This lively and fascinating text traces the key developments in computation - from 3000 B.C. to the present day - in an easy-to-follow and concise manner. Topics and features: ideal for self-study, offering many pedagogical features such as chapter-opening key topics, chapter introductions and summaries, exercises, and a glossary; presents detailed information on major figures in computing, such as Boole, Babbage, Shannon, Turing, Zuse and Von Neumann; reviews the history of software engineering and of programming languages, including syntax and semantics; discusses the progress of artificial intelligence, with extension to such key disciplines as philosophy, psychology, linguistics, neural networks and cybernetics; examines the impact on society of the introduction of the personal computer, the World Wide Web, and the development of mobile phone technology; follows the evolution of a number of major technology companies, including IBM, Microsoft and Apple.

Internet heterogeneity is driving a new challenge in application development: adaptive software. Together with the increased Internet capacity and new access technologies, network congestion and the use of older technologies, wireless access, and peer-to-peer networking are increasing the heterogeneity of the Internet. Applications should provide gracefully degraded levels of service when network conditions are poor, and enhanced services when network conditions exceed expectations. Existing adaptive technologies, which are primarily end-to-end or proxy-based and often focus on a single deficient link, can perform poorly in heterogeneous networks. Instead, heterogeneous networks frequently require multiple, coordinated, and distributed remedial actions. Conductor: Distributed Adaptation for Heterogeneous Networks describes a new approach to graceful degradation in the face of network heterogeneity - distributed adaptation - in which adaptive code is deployed at multiple points within a network. The feasibility of this approach is demonstrated by conductor, a middleware framework that enables distributed adaptation of connection-oriented, application-level protocols. By adapting protocols, conductor provides application-transparent adaptation, supporting both existing applications and applications designed with adaptation in mind. Conductor: Distributed Adaptation for Heterogeneous Networks introduces new techniques that enable distributed adaptation, making it automatic, reliable, and secure. In particular, we introduce the notion of semantic segmentation, which maintains exactly-once delivery of the semantic elements of a data stream while allowing the stream to be arbitrarily adapted in transit. We also introduce a secure architecture for automatic adaptor selection, protecting user data from unauthorized adaptation. These techniques are described both in the context of conductor and in the broader context of distributed systems. Finally, this book presents empirical evidence from several case studies indicating that distributed adaptation can allow applications to degrade gracefully in heterogeneous networks, providing a higher quality of service to users than other adaptive techniques. Further, experimental results indicate that the proposed techniques can be employed without excessive cost. Thus, distributed adaptation is both practical and beneficial. Conductor: Distributed Adaptation for Heterogeneous Networks is designed to meet the needs of a professional audience composed of researchers and practitioners in industry and graduate-level students in computer science.

This Proceedings Volume documents recent cutting-edge developments in multi-robot systems research and is the result of the Second International Workshop on Multi-Robot Systems that was held in March 2003 at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. This Workshop brought together top researchers working in areas relevant to designing teams of autonomous vehicles, including robots and unmanned ground, air, surface, and undersea vehicles. The workshop focused on the challenging issues of team architectures, vehicle learning and adaptation, heterogeneous group control and cooperation, task selection, dynamic autonomy, mixed initiative, and human and robot team interaction. A broad range of applications of this technology are presented in this volume, including UCAVS (Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles), micro-air vehicles, UUVs (Unmanned Underwater Vehicles), UGVs (Unmanned Ground Vehicles), planetary exploration, assembly in space, clean-up, and urban search and rescue.

This Proceedings Volume represents the contributions of the top researchers in this field and serves as a valuable tool for professionals in this interdisciplinary field.

Auctions have long been a popular method for allocation and procurement of products and services. Traditional auctions are constrained by time, place, number of bidders, number of bids, and the bidding experience. With the advent of internet communication technologies, the online auction environment has blossomed to support a bustling enterprise. Up until this time, the functional inner workings of these online exchange mechanisms have only been described using anecdotal accounts. Best Practices for Online Procurement Auctions offers a systematic approach to auction examination that will become invaluable to both practitioners and researchers alike.

This book covers the wide-ranging scientific areas of computational science, from basic research fields such as algorithms and soft-computing to diverse applied fields targeting macro, micro, nano, genome and complex systems. It presents the proceedings of the International Symposium on Frontiers of Computational Science 2005, held in Nagoya in December 2005.

Online activities present a unique challenge for museums as they harness the potential of digital technology for sustainable development, trust building, and representations of diversity. This volume offers a holistic picture of museum online activities that can serve as a starting point for cross-disciplinary discussion. It is a resource for museum staff, students, designers, and researchers working at the intersection of cultural institutions and digital technologies. The aim is to provide insight into the issues behind designing and implementing web pages and social media to serve the broadest range of museum stakeholders.

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.

Collaborative Networks for a Sustainable World Aiming to reach a sustainable world calls for a wider collaboration among multiple stakeholders from different origins, as the changes needed for sustainability exceed the capacity and capability of any individual actor. In recent years there has been a growing awareness both in the political sphere and in civil society including the bu- ness sectors, on the importance of sustainability. Therefore, this is an important and timely research issue, not only in terms of systems design but also as an effort to b- row and integrate contributions from different disciplines when designing and/or g- erning those systems. The discipline of collaborative networks especially, which has already emerged in many application sectors, shall play a key role in the implemen- tion of effective sustainability strategies. PRO-VE 2010 focused on sharing knowledge and experiences as well as identi- ing directions for further research and development in this area. The conference - dressed models, infrastructures, support tools, and governance principles developed for collaborative networks, as important resources to support multi-stakeholder s- tainable developments. Furthermore, the challenges of this theme open new research directions for CNs. PRO-VE 2010 held in St.

Facing the challenge of the fast changing technological environment, many companies are developing an interest in the field of technology intelligence. Their aim is to support the decision-making process by taking advantage of a well-timed preparation of relevant information by means of systematic identification, collection, analysis, dissemination, and application of this information. This book covers the gap in literature by showing how a technology intelligence system can be designed and implemented.

With the development of networked computing and the increased complexity of applications and software systems development, the importance of computer-supported collaborative work CSCW] has dramatically increased. Globalization has further accentuated the necessity of collaboration, while the Web has made geographically distributed collaborative systems technologically feasible in a manner that was impossible until recently. The software environments needed to support such distributed teams are referred to as Groupware. Groupware is intended to address the logistical, managerial, social, organizational and cognitive difficulties that arise in the application of distributed expertise. These issues represent the fundamental challenges to the next generation of process management.

Computer-Supported Collaboration with Applications to Software Development reviews the theory of collaborative groups and the factors that affect collaboration, particularly collaborative software development. The influences considered derive from diverse sources: social and cognitive psychology, media characteristics, the problem-solving behavior of groups, process management, group information processing, and organizational effects. It also surveys empirical studies of computer-supported problem solving, especially for software development. The concluding chapter describes a collaborative model for program development.

Computer-Supported Collaboration with Applications to Software Development is designed for an academic and professional market in software development, professionals and researchers in the areas of software engineering, collaborative development, management information systems, problem solving, cognitive and social psychology. This book also meets the needs of graduate-level students in computer science and information systems.

Evolutionary computation has emerged as a major topic in the scientific community as many of its techniques have successfully been applied to solve problems in a wide variety of fields. Modeling Applications and Theoretical Innovations in Interdisciplinary Evolutionary Computation provides comprehensive research on emerging theories and its aspects on intelligent computation. Particularly focusing on breaking trends in evolutionary computing, algorithms, and programming, this publication serves to support professionals, government employees, policy and decision makers, as well as students in this scientific field.

Do Smart Adaptive Systems Exist? is intended as a reference and a guide summarising and focusing on best practices when using intelligent techniques and building systems requiring a degree of adaptation and intelligence.

It is therefore not intended as a collection of the most recent research results, but as a practical guide for experts from other areas and industrial users interested in building solutions to their problems using intelligent techniques. One of the main issues covered is an attempt to answer the question of how to select and/or combine suitable intelligent techniques from a large pool of potential solutions.

Another attractive feature of the book is that it brings together experts from neural network, fuzzy, machine learning, evolutionary and hybrid systems communities who will provide their views on how these different intelligent technologies have contributed and will contribute to creation of smart adaptive systems of the future.

As more and more hardware platforms support parallelism, parallel programming is gaining momentum. Applications can only leverage the performance of multi-core processors or graphics processing units if they are able to split a problem into smaller ones that can be solved in parallel. The challenges emerging from the development of parallel applications have led to the development of a great number of tools for debugging, performance analysis and other tasks. The proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Parallel Tools for High Performance Computing provide a technical overview in order to help engineers, developers and computer scientists decide which tools are best suited to enhancing their current development processes.

We are extremely pleased to present a comprehensive book comprising a collection of research papers which is basically an outcome of the Second IFIP TC 13.6 Working Group conference on Human Work Interaction Design, HWID2009. The conference was held in Pune, India during October 7-8, 2009. It was hosted by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, India, and jointly organized with Copenhagen Business School, Denmark; Aarhus University, Denmark; and Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India. The theme of HWID2009 was Usability in Social, C- tural and Organizational Contexts. The conference was held under the auspices of IFIP TC 13 on Human-Computer Interaction. 1 Technical Committee TC13 on Human-Computer Interaction The committees under IFIP include the Technical Committee TC13 on Human-Computer Interaction within which the work of this volume has been conducted. TC13 on Human-Computer Interaction has as its aim to encourage theoretical and empirical human science research to promote the design and evaluation of human-oriented ICT. Within TC13 there are different working groups concerned with different aspects of human- computer interaction. The flagship event of TC13 is the bi-annual international conference called INTERACT at which both invited and contributed papers are presented. Contributed papers are rigorously refereed and the rejection rate is high.

Information engineering and applications is the field of study concerned with constructing information computing, intelligent systems, mathematical models, numerical solution techniques, and using computers and other electronic devices to analyze and solve natural scientific, social scientific and engineering problems. Information engineering is an important underpinning for techniques used in information and computational science and there are many unresolved problems worth studying. The Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Information Engineering and Applications (IEA 2012), which was held in Chongqing, China, from October 26-28, 2012, discusses the most innovative research and developments including technical challenges and social, legal, political, and economic issues. A forum for engineers and scientists in academia, industry, and government, the Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Information Engineering and Applications presents ideas, results, works in progress, and experience in all aspects of information engineering and applications.

This volume is a post-conference publication of the 4th World Congress on Social Simulation (WCSS), with contents selected from among the 80 papers originally presented at the conference. WCSS is a biennial event, jointly organized by three scientific communities in computational social science, namely, the Pacific-Asian Association for Agent-Based Approach in Social Systems Sciences (PAAA), the European Social Simulation Association (ESSA), and the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas (CSSSA). It is, therefore, currently the most prominent conference in the area of agent-based social simulation. The papers selected for this volume give a holistic view of the current development of social simulation, indicating the directions for future research and creating an important archival document and milestone in the history of computational social science. Specifically, the papers included here cover substantial progress in artificial financial markets, macroeconomic forecasting, supply chain management, bank networks, social networks, urban planning, social norms and group formation, cross-cultural studies, political party competition, voting behavior, computational demography, computational anthropology, evolution of languages, public health and epidemics, AIDS, security and terrorism, methodological and epistemological issues, empirical-based agent-based modeling, modeling of experimental social science, gaming simulation, cognitive agents, and participatory simulation. Furthermore, pioneering studies in some new research areas, such as the theoretical foundations of social simulation and categorical social science, also are included in the volume.

Computer-based information technologies have been extensively used to help industries manage their processes and information systems hereby - come their nervous center. More specially, databases are designed to s- port the data storage, processing, and retrieval activities related to data management in information systems. Database management systems p- vide efficient task support and database systems are the key to impleme- ing industrial data management. Industrial data management requires da- base technique support. Industrial applications, however, are typically data and knowledge intensive applications and have some unique character- tics that makes their management difficult. Besides, some new techniques such as Web, artificial intelligence, and etc. have been introduced into - dustrial applications. These unique characteristics and usage of new te- nologies have put many potential requirements on industrial data mana- ment, which challenge today's database systems and promote their evolvement. Viewed from database technology, information modeling in databases can be identified at two levels: (conceptual) data modeling and (logical) database modeling. This results in conceptual (semantic) data model and logical database model. Generally a conceptual data model is designed and then the designed conceptual data model will be transformed into a chosen logical database schema. Database systems based on logical database model are used to build information systems for data mana- ment. Much attention has been directed at conceptual data modeling of - dustrial information systems. Product data models, for example, can be views as a class of semantic data models (i. e.

The field of high performance computing achieved prominence through advances in electronic and integrated technologies beginning in the 1940s. Current times are very exciting and the years to come will witness a proliferation of the use of parallel and distributed systems. The scientific and engineering application domains have a key role in shaping future research and development activities in academia and industry, especially when the solution of large and complex problems must cope with harder and harder timing.
High Performance Scientific And Engineering Computing: Hardware/Software Support contains selected chapters on hardware/software support for high performance scientific and engineering computing from prestigious workshops in the fields such as PACT-SHPSEC, IPDPS-PDSECA and ICPP-HPSECA. This edited volume is basically divided into six main sections which include invited material from prominent researchers around the world. We believe all of these contributed chapters and topics not only provide novel ideas, new results and state-of-the-art techniques in this field, but also stimulate the future research activities in the area of high performance computing for science and engineering applications.
High Performance Scientific And Engineering Computing: Hardware/Software Support is designed for a professional audience, composed of researchers and practitioners in industry. This book is also suitable as a secondary text for graduate-level students in computer science and engineering.

Peter A. Coming Palo Alto, CA November, 2000 This volwne represents a distillation of the plenary sessions at a unique millenniwn year event -a World Congress of the Systems Sciences in conjunction with the 44th annual meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS). The overall theme of the conference was "Understanding Complexity in the New Millenniwn. " Held at Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto, Canada, from July 16-22,2000, the conference included some 350 participants from over 30 countries, many of whom were representatives of the 21 organizations and groups that co-hosted this landmark event. Each of these co-host organizations/groups also presented a segment of the program, including a plenary speech. In addition, the conference featured a nwnber of distinguished "keynote" speeches related to the three daily World Congress themes: (1) The Evolution of Complex Systems, (2) The Dynamics of Complex Systems, and (3) Human Systems in the 21st Century. There were also seven special plenary-level symposia on a range of timely topics, including: "The Art and Science of Forecasting in the Age of Global Wanning"; "Capitalism in the New Millenniwn: The Challenge of Sustainability"; "The Future of the Systems Sciences"; "Global Issues in the New Millenniwn"; "Resources and the Environment in the New Millenniwn"; "The Lessons of Y2K"; and "Can There be a Reconciliation Between Science and Religion?" Included in this special commemorative volume is a cross-section of these presentations."

This book represents the compilation of papers presented at the IFIP Working Group 8. 2 conference entitled "Information Technology in the Service Economy: Challenges st and Possibilities for the 21 Century. " The conference took place at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada, on August 10 13, 2008. Par ticipation in the conference spanned the continents from Asia to Europe with paper submissions global in focus as well. Conference submissions included complete d research papers and research in progress reports. Papers submitted to the conference went through a double blind review process in which the program co chairs, an associate editor, and reviewers provided assessments and recommendations. The editor ial efforts of the associate editors and reviewers in this process were outstanding. To foster high quality research publications in this field of study, authors of accepted pape rs were then invited to revise and resubmit their work. Through this rigorous review and revision process, 12 completed research papers and 11 research in progress reports were accepted for presentation and publica tion. Paper workshop sessions were also esta blished to provide authors of emergent work an opportunity to receive feedback fromthe IF IP 8. 2 community. Abstracts of these new projects are included in this volume. Four panels were presented at the conference to provide discussion forums for the varied aspect s of IT, service, and globalization. Panel abstracts are also included here.

Over the past years, business schools have been experimenting with distance learning and online education. In many cases this new technology has not brought the anticipated results. Questions raised by online education can be linked to the fundamental problem of education and teaching, and more specifically to the models and philosophy of education and teaching.

Virtual Corporate Universities: A Matrix of Knowledge and Learning for the New Digital Dawn offers a source for new thoughts about those processes in view of the use of new technologies. Learning is considered as a key-strategic tool for new strategies, innovation, and significantly improving organizational effectiveness. The book blends the elements of knowledge management, as well as organizational and individual learning. The book is not just a treatment of technology, but a fusion of a novel dynamic learner (student)-driven learning concept, the management and creation of dynamic knowledge, and next-generation technologies to generic business, organizational and managerial processes, and the development of human capital. Obviously, the implications of online learning go far beyond the field of business as presented in this book.