This book presents the most recent achievements in some rapidly developing fields within Computer Science. This includes the very latest research in biometrics and computer security systems, and descriptions of the latest inroads in artificial intelligence applications. The book contains over 30 articles by well-known scientists and engineers. The articles are extended versions of works introduced at the ACS-CISIM 2005 conference.

Recent Advances in RSA Cryptography surveys the most important achievements of the last 22 years of research in RSA cryptography. Special emphasis is laid on the description and analysis of proposed attacks against the RSA cryptosystem. The first chapters introduce the necessary background information on number theory, complexity and public key cryptography. Subsequent chapters review factorization algorithms and specific properties that make RSA attractive for cryptographers. Most recent attacks against RSA are discussed in the third part of the book (among them attacks against low-exponent RSA, Hastad's broadcast attack, and Franklin-Reiter attacks). Finally, the last chapter reviews the use of the RSA function in signature schemes. Recent Advances in RSA Cryptography is of interest to graduate level students and researchers who will gain an insight into current research topics in the field and an overview of recent results in a unified way. Recent Advances in RSA Cryptography is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

This book draws new attention to domain-specific conceptual modeling by presenting the work of thought leaders who have designed and deployed specific modeling methods. It provides hands-on guidance on how to build models in a particular domain, such as requirements engineering, business process modeling or enterprise architecture. In addition to these results, it also puts forward ideas for future developments. All this is enriched with exercises, case studies, detailed references and further related information. All domain-specific methods described in this volume also have a tool implementation within the OMiLAB Collaborative Environment - a dedicated research and experimentation space for modeling method engineering at the University of Vienna, Austria - making these advances accessible to a wider community of further developers and users. The collection of works presented here will benefit experts and practitioners from academia and industry alike, including members of the conceptual modeling community as well as lecturers and students.

This book is the result of a group of researchers from different disciplines asking themselves one question: what does it take to develop a computer interface that listens, talks, and can answer questions in a domain? First, obviously, it takes specialized modules for speech recognition and synthesis, human interaction management (dialogue, input fusion, and multimodal output fusion), basic question understanding, and answer finding. While all modules are researched as independent subfields, this book describes the development of state-of-the-art modules and their integration into a single, working application capable of answering medical (encyclopedic) questions such as "How long is a person with measles contagious?" or "How can I prevent RSI?."

The contributions in this book, which grew out of the IMIX project funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, document the development of this system, but also address more general issues in natural language processing, such as the development of multidimensional dialogue systems, the acquisition of taxonomic knowledge from text, answer fusion, sequence processing for domain-specific entity recognition, and syntactic parsing for question answering. Together, they offer an overview of the most important findings and lessons learned in the scope of the IMIX project, making the book of interest to both academic and commercial developers of human-machine interaction systems in Dutch or any other language.

Highlights include: integrating multi-modal input fusion in dialogue management (Van Schooten and Op den Akker), state-of-the-art approaches to the extraction of term variants (Van der Plas, Tiedemann, and Fahmi; Tjong Kim Sang, Hofmann, and De Rijke), and multi-modal answer fusion (two chapters by Van Hooijdonk, Bosma, Krahmer, Maes, Theune, and Marsi).

Watch the IMIX movie at www.nwo.nl/imix-film.

Like IBM's Watson, the IMIX system described in the book gives naturally phrased responses to naturally posed questions. Where Watson can only generate synthetic speech, the IMIX system also recognizes speech. On the other hand, Watson is able to win a television quiz, while the IMIX system is domain-specific, answering only to medical questions.

"The Netherlands has always been one of the leaders in the general field of Human Language Technology, and IMIX is no exception. It was a very ambitious program, with a remarkably successful performance leading to interesting results. The teams covered a remarkable amount of territory in the general sphere of multimodal question answering and information delivery, question answering, information extraction and component technologies."

Eduard Hovy, USC, USA, Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Norbert Reithinger, DFKI, Germany"

YOU HAVE TO OWN THIS BOOK!

"Software Exorcism: A Handbook for Debugging and Optimizing Legacy Code" takes an unflinching, no bulls$&# look at behavioral problems in the software engineering industry, shedding much-needed light on the social forces that make it difficult for programmers to do their job. Do you have a co-worker who perpetually writes bad code that "you" are forced to clean up? This is your book. While there are plenty of books on the market that cover debugging and short-term workarounds for bad code, Reverend Bill Blunden takes a revolutionary step beyond them by bringing our attention to the underlying illnesses that plague the software industry as a whole.

Further, "Software Exorcism" discusses tools and techniques for effective and aggressive debugging, gives optimization strategies that appeal to all levels of programmers, and presents in-depth treatments of technical issues with honest assessments that are not biased toward proprietary solutions.

This carefully edited and reviewed volume addresses the increasingly popular demand for seeking more clarity in the data that we are immersed in. It offers excellent examples of the intelligent ubiquitous computation, as well as recent advances in systems engineering and informatics. The content represents state-of-the-art foundations for researchers in the domain of modern computation, computer science, system engineering and networking, with many examples that are set in industrial application context. The book includes the carefully selected best contributions to APCASE 2014, the 2nd Asia-Pacific Conference on Computer Aided System Engineering, held February 10-12, 2014 in South Kuta, Bali, Indonesia. The book consists of four main parts that cover data-oriented engineering science research in a wide range of applications: computational models and knowledge discovery; communications networks and cloud computing; computer-based systems; and data-oriented and software-intensive systems.

In October 2000, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology selected the block cipher Rijndael as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). AES is expected to gradually replace the present Data Encryption Standard (DES) as the most widely applied data encryption technology. This book by the designers of the block cipher presents Rijndael from scratch. The underlying mathematics and the wide trail strategy as the basic design idea are explained in detail and the basics of differential and linear cryptanalysis are reworked. Subsequent chapters review all known attacks against the Rijndael structure and deal with implementation and optimization issues. Finally, other ciphers related to Rijndael are presented. This book is THE authoritative guide to the Rijndael algorithm and AES. Professionals, researchers, and students active or interested in data encryption will find it a valuable source of information and reference.

This volume directly addresses the complexities involved in data mining and the development of new algorithms, built on an underlying theory consisting of linear and non-linear dynamics, data selection, filtering, and analysis, while including analytical projection and prediction. The results derived from the analysis are then further manipulated such that a visual representation is derived with an accompanying analysis. The book brings very current methods of analysis to the forefront of the discipline, provides researchers and practitioners the mathematical underpinning of the algorithms, and the non-specialist with a visual representation such that a valid understanding of the meaning of the adaptive system can be attained with careful attention to the visual representation. The book presents, as a collection of documents, sophisticated and meaningful methods that can be immediately understood and applied to various other disciplines of research. The content is composed of chapters addressing: An application of adaptive systems methodology in the field of post-radiation treatment involving brain volume differences in children; A new adaptive system for computer-aided diagnosis of the characterization of lung nodules; A new method of multi-dimensional scaling with minimal loss of information; A description of the semantics of point spaces with an application on the analysis of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan; The description of a new family of meta-classifiers; A new method of optimal informational sorting; A general method for the unsupervised adaptive classification for learning; and the presentation of two new theories, one in target diffusion and the other in twisting theory.

This book is an essential contribution to the description of fuzziness in information systems. Usually users want to retrieve data or summarized information from a database and are interested in classifying it or building rule-based systems on it. But they are often not aware of the nature of this data and/or are unable to determine clear search criteria. The book examines theoretical and practical approaches to fuzziness in information systems based on statistical data related to territorial units. Chapter 1 discusses the theory of fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic to enable readers to understand the information presented in the book. Chapter 2 is devoted to flexible queries and includes issues like constructing fuzzy sets for query conditions, and aggregation operators for commutative and non-commutative conditions, while Chapter 3 focuses on linguistic summaries. Chapter 4 presents fuzzy logic control architecture adjusted specifically for the aims of business and governmental agencies, and shows fuzzy rules and procedures for solving inference tasks. Chapter 5 covers the fuzzification of classical relational databases with an emphasis on storing fuzzy data in classical relational databases in such a way that existing data and normal forms are not affected. This book also examines practical aspects of user-friendly interfaces for storing, updating, querying and summarizing. Lastly, Chapter 6 briefly discusses possible integration of fuzzy queries, summarization and inference related to crisp and fuzzy databases. The main target audience of the book is researchers and students working in the fields of data analysis, database design and business intelligence. As it does not go too deeply into the foundation and mathematical theory of fuzzy logic and relational algebra, it is also of interest to advanced professionals developing tailored applications based on fuzzy sets.

This book offers a comprehensive guide to implementing SAP and HANA on private, public and hybrid clouds. Cloud computing has transformed the way organizations run their IT infrastructures: the shift from legacy monolithic mainframes and UNIX platforms to cloud based infrastructures offering ubiquitous access to critical information, elastic provisioning and drastic cost savings has made cloud an essential part of every organization's business strategy. Cloud based services have evolved from simple file sharing, email and messaging utilities in the past, to the current situation, where their improved technical capabilities and SLAs make running mission-critical applications such as SAP possible. However, IT professionals must take due care when deploying SAP in a public, private or hybrid cloud environment. As a foundation for core business operations, SAP cloud deployments must satisfy stringent requirements concerning their performance, scale and security, while delivering measurable improvements in IT efficiency and cost savings. The 2nd edition of "SAP on the Cloud" continues the work of its successful predecessor released in 2013, providing updated guidance for deploying SAP in public, private and hybrid clouds. To do so, it discusses the technical requirements and considerations necessary for IT professionals to successfully implement SAP software in a cloud environment, including best-practice architectures for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS deployments. The section on SAP's in-memory database HANA has been significantly extended to cover Suite on HANA (SoH) and the different incarnations of HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) and Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI). As cyber threats are a significant concern, it also explores appropriate security models for defending SAP cloud deployments against modern and sophisticated attacks. The reader will gain the insights needed to understand the respective benefits and drawbacks of various deployment models and how SAP on the cloud can be used to deliver IT efficiency and cost-savings in a secure and agile manner.

Data and knowledge play a key role in both current and future Grids. The issues concerning representation, discovery, and integration of data and knowledge in dynamic distributed environments can be addressed by exploiting features offered by Grid Technologies. Current research activities are leveraging the Grid for the provision of generic- and domain-specific solutions and services for data management and knowledge discovery. Knowledge and Data Management in Grids is the third volume of the Core Grid series and brings together scientific contributions by researchers and scientists working on storage, data, and knowledge management in Grid and Peer-to-Peer systems. This volume presents the latest Grid solutions and research results in key areas of knowledge and data management such as distributed storage management, Grid databases, Semantic Grid and Grid-aware data mining. Knowledge and Data Management in Grids is for a professional audience, composed of researchers and practitioners in industry. This book is also suitable for graduate-level students in computer science.

Health information about patients is critical; currently, health records are saved in databases controlled by individual users, organizations, or large groups of organizations. As there are many malicious users, this information is not shared with other organizations due to security issues and the chance of the data being modified or tampered with. Blockchain can be used to securely exchange healthcare data, which can be accessed by organizations sharing the same network, allowing doctors/practitioners to provide better care for patients. The key properties of decentralization, such as immutability and transparency, improve healthcare interoperability. This book brings forth the prospects and research trends of Blockchain in healthcare, so that Researchers, Database professionals, Academia, and Healthcare professionals across the world can know/use the concept of Blockchain in healthcare. The book provides the fundamental and technical details of Blockchain, the applications of Blockchain in healthcare, hands-on chapters for graduate/postgraduate/doctoral students/healthcare professionals to secure healthcare data of patients, and research challenges and future work directions for researchers in healthcare.

With advances and in-depth applications of computer technologies, and the extensive applications of Web technology in various areas, databases have become the repositories of large volumes of data. It is very critical to manage data resources for effective problem solving and decision making. Collecting and presenting the latest research and development results from the leading researchers in the field of intelligent databases, ""Intelligent Databases: Technologies and Applications"" provides a single record of current research and practical applications in this field. ""Intelligent Databases: Technologies and Applications"" integrates data management in databases with intelligent data processing and analysis in artificial intelligence. This book challenges today's database technology and promotes its evolution.

Data warehousing is an important topic that is of interest to both the industry and the knowledge engineering research communities. Both data mining and data warehousing technologies have similar objectives and can potentially benefit from each other's methods to facilitate knowledge discovery. Improving Knowledge Discovery through the Integration of Data Mining Techniques provides insight concerning the integration of data mining and data warehousing for enhancing the knowledge discovery process. Decision makers, academicians, researchers, advanced-level students, technology developers, and business intelligence professionals will find this book useful in furthering their research exposure to relevant topics in knowledge discovery.

Web search engines are not just indispensable tools for finding and accessing information online, but have become a defining component of the human condition and can be conceptualized as a complex behavior embedded within an individual's everyday social, cultural, political, and information-seeking activities. This book investigates Web search from the non-technical perspective, bringing together chapters that represent a range of multidisciplinary theories, models, and ideas.

This book presents real-world decision support systems, i.e., systems that have been running for some time and as such have been tested in real environments and complex situations; the cases are from various application domains and highlight the best practices in each stage of the system's life cycle, from the initial requirements analysis and design phases to the final stages of the project. Each chapter provides decision-makers with recommendations and insights into lessons learned so that failures can be avoided and successes repeated. For this reason unsuccessful cases, which at some point of their life cycle were deemed as failures for one reason or another, are also included. All decision support systems are presented in a constructive, coherent and deductive manner to enhance the learning effect. It complements the many works that focus on theoretical aspects or individual module design and development by offering 'good' and 'bad' practices when developing and using decision support systems. Combining high-quality research with real-world implementations, it is of interest to researchers and professionals in industry alike.

The healthcare industry produces a constant flow of data, creating a need for deep analysis of databases through data mining tools and techniques resulting in expanded medical research, diagnosis, and treatment. ""Data Mining and Medical Knowledge Management: Cases and Applications"" presents case studies on applications of various modern data mining methods in several important areas of medicine, covering classical data mining methods, elaborated approaches related to mining in electroencephalogram and electrocardiogram data, and methods related to mining in genetic data. A premier resource for those involved in data mining and medical knowledge management, this book tackles ethical issues related to cost-sensitive learning in medicine and produces theoretical contributions concerning general problems of data, information, knowledge, and ontologies.

Research in multi-agent systems offers a promising technology for problems with networks, online trading and negotiations but also social structures and communication. This is a book on agent and multi-agent technology for internet and enterprise systems. The book is a pioneer in the combination of the fields and is based on the concept of developing a platform to share ideas and presents research in technology in the field and application to real problems. The chapters range over both applications, illustrating the possible uses of agents in an enterprise domain, and design and analytic methods, needed to provide the solid foundation required for practical systems.