This timely text/reference explores the business and technical issues involved in the management of information systems in the era of big data and beyond. Topics and features: presents review questions and discussion topics in each chapter for classroom group work and individual research assignments; discusses the potential use of a variety of big data tools and techniques in a business environment, explaining how these can fit within an information systems strategy; reviews existing theories and practices in information systems, and explores their continued relevance in the era of big data; describes the key technologies involved in information systems in general and big data in particular, placing these technologies in an historic context; suggests areas for further research in this fast moving domain; equips readers with an understanding of the important aspects of a data scientist's job; provides hands-on experience to further assist in the understanding of the technologies involved.

Articles in this book examine various materials and how to determine directly the limit state of a structure, in the sense of limit analysis and shakedown analysis. Apart from classical applications in mechanical and civil engineering contexts, the book reports on the emerging field of material design beyond the elastic limit, which has further industrial design and technological applications. Readers will discover that "Direct Methods" and the techniques presented here can in fact be used to numerically estimate the strength of structured materials such as composites or nano-materials, which represent fruitful fields of future applications. Leading researchers outline the latest computational tools and optimization techniques and explore the possibility of obtaining information on the limit state of a structure whose post-elastic loading path and constitutive behavior are not well defined or well known. Readers will discover how Direct Methods allow rapid and direct access to requested information in mathematically constructive manners without cumbersome step-by-step computation. Both researchers already interested or involved in the field and practical engineers who want to have a panorama of modern methods for structural safety assessment will find this book valuable. It provides the reader with the latest developments and a significant amount of references on the topic.

This book constitutes thoroughly refereed and revised selected papers from the 10th International Symposium on Algorithms and Experiments for Sensor Systems, Wireless Networks and Distributed Robotics, ALGOSENSORS 2014, held in Wroclaw, Poland, on September 12, 2014. The 10 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 20 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: robot planning; algorithms and data structures on graphs; and wireless networks.

The Proceedings of SocProS 2014 serves as an academic bonanza for scientists and researchers working in the field of Soft Computing. This book contains theoretical as well as practical aspects using fuzzy logic, neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence algorithms, etc., with many applications under the umbrella of 'Soft Computing'. The book is beneficial for young as well as experienced researchers dealing across complex and intricate real world problems for which finding a solution by traditional methods is a difficult task. The different application areas covered in the Proceedings are: Image Processing, Cryptanalysis, Industrial Optimization, Supply Chain Management, Newly Proposed Nature Inspired Algorithms, Signal Processing, Problems related to Medical and Healthcare, Networking Optimization Problems, etc.

This book collects the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference onon Algorithms and Discrete Applied Mathematics, CALDAM 2015, held in Kanpur, India, in February 2015. The volume contains 26 full revised papers from 58 submissions along with 2 invited talks presented at the conference. The workshop covered a diverse range of topics on algorithms and discrete mathematics, including computational geometry, algorithms including approximation algorithms, graph theory and computational complexity.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services, GECON 2014, held in Cardiff, UK, in September 2014. The 8 revised full papers and 7 paper-in-progress presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 24 submissions. The presentation sessions that have been set up are: Cloud Adoption, Work in Progress on Market Dynamics, Cost Optimization, Work in Progress on Pricing, Contracts and Service Selection and Economic Aspects of Quality of Service.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Internet Technology, ICDCIT 2015, held in Bhubaneswar, India, in February 2015. The 12 revised full papers presented together with 30 short papers and 9 invited talks in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 221 submissions. The papers cover topics such as distributed computing and algorithms; internet technologies and Web services; secure computing and communication; cloud computing; information retrieval and recommender systems and societal applications.

This timely review volume summarizes the state-of-the-art developments in nature-inspired algorithms and applications with the emphasis on swarm intelligence and bio-inspired computation. Topics include the analysis and overview of swarm intelligence and evolutionary computation, hybrid metaheuristic algorithms, bat algorithm, discrete cuckoo search, firefly algorithm, particle swarm optimization, and harmony search as well as convergent hybridization. Application case studies have focused on the dehydration of fruits and vegetables by the firefly algorithm and goal programming, feature selection by the binary flower pollination algorithm, job shop scheduling, single row facility layout optimization, training of feed-forward neural networks, damage and stiffness identification, synthesis of cross-ambiguity functions by the bat algorithm, web document clustering, truss analysis, water distribution networks, sustainable building designs and others. As a timely review, this book can serve as an ideal reference for graduates, lecturers, engineers and researchers in computer science, evolutionary computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computational intelligence, data mining, engineering optimization and designs.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science held in Pec pod Snezkou, Czech Republic, during January 24-29, 2015. The book features 8 invited talks and 42 regular papers which were carefully reviewed and selected from 101 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections named: foundations of computer science; software and Web engineering; data, information, and knowledge engineering; and cryptography, security, and verification.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Australasian Conference on Artificial Life and Computational Intelligence, ACALCI 2015, held in Newcastle, NSW, Australia, in February 2015. The 34 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 63 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: philosophy and theory; game environments and methods; learning, memory and optimization; and applications and implementations.

This book covers the concept of the Semantic Web-what it is, the components that comprise it, including Linked Data, and the various ways that libraries are engaged in contributing to its development in making library resources and services ever more accessible to end-users.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, Lanzhou, China, in July 2014. The 45 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 421 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on classification and semi-supervised learning; clustering and kernel; application to recognition; sampling and big data; application to detection; decision tree learning; learning and adaptation; similarity and decision making; learning with uncertainty; improved learning algorithms and applications.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Energy Minimization Methods in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, EMMCVPR 2015, held in Hong Kong, China, in January 2015. The 36 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on discrete and continuous optimization; image restoration and inpainting; segmentation; PDE and variational methods; motion, tracking and multiview reconstruction; statistical methods and learning; and medical image analysis.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Systems Simulation, Asia Simulation 2014, held in Kitakyushu, Japan, in October 2014. The 32 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 69 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on modeling and simulation technology; network simulation; high performance computing and cloud simulation; numerical simulation and visualization; simulation of instrumentation and control application; simulation technology in diversified higher education; general purpose simulation.

The two volumes LNCS 8805 and 8806 constitute the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of 18 workshops held at the 20th International Conference on Parallel Computing, Euro-Par 2014, in Porto, Portugal, in August 2014. The 100 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 173 submissions. The volumes include papers from the following workshops: APCI&E (First Workshop on Applications of Parallel Computation in Industry and Engineering - BigDataCloud (Third Workshop on Big Data Management in Clouds) - DIHC (Second Workshop on Dependability and Interoperability in Heterogeneous Clouds) - FedICI (Second Workshop on Federative and Interoperable Cloud Infrastructures) - Hetero Par (12th International Workshop on Algorithms, Models and Tools for Parallel Computing on Heterogeneous Platforms) - HiBB (5th Workshop on High Performance Bioinformatics and Biomedicine) - LSDVE (Second Workshop on Large Scale Distributed Virtual Environments on Clouds and P2P) - MuCoCoS (7th International Workshop on Multi-/Many-core Computing Systems) - OMHI (Third Workshop on On-chip Memory Hierarchies and Interconnects) - PADAPS (Second Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Agent-Based Simulations) - PROPER (7th Workshop on Productivity and Performance) - Resilience (7th Workshop on Resiliency in High Performance Computing with Clusters, Clouds, and Grids) - REPPAR (First International Workshop on Reproducibility in Parallel Computing) - ROME (Second Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for the Many Core Era) - SPPEXA (Workshop on Software for Exascale Computing) - TASUS (First Workshop on Techniques and Applications for Sustainable Ultrascale Computing Systems) - UCHPC (7th Workshop on Un Conventional High Performance Computing) and VHPC (9th Workshop on Virtualization in High-Performance Cloud Computing.

The two volumes LNCS 8805 and 8806 constitute the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of 18 workshops held at the 20th International Conference on Parallel Computing, Euro-Par 2014, in Porto, Portugal, in August 2014. The 100 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 173 submissions. The volumes include papers from the following workshops: APCI&E (First Workshop on Applications of Parallel Computation in Industry and Engineering - BigDataCloud (Third Workshop on Big Data Management in Clouds) - DIHC (Second Workshop on Dependability and Interoperability in Heterogeneous Clouds) - FedICI (Second Workshop on Federative and Interoperable Cloud Infrastructures) - Hetero Par (12th International Workshop on Algorithms, Models and Tools for Parallel Computing on Heterogeneous Platforms) - HiBB (5th Workshop on High Performance Bioinformatics and Biomedicine) - LSDVE (Second Workshop on Large Scale Distributed Virtual Environments on Clouds and P2P) - MuCoCoS (7th International Workshop on Multi-/Many-core Computing Systems) - OMHI (Third Workshop on On-chip Memory Hierarchies and Interconnects) - PADAPS (Second Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Agent-Based Simulations) - PROPER (7th Workshop on Productivity and Performance) - Resilience (7th Workshop on Resiliency in High Performance Computing with Clusters, Clouds, and Grids) - REPPAR (First International Workshop on Reproducibility in Parallel Computing) - ROME (Second Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for the Many Core Era) - SPPEXA (Workshop on Software for Exascale Computing) - TASUS (First Workshop on Techniques and Applications for Sustainable Ultrascale Computing Systems) - UCHPC (7th Workshop on Un Conventional High Performance Computing) and VHPC (9th Workshop on Virtualization in High-Performance Cloud Computing.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Selected Areas in Cryptography, SAC 2014, held in Montreal, QC, Canada, in August 2014. The 22 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 103 submissions. There are four areas covered at each SAC conference. The three permanent areas are: design and analysis of symmetric key primitives and cryptosystems, including block and stream ciphers, hash function, MAC algorithms, cryptographic permutations, and authenticated encryption schemes; efficient implementations of symmetric and public key algorithms; mathematical and algorithmic aspects of applied cryptology. This year, the fourth area for SAC 2014 is: algorithms for cryptography, cryptanalysis and their complexity analysis.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Swarm Intelligence Based Optimization, ICSIBO 2014, held in Mulhouse, France, in May 2014. The 20 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. Topics of interest presented and discussed in the conference focuses on the theoretical progress of swarm intelligence metaheuristics and their applications in areas such as: theoretical advances of swarm intelligence metaheuristics, combinatorial, discrete, binary, constrained, multi-objective, multi-modal, dynamic, noisy, and large-scale optimization, artificial immune systems, particle swarms, ant colony, bacterial foraging, artificial bees, fireflies algorithm, hybridization of algorithms, parallel/distributed computing, machine learning, data mining, data clustering, decision making and multi-agent systems based on swarm intelligence principles, adaptation and applications of swarm intelligence principles to real world problems in various domains.

Clear and concise explanations to understand the learning paradigms. Chapters written by leading world experts.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Activity Monitoring by Multiple Distributed Sensing, AMMDS 2014, held in Stockholm, Sweden, in August 2014, as a satellite event of ICPR 2014, the 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition. The 9 revised full papers included in the volume investigate the challenges that arise when distributed sensor networks are used to track, monitor, and understand the activity, intent, and motives of human beings. Application areas include human-computer interaction, user interface design, robot learning, and surveillance.

Communications and Multimedia Security is an essential reference for both academic and professional researchers in the fields of Communications and Multimedia Security. This state-of-the-art volume presents the proceedings of the Eighth Annual IFIP TC-6 TC-11 Conference on Communications and Multimedia Security, September 2004, in Windermere, UK. The papers presented here represent the very latest developments in security research from leading people in the field. The papers explore a wide variety of subjects including privacy protection and trust negotiation, mobile security, applied cryptography, and security of communication protocols. Of special interest are several papers which addressed security in the Microsoft .Net architecture, and the threats that builders of web service applications need to be aware of. The papers were a result of research sponsored by Microsoft at five European University research centers. This collection will be important not only for multimedia security experts and researchers, but also for all teachers and administrators interested in communications security.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Security Protocols, held in Cambridge, UK, in March 2010. After an introduction the volume presents 16 revised papers and one abstract, each followed by a revised transcript of the discussion ensuing the presentation at the event. The theme of this year's workshop was "Virtually Perfect Security".

This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the Third International Conference on Big Data Analytics, BDA 2014, held in New Delhi, India, in December 2014. The 11 revised full papers and 6 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 35 submissions and cover topics on media analytics; geospatial big data; semantics and data models; search and retrieval; graphics and visualization; application-specific big data.

This monograph is based on the third author's lectures on computer architecture, given in the summer semester 2013 at Saarland University, Germany. It contains a gate level construction of a multi-core machine with pipelined MIPS processor cores and a sequentially consistent shared memory. The book contains the first correctness proofs for both the gate level implementation of a multi-core processor and also of a cache based sequentially consistent shared memory. This opens the way to the formal verification of synthesizable hardware for multi-core processors in the future. Constructions are in a gate level hardware model and thus deterministic. In contrast the reference models against which correctness is shown are nondeterministic. The development of the additional machinery for these proofs and the correctness proof of the shared memory at the gate level are the main technical contributions of this work.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Sequences and Their Applications, SETA 2014, held in Melbourne, VIC, Australia, in November 2014. The 24 full papers presented together with 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 36 submissions. The papers have been organized in topical sections on Boolean functions, perfect sequences, correlation of arrays, relative difference sets, aperiodic correlation, pseudorandom sequences and stream ciphers, crosscorrelation of sequences, prime numbers in sequences, OFDM and CDMA, and frequency-hopping sequences.