Peer-to-peer computing has gained significant attention from both industry and research communities in the past decade as the number of users worldwide continues to grow along with demand for mobile computing. Mobile Peer-to-Peer Computing for Next Generation Distributed Environments: Advancing Conceptual and Algorithmic Applications focuses on current research and innovation in mobile and wireless technologies that address challenges from both a theoretical and applied perspective. This advanced publication provides researchers, practitioners, and academicians with an authoritative reference source to the latest state-of-the-art developments in this growing technology field.

This book presents 13 peer-reviewed papers as written results from the 2005 workshop "Topology-Based Methods in Visualization" that was initiated to enable additional stimulation in this field. It contains a survey of the state-of-the-art, as well original work by leading experts that has not been published before, spanning both theory and applications. It captures key concepts and novel ideas and serves as an overview of current trends in its subject.

Electronics has become the largest industry, surpassing agriCUlture, auto. and heavy metal industries. It has become the industry of choice for a country to prosper, already having given rise to the phenomenal prosperity of Japan. Korea. Singapore. Hong Kong. and Ireland among others. At the current growth rate, total worldwide semiconductor sales will reach $300B by the year 2000. The key electronic technologies responsible for the growth of the industry include semiconductors. the packaging of semiconductors for systems use in auto, telecom, computer, consumer, aerospace, and medical industries. displays. magnetic, and optical storage as well as software and system technologies. There has been a paradigm shift, however, in these technologies. from mainframe and supercomputer applications at any cost. to consumer applications at approximately one-tenth the cost and size. Personal computers are a good example. going from $500IMIP when products were first introduced in 1981, to a projected $lIMIP within 10 years. Thin. light portable. user friendly and very low-cost are. therefore. the attributes of tomorrow's computing and communications systems. Electronic packaging is defined as interconnection. powering, cool ing, and protecting semiconductor chips for reliable systems. It is a key enabling technology achieving the requirements for reducing the size and cost at the system and product level."

By its very nature, free and open source software encourages collaboration within and across virtual teams and promotes interdisciplinary methods and perspectives. Multi-Disciplinary Advancement in Open Source Software and Processes reviews the development, design, and use of free and open source software, providing relevant topics of discussion for programmers, as well as researchers in human-computer studies, online and virtual collaboration, and e-learning. This reference explores successes and failures in the discipline, providing a foundation for future research and new approaches for the development and application of free and open source projects.

Part of the highly successful Shelly Cashman Series (R), this text provides an introduction to HTML5 and CSS and leads the user through a clear, step-by-step, screen-by-screen approach to learning. Readers learn how to create a Web page using HTML5, format the page, add graphics, and more.

Operations research and mathematical programming would not be as advanced today without the many advances in interior point methods during the last decade. These methods can now solve very efficiently and robustly large scale linear, nonlinear and combinatorial optimization problems that arise in various practical applications. The main ideas underlying interior point methods have influenced virtually all areas of mathematical programming including: analyzing and solving linear and nonlinear programming problems, sensitivity analysis, complexity analysis, the analysis of Newton's method, decomposition methods, polynomial approximation for combinatorial problems etc. This book covers the implications of interior techniques for the entire field of mathematical programming, bringing together many results in a uniform and coherent way. For the topics mentioned above the book provides theoretical as well as computational results, explains the intuition behind the main ideas, gives examples as well as proofs, and contains an extensive up-to-date bibliography. Audience: The book is intended for students, researchers and practitioners with a background in operations research, mathematics, mathematical programming, or statistics.

Praise from the Reviewers:

"The practicality of the subject in a real-world situation distinguishes this book from others available on the market."
--Professor Behrouz Far, University of Calgary

"This book could replace the computer organization texts now in use that every CS and CpE student must take. . . . It is much needed, well written, and thoughtful."
--Professor Larry Bernstein, Stevens Institute of Technology

A distinctive, educational text onsoftware performance and scalability

This is the first book to take a quantitative approach to the subject of software performance and scalability. It brings together three unique perspectives to demonstrate how your products can be optimized and tuned for the best possible performance and scalability: The Basics--introduces the computer hardware and software architectures that predetermine the performance and scalability of a software product as well as the principles of measuring the performance and scalability of a software productQueuing Theory--helps you learn the performance laws and queuing models for interpreting the underlying physics behind software performance and scalability, supplemented with ready-to-apply techniques for improving the performance and scalability of a software systemAPI Profiling--shows you how to design more efficient algorithms and achieve optimized performance and scalability, aided by adopting an API profiling framework (perfBasic) built on the concept of a performance map for drilling down performance root causes at the API level

"Software Performance and Scalability" gives you a specialized skill set that will enable you to design and build performance into your products with immediate, measurable improvements. Complemented with real-world case studies, it is an indispensable resource for software developers, quality and performance assurance engineers, architects, and managers. It is anideal text for university courses related to computer and software performance evaluation and can also be used to supplement a course in computer organization or in queuing theory for upper-division and graduate computer science students.

At a time when information systems are becoming ever more complex and quality to market and time to market are critical for many companies, a structured test process is essential. Even more important is a structured test management process to keep testing under control. Nowadays a test manager must have extensive knowledge of and experience with project management, risk assessment, team building, and, process improvement.

Based on their long-term industry experience, Pinkster and her coauthors describe a holistic approach to test management that combines test methods, test management, risk assessment and stakeholder management into one integral process, giving test managers, test coordinators, IT project managers, and QA managers a competitive edge in environments where there are numerous unstructured requirements, tough testing schedules and limited resources.

This book should be in every test manager's backpack!

Time is ubiquitous in information systems. Almost every enterprise faces the problem of its data becoming out of date. However, such data is often valu able, so it should be archived and some means to access it should be provided. Also, some data may be inherently historical, e.g., medical, cadastral, or ju dicial records. Temporal databases provide a uniform and systematic way of dealing with historical data. Many languages have been proposed for tem poral databases, among others temporal logic. Temporal logic combines ab stract, formal semantics with the amenability to efficient implementation. This chapter shows how temporal logic can be used in temporal database applica tions. Rather than presenting new results, we report on recent developments and survey the field in a systematic way using a unified formal framework [GHR94; Ch094]. The handbook [GHR94] is a comprehensive reference on mathematical foundations of temporal logic. In this chapter we study how temporal logic is used as a query and integrity constraint language. Consequently, model-theoretic notions, particularly for mula satisfaction, are of primary interest. Axiomatic systems and proof meth ods for temporal logic [GHR94] have found so far relatively few applications in the context of information systems. Moreover, one needs to bear in mind that for the standard linearly-ordered time domains temporal logic is not re cursively axiomatizable [GHR94]' so recursive axiomatizations are by necessity incomplete.

* need to creat and design your own Web pages that include both text and graphics * want your own Web page up and running quickly and efficiently * would like to know how to include Java applets on your Web pages * need a self-teaching approach * want results fast...then this book is for you!

"Expert ASP.NET 2.0 Advanced Application Design" will help you derive maximum performance and reliability from the distributed applications you create with ASP.NET 2.0.

The book first looks at some of the non-functional requirements that impact the design of a distributed application. It then relates them to the servers and services available in the .NET 2.0 Framework. ASP.NET 2.0 is the central process for use in distributed .NET applications, and the book closely examines the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework and its hosting environment, Internet Information Server (IIS). The book looks at how ASP.NET 2.0 is used by different packages within .NET (like Web Services), and explores how it can be extended to meet your own custom requirements.

The second part of the book drills down and examines some of the common architectural challenges encountered when developing application designs. The book walks through the tiers of the .NET Framework, starting at the client level and exploring the internals of the page type, enhancements to ViewState, client script generation, and new out-of-band callbacks. At the middle tier, the book examines Web Services, Remoting, COM+, MSMQ, and mix and match communication options to suit your own requirements. This section wraps up by previewing Windows Communication Foundation, which aims to unify these technologies.

The third part of the book examines the data layer of your distributed applications. This includes enhancements to the Managed Providers in 2.0, the new transactional model, and a preview of usage guidelines for SQL Server 2005. By the books conclusion, you will be able to select with confidence the most appropriate design elements for yourpurposes, elegantly connecting them, and ensuring you get the very best from the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework.

This book is a concise step-by-step guide to building and establishing the frameworks and models for the effective management and development of software requirements. It describes what great requirements must look like and who the real audience is for documentation. It then explains how to generate consistent, complete, and accurate requirements in exacting detail following a simple formula across the full life cycle from vague concept to detailed design-ready specifications. Mastering Software Project Requirements will enable business analysts and project managers to decompose high-level solutions into granular requirements and to elevate their performance through due diligence and the use of better techniques to meet the particular needs of a given project without sacrificing quality, scope, or project schedules.

The complexity of issues requiring rational decision making grows and thus such decisions are becoming more and more difficult, despite advances in methodology and tools for decision support and in other areas of research. Globalization, interlinks between environmental, industrial, social and political issues, and rapid speed of change all contribute to the increase of this complexity. Specialized knowledge about decision-making processes and their support is increasing, but a large spectrum of approaches presented in the literature is typically illustrated only by simple examples. Moreover, the integration of model-based decision support methodologies and tools with specialized model-based knowledge developed for handling real problems in environmental, engineering, industrial, economical, social and political activities is often not satisfactory. Therefore, there is a need to present the state of art of methodology and tools for development of model-based decision support systems, and illustrate this state by applications to various complex real-world decision problems. The monograph reports many years of experience of many researchers, who have not only contributed to the developments in operations research but also succeeded to integrate knowledge and craft of various disciplines into several modern decision support systems which have been applied to actual complex decision-making processes in various fields of policy making. The experience presented in this book will be of value to researchers and practitioners in various fields. The issues discussed in this book gain in importance with the development of the new era of the information society, where information, knowledge, and ways of processing them become a decisive part of human activities. The examples presented in this book illustrate how how various methods and tools of model-based decision support can actually be used for helping modern decision makers that face complex problems. Overview of the contents: The first part of this three-part book presents the methodological background and characteristics of modern decision-making environment, and the value of model-based decision support thus addressing current challenges of decision support. It also provides the methodology of building and analyzing mathematical models that represent underlying physical and economic processes, and that are useful for modern decision makers at various stages of decision making. These methods support not only the analysis of Pareto-efficient solutions that correspond best to decision maker preferences but also allow the use of other modeling concepts like soft constraints, soft simulation, or inverse simulation. The second part describes various types of tools that are used for the development of decision support systems. These include tools for modeling, simulation, optimization, tools supporting choice and user interfaces. The described tools are both standard, commercially available, and nonstandard, public domain or shareware software, which are robust enough to be used also for complex applications. All four environmental applications (regional water quality management, land use planning, cost-effective policies aimed at improving the European air quality, energy planning with environmental implications) presented in the third part of the book rely on many years of cooperation between the authors of the book with several IIASA's projects, and with many researchers from the wide IIASA network of collaborating institutions. All these applications are characterized by an intensive use of model-based decision support. Finally, the appendix contains a short description of some of the tools described in the book that are available from IIASA, free of charge, for research and educational purposes. The experiences reported in this book indicate that the development of DSSs for strategic environmental decision making should be a joint effort involving experts in the subject area, modelers, and decision support experts. For the other experiences discussed in this book, the authors stress the importance of good data bases, and good libraries of tools. One of the most important requirements is a modular structure of a DSS that enhances the reusability of system modules. In such modular structures, user interfaces play an important role. The book shows how modern achievements in mathematical programming and computer sciences may be exploited for supporting decision making, especially about strategic environmental problems. It presents the methodological background of various methods for model-based decision support and reviews methods and tools for model development and analysis. The methods and tools are amply illustrated with extensive applications. Audience: This book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in the fields of model development and analysis, model-based decision analysis and support, (particularly in the environment, economics, agriculture, engineering, and negotiations areas) and mathematical programming. For understanding of some parts of the text a background in mathematics and operational research is required but several chapters of the book will be of value also for readers without such a background. The monograph is also suitable for use as a text book for courses on advanced (Master and Ph.D.) levels for programs on Operations Research, decision analysis, decision support and various environmental studies (depending on the program different parts of the book may be emphasized).

Developing today's complex systems requires "more" than just good software engineering solutions. Many are faced with complex systems projects, incomplete or inaccurate requirements, canceled projects, or cost overruns, and have their systems' users in revolt and demanding more. Others want to build user-centric systems, but fear managing the process. This book describes an approach that brings the engineering process together with human performance engineering and business process reengineering. The result is a manageable user-centered process for gathering, analyzing, and evaluating requirements that can vastly improve the success rate in the development of medium-to-large size systems and applications.
Unlike some texts that are primarily conceptual, this volume provides guidelines, "how-to" information, and examples, enabling the reader to quickly apply the process and techniques to accomplish the following goals:
* define high quality requirements,
* enhance productive client involvement,
* help clients maintain competitiveness,
* ensure client buy-in and support throughout the process,
* reduce missing functionality and corrections, and
* improve user satisfaction with systems.
This volume clearly details the role of user-centered requirements and knowledge acquisition within Scenario-Based Engineering Process (SEP) and identifies SEP products and artifacts. It assists project personnel in planning and managing effective requirements activities, including managing risks, avoiding common problems with requirements elicitation, organizing project participants and tools, and managing the logistics. Guidelines are provided for the following: selecting the right individual and group techniques to elicit scenarios and requirements from users; subject matter experts, or other shareholders; and ensuring engineers or analysts have the necessary skills.

Content distribution, i.e., distributing digital content from one node to another node or multiple nodes, is the most fundamental function of the Internet. Since Amazon's launch of EC2 in 2006 and Apple's release of the iPhone in 2007, Internet content distribution has shown a strong trend toward polarization. On the one hand, considerable investments have been made in creating heavyweight, integrated data centers ("heavy-cloud") all over the world, in order to achieve economies of scale and high flexibility/efficiency of content distribution. On the other hand, end-user devices ("light-end") have become increasingly lightweight, mobile and heterogeneous, creating new demands concerning traffic usage, energy consumption, bandwidth, latency, reliability, and/or the security of content distribution. Based on comprehensive real-world measurements at scale, we observe that existing content distribution techniques often perform poorly under the abovementioned new circumstances. Motivated by the trend of "heavy-cloud vs. light-end," this book is dedicated to uncovering the root causes of today's mobile networking problems and designing innovative cloud-based solutions to practically address such problems. Our work has produced not only academic papers published in prestigious conference proceedings like SIGCOMM, NSDI, MobiCom and MobiSys, but also concrete effects on industrial systems such as Xiaomi Mobile, MIUI OS, Tencent App Store, Baidu PhoneGuard, and WiFi.com. A series of practical takeaways and easy-to-follow testimonials are provided to researchers and practitioners working in mobile networking and cloud computing. In addition, we have released as much code and data used in our research as possible to benefit the community.

Like the anti-lock brakes system of a car, real-time systems are time-vital technologies put in place to react under a certain set of circumstances, often vital to security of data, information, or other resources. Innovations in Embedded and Real-Time Systems Engineering for Communication has collected the latest research within the field of real-time systems engineering, and will serve as a vital reference compendium for practitioners and academics. From a wide variety of fields and countries, the authors of this collection are the respective experts in their areas of concentration, giving the latest case studies, methodologies, frameworks, architectures, best practices, and research as it relates to real-time systems engineering for communication.

Developing today's complex systems requires "more" than just good software engineering solutions. Many are faced with complex systems projects, incomplete or inaccurate requirements, canceled projects, or cost overruns, and have their systems' users in revolt and demanding more. Others want to build user-centric systems, but fear managing the process. This book describes an approach that brings the engineering process together with human performance engineering and business process reengineering. The result is a manageable user-centered process for gathering, analyzing, and evaluating requirements that can vastly improve the success rate in the development of medium-to-large size systems and applications.
Unlike some texts that are primarily conceptual, this volume provides guidelines, "how-to" information, and examples, enabling the reader to quickly apply the process and techniques to accomplish the following goals:
* define high quality requirements,
* enhance productive client involvement,
* help clients maintain competitiveness,
* ensure client buy-in and support throughout the process,
* reduce missing functionality and corrections, and
* improve user satisfaction with systems.
This volume clearly details the role of user-centered requirements and knowledge acquisition within Scenario-Based Engineering Process (SEP) and identifies SEP products and artifacts. It assists project personnel in planning and managing effective requirements activities, including managing risks, avoiding common problems with requirements elicitation, organizing project participants and tools, and managing the logistics. Guidelines are provided for the following: selecting the right individual and group techniques to elicit scenarios and requirements from users; subject matter experts, or other shareholders; and ensuring engineers or analysts have the necessary skills.

This monograph presents the challenges, vision and context to design smart learning objects (SLOs) through Computer Science (CS) education modelling and feature model transformations. It presents the latest research on the meta-programming-based generative learning objects (the latter with advanced features are treated as SLOs) and the use of educational robots in teaching CS topics. The introduced methodology includes the overall processes to develop SLO and smart educational environment (SEE) and integrates both into the real education setting to provide teaching in CS using constructivist and project-based approaches along with evaluation of pedagogic outcomes. Smart Learning Objects for Smart Education in Computer Science will appeal to researchers in CS education particularly those interested in using robots in teaching, course designers and educational software and tools developers. With research and exercise questions at the end of each chapter students studying CS related courses will find this work informative and valuable too.

The book is a short, concise and complete presentation of constraint programming and reasoning. The use of constraints had its scientific and commercial breakthrough in the 1990s. Programming with constraints makes it possible to model and solve problems with uncertain, incomplete information and combinatorial problems, as they are abundant in industry and commerce, such as scheduling, planning, transportation, resource allocation, layout, design and analysis. The theoretically well-founded presentation includes application examples from real life. It introduces the common classes of constraint programming languages and constraint systems in a uniform way. Constraint solving algorithms are specified and implemented in the constraint handling rules language (CHR). This book is ideally suited as a textbook for graduate students and as a resource for researchers and practitioners. The Internet support includes teaching material, software, latest news and online use and examples of the CHR language.

Duration calculus constitutes a formal approach to the development of real-time systems; as an interval logic with special features for expressing and analyzing time durations of states in real-time systems, it allows for representing and formally reasoning about requirements and designs at an appropriate level of abstraction.

This book presents the logical foundations of duration calculus in a coherent and thorough manner. Through selective case studies it explains how duration calculus can be applied to the formal specification and verification of real-time systems. The book also contains an extensive survey of the current research in this field.

The material included in this book has been used for graduate and postgraduate courses, while it is also suitable for experienced researchers and professionals.

Focused on practical matters: this book will not cover Shiny concepts, but practical tools and methodologies to use for production. Based on experience: this book will be a formalization of several years of experience building Shiny applications. Original content: this book will present new methodology and tooling, not just do a review of what already exists.

This volume offers an expansion of ideas presented at a recent conference convened to identify the major strategies and more promising practices for assessing technology. The authors -- representing government, business, and university sectors -- helped to set the boundaries of present technology assessment by offering perspectives from computer science, cognitive and military psychology, and education. Their work explores both the use of techniques to assess technology and the use of technology to facilitate the assessment process.
The book's main purpose is to portray the state of the art in technology assessment and to provide conceptual options to help readers understand the power of technology. Technological innovation will continue to develop its own standards of practice and effectiveness. To the extent that these practices are empirically based, designers, supporters, and consumers will be given better information for their decisions.

Hone Your Agile Leadership Skills to Help Your Organization Transform and Thrive To leverage the immense opportunities associated with accelerating change, organizations need teams capable of trying new ideas quickly, learning from their experiences, and adapting based on that learning. Helping these teams to grow and thrive requires agile leaders who support, inspire, and encourage, and who can leave behind the management skills of directing, monitoring, and rewarding or punishing. The Professional Agile Leader is a realistic, practical guide, written by experienced agile leaders who share their collective experiences in helping agile leaders to grow responsive and adaptive teams. They structure powerful lessons around a case study based on decades of experience helping agile leaders achieve and sustain agile transformation. Best of all, they never settle for high-level hand-waving--they show you how it's really done. Reignite once-successful organizations that have lost their way Form cross-functional teams and empower them with purpose Learn to let go, as your teams start taking more responsibility Overcome forces that want to reel you back into the "old rules" Realign the whole organization, since agile and traditional models can't coexist forever Achieve the most challenging goal of all: changing culture Great agile leaders aren't born that way--they're regular people who care deeply about helping others achieve shared goals and have discovered a better way to lead. Whatever your role in the organization, this guide will help you master those skills and mindsets a whole lot faster. "Drawing on vast experience, Ron, Kurt, and Laurens tease out practical tips and patterns for good leadership [and show] how a leader can help shape the environment for agile teams to succeed. . . . The narrative style of the book makes it easy to read, and I am sure there will be many times that you see yourself in it." --From the Foreword by Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

Creating scientific workflow applications is a very challenging task due to the complexity of the distributed computing environments involved, the complex control and data flow requirements of scientific applications, and the lack of high-level languages and tools support. Particularly, sophisticated expertise in distributed computing is commonly required to determine the software entities to perform computations of workflow tasks, the computers on which workflow tasks are to be executed, the actual execution order of workflow tasks, and the data transfer between them. Qin and Fahringer present a novel workflow language called Abstract Workflow Description Language (AWDL) and the corresponding standards-based, knowledge-enabled tool support, which simplifies the development of scientific workflow applications. AWDL is an XML-based language for describing scientific workflow applications at a high level of abstraction. It is designed in a way that allows users to concentrate on specifying such workflow applications without dealing with either the complexity of distributed computing environments or any specific implementation technology. This research monograph is organized into five parts: overview, programming, optimization, synthesis, and conclusion, and is complemented by an appendix and an extensive reference list. The topics covered in this book will be of interest to both computer science researchers (e.g. in distributed programming, grid computing, or large-scale scientific applications) and domain scientists who need to apply workflow technologies in their work, as well as engineers who want to develop distributed and high-throughput workflow applications, languages and tools.