The biggest challenges faced by the software industry are cost control and schedule control. As such, effective strategies for process improvement must be researched and implemented. Analyzing the Role of Risk Mitigation and Monitoring in Software Development is a critical scholarly resource that explores software risk and development as organizations continue to implement more applications across multiple technologies and a multi-tiered environment. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as quantitative risk assessment, threat analysis, and software vulnerability management, this book is a vital resource for engineers, academicians, professionals, and researchers seeking current research on the importance of risk management in software development.

Social networks have emerged as a major trend in computing and social paradigms in the past few years. The social network model helps to inform the study of community behavior, allowing qualitative and quantitative assessments of how people communicate and the rules that govern communication. Social Networking and Community Behavior Modeling: Qualitative and Quantitative Measures provides a clear and consolidated view of current social network models. This work explores new methods for modeling, characterizing, and constructing social networks. Chapters contained in this book study critical security issues confronting social networking, the emergence of new mobile social networking devices and applications, network robustness, and how social networks impact the business aspects of organizations.

Whether by synergy or by synthesis, development and technology are becoming synonymous in every domain. Cases on Transnational Learning and Technologically Enabled Environments reports on national and international initiatives undertaken to adapt advancements in information and communication technology and successfully face the challenges posed by various social and economic forces. The international research in this book represents instances of institutions that are in transition as well as those that are readily using technology in education.

Decades of research have shown that student collaboration in groups doesn't just happen; rather it needs to be a deliberate process facilitated by the instructor. Promoting collaboration in virtual learning environments presents a variety of challenges. Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning: Best Practices & Principles for Instructors answers the demand for a thorough resource on techniques to facilitate effective collaborative learning in virtual environments. This book provides must-have information on the role of the instructor in computer-supported collaborative learning, real-world perspectives on virtual learning group collaboration, and supporting learning group motivation.

Software has long been perceived as complex, at least within Software Engineering circles. We have been living in a recognised state of crisis since the first NATO Software Engineering conference in 1968. Time and again we have been proven unable to engineer reliable software as easily/cheaply as we imagined. Cost overruns and expensive failures are the norm.
The problem is fundamentally one of complexity: software is fundamentally complex because it must be precise. Problems that appear to be specified quite easily in plain language become far more complex when written in a more formal notation, such as computer code. Comparisons with other engineering disciplines are deceptive. One cannot easily increase the factor of safety of software in the same way that one could in building a steel structure, for example. Software is typically built assuming perfection, often without adequate safety nets in case the unthinkable happens. In such circumstances it should not be surprising to find out that (seemingly) minor errors have the potential to cause entire software systems to collapse.
The goal of this book is to uncover techniques that will aid in overcoming complexity and enable us to produce reliable, dependable computer systems that will operate as intended, and yet are produced on-time, in budget, and are evolvable, both over time and at run time. We hope that the contributions in this book will aid in understanding the nature of software complexity and provide guidance for the control or avoidance of complexity in the engineering of complex software systems.

M-commerce (mobile-commerce) refers to e-commerce activities carried out via a mobile terminal such as a phone or PDA. M-commerce applications for both individuals and organizations are expected to grow considerably over the next few years. Mobile Commerce: Technology, Theory and Applications addresses issues pertaining to the development, deployment, and use of these applications. The objective of this book is to provide a single source of up-to-date information about mobile commerce including the technology (hardware and software) involved, research on the expected impact of this technology on businesses and consumers, and case studies describing state-of-the-art m-commerce applications and lessons learned.

Increasing numbers of businesses and Information Technology firms are outsourcing their software and Web development tasks. It is has been estimated that currently half of the Fortune 500 companies have utilized outsourcing for their development needs and estimates that by the end of 2008, 40% of U.S. companies will either develop, test, support, or store software overseas, with another 40% considering doing the same. Several industries, from computer software to telemarketing, have begun aggressively shifting white-collar work out of the United States. The United States currently accounts for more than half of worldwide spending on IT outsourcing, with a growing portion of this spending going to countries such as India, Russia, and the Philippines, and this trend will continue. Research has indicated that the primary problem is language because of idiomatic expressions and subtle cultural nuances associated with the use of particular words. Thus communication frequently breaks down when dealing with overseas companies.

This Festschrift is in honor of Marilyn Wolf, on the occasion of her 60th birthday. Prof. Wolf is a renowned researcher and educator in Electrical and Computer Engineering, who has made pioneering contributions in all of the major areas in Embedded, Cyber-Physical, and Internet of Things (IoT) Systems. This book provides a timely collection of contributions that cover important topics related to Smart Cameras, Hardware/Software Co-Design, and Multimedia applications. Embedded systems are everywhere; cyber-physical systems enable monitoring and control of complex physical processes with computers; and IoT technology is of increasing relevance in major application areas, including factory automation, and smart cities. Smart cameras and multimedia technologies introduce novel opportunities and challenges in embedded, cyber-physical and IoT applications. Advanced hardware/software co-design methodologies provide valuable concepts and tools for addressing these challenges. The diverse topics of the chapters in this Festschrift help to reflect the great breadth and depth of Marilyn Wolf's contributions in research and education. The chapters have been written by some of Marilyn's closest collaborators and colleagues.

This book addresses the question of how to achieve social coordination in Socio-Cognitive Technical Systems (SCTS). SCTS are a class of Socio-Technical Systems that are complex, open, systems where several humans and digital entities interact in order to achieve some collective endeavour. The book approaches the question from the conceptual background of regulated open multiagent systems, with the question being motivated by their design and construction requirements. The book captures the collective effort of eight groups from leading research centres and universities, each of which has developed a conceptual framework for the design of regulated multiagent systems and most have also developed technological artefacts that support the processes from specification to implementation of that type of systems. The first, introductory part of the book describes the challenge of developing frameworks for SCTS and articulates the premises and the main concepts involved in those frameworks. The second part discusses the eight frameworks and contrasts their main components. The final part maps the new field by discussing the types of activities in which SCTS are likely to be used, the features that such uses will exhibit, and the challenges that will drive the evolution of this field.

Tearing and interconnecting methods, such as FETI, FETI-DP, BETI, etc., are among the most successful domain decomposition solvers for partial differential equations. The purpose of this book is to give a detailed and self-contained presentation of these methods, including the corresponding algorithms as well as a rigorous convergence theory. In particular, two issues are addressed that have not been covered in any monograph yet: the coupling of finite and boundary elements within the tearing and interconnecting framework including exterior problems, and the case of highly varying (multiscale) coefficients not resolved by the subdomain partitioning. In this context, the book offers a detailed view to an active and up-to-date area of research.

This research volume presents a sample of recent contributions related to the issue of quality-assessment for Web Based information in the context of information access, retrieval, and filtering systems.

The advent of the Web and the uncontrolled process of documents' generation have raised the problem of declining quality assessment to information on the Web, by considering both the nature of documents (texts, images, video, sounds, and so on), the genre of documents ( news, geographic information, ontologies, medical records, products records, and so on), the reputation of information sources and sites, and, last but not least the actions performed on documents (content indexing, retrieval and ranking, collaborative filtering, and so on).

The volume constitutes a compendium of both heterogeneous approaches and sample applications focusing specific aspects of the quality assessment for Web-based information for researchers, PhD students and practitioners carrying out their research activity in the field of Web information retrieval and filtering, Web information mining, information quality representation and management.

This book is a compilation of Mark Pelczarski's "Graphically Speaking" tutorial columns that appeared in Softalk magazine. Using the included programs, you will be able to create art, do animation for games, and have a bunch of fun on your Apple II computer. Once you learn the fundamentals of creating hi-res, 3-D, and animation, you will be limited only by your imagination. Originally published in 1983, this Enhanced Edition features a new preface from the author and a refreshed design with a lot of art from Penguin Software. Mark taught computer science, programming, and mathematics at the high school and university levels. He founded Penguin Software and created such classic software as Graphics Magician, Complete Graphics System, and Special Effects. Penguin published over 45 popular titles such as: The Coveted Mirror, Expedition Amazon, Oo-Topos, The Quest, The Spy's Adventures Around the World, Spy's Demise, Sword of Kadash, Transylvania, and Xyphus.

Enabling information interoperability, fostering legal knowledge usability and reuse, enhancing legal information search, in short, formalizing the complexity of legal knowledge to enhance legal knowledge management are challenging tasks, for which different solutions and lines of research have been proposed.

During the last decade, research and applications based on the use of legal ontologies as a technique to represent legal knowledge has raised a very interesting debate about their capacity and limitations to represent conceptual structures in the legal domain. Making conceptual legal knowledge explicit would support the development of a web of legal knowledge, improve communication, create trust and enable and support open data, e-government and e-democracy activities. Moreover, this explicit knowledge is also relevant to the formalization of software agents and the shaping of virtual institutions and multi-agent systems or environments.

This book explores the use of ontologism in legal knowledge representation for semantically-enhanced legal knowledge systems or web-based applications. In it, current methodologies, tools and languages used for ontology development are revised, and the book includes an exhaustive revision of existing ontologies in the legal domain. The development of the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK) is presented as a case study.
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Scheduling theory has received a growing interest since its origins in the second half of the 20th century. Developed initially for the study of scheduling problems with a single objective, the theory has been recently extended to problems involving multiple criteria. However, this extension has still left a gap between the classical multi-criteria approaches and some real-life problems in which not all jobs contribute to the evaluation of each criterion.

In this book, we close this gap by presenting and developing multi-agent scheduling models in which subsets of jobs sharing the same resources are evaluated by different criteria. Several scenarios are introduced, depending on the definition and the intersection structure of the job subsets. Complexity results, approximation schemes, heuristics and exact algorithms are discussed for single-machine and parallel-machine scheduling environments. Definitions and algorithms are illustrated with the help of examples and figures.

"Computer Science and Convergence"is proceedings of the 3rd FTRA International Conference on Computer Science and its Applications (CSA-11) and The 2011 FTRA World Convergence Conference (FTRA WCC 2011). The topics of CSA and WCC cover the current hot topics satisfying the world-wide ever-changing needs.

CSA-11 will be the most comprehensive conference focused on the various aspects of advances in computer science and its applicationsand will provide an opportunity for academic and industry professionals to discuss the latest issues and progress in the area of CSA. In addition, the conference will publish high quality papers which are closely related to the various theories and practical applications in CSA. Furthermore, we expect that the conference and its publications will be a trigger for further related research and technology improvements in this important subject. The main scope of CSA-11 is as follows:

- Mobile and ubiquitous computing
- Dependable, reliable and autonomic computing
- Security and trust management
- Multimedia systems and services
- Networking and communications
- Database and data mining
- Game and software engineering
- Grid, cloud and scalable computing
- Embedded system and software
- Artificial intelligence
- Distributed and parallel algorithms
- Web and internet computing
- IT policy and business management

WCC-11 is a major conference for scientists, engineers, and practitioners throughout the world to present the latest research, results, ideas, developments and applications in all areas of convergence technologies. The main scope of WCC-11 is as follows:

- Cryptography and Security for Converged environments - Wireless sensor network for Converged environments
- Multimedia for Converged environments
- Advanced Vehicular Communications Technology for Converged environments
- Human centric computing, P2P, Grid and Cloud computing for Converged environments
- U-Healthcare for Converged environments
- Strategic Security Management for Industrial Technology
- Advances in Artificial Intelligence and Surveillance Systems "

'Rough Computing' explores the application of rough set theory, which has attracted attention because of the ability to enhance databases by allowing for the management of uncertainty, a comparative analysis between rough sets, and other intelligent data analysis.