Nash equilibrium is the central solution concept in Game Theory. Since Nash's original paper in 1951, it has found countless applications in modeling strategic behavior of traders in markets, (human) drivers and (electronic) routers in congested networks, nations in nuclear disarmament negotiations, and more. A decade ago, the relevance of this solution concept was called into question by computer scientists, who proved (under appropriate complexity assumptions) that computing a Nash equilibrium is an intractable problem. And if centralized, specially designed algorithms cannot find Nash equilibria, why should we expect distributed, selfish agents to converge to one? The remaining hope was that at least approximate Nash equilibria can be efficiently computed.Understanding whether there is an efficient algorithm for approximate Nash equilibrium has been the central open problem in this field for the past decade. In this book, we provide strong evidence that even finding an approximate Nash equilibrium is intractable. We prove several intractability theorems for different settings (two-player games and many-player games) and models (computational complexity, query complexity, and communication complexity). In particular, our main result is that under a plausible and natural complexity assumption ("Exponential Time Hypothesis for PPAD"), there is no polynomial-time algorithm for finding an approximate Nash equilibrium in two-player games. The problem of approximate Nash equilibrium in a two-player game poses a unique technical challenge: it is a member of the class PPAD, which captures the complexity of several fundamental total problems, i.e., problems that always have a solution; and it also admits a quasipolynomial time algorithm. Either property alone is believed to place this problem far below NP-hard problems in the complexity hierarchy; having both simultaneously places it just above P, at what can be called the frontier of intractability. Indeed, the tools we develop in this book to advance on this frontier are useful for proving hardness of approximation of several other important problems whose complexity lies between P and NP: Brouwer's fixed point, market equilibrium, CourseMatch (A-CEEI), densest k-subgraph, community detection, VC dimension and Littlestone dimension, and signaling in zero-sum games.

Bioinformatics as a discipline has come of age, and there are now numerous databases and tools that are widely used by researchers in the biomedical field. However, successful development of future bioinformatics applications will depend on an appropriately formalised representation of domain knowledge.

This book provides a timely and first-of-its-kind collection of contributed chapters on anatomy ontologies. It is interdisciplinary in its approach, bringing together relevant expertise from computing and biomedical studies, and covering both theoretical and applied aspects, with an emphasis on newer work relevant to the emerging Semantic Web.

Topics and Features:

a [ Provides a comprehensive discussion of the foundations of anatomical ontologies and the state of the art in existing computational tools and applications

a [ Considers a number of fundamental modelling principles

a [ Includes chapters about research on algorithms to systematically align anatomy ontologies and to mine data in the literature, using anatomy terms

a [ Explains recent efforts to develop a common anatomy reference ontology

a [ Discusses anatomy in the context of spatio-temporal biomedical atlases

a [ Describes systems and tools for linking anatomy ontologies with each other and with other on-line resources, such as the biomedical literature

a [ Highlights the challenges of dealing with anatomy-based information on the Semantic Web

Although primarily written for readers who will be involved in developing the next generation of IT applications in the areas of life sciences, biomedical sciences and health care, this unique volume will be of interest to anyone who will furtherdevelop anatomy ontologies, who will use them, and who will be involved in the actual development of relevant (semantic) web applications.

This volume offers the advice of selected expert contributors on the application of heterogeneous methods for managing uncertainty and imprecision in databases. It contains both survey chapters on classic topics such as "flexible querying in databases," and up to date information on "database models to represent imperfect data." Further, it includes specific contributions on uncertainty management in database integration, and in representing and querying semistructured and spatial data.

This monograph presents recursion theory from a generalized point of view centered on the computational aspects of definability. A major theme is the study of the structures of degrees arising from two key notions of reducibility, the Turing degrees and the hyperdegrees, using techniques and ideas from recursion theory, hyperarithmetic theory, and descriptive set theory. The emphasis is on the interplay between recursion theory and set theory, anchored on the notion of definability. The monograph covers a number of fundamental results in hyperarithmetic theory as well as some recent results on the structure theory of Turing and hyperdegrees. It also features a chapter on the applications of these investigations to higher randomness.

Recently, the emergence of wireless and mobile networks has made possible the admission of electronic commerce to a new application and research subject: mobile commerce, defined as the exchange or buying and selling of commodities, services, or information on the Internet through the use of mobile handheld devices. In just a few years, mobile commerce has emerged from nowhere to become the hottest new trend in business transactions. However, the prosperity and popularity of mobile commerce will be brought to a higher level only if information is securely and safely exchanged among end systems (mobile users and content providers). Advances in Security and Payment Methods for Mobile Commerce includes high-quality research papers and industrial and practice articles in the areas of mobile commerce security and payment from academics and industrialists. It covers research and development results of lasting significance in the theory, design, implementation, analysis, and application of mobile commerce security and payment.

This is a collection of classic research papers on the Dempster-Shafer theory of belief functions. The book is the authoritative reference in the field of evidential reasoning and an important archival reference in a wide range of areas including uncertainty reasoning in artificial intelligence and decision making in economics, engineering, and management. The book includes a foreword reflecting the development of the theory in the last forty years.

In 1984, Working Group 8.2 of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) threw down the gauntlet at its Manchester conference, challenging the traditionalist orthodoxy with its uncommon research approaches and topics. Manchester 1984, followed by research methods conferences in Copenhagen (1990) and Philadelphia (1997), marked the growing legitimacy of the linguistic and qualitative turns in Information Systems research and played a key role in making qualitative methods a respected part of IS research. As evidenced by the papers in this volume, Working Group 8.2 conferences showcase fresh thinking, provocative sessions, and intellectual stimulation. The spirited, at times boisterous, and always enlivening debate has turned WG8.2 conferences into life-changing and discipline-changing inspirational events.
Information Systems Research: Relevant Theory and Informed Practice comprises the edited proceedings of the WG8.2 conference, "Relevant Theory and Informed Practice: Looking Forward from a 20-Year Perspective on IS Research," which was sponsored by IFIP and held in Manchester, England, in July 2004. The conference attracted a record number of high-quality manuscripts, all of which were subjected to a rigorous reviewing process in which four to eight track chairs, associate editors, and reviewers thoughtfully scrutinized papers by the highly regarded as well as the newcomers. No person or idea was considered sacrosanct and no paper made it through this process unscathed. All authors were asked to revise the accepted papers, some more than once; thus, good papers got better. With only 29 percent of the papers accepted, these proceedings are significantly moreselective than is typical of many conference proceedings.
This volume is organized in 7 sections, with 33 full research papers providing panoramic views and reflections on the Information Systems (IS) discipline followed by papers featuring critical interpretive studies, action research, theoretical perspectives on IS research, and the methods and politics of IS development. Also included are 6 panel descriptions and a new category of "bright idea" position papers, 11 in all, wherein main points are summarized in a pithy and provocative fashion.

CSIE 2011 is an international scientific Congress for distinguished scholars engaged in scientific, engineering and technological research, dedicated to build a platform for exploring and discussing the future of Computer Science and Information Engineering with existing and potential application scenarios. The congress has been held twice, in Los Angeles, USA for the first and in Changchun, China for the second time, each of which attracted a large number of researchers from all over the world. The congress turns out to develop a spirit of cooperation that leads to new friendship for addressing a wide variety of ongoing problems in this vibrant area of technology and fostering more collaboration over the world.

The congress, CSIE 2011, received 2483 full paper and abstract submissions from 27 countries and regions over the world. Through a rigorous peer review process, all submissions were refereed based on their quality of content, level of innovation, significance, originality and legibility. 688 papers have been accepted for the international congress proceedings ultimately.

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This book is about wireless local area networks (WLANs) based upon the IEEE 802.11 standards. It has three primary objectives: * To introduce the principles of 802.11 wireless networks and show how to con- ure equipment in order to implement various network solutions. * To provide an understandingof the security implicationsof wireless networks and demonstrate how vulnerabilities can be mitigated. * To introduce the underlying 802.11 protocols and build mathematical models in order to analyse performance in a WLAN environment. The book is aimed at industry professionals as well as undergraduate and gra- ate level students. It is intended as a companion for a university course on wireless networking. A practical approach is adopted in this book; examples are provided throughout, supported by detailed instructions. We cover a number of wireless vendors; namely, Cisco's Aironet, Alactel-Lucent's Omniaccess and Meru Networks. While separate vendors, all three systems have a Cisco IOS-like command-line interface. The GNU/Linux operating system is used extensively throughout this book.

This book provides a holistic perspective on Digital Twin (DT) technologies, and presents cutting-edge research in the field. It assesses the opportunities that DT can offer for smart cities, and covers the requirements for ensuring secure, safe and sustainable smart cities. Further, the book demonstrates that DT and its benefits with regard to: data visualisation, real-time data analytics, and learning leading to improved confidence in decision making; reasoning, monitoring and warning to support accurate diagnostics and prognostics; acting using edge control and what-if analysis; and connection with back-end business applications hold significant potential for applications in smart cities, by employing a wide range of sensory and data-acquisition systems in various parts of the urban infrastructure. The contributing authors reveal how and why DT technologies that are used for monitoring, visualising, diagnosing and predicting in real-time are vital to cities' sustainability and efficiency. The concepts outlined in the book represents a city together with all of its infrastructure elements, which communicate with each other in a complex manner. Moreover, securing Internet of Things (IoT) which is one of the key enablers of DT's is discussed in details and from various perspectives. The book offers an outstanding reference guide for practitioners and researchers in manufacturing, operations research and communications, who are considering digitising some of their assets and related services. It is also a valuable asset for graduate students and academics who are looking to identify research gaps and develop their own proposals for further research.

For the first time advances in semiconductor manufacturing do not lead to a corresponding increase in performance. At 65 nm and below it is predicted that only a small portion of performance increase will be attributed to shrinking geometries while the lion share is due to innovative processor architectures. To substantiate this assertion it is instructive to look at major drivers of the semiconductor industry: wireless communications and multimedia. Both areas are characterized by an exponentially increasing demand of computational power, which cannot be provided in an energy-efficient manner by traditional processor architectures. Todaya (TM)s applications in wireless communications and multimedia require highly specialized and optimized architectures.

New software tools and a sophisticated methodology above RTL are required to answer the challenges of designing an optimized application specific processor (ASIP). This book offers an automated and fully integrated implementation flow and compares it to common implementation practice. Case-studies emphasise that neither the architectural advantages nor the design space of ASIPs are sacrificed for an automated implementation. Realizing a building block which fulfils the requirements on programmability and computational power is now efficiently possible for the first time.

Optimized ASIP Synthesis from Architecture Description Language Models inspires hardware designers as well as application engineers to design powerful ASIPs that will make their SoC designs unique.

The papers containedin this volume were presentedat the 5th IFIP InternationalC- ference on Theoretical Computer Science (IFIP TCS), 7-10 September 2008, Milan, Italy. TCS is a bi-annual conference.The ?rst conferenceof the series was held in Sendai (Japan, 2000), followed by Montreal (Canada, 2002), Toulouse (France, 2004) and Santiago (Chile, 2006).TCS is organizedby IFIP TC1 (Technical Committee 1: Fo- dations of Computer Science) and Working Group 2.2 of IFIP TC2 (Technical C- mittee 2: Software: Theory and Practice). TCS 2008 was part of the 20th IFIP World Computer Congress (WCC 2008), constituting the TC1 Track of WCC 2008. The contributed papers were selected from 36+45 submissions from altogether 30 countries. A total of 14+16 submissions were accepted as full papers. Papers in this volume are original contributions in two general areas: Track A: Algorithms, C- plexity and Models of Computation;and Track B: Logic, Semantics, Speci?cation and Veri?cation. The conference also included seven invited presentations, from Luca Cardelli, Thomas Ehrhard, Javier Esparza, Antonio Restivo, Tim Roughgarden, Gr- gorz Rozenberg and Avraham Trakhtman. These presentations are included (except one) in this volume. In particular, Luca Cardelli, Javier Esparza, Antonio Restivo, Tim Roughgarden and Avraham Trakhtman accepted our invitation to write full papers - lated to their talks.

As part of the best-selling Pocket Primer series, this book is designed to present the fundamentals of data structures using Python. Data structures provide a means to managing huge amounts of information such as large databases and the ability to use search and sort algorithms effectively. It is intended to be a fast-paced introduction to the core concepts of Python and data structures, illustrated with numerous code samples. Companion files with source code are available for downloading.

Smart cards have recently emerged as a key computer network and Internet security technology. These plastic cards contain an embedded microprocessor, allowing them to be programmed to perform specific duties. This extensively updated, second edition of the popular Artech House book, Smart Card Security and Applications, offers a current overview of the ways smart cards address the computer security issues of today's varied applications. Brand new discussions on multi-application operating systems, computer networks, and the Internet are included to keep technical and business professionals abreast of the very latest developments in this field. The book provides technical details on the newest protection mechanisms, features a discussion on the effects of recent attacks, and presents a clear methodology for solving unique security problems.

HACKING: Ultimate Hacking for Beginners Hacking is a widespread problem that has compromised the records of individuals, major corporations, and even the federal government. This book lists the various ways hackers can breach the security of an individual or an organization's data and network. Its information is for learning purposes only, and the hacking techniques should not be tried because it is a crime to hack someone's personal details without his or her consent. In HACKING: Ultimate Hacking for Beginners you will learn: The advantages and disadvantages of Bluetooth technology. The tools and software that is used for Bluetooth hacking with a brief description The four primary methods of hacking a website and a brief explanation of each Seven different types of spamming, with a focus on email spamming and how to prevent it. Eight common types of security breaches How to understand the process of hacking computers and how to protect against it Using CAPTCHA to prevent hacking

Recent decades have witnessed the thriving development of new mathematical, computational and theoretical approaches, such as bioinformatics and neuroinformatics, to tackle fundamental issues in biology. These approaches focus no longer on individual units, such as nerve cells or genes, but rather on dynamic patterns of interactions between them. This volume explores the concept in full, featuring contributions from a global group of contributors, many of whom are pre-eminent in their field.

This book is written for anyone who is interested in how a field of research evolves and the fundamental role of understanding uncertainties involved in different levels of analysis, ranging from macroscopic views to meso- and microscopic ones. We introduce a series of computational and visual analytic techniques, from research areas such as text mining, deep learning, information visualization and science mapping, such that readers can apply these tools to the study of a subject matter of their choice. In addition, we set the diverse set of methods in an integrative context, that draws upon insights from philosophical, sociological, and evolutionary theories of what drives the advances of science, such that the readers of the book can guide their own research with their enriched theoretical foundations. Scientific knowledge is complex. A subject matter is typically built on its own set of concepts, theories, methodologies and findings, discovered by generations of researchers and practitioners. Scientific knowledge, as known to the scientific community as a whole, experiences constant changes. Some changes are long-lasting, whereas others may be short lived. How can we keep abreast of the state of the art as science advances? How can we effectively and precisely convey the status of the current science to the general public as well as scientists across different disciplines? The study of scientific knowledge in general has been overwhelmingly focused on scientific knowledge per se. In contrast, the status of scientific knowledge at various levels of granularity has been largely overlooked. This book aims to highlight the role of uncertainties, in developing a better understanding of the status of scientific knowledge at a particular time, and how its status evolves over the course of the development of research. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the knowledge of the types of uncertainties associated with scientific claims serves as an integral and critical part of our domain expertise.

This book presents some recent works on the application of Soft Computing techniques in information access on the World Wide Web. The book comprises 15 chapters from internationally known researchers and is divided in four parts reflecting the areas of research of the presented works such as Document Classification, Semantic Web, Web Information Retrieval and Web Applications. This book demonstrates that Web Information Retrieval is a stimulating area of research where Soft Computing technologies can be applied satisfactorily.

Networks have become nearly ubiquitous and increasingly complex, and their support of modern enterprise environments has become fundamental. Accordingly, robust network management techniques are essential to ensure optimal performance of these networks. This monograph treats the application of numerous graph-theoretic algorithms to a comprehensive analysis of dynamic enterprise networks. Network dynamics analysis yields valuable information about network performance, efficiency, fault prediction, cost optimization, indicators and warnings. Based on many years of applied research of generic network dynamics, this work covers a number of elegant applications (including many new and experimental results) of traditional graph theory algorithms and techniques to computationally tractable network dynamics analysis to motivate network analysts, practitioners and researchers alike. The material is also suitable for graduate courses addressing state-of-the-art applications of graph theory in analysis of dynamic communication networks, dynamic databasing, and knowledge management.

Confronting the digital revolution in academia, this book examines the application of new computational techniques and visualisation technologies in the Arts & Humanities. Uniting differing perspectives, leading and emerging scholars discuss the theoretical and practical challenges that computation raises for these disciplines.

The two volumes IFIP AICT 545 and 546 constitute the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 11th IFIP WG 5.14 International Conference on Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture, CCTA 2017, held in Jilin, China, in August 2017. The 100 revised papers included in the two volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 282 submissions. They cover a wide range of interesting theories and applications of information technology in agriculture. The papers focus on four topics: Internet of Things and big data in agriculture, precision agriculture and agricultural robots, agricultural information services, and animal and plant phenotyping for agriculture.

Cognitive Intelligence with Neutrosophic Statistics in Bioinformatics investigates and presents the many applications that have arisen in the last ten years using neutrosophic statistics in bioinformatics, medicine, agriculture and cognitive science. This book will be very useful to the scientific community, appealing to audiences interested in fuzzy, vague concepts from which uncertain data are collected, including academic researchers, practicing engineers and graduate students. Neutrosophic statistics is a generalization of classical statistics. In classical statistics, the data is known, formed by crisp numbers. In comparison, data in neutrosophic statistics has some indeterminacy. This data may be ambiguous, vague, imprecise, incomplete, and even unknown. Neutrosophic statistics refers to a set of data, such that the data or a part of it are indeterminate in some degree, and to methods used to analyze the data.

This book constitutes Part IV of the refereed four-volume post-conference proceedings of the 4th IFIP TC 12 International Conference on Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture, CCTA 2010, held in Nanchang, China, in October 2010. The 352 revised papers presented were carefully selected from numerous submissions. They cover a wide range of interesting theories and applications of information technology in agriculture, including simulation models and decision-support systems for agricultural production, agricultural product quality testing, traceability and e-commerce technology, the application of information and communication technology in agriculture, and universal information service technology and service systems development in rural areas.

This book includes 23 papers dealing with the impact of modern information and communication technologies that support a wide variety of communities: local communities, virtual communities, and communities of practice, such as knowledge communities and scientific communities. The volume is the result of the second multidisciplinary "Communities and Technologies Conference," a major event in this emerging research field. The various chapters discuss how communities are affected by technologies, and how understanding of the way that communities function can be used in improving information systems design. This state of the art overview will be of interest to computer and information scientists, social scientists and practitioners alike.