Computational models can be found everywhere in present day science and engineering. In providing a logical framework and foundation for the specification and design of specification languages, Raymond Turner uses this framework to introduce and study computable models. In doing so he presents the first systematic attempt to provide computational models with a logical foundation.

Computable models have wide-ranging applications from programming language semantics and specification languages, through to knowledge representation languages and formalism for natural language semantics. They are also implicit in computer modelling in many areas of physical and social science.

This detailed investigation into the logical foundations of specification and specification languages and their application to the definition of programming languages, coupled with a clear exposition of theories of data and computable models as mathematical notions will be welcomed by researchers and graduate students.

Advances In Digital Government presents a collection of in-depth articles that addresses a representative cross-section of the matrix of issues involved in implementing digital government systems. These articles constitute a survey of both the technical and policy dimensions related to the design, planning and deployment of digital government systems. The research and development projects within the technical dimension represent a wide range of governmental functions, including the provisioning of health and human services, management of energy information, multi-agency integration, and criminal justice applications. The technical issues dealt with in these projects include database and ontology integration, distributed architectures, scalability, and security and privacy. The human factors research emphasizes compliance with access standards for the disabled and the policy articles contain both conceptual models for developing digital government systems as well as real management experiences and results in deploying them. Advances In Digital Government presents digital government issues from the perspectives of different communities and societies. This geographic and social diversity illuminates a unique array of policy and social perspectives, exposing practitioners to new and useful ways of thinking about digital government.

Sparse grids have gained increasing interest in recent years for the numerical treatment of high-dimensional problems. Whereas classical numerical discretization schemes fail in more than three or four dimensions, sparse grids make it possible to overcome the curse of dimensionality to some degree, extending the number of dimensions that can be dealt with. This volume of LNCSE collects the papers from the proceedings of the second workshop on sparse grids and applications, demonstrating once again the importance of this numerical discretization scheme. The selected articles present recent advances on the numerical analysis of sparse grids as well as efficient data structures, and the range of applications extends to uncertainty quantification settings and clustering, to name but a few examples.
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As instructors move further into the incorporation of 21st century technologies in adult education, a new paradigm of digitally-enriched mediated learning has emerged. ""Adult Learning in the Digital Age: Perspectives on Online Technologies and Outcomes"" provides a comprehensive framework of trends and issues related to adult learning for the facilitation of authentic learning in the age of digital technology. This significant reference source offers researchers, academicians, and practitioners a valuable compendium of expert ideas, practical experiences, field challenges, and potential opportunities concerning the advancement of new technological and pedagogical techniques used in adult schooling.

In recent years, building information modeling has become a very active research area of construction informatics with investigation of ICT use within construction industry processes and organizations. The Handbook of Research on Building Information Modeling and Construction Informatics: Concepts and Technologies addresses the problems related to information integration and interoperability throughout the lifecycle of a building, from feasibility and conceptual design through to demolition and recycling stages. Containing research from leading international experts, this Handbook of Research provides comprehensive coverage and definitions of the most important issues, concepts, trends, and technologies within the field.

Organisational Semiotics offers an effective approach to analysing organisations and modelling organisational behaviour. The methods and techniques derived from Organisational Semiotics enable us to study the organisation by examining how information is created and used for communication, coordination and performance of actions towards organisational objectives. The latest development of the young discipline and its applications have been reported in this book, which provides a useful guide and a valuable reference to anyone working in the areas of organisational study and information systems development.

Email steals too much of your precious time, doesn't it?

Processing email takes way too much time because we never learned to manage it effectively. We are constantly interrupted, invest countless hours in it, re-read emails that languish in our inbox, store email we don't need and suffer from email overload. Don't you agree?

This book provides what you need to manage email, eliminate the overload and save your precious time. It will help you minimize interruption, overcome indecision and empty your inbox. It will help you organize priorities and manage time, so you can get your work done--at work. You can give up doing email at dinner and in bed. Good idea?

Privacy, Security and Trust within the Context of Pervasive Computing is an edited volume based on a post workshop at the second international conference on Pervasive Computing. The workshop was held April18-23, 2004, in Vienna, Austria.

The goal of the workshop was not to focus on specific, even novel mechanisms, but rather on the interfaces between mechanisms in different technical and social problem spaces. An investigation of the interfaces between the notions of context, privacy, security, and trust will result in a deeper understanding of the "atomic" problems, leading to a more complete understanding of the social and technical issues in pervasive computing.

The ability to uncover, share, and utilize knowledge is one of the most vital components to the success of any organization. While new technologies and techniques of knowledge dissemination are promising, there is still a struggle to derive and circulate meaningful information from large data sets. Strategic Data-Based Wisdom in the Big Data Era combines the latest empirical research findings, best practices, and applicable theoretical frameworks surrounding data analytics and knowledge acquisition. Providing a multi-disciplinary perspective of the subject area, this book is an essential reference source for professionals and researchers working in the field of knowledge management who would like to improve their understanding of the strategic role of data-based wisdom in different types of work communities and environments.

This book encapsulates some work done in the DIRC project concerned with trust and responsibility in socio-technical systems. It brings together a range of disciplinary approaches - computer science, sociology and software engineering - to produce a socio-technical systems perspective on the issues surrounding trust in technology in complex settings. Computer systems can only bring about their purported benefits if functionality, users and usability are central to their design and deployment. Thus, technology can only be trusted in situ and in everyday use if these issues have been brought to bear on the process of technology design, implementation and use. The studies detailed in this book analyse the ways in which trust in technology is achieved and/or worked around in everyday situations in a range of settings - including hospitals, a steelworks, a public enquiry, the financial services sector and air traffic control.

REAL-TIME MANAGEMENT OF RESOURCE ALLOCATION SYSTEMS focuses on the problem of managing the resource allocation taking place within the operational context of many contemporary technological applications, including flexibly automated production systems, automated railway and/or monorail transportation systems, electronic workflow management systems, and business transaction supporting systems. A distinct trait of all these applications is that they limit the role of the human element to remote high-level supervision, while placing the burden of the real-time monitoring and coordination of the ongoing activity upon a computerized control system. Hence, any applicable control paradigm must address not only the issues of throughput maximization, work-in-process inventory reduction, and delay and cost minimization, that have been the typical concerns for past studies on resource allocation, but it must also guarantee the operational correctness and the behavioral consistency of the underlying automated system. The resulting problem is rather novel for the developers of these systems, since, in the past, many of its facets were left to the jurisdiction of the present human intelligence. It is also complex, due to the high levels of choice a" otherwise known as flexibility a" inherent in the operation of these environments.

This book proposes a control paradigm that offers a comprehensive and integrated solution to, both, the behavioral / logical and the performance-oriented control problems underlying the management of the resource allocation taking place in the aforementioned highly automated technological applications. Building upon a series of fairly recent results fromDiscrete Event Systems theory, the proposed paradigm is distinguished by: (i) its robustness to the experienced stochasticities and operational contingencies; (ii) its scalability to the large-scale nature of the target technological applications; and (iii) its operational efficiency. These three properties are supported through the adoption of a "closed-loop" structure for the proposed control scheme, and also, through a pertinent decomposition of the overall control function to a logical and a performance-oriented controller for the underlying resource allocation. REAL-TIME MANAGEMENT OF RESOURCE ALLOCATION SYSTEMS provides a rigorous study of the control problems addressed by each of these two controllers, and of their integration to a unified control function. A notion of optimal control is formulated for each of these problems, but it turns out that the corresponding optimal policies are computationally intractable. Hence, a large part of the book is devoted to the development of effective and computationally efficient approximations for these optimal control policies, especially for those that correspond to the more novel logical control problem.

While a typical project manager s responsibility and accountability are both limited to a project with a clear start and end date, IT managers are responsible for an ongoing, ever-changing process for which they must adapt and evolve to stay updated, dependable, and secure in their field. Professional Advancements and Management Trends in the IT Sector offers the latest managerial trends within the field of information technology management. By collecting research from experts from around the world, in a variety of sectors and levels of technical expertise, this volume offers a broad variety of case studies, best practices, methodologies, and research within the field of information technology management. It will serve as a vital resource for practitioners and academics alike.

Digital Timing Macromodeling for VLSI Design Verification first of all provides an extensive history of the development of simulation techniques. It presents detailed discussion of the various techniques implemented in circuit, timing, fast-timing, switch-level timing, switch-level, and gate-level simulation. It also discusses mixed-mode simulation and interconnection analysis methods. The review in Chapter 2 gives an understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of the many techniques applied in modern digital macromodels. The book also presents a wide variety of techniques for performing nonlinear macromodeling of digital MOS subcircuits which address a large number of shortcomings in existing digital MOS macromodels. Specifically, the techniques address the device model detail, transistor coupling capacitance, effective channel length modulation, series transistor reduction, effective transconductance, input terminal dependence, gate parasitic capacitance, the body effect, the impact of parasitic RC-interconnects, and the effect of transmission gates. The techniques address major sources of errors in existing macromodeling techniques, which must be addressed if macromodeling is to be accepted in commercial CAD tools by chip designers. The techniques presented in Chapters 4-6 can be implemented in other macromodels, and are demonstrated using the macromodel presented in Chapter 3. The new techniques are validated over an extremely wide range of operating conditions: much wider than has been presented for previous macromodels, thus demonstrating the wide range of applicability of these techniques.

The papers in this volume comprise the refereed proceedings of the First Int- national Conference on Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture (CCTA 2007), in Wuyishan, China, 2007. This conference is organized by China Agricultural University, Chinese Society of Agricultural Engineering and the Beijing Society for Information Technology in Agriculture. The purpose of this conference is to facilitate the communication and cooperation between institutions and researchers on theories, methods and implementation of computer science and information technology. By researching information technology development and the - sources integration in rural areas in China, an innovative and effective approach is expected to be explored to promote the technology application to the development of modern agriculture and contribute to the construction of new countryside. The rapid development of information technology has induced substantial changes and impact on the development of China's rural areas. Western thoughts have exerted great impact on studies of Chinese information technology devel- ment and it helps more Chinese and western scholars to expand their studies in this academic and application area. Thus, this conference, with works by many prominent scholars, has covered computer science and technology and information development in China's rural areas; and probed into all the important issues and the newest research topics, such as Agricultural Decision Support System and Expert System, GIS, GPS, RS and Precision Farming, CT applications in Rural Area, Agricultural System Simulation, Evolutionary Computing, etc.

Of all the millions of organisms alive on Earth today and that lived in the past, the human species, Homo sapiens, is the only one, as far as the scientists can tell, that is capable of creative thoughts. All of us, every one of us can do it as it is part of our badge of humanity. Indeed, it might be our only true badge of humanity since in no other characteristics are we truly unique and supreme among all species, living or extinct. Creative thought might be the only salvation given the 21st century's complexities and unsolved issues. Ayse discusses in her book how computers might act as creativity support tools by providing several articles with regard to the mind, creativity and technology in general.

Geocomputation may be viewed as the application of a computational science paradigm to study a wide range of problems in geographical systems contexts.This volume presents a clear, comprehensive and thoroughly state-of-the-art overview of current research, written by leading figures in the field.It provides important insights into this new and rapidly developing field and attempts to establish the principles, and to develop techniques for solving real world problems in a wide array of application domains with a catalyst to greater understanding of what geocomputation is and what it entails.The broad coverage makes it invaluable reading for resarchers and professionals in geography, environmental and economic sciences as well as for graduate students of spatial science and computer science.

Collaborative research in bioinformatics and systems biology is a key element of modern biology and health research. This book highlights and provides access to many of the methods, environments, results and resources involved, including integral laboratory data generation and experimentation and clinical activities. Collaborative projects embody a research paradigm that connects many of the top scientists, institutions, their resources and research worldwide, resulting in first-class contributions to bioinformatics and systems biology. Central themes include describing processes and results in collaborative research projects using computational biology and providing a guide for researchers to access them.

The book is also a practical guide on how science is managed. It shows how collaborative researchers are putting results together in a way accessible to the entire biomedical community.

This self-contained book systematically explores the statistical dynamics on and of complex networks having relevance across a large number of scientific disciplines. The theories related to complex networks are increasingly being used by researchers for their usefulness in harnessing the most difficult problems of a particular discipline. The book is a collection of surveys and cutting-edge research contributions exploring the interdisciplinary relationship of dynamics on and of complex networks. Topics covered include complex networks found in nature-genetic pathways, ecological networks, linguistic systems, and social systems-as well as man-made systems such as the World Wide Web and peer-to-peer networks.

The contributed chapters in this volume are intended to promote cross-fertilization in several research areas, and will be valuable to newcomers in the field, experienced researchers, practitioners, and graduate students interested in systems exhibiting an underlying complex network structure in disciplines such as computer science, biology, statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics, linguistics, and the social sciences.

Computer-Aided Verification is a collection of papers that begins with a general survey of hardware verification methods. Ms. Gupta starts with the issue of verification itself and develops a taxonomy of verification methodologies, focusing especially upon recent advances. Although her emphasis is hardware verification, most of what she reports applies to software verification as well. Graphical presentation is coming to be a de facto requirement for a friendly' user interface. The second paper presents a generic format for graphical presentations of coordinating systems represented by automata. The last two papers as a pair, present a variety of generic techniques for reducing the computational cost of computer-aided verification based upon explicit computational memory: the first of the two gives a time-space trade-off, while the second gives a technique which trades space for a (sometimes predictable) probability of error. Computer-Aided Verification is an edited volume of original research. This research work has also been published as a special issue of the journal Formal Methods in System Design, 1:2-3.

This volume covers a variety of topics in the field of research in strategic management and information technology. These topics include organizational fit and flexibility and the determinants of business unit reliance on information technologies.

This volume examines the application of swarm intelligence in data mining, addressing the issues of swarm intelligence and data mining using novel intelligent approaches. The book comprises 11 chapters including an introduction reviewing fundamental definitions and important research challenges. Important features include a detailed overview of swarm intelligence and data mining paradigms, focused coverage of timely, advanced data mining topics, state-of-the-art theoretical research and application developments and contributions by pioneers in the field.