means of boosting consumer confidence. It introduces a conceptual framework for a multidimensional approach to access to justice in the context of consumer protection, describing the various reasonable criteria needed to satisfy consumer demands in B2C e-commerce. The framework, which reflects all essential aspects of consumers' expectations when they engage in online transactions, provides a benchmark for the evaluation of various consumer protection mechanisms. Based on an analysis of different mechanisms and using the framework's criteria, the practice of private ordering, which does not rely on the creation of rules of law but rather on the use of technology as a solution, appears to offer a meaningful way to enhance access to justice in B2C e-commerce. However, though private ordering holds considerable potential, certain weaknesses still need to be eliminated. This book demonstrates how private ordering can be successfully implemented with the help of an intermediary, a neutral third party that plays an integral part in the collaborative task of facilitating various aspects of private ordering, thus helping to limit the risks of failure and ensuring a fairer market setting. In order to move forward, it argues that the state, with its wealth of material resources and incentive options, is the institution best suited to acting as an intermediary in facilitating private ordering. This promising proposal can improve consumer protection, which will in turn boost consumer confidence.

The book describes what these models are, what they are based on, how they function, and then, most innovatively, how they can be used to generate new useful knowledge about the environmental system.

Discusses this generation of knowledge by computer models from an epistemological perspective and illustrates it by numerous examples from applied and fundamental research.

Includes ample technical appendices and is a valuable source of information for graduate students and scientists alike working in the field of environmental sciences.

This book features 13 papers presented at the Fifth International Symposium on Recurrence Plots, held August 2013 in Chicago, IL. It examines recent applications and developments in recurrence plots and recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) with special emphasis on biological and cognitive systems and the analysis of coupled systems using cross-recurrence methods. Readers will discover new applications and insights into a range of systems provided by recurrence plot analysis and new theoretical and mathematical developments in recurrence plots. Recurrence plot based analysis is a powerful tool that operates on real-world complex systems that are nonlinear, non-stationary, noisy, of any statistical distribution, free of any particular model type and not particularly long. Quantitative analyses promote the detection of system state changes, synchronized dynamical regimes or classification of system states. The book will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience of recurrence plot users and researchers interested in time series analysis of complex systems in general.

This book provides an overview of the theory and application of linear and nonlinear mixed-effects models in the analysis of grouped data, such as longitudinal data, repeated measures, and multilevel data. Over 170 figures are included in the book.