Nonsmooth energy functions govern phenomena which occur frequently in nature and in all areas of life. They constitute a fascinating subject in mathematics and permit the rational understanding of yet unsolved or partially solved questions in mechanics, engineering and economics. This is the first book to provide a complete and rigorous presentation of the quasidifferentiability approach to nonconvex, possibly nonsmooth, energy functions, of the derivation and study of the corresponding variational expressions in mechanics, engineering and economics, and of their numerical treatment. The new variational formulations derived are illustrated by many interesting numerical problems. The techniques presented will permit the reader to check any solution obtained by other heuristic techniques for nonconvex, nonsmooth energy problems. A civil, mechanical or aeronautical engineer can find in the book the only existing mathematically sound technique for the formulation and study of nonconvex, nonsmooth energy problems. Audience: The book will be of interest to pure and applied mathematicians, physicists, researchers in mechanics, civil, mechanical and aeronautical engineers, structural analysts and software developers. It is also suitable for graduate courses in nonlinear mechanics, nonsmooth analysis, applied optimization, control, calculus of variations and computational mechanics.

In this book, three main notions will be used in the editors search of improvements in various areas of computer graphics: Artificial Intelligence, Viewpoint Complexity and Human Intelligence. Several Artificial Intelligence techniques are used in presented intelligent scene modelers, mainly declarative ones. Among them, the mostly used techniques are Expert systems, Constraint Satisfaction Problem resolution and Machine-learning. The notion of viewpoint complexity, that is complexity of a scene seen from a given viewpoint, will be used in improvement proposals for a lot of computer graphics problems like scene understanding, virtual world exploration, image-based modeling and rendering, ray tracing and radiosity. Very often, viewpoint complexity is used in conjunction with Artificial Intelligence techniques like Heuristic search and Problem resolution. The notions of artificial Intelligence and Viewpoint Complexity may help to automatically resolve a big number of computer graphics problems. However, there are special situations where is required to find a particular solution for each situation. In such a case, human intelligence has to replace, or to be combined with, artificial intelligence. Such cases, and proposed solutions are also presented in this book.

In "Distributed Algorithms," Nancy Lynch provides a blueprint for designing, implementing, and analyzing distributed algorithms. She directs her book at a wide audience, including students, programmers, system designers, and researchers.

"Distributed Algorithms" contains the most significant algorithms and impossibility results in the area, all in a simple automata-theoretic setting. The algorithms are proved correct, and their complexity is analyzed according to precisely defined complexity measures. The problems covered include resource allocation, communication, consensus among distributed processes, data consistency, deadlock detection, leader election, global snapshots, and many others.

The material is organized according to the system model first by the timing model and then by the interprocess communication mechanism. The material on system models is isolated in separate chapters for easy reference.

The presentation is completely rigorous, yet is intuitive enough for immediate comprehension. This book familiarizes readers with important problems, algorithms, and impossibility results in the area: readers can then recognize the problems when they arise in practice, apply the algorithms to solve them, and use the impossibility results to determine whether problems are unsolvable. The book also provides readers with the basic mathematical tools for designing new algorithms and proving new impossibility results. In addition, it teaches readers how to reason carefully about distributed algorithms to model them formally, devise precise specifications for their required behavior, prove their correctness, and evaluate their performance with realistic measures."

This book deals with decision making in environments of significant data un certainty, with particular emphasis on operations and production management applications. For such environments, we suggest the use of the robustness ap proach to decision making, which assumes inadequate knowledge of the decision maker about the random state of nature and develops a decision that hedges against the worst contingency that may arise. The main motivating factors for a decision maker to use the robustness approach are: * It does not ignore uncertainty and takes a proactive step in response to the fact that forecasted values of uncertain parameters will not occur in most environments; * It applies to decisions of unique, non-repetitive nature, which are common in many fast and dynamically changing environments; * It accounts for the risk averse nature of decision makers; and * It recognizes that even though decision environments are fraught with data uncertainties, decisions are evaluated ex post with the realized data. For all of the above reasons, robust decisions are dear to the heart of opera tional decision makers. This book takes a giant first step in presenting decision support tools and solution methods for generating robust decisions in a variety of interesting application environments. Robust Discrete Optimization is a comprehensive mathematical programming framework for robust decision making.

With 11 invited submissions from leading researchers and teams of researchers sharing one common characteristic ? all have worked with Dr. Judith Bishop during her long and continuing career as a leader in computer science education and research ? this book reflects on Dr Bishop's outstandingcontribution to computer science. Havingworked at three different universities she now holds a leadership position in the research division of a major software company.

The topics covered reflect some of the transitions in her career. The dominant theme is programming languages, with chapters on object oriented programming, real-time programming, component programming and design patterns. Another major and related topic is compilers, with contributions on dataflow analysis, tree rewriting and keyword recognition. Finally, there are some additional chapters on other varied but highly interesting topics including smart homes, mobile systems and teaching computer science."

The promise of Software Factories is to streamline and automate software development-and thus to produce higher-quality software more efficiently. The key idea is to promote systematic reuse at all levels and exploit economies of scope, which translates into concrete savings in planning, development, and maintenance efforts. However, the theory behind Software Factories can be overwhelming, because it spans many disciplines of software development. On top of that, Software Factories typically require significant investments into reusable assets.

This book was written in order to demystify the Software Factories paradigm by guiding you through a practical case study from the early conception phase of building a Software Factory to delivering a ready-made software product. The authors provide you with a hands-on example covering each of the four pillars of Software Factories: software product lines, architectural frameworks, model-driven development, and guidance in context.

While the ideas behind Software Factories are platform independent, the Microsoft .NET platform, together with recent technologies such as DSL Tools and the Smart Client Baseline Architecture Toolkit, makes an ideal foundation. A study shows the different facets and caveats and demonstrates how each of these technologies becomes part of a comprehensive factory. Software Factories are a top candidate for revolutionizing software development. This book will give you a great starting point to understanding the concepts behind it and ultimately applying this knowledge to your own software projects.

Contributions by Jack Greenfield, Wojtek Kozaczynski Foreword by Douglas C. Schmidt, Jack Greenfield, JA1/4rgenKazmeier and Eugenio Pace.

The aim of this book is to present the mathematical theory and the know-how to make computer programs for the numerical approximation of Optimal Control of PDE's. The computer programs are presented in a straightforward generic language. As a consequence they are well structured, clearly explained and can be translated easily into any high level programming language. Applications and corresponding numerical tests are also given and discussed. To our knowledge, this is the first book to put together mathematics and computer programs for Optimal Control in order to bridge the gap between mathematical abstract algorithms and concrete numerical ones. The text is addressed to students and graduates in Mathematics, Mechanics, Applied Mathematics, Numerical Software, Information Technology and Engineering. It can also be used for Master and Ph.D. programs.

This book contains a selection of papers presented at the conference on High Performance Software for Nonlinear Optimization (HPSN097) which was held in Ischia, Italy, in June 1997. The rapid progress of computer technologies, including new parallel architec tures, has stimulated a large amount of research devoted to building software environments and defining algorithms able to fully exploit this new computa tional power. In some sense, numerical analysis has to conform itself to the new tools. The impact of parallel computing in nonlinear optimization, which had a slow start at the beginning, seems now to increase at a fast rate, and it is reasonable to expect an even greater acceleration in the future. As with the first HPSNO conference, the goal of the HPSN097 conference was to supply a broad overview of the more recent developments and trends in nonlinear optimization, emphasizing the algorithmic and high performance software aspects. Bringing together new computational methodologies with theoretical ad vances and new computer technologies is an exciting challenge that involves all scientists willing to develop high performance numerical software. This book contains several important contributions from different and com plementary standpoints. Obviously, the articles in the book do not cover all the areas of the conference topic or all the most recent developments, because of the large number of new theoretical and computational ideas of the last few years."

Provides comprehensive research ideas about Edge-AI technology that can assist doctors in making better data-driven decisions and will provide insights to researchers about healthcare industry, trends and future perspective. Examines how healthcare systems of the future will operate, by augmenting clinical resources and ensuring optimal patient outcomes. Provides insight about how Edge-AI is revolutionizing decision making, early warnings for conditions, and visual inspection in healthcare. Highlight trends, challenges, opportunities and future areas where Healthcare informatics deal with accessing vast data sets of potentially life-saving information.

This unique book examines up-to-the-minute uses of technology in financial markets and then explains how you can profit from that knowledge. To participate in mainstream .NET development, you must address the changes in financial markets by using the most sophisticated tools available, Microsoft .NET technology.

Software developers and architects, IT pros, and tech-savvy business users alike will find this book comprehensive and relevant. Each chapter presents problems and solutions that cover business aspects and relevant .NET features. Each aspect of .NET is analyzed in its proper context, so you'll understand why it is relevant and applicable in a real-life business case.

Formal Equivalence Checking and Design Debugging covers two major topics in design verification: logic equivalence checking and design debugging. The first part of the book reviews the design problems that require logic equivalence checking and describes the underlying technologies that are used to solve them. Some novel approaches to the problems of verifying design revisions after intensive sequential transformations such as retiming are described in detail. The second part of the book gives a thorough survey of previous and recent literature on design error diagnosis and design error correction. This part also provides an in-depth analysis of the algorithms used in two logic debugging software programs, ErrorTracer and AutoFix, developed by the authors. From the Foreword: With the adoption of the static sign-off approach to verifying circuit implementations the application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) industry will experience the first radical methodological revolution since the adoption of logic synthesis. Equivalence checking is one of the two critical elements of this methodological revolution. This book is timely for either the designer seeking to better understand the mechanics of equivalence checking or for the CAD researcher who wishes to investigate well-motivated research problems such as equivalence checking of retimed designs or error diagnosis in sequential circuits.' Kurt Keutzer, University of California, Berkeley

Evolutionary Algorithms and Agricultural Systems deals with the practical application of evolutionary algorithms to the study and management of agricultural systems. The rationale of systems research methodology is introduced, and examples listed of real-world applications. It is the integration of these agricultural systems models with optimization techniques, primarily genetic algorithms, which forms the focus of this book. The advantages are outlined, with examples of agricultural models ranging from national and industry-wide studies down to the within-farm scale. The potential problems of this approach are also discussed, along with practical methods of resolving these problems. Agricultural applications using alternate optimization techniques (gradient and direct-search methods, simulated annealing and quenching, and the tabu search strategy) are also listed and discussed. The particular problems and methodologies of these algorithms, including advantageous features that may benefit a hybrid approach or be usefully incorporated into evolutionary algorithms, are outlined. From consideration of this and the published examples, it is concluded that evolutionary algorithms are the superior method for the practical optimization of models of agricultural and natural systems. General recommendations on robust options and parameter settings for evolutionary algorithms are given for use in future studies. Evolutionary Algorithms and Agricultural Systems will prove useful to practitioners and researchers applying these methods to the optimization of agricultural or natural systems, and would also be suited as a text for systems management, applied modeling, or operations research.

Updated for Excel 2021 and based on the bestselling editions from previous versions, Excel 2021 / Microsoft 365 Programming by Example is a practical, how-to book on Excel programming, suitable for readers already proficient with the Excel user interface. If you are looking to automate Excel routine tasks, this book will progressively introduce you to programming concepts via numerous illustrated hands-on exercises. More advanced topics are demonstrated via custom projects. From recording and editing a macro and writing VBA code from scratch to programming the Ribbon interface and working with XML documents, this book takes you on a programming journey that will change the way you work with Excel. The book provides information on performing automatic operations on files, folders, and other Microsoft Office applications. It also covers proper use of event procedures, testing and debugging, and guides you through programming more advanced Excel features, such as working with VBA classes and raising your own events in standalone class modules. Includes companion files with source code, hands-on projects, and figures.

If you develop, test, or manage .NET software, you will find ."NET Test Automation Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach" very useful. The book presents practical techniques for writing lightweight software test automation in a .NET environment and covers API testing thoroughly. It also discusses lightweight, custom Windows application user interface automation and teaches you low-level web application user interface automation. Additional material covers SQL stored procedure testing techniques.

The examples in this book have been successfully used in seminars and teaching environments where they have proven highly effective for students who are learning intermediate-level .NET programming. You'll come away from the book knowing how to write production-quality combination and permutation methods.-->Table of Contents-->API Testing Reflection-Based UI Testing Windows-Based UI Testing Test Harness Design Patterns Request-Response Testing Script-Based Web UI Testing Low-Level Web UI Testing Web Services Testing SQL Stored Procedure Testing Combinations and Permutations ADO.NET Testing XML Testing

Real-Time Systems Engineering and Applications is a well-structured collection of chapters pertaining to present and future developments in real-time systems engineering. After an overview of real-time processing, theoretical foundations are presented. The book then introduces useful modeling concepts and tools. This is followed by concentration on the more practical aspects of real-time engineering with a thorough overview of the present state of the art, both in hardware and software, including related concepts in robotics. Examples are given of novel real-time applications which illustrate the present state of the art. The book concludes with a focus on future developments, giving direction for new research activities and an educational curriculum covering the subject. This book can be used as a source for academic and industrial researchers as well as a textbook for computing and engineering courses covering the topic of real-time systems engineering.

The volume, devoted to variational analysis and its applications, collects selected and refereed contributions, which provide an outline of the field. The meeting of the title "Equilibrium Problems and Variational Models," which was held in Erice (Sicily) in the period June 23 - July 2 2000, was the occasion of the presentation of some of these papers; other results are a consequence of a fruitful and constructive atmosphere created during the meeting. New results, which enlarge the field of application of variational analysis, are presented in the book; they deal with the vectorial analysis, time dependent variational analysis, exact penalization, high order deriva tives, geometric aspects, distance functions and log-quadratic proximal methodology. The new theoretical results allow one to improve in a remarkable way the study of significant problems arising from the applied sciences, as continuum model of transportation, unilateral problems, multicriteria spatial price models, network equilibrium problems and many others. As noted in the previous book "Equilibrium Problems: Nonsmooth Optimization and Variational Inequality Models," edited by F. Giannessi, A. Maugeri and P.M. Pardalos, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Vol. 58 (2001), the progress obtained by variational analysis has permitted to han dle problems whose equilibrium conditions are not obtained by the mini mization of a functional. These problems obey a more realistic equilibrium condition expressed by a generalized orthogonality (complementarity) con dition, which enriches our knowledge of the equilibrium behaviour. Also this volume presents important examples of this formulation."

Multilevel decision theory arises to resolve the contradiction between increasing requirements towards the process of design, synthesis, control and management of complex systems and the limitation of the power of technical, control, computer and other executive devices, which have to perform actions and to satisfy requirements in real time. This theory rises suggestions how to replace the centralised management of the system by hierarchical co-ordination of sub-processes. All sub-processes have lower dimensions, which support easier management and decision making. But the sub-processes are interconnected and they influence each other. Multilevel systems theory supports two main methodological tools: decomposition and co-ordination. Both have been developed, and implemented in practical applications concerning design, control and management of complex systems. In general, it is always beneficial to find the best or optimal solution in processes of system design, control and management. The real tendency towards the best (optimal) decision requires to present all activities in the form of a definition and then the solution of an appropriate optimization problem. Every optimization process needs the mathematical definition and solution of a well stated optimization problem. These problems belong to two classes: static optimization and dynamic optimization. Static optimization problems are solved applying methods of mathematical programming: conditional and unconditional optimization. Dynamic optimization problems are solved by methods of variation calculus: Euler Lagrange method; maximum principle; dynamical programming."

In Computer Graphics, the use of intelligent techniques started more recently than in other research areas. However, during these last two decades, the use of intelligent Computer Graphics techniques is growing up year after year and more and more interesting techniques are presented in this area. The purpose of this volume is to present current work of the Intelligent Computer Graphics community, a community growing up year after year. This volume is a kind of continuation of the previously published Springer volumes "Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Computer Graphics" (2008), "Intelligent Computer Graphics 2009" (2009), "Intelligent Computer Graphics 2010" (2010) and "Intelligent Computer Graphics 2011" (2011). Usually, this kind of volume contains, every year, selected extended papers from the corresponding 3IA Conference of the year. However, the current volume is made from directly reviewed and selected papers, submitted for publication in the volume "Intelligent Computer Graphics 2012". This year papers are particularly exciting and concern areas like plant modelling, text-to-scene systems, information visualization, computer-aided geometric design, artificial life, computer games, realistic rendering and many other very important themes.

This edited volume comprises invited chapters that cover five areas of the current and the future development of intelligent systems and information sciences. Half of the chapters were presented as invited talks at the Workshop "Future Directions for Intelligent Systems and Information Sciences" held in Dunedin, New Zealand, 22-23 November 1999 after the International Conference on Neuro-Information Processing (lCONIPI ANZIISI ANNES '99) held in Perth, Australia. In order to make this volume useful for researchers and academics in the broad area of information sciences I invited prominent researchers to submit materials and present their view about future paradigms, future trends and directions. Part I contains chapters on adaptive, evolving, learning systems. These are systems that learn in a life-long, on-line mode and in a changing environment. The first chapter, written by the editor, presents briefly the paradigm of Evolving Connectionist Systems (ECOS) and some of their applications. The chapter by Sung-Bae Cho presents the paradigms of artificial life and evolutionary programming in the context of several applications (mobile robots, adaptive agents of the WWW). The following three chapters written by R.Duro, J.Santos and J.A.Becerra (chapter 3), GCoghill . (chapter 4), Y.Maeda (chapter 5) introduce new techniques for building adaptive, learning robots.

HTML, JavaScript, and PHP are Web-based programming languages that can be used to solve computational problems in an online environment.

This easy-to-read, informative guide/reference will enable readers to quickly develop a working knowledge of HTML, JavaScript and PHP a valuable skill for any scientist or engineer. Updating and expanding upon the author s previous Springer titles, "An Introduction to HTML and JavaScript" and "An Introduction to PHP," the text emphasizes a hands-on approach to learning and makes extensive use of examples throughout the book. A detailed science, engineering, or mathematics background is not required to understand the material, making the book ideally suitable for self-study or an introductory course in programming.

Topics and features: describes the creation and use of HTML documents, including tables, forms, lists, frames, and cascading style sheets; presents fundamental concepts of client-side and server-side programming languages and their application to scientific and engineering calculations, using JavaScript and PHP; examines JavaScript and PHP implementation of arrays, built-in and user-defined methods and functions, math capabilities, and input processing with HTML forms; with PHP, extends programming fundamentals to include reading and writing server-based files, command-line interfaces, and an introduction to GD graphics; appendices include lists of ASCII and HTML special characters, and a brief introduction to using a pseudocode approach to organizing solutions to computing problems; includes a Glossary and an extensive set of programming exercises.

This highly useful guidebook supplies all the tools necessary to begin programming in HTML, JavaScript and PHP for scientific and engineering applications. Its clear writing style, with a focus on the importance of learning by example, will appeal to both professionals and undergraduate students in any technical field.

In this edition, the scope and character of the monograph did not change with respect to the first edition. Taking into account the rapid development of the field, we have, however, considerably enlarged its contents. Chapter 4 includes two additional sections 4.4 and 4.6 on theory and algorithms of D.C. Programming. Chapter 7, on Decomposition Algorithms in Nonconvex Optimization, is completely new. Besides this, we added several exercises and corrected errors and misprints in the first edition. We are grateful for valuable suggestions and comments that we received from several colleagues. R. Horst, P.M. Pardalos and N.V. Thoai March 2000 Preface to the First Edition Many recent advances in science, economics and engineering rely on nu merical techniques for computing globally optimal solutions to corresponding optimization problems. Global optimization problems are extraordinarily di verse and they include economic modeling, fixed charges, finance, networks and transportation, databases and chip design, image processing, nuclear and mechanical design, chemical engineering design and control, molecular biology, and environment al engineering. Due to the existence of multiple local optima that differ from the global solution all these problems cannot be solved by classical nonlinear programming techniques. During the past three decades, however, many new theoretical, algorith mic, and computational contributions have helped to solve globally multi extreme problems arising from important practical applications."

The purpose of this volume is to present current work of the Intelligent Computer Graphics community, a community growing up year after year. This volume is a kind of continuation of the previously published Springer volume "Artificial Int- ligence Techniques for Computer Graphics". Nowadays, intelligent techniques are more and more used in Computer Graphics in order, not only to optimise the pr- essing time, but also to find more accurate solutions for a lot of Computer Gra- ics problems, than with traditional methods. What are intelligent techniques for Computer Graphics? Mainly, they are te- niques based on Artificial Intelligence. So, problem resolution (especially constraint satisfaction) techniques, as well as evolutionary techniques, are used in Declarative scene Modelling; heuristic search techniques, as well as strategy games techniques, are currently used in scene understanding and in virtual world exploration; multi-agent techniques and evolutionary algorithms are used in behavioural animation; and so on. However, even if in most cases the used intelligent techniques are due to Artificial - telligence, sometimes, simple human intelligence can find interesting solutions in cases where traditional Computer Graphics techniques, even combined with Artificial Intelligence ones, cannot propose any satisfactory solution. A good example of such a case is the one of scene understanding, in the case where several parts of the scene are impossible to access.

Semi-infinite optimization is a vivid field of active research. Recently semi infinite optimization in a general form has attracted a lot of attention, not only because of its surprising structural aspects, but also due to the large number of applications which can be formulated as general semi-infinite programs. The aim of this book is to highlight structural aspects of general semi-infinite programming, to formulate optimality conditions which take this structure into account, and to give a conceptually new solution method. In fact, under certain assumptions general semi-infinite programs can be solved efficiently when their bi-Ievel structure is exploited appropriately. After a brief introduction with some historical background in Chapter 1 we be gin our presentation by a motivation for the appearance of standard and general semi-infinite optimization problems in applications. Chapter 2 lists a number of problems from engineering and economics which give rise to semi-infinite models, including (reverse) Chebyshev approximation, minimax problems, ro bust optimization, design centering, defect minimization problems for operator equations, and disjunctive programming."

Both Java and .NET use the idea of a virtual machine (VM) rather than a true executable. While very useful for some purposes, VMs make your source code and hence your intellectual property (IP) inherently less secure because the process can be reversed or decompiled. This book is useful because you must understand how decompilation works in order to properly protect your IP. Anyone interested in protecting Java code from prying eyes will want to buy this one of a kind book as it separates fact from fiction about just how ineffective obfuscators are at protecting your corporate secrets.While it is very easy for anyone to decompile Java code and almost as easy to run it through an obfuscation protection tool, there is very little information on just what happens when you do this. How secure is your code after you run an obfuscator, for example? bytecodes and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) than in any book yet published. This book redresses the imbalance by providing insights into the features and limitations of todays decompilers and obfuscators, as well as offering a detailed look at what JVMs actually do.Virtual machine is the computer science term used when (most often in an attempt to gain greater portability) you create an abstract virtual processor and write code for it instead of having your compiler generate actual machine language for a chip like the Pentium 4. want the code to run. This translates the virtual machine language to the real machine language of your processor. The intermediary code for the virtual machine is what can more easily be decompiled, although with a loss of security, since in order for the code to be converted to real machine language it must be relatively transparent and not just a sequence of 0s and 1s

This book can be presented in two different ways. Firstly, it introduces a particular methodology to build adaptive Web sites and secondly, it presents the main concepts behind Web mining and then applying them to adaptive Web sites. In this case, Adaptive Web Sites is the case study to exemplify the tools introduced in the text. The authors start by introducing the Web and motivating the need for adaptive Web sites. The second chapter introduces the main concepts behind a Web site: its operation, its associated data and structure, user sessions, etc. Chapter three explains the Web mining process and the tools to analyze Web data, mainly focused in machine learning. The fourth chapter looks at how to store and manage data. Chapter five looks at the three main and different mining tasks: content, links and usage. The following chapter covers Web personalization; a crucial topic if we want to adapt our site to specific groups of people. Chapter seven shows how to use information extraction techniques to find user behavior patterns. The subsequent chapter explains how to acquire and maintain knowledge extracted from the previous phase. Finally, chapter nine contains the case study where all the previous concepts are applied to present a framework to build adaptive Web sites. In other words, the authors have taken care of writing a self-contained book for people that want to learn and apply personalization and adaptation in Web sites. This is commendable considering the large and increasing bibliography in these and related topics. The writing is easy to follow and although the coverage is not exhaustive, the main concepts and topics are all covered.