Commutative Algebra, Singularities and Computer Algebra presents current trends in commutative algebra, algebraic combinatorics, singularity theory and computer algebra, and highlights the interaction between these disciplines. Contributions by leading international mathematicians thoroughly discuss topics in: modules theory, integrally closed ideals and determinantal ideals, singularities in projective spaces and Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity, Groebner and SAGBI basis, and the use of the computer packages Bergman, CoCoA and SINGULAR.

Genetic Programming Theory and Practice IV was developed from the fourth workshop at the University of Michigan's Center for the Study of Complex Systems to facilitate the exchange of ideas and information related to the rapidly advancing field of Genetic Programming (GP). The text provides a cohesive view of the issues facing both practitioners and theoreticians, and examines the synergy between GP theory and application. The foremost international researchers and practitioners in the GP arena contributed to the volume, exploring application areas including chemical process control, circuit design, financial data mining and bioinformatics, to name just a few. This volume is the result of an extensive dialog between GP theoreticians and practitioners, and is a unique and indispensable tool for both academics and industry professionals involved in GP, evolutionary computation, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Learn how to create computational designs, graphics and animations with minimum programming effort but without sacrificing an understanding of the algorithmic processes involved.

Students and teachers of computer aided design have two options available to them. On the one hand, they can make use of state-of-the-art computer aided design systems that hide all the programming behind the user interface. Alternatively, they can learn from first principles and expend excess effort dealing with the tangential programming requirements of the computational framework, the user interface and graphical display methods.

Geometric Programming for Computer Aided Design provides a middle way. It presents PlaSM, a design environment for graphics, modelling and animation that supports rapid prototyping but does not deprive the user of direct control over the underlying geometric programming.

Divided into 3 self-contained sections, this book provides:

• An introduction to functional programming with PLaSM

• A comprehensive discussion of basic graphics programming techniques

• An in-depth tutorial on geometric modelling progressing from basic to advanced concepts including animation and motion modelling

• Complete PLaSM language libraries organized by chapter

• Access to free geometric libraries and the PLaSM source code via an accompanying web site

• Examples from other disciplines such as mathematics, mechanical engineering, architecture and the arts.

This book presents a powerful new language and methodology for programming complex reactive systems in a scenario-based manner. The language is live sequence charts (LSCs), a multimodal extension of sequence charts and UML's sequence diagrams, used in the past mainly for requirements. The methodology is play-in/play-out, an unusually convenient means for specifying inter-object scenario-based behavior directly from a GUI or an object model diagram, with the surprising ability to execute that behavior, or those requirements, directly. The language and methodology are supported by a fully implemented tool – the Play-Engine – which is attached to the book in CD form.   The design of reactive systems is one of the most challenging problems in computer science. This books starts with a critical insight to explain the difficulty of this problem: there is a fundamental gap between the scenario-based way in which people think about such systems and the state-based way in which these systems are implemented. The book then offers a radical proposal to bridge this gap by means of playing scenarios. Systems can be specified by playing in scenarios and implemented by means of a Play-Engine that plays out scenarios. This idea is carried out and developed, lucidly, formally and playfully, to its fullest. The result is a compelling proposal, accompanied by a prototype software engine, for reactive systems design, which is bound to cause a splash in the software-engineering community. Moshe Y. Vardi, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA Scenarios are a primary exchange tool in explaining system behavior to others, but their limited expressive power never made them able to fully describe systems, thus limiting their use. The language of Live Sequence Charts (LSCs) presented in this beautifully written book achieves this goal, and the attached Play-Engine software makes these LSCs really come alive. This is undoubtedly a key breakthrough that will start long-awaited and exciting new directions in systems specification, synthesis, and analysis. Gérard Berry, Esterel Technologies and INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, France The approach of David Harel and Rami Marelly is a fascinating way of combining prototyping techniques with techniques for identifying behavior and user interfaces. Manfred Broy, Technical University of Munich, Germany

Object relationships in modern software systems are becoming increasingly numerous and complex, and program errors due to violations of object relationships are difficult to detect. Programmers need new tools that allow them to explore objects in a large system more efficiently and to detect broken object relationships instantaneously. Such tools incorporate approaches used in such areas as data visualization, pattern matching and extraction, database querying, active databases, and rule-based programming. The query-based debugging approach developed by the author of this book is another powerful yet efficient tool to be added to the developer's tool chest. Advanced Debugging Methods presents practice and tools for debugging computer programs. This book proposes new powerful approaches that simplify the daunting task of debugging complex software systems. Although debugging has been addressed in numerous research papers, many of its methods have yet to be explored in a book-length format. This book helps to fill this gap by presenting an overview of existing debugging tools with motivating examples and case studies, as well as presenting new, state-of-the-art debugging methods. Advanced Debugging Methods will be of use to software developers looking for tools to be applied in cutting edge practice; system architects looking at the relationship between software design and debugging; tools and programming language researchers looking for new ideas in run-time tool implementation as well as detailed descriptions of advanced implementations; and university professors and graduate students who will use this book as supplementary reading for graduate courses in programming tools, language implementation, and advanced object-oriented systems. Advanced Debugging Methods is also a handy reference of currently existing debugging methodologies as well as a springboard for cutting-edge research to simplify the difficult task of debugging and to facilitate the development of more robust software systems.

Among the group of physics honors students huddled in 1957 on a Colorado mountain watching Sputnik bisect the heavens, one young scientist was destined, three short years later, to become a key player in America s own top-secret spy satellite program. One of our era s most prolific mathematicians, Karl Gustafson was given just two weeks to write the first US spy satellite s software. The project would fundamentally alter America s Cold War strategy, and this autobiographical account of a remarkable academic life spent in the top flight tells this fascinating inside story for the first time.

Gustafson takes you from his early pioneering work in computing, through fascinating encounters with Nobel laureates and Fields medalists, to his current observations on mathematics, science and life. He tells of brushes with death, being struck by lightning, and the beautiful women who have been a part of his journey."

This book introduces a fairly universal approach to the design and analysis of exact optimization algorithms for multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems. It proposes the circuits without repetitions representing the sets of feasible solutions along with the increasing and strictly increasing cost functions as a model for such problems. The book designs the algorithms for multi-stage and bi-criteria optimization and for counting the solutions in the framework of this model. As applications, this book studies eleven known combinatorial optimization problems: matrix chain multiplication, global sequence alignment, optimal paths in directed graphs, binary search trees, convex polygon triangulation, line breaking (text justification), one-dimensional clustering, optimal bitonic tour, segmented least squares, optimization of matchings in trees, and 0/1 knapsack problem. The results presented are useful for researchers in combinatorial optimization. This book is also useful as the basis for graduate courses.

This book contains the research on modeling bodies, cloth and character based adaptation performed during the last 3 years at MIRALab at the University of Geneva. More than ten researchers have worked together in order to reach a truly 3D Virtual Try On. What we mean by Virtual Try On is the possibility of anyone to give dimensions on her predefined body and obtain her own sized shape body, select a 3D cloth and see oneself animated in Real-Time, walking along a catwalk. Some systems exist today but are unable to adapt to body dimensions, have no real-time animation of body and clothes. A truly system on the web of Virtual Try On does not exist so far. This book is an attempt to explain how to build a 3D Virtual Try On system which is now very much in demand in the clothing industry. To describe this work, the book is divided into five chapters. The first chapter contains a brief historical background of general deformation methods. It ends with a section on the 3D human body scanner systems that are used both for rapid p- totyping and statistical analyses of the human body size variations.

On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders is an absorbing chronicle of the inventive, individualistic, and often cantankerous individuals who set the Internet free. Michael A. Banks describes how the online population created a new culture and turned a new frontier into their vision of the future. This book will introduce you to the innovators who laid the foundation for the Internet and the World Wide Web, the man who invented online chat, and the people who invented the products all of us use online every day. Learn where, when, how and why the Internet came into being, and exactly what hundreds of thousands of people were doing online before the Web. See who was behind it all, and what inspired them.

Semantic Web services promise to automate tasks such as discovery, mediation, selection, composition, and invocation of services, enabling fully flexible automated e-business. Their usage, however, still requires a significant amount of human intervention due to the lack of support for a machine-processable description.

In this book, Jos de Bruijn and his coauthors lay the foundations for understanding the requirements that shape the description of the various aspects related to Semantic Web services, such as the static background knowledge in the form of ontologies, the functional description of the service, and the behavioral description of the service. They introduce the Web Service Modeling Language (WSML), which provides means for describing the functionality and behavior of Web services, as well as the underlying business knowledge, in the form of ontologies, with a conceptual grounding in the Web Service Modeling Ontology.

Academic and industrial researchers as well as professionals will find a comprehensive overview of the concepts and challenges in the area of Semantic Web services, the Web Services Modeling Language and its relation to the Web Services Modeling Ontology, and an in-depth treatment of both enabling technologies and theoretical foundations.

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.

This book provides a comprehensive and practically minded introduction into serious games for law enforcement agencies. Serious games offer wide ranging benefits for law enforcement with applications from professional trainings to command-level decision making to the preparation for crises events. This book explains the conceptual foundations of virtual and augmented reality, gamification and simulation. It further offers practical guidance on the process of serious games development from user requirements elicitation to evaluation. The chapters are intended to provide principles, as well as hands-on knowledge to plan, design, test and apply serious games successfully in a law enforcement environment. A diverse set of case studies showcases the enormous variety that is possible in serious game designs and application areas and offers insights into concrete design decisions, design processes, benefits and challenges. The book is meant for law enforcement professionals interested in commissioning their own serious games as well as game designers interested in collaborative pedagogy and serious games for the law enforcement and security sector.

Soft City Culture and Technology: The Betaville Project discusses the complete cycle of conception, development, and deployment of the Betaville platform.

Betaville is a massively participatory online environment for distributed 3D design and development of proposals for changes to the built environment an experimental integration of art, design, and software development for the public realm. Through a detailed account of Betaville from a Big Crazy Idea to a working "deep social medium," the author examines the current conditions of performance and accessibility of hardware, software, networks, and skills that can be brought together into a new form of open public design and deliberation space, for and spanning and integrating the disparate spheres of art, architecture, social media, and engineering.

Betaville is an ambitious enterprise, of building compelling and constructive working relationships in situations where roles and disciplinary boundaries must be as agile as the development process of the software itself. Through a considered account and analysis of the interdependencies between Betaville's project design, development methods, and deployment, the reader can gain a deeper understanding of the potential socio-technical forms of New Soft Cities: blended virtual-physical worlds, whose "public works" must ultimately serve and succeed as massively collaborative works of art and infrastructure."

It was a pleasure to provide an introduction to a new volume on user experience evaluation in games. The scope, depth, and diversity of the work here is amazing. It attests to the growing popularity of games and the increasing importance developing a range of theories, methods, and scales to evaluate them. This evolution is driven by the cost and complexity of games being developed today. It is also driven by the need to broaden the appeal of games. Many of the approaches described here are enabled by new tools and techniques. This book (along with a few others) represents a watershed in game evaluation and understanding. The eld of game evaluation has truly "come of age." The broader eld of HCI can begin to look toward game evaluation for fresh, critical, and sophisticated thi- ing about design evaluation and product development. They can also look to games for groundbreaking case studies of evaluation of products. I'll brie y summarize each chapter below and provide some commentary. In conclusion, I will mention a few common themes and offer some challenges. Discussion In Chapter 1, User Experience Evaluation in Entertainment, Bernhaupt gives an overview and presents a general framework on methods currently used for user experience evaluation. The methods presented in the following chapters are s- marized and thus allow the reader to quickly assess the right set of methods that will help to evaluate the game under development.

As the first book devoted to relational data mining, this coherently written multi-author monograph provides a thorough introduction and systematic overview of the area. The first part introduces the reader to the basics and principles of classical knowledge discovery in databases and inductive logic programming; subsequent chapters by leading experts assess the techniques in relational data mining in a principled and comprehensive way; finally, three chapters deal with advanced applications in various fields and refer the reader to resources for relational data mining.This book will become a valuable source of reference for R&D professionals active in relational data mining. Students as well as IT professionals and ambitioned practitioners interested in learning about relational data mining will appreciate the book as a useful text and gentle introduction to this exciting new field.

This 2nd edition has been completely revised and updated, with additional new chapters. It presents state-of-the-art research in this area and focuses on key topics such as: visualization of semantic and structural information and metadata in the context of the emerging Semantic Web; Ontology-based Information Visualization and the use of graphically represented ontologies; Semantic Visualizations using Topic Maps and graph techniques; Recommender systems for filtering and recommending on the Semantic Web; SVG and X3D as new XML-based languages for 2D and 3D visualisations; methods used to construct and visualize high quality metadata and ontologies; and navigating and exploring XML documents using interactive multimedia interfaces. The design of visual interfaces for e-commerce and information retrieval is currently a challenging area of practical web development.

This monograph book is focused on the recent advances in smart, multimedia and computer gaming technologies. The Contributions include: *Smart Gamification and Smart Serious Games. *Fusion of secure IPsec-based Virtual Private Network, mobile computing and rich multimedia technology. *Teaching and Promoting Smart Internet of Things Solutions Using the Serious-game Approach. *Evaluation of Student Knowledge using an e-Learning Framework. *The iTEC Eduteka. *3D Virtual Worlds as a Fusion of Immersing, Visualizing, Recording, and Replaying Technologies. *Fusion of multimedia and mobile technology in audio guides for Museums and Exhibitions: from Bluetooth Push to Web Pull. The book is directed to researchers, students and software developers working in the areas of education and information technologies.

MATLAB and Simulink Crash Course for Engineers is a reader-friendly introductory guide to the features, functions, and applications of MATLAB and Simulink. The book provides readers with real-world examples, exercises, and applications, and offers highly illustrated, step-by-step demonstrations of techniques for the modelling and simulation of complex systems. MATLAB coverage includes vectors and matrices, programs and functions, complex numbers, visualization, solving equations, numerical methods, optimization problems, and graphical user interfaces. The Simulink coverage includes commonly used Simulink blocks, control system simulation, electrical circuit analysis, electric power systems, power electronics, and renewable energy technology. This powerful tutorial is a great resource for students, engineers, and other busy technical professionals who need to quickly acquire a solid understanding of MATLAB and Simulink.

This book celebrates Michael Stonebraker's accomplishments that led to his 2014 ACM A.M. Turing Award "for fundamental contributions to the concepts and practices underlying modern database systems." The book describes, for the broad computing community, the unique nature, significance, and impact of Mike's achievements in advancing modern database systems over more than forty years. Today, data is considered the world's most valuable resource, whether it is in the tens of millions of databases used to manage the world's businesses and governments, in the billions of databases in our smartphones and watches, or residing elsewhere, as yet unmanaged, awaiting the elusive next generation of database systems. Every one of the millions or billions of databases includes features that are celebrated by the 2014 Turing Award and are described in this book. Why should I care about databases? What is a database? What is data management? What is a database management system (DBMS)? These are just some of the questions that this book answers, in describing the development of data management through the achievements of Mike Stonebraker and his over 200 collaborators. In reading the stories in this book, you will discover core data management concepts that were developed over the two greatest eras (so far) of data management technology. The book is a collection of 36 stories written by Mike and 38 of his collaborators: 23 world-leading database researchers, 11 world-class systems engineers, and 4 business partners. If you are an aspiring researcher, engineer, or entrepreneur you might read these stories to find these turning points as practice to tilt at your own computer-science windmills, to spur yourself to your next step of innovation and achievement.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. (Albert Einstein, Readers Digest, 1977) The modern practice of creating technical systems and technological processes of high effi.ciency besides the employment of new principles, new materials, new physical effects and other new solutions ( which is very traditional and plays the key role in the selection of the general structure of the object to be designed) also includes the choice of the best combination for the set of parameters (geometrical sizes, electrical and strength characteristics, etc.) concretizing this general structure, because the Variation of these parameters ( with the structure or linkage being already set defined) can essentially affect the objective performance indexes. The mathematical tools for choosing these best combinations are exactly what is this book about. With the advent of computers and the computer-aided design the pro bations of the selected variants are usually performed not for the real examples ( this may require some very expensive building of sample op tions and of the special installations to test them ), but by the analysis of the corresponding mathematical models. The sophistication of the mathematical models for the objects to be designed, which is the natu ral consequence of the raising complexity of these objects, greatly com plicates the objective performance analysis. Today, the main (and very often the only) available instrument for such an analysis is computer aided simulation of an object's behavior, based on numerical experiments with its mathematical model."

Polynomial extremal problems (PEP) constitute one of the most important subclasses of nonlinear programming models. Their distinctive feature is that an objective function and constraints can be expressed by polynomial functions in one or several variables. Let: e = {: e 1, ...: en} be the vector in n-dimensional real linear space Rn; n PO(: e), PI (: e), ..., Pm (: e) are polynomial functions in R with real coefficients. In general, a PEP can be formulated in the following form: (0.1) find r = inf Po(: e) subject to constraints (0.2) Pi (: e) =0, i=l, ..., m (a constraint in the form of inequality can be written in the form of equality by introducing a new variable: for example, P( x) 0 is equivalent to P(: e) + y2 = 0). Boolean and mixed polynomial problems can be written in usual form by adding for each boolean variable z the equality: Z2 - Z = O. Let a = {al, ..., a } be integer vector with nonnegative entries {a;}f=l. n Denote by R a](: e) monomial in n variables of the form: n R a](: e) = IT: ef';;=1 d(a) = 2:7=1 ai is the total degree of monomial R a]. Each polynomial in n variables can be written as sum of monomials with nonzero coefficients: P(: e) = L caR a](: e), aEA{P) IX x Nondifferentiable optimization and polynomial problems where A(P) is the set of monomials contained in polynomial P

Overtheyears, research inthelifescienceshasbenefitedgreatlyfromthequantita tive toolsofmathematics and modeling. Many aspectsofcomplex biological systems can be more deeply understood when mathematical techniques are incorporated into a scientific investigation. Modelingcanbefruitfully applied in many typesofbiological research, from studies on the molecular, cellular, and organ level, to experiments in wholeanimalsandinpopulations. Using the field of nutrition as an example, one can find many cases of recent advances in knowledge and understanding that were facilitated by the application of mathematical modelingtokineticdata. Theavailabilityofbiologicallyimportantstable isotope-labeled compounds, developments in sensitive mass spectrometry and other analytical techniques, and advances in the powerful modeling software applied to data haveeachcontributed toourability tocarryoutevermoresophisticated kinetic studies that are relevant to nutrition and the health sciences at many levels oforganization. Furthermore, weanticipatethatmodeling isonthebrinkofanothermajoradvance: the application of kinetic modeling to clinical practice. With advances in the abilityof modelstoaccesslargedatabases(e. g., apopulationofindividualpatientrecords)andthe developmentofuserinterfaces thatare"friendly"enough tobeused byclinicians who arenotmodelers, wepredictthathealthapplicationsmodeling willbeanimportantnew 51 directionformodelinginthe21 century. This book contains manuscripts that are based on presentations at the seventh conference in a series focused on advancing nutrition and health research by fostering exchange among scientists from such disciplines as nutrition, biology, mathematics, statistics, kinetics, andcomputing. Thethemesofthesixpreviousconferencesincluded general nutritionmodeling(CanoltyandCain, 1985;Hoover-PlowandChandra, 1988), amino acids and carbohydrates (Aburnrad, 1991), minerals (Siva Subramanian and Wastney, 1995), vitamins, proteins, andmodelingtheory(CoburnandTownsend, 1996), and physiological compartmental modeling (Clifford and Muller, 1998). The seventh conference in the series was held at The Pennsylvania State University from July 29 throughAugust1,2000. Themeetingbeganwithaninstructiveandentertainingkeynote address by Professor Britton Chance, Eldridge Reeves Johnson University Professor Emeritus of Biophysics, Physical Chemistry, and Radiologic Physics, University of Pennsylvania. Dr."

A presentation of the central and basic concepts, techniques, and tools of computer science, with the emphasis on presenting a problem-solving approach and on providing a survey of all of the most important topics covered in degree programmes. Scheme is used throughout as the programming language and the author stresses a functional programming approach to create simple functions so as to obtain the desired programming goal. Such simple functions are easily tested individually, which greatly helps in producing programs that work correctly first time. Throughout, the author aids to writing programs, and makes liberal use of boxes with "Mistakes to Avoid." Programming examples include: * abstracting a problem; * creating pseudo code as an intermediate solution; * top-down and bottom-up design; * building procedural and data abstractions; * writing progams in modules which are easily testable. Numerous exercises help readers test their understanding of the material and develop ideas in greater depth, making this an ideal first course for all students coming to computer science for the first time.

As the telecommunication industry introduces new sophisticated technologies, the nature of services and the volume of demands have changed. Indeed, a broad range of new services for users appear, combining voice, data, graphics, video, etc. This implies new planning issues. Fiber transmission systems that can carry large amounts of data on a few strands of wire were introduced. These systems have such a large bandwidth that the failure of even a single transmission link: in the network can create a severe service loss to customers. Therefore, a very high level of service reliability is becoming imperative for both system users and service providers. Since equipment failures and accidents cannot be avoided entirely, networks have to be designed so as to "survive" failures. This is done by judiciously installing spare capacity over the network so that all traffic interrupted by a failure may be diverted around that failure by way of this spare or reserve capacity. This of course translates into huge investments for network operators. Designing such survivable networks while minimizing spare capacity costs is, not surprisingly, a major concern of operating companies which gives rise to very difficult combinatorial problems. In order to make telecommunication networks survivable, one can essentially use two different strategies: protection or restoration. The protection approach preas signs spare capacity to protect each element of the network independently, while the restoration approach spreads the redundant capacity over the whole network and uses it as required in order to restore the disrupted traffic."