Using Android as a reference, this book teaches the development of mobile apps designed to be responsive, trustworthy and robust, and optimized for maintainability. As the share of mission-critical mobile apps continues to increase in the ever-expanding mobile app ecosystem, it has become imperative that processes and procedures to assure their reliance are developed and included in the software life cycle at opportune times. Memory, CPU, battery life and screen size limitations of smartphones coupled with volatility associated with mobile environments underlines that the quality assurance strategies that proved to be successful for desktop applications may no longer be effective in mobile apps. To that effect, this book lays a foundation upon which quality assurance processes and procedures for mobile apps could be devised. This foundation is composed of analytical models, experimental test-beds and software solutions. Analytical models proposed in the literature to predict software quality are studied and adapted for mobile apps. The efficacy of these analytical models in prejudging the operations of mobile apps under design and development is evaluated. A comprehensive test suite is presented that empirically assesses a mobile app's compliance to its quality expectations. Test procedures to measure quality attributes such as maintainability, usability, performance, scalability, reliability, availability and security, are detailed. Utilization of test tools provided in Android Studio as well as third-party vendors in constructing the corresponding test-beds is highlighted. An in-depth exploration of utilities, services and frameworks available on Android is conducted, and the results of their parametrization observed through experimentation to construct quality assurance solutions are presented. Experimental development of some example mobile apps is conducted to gauge adoption of process models and determine favorable opportunities for integrating the quality assurance processes and procedures in the mobile app life cycle. The role of automation in testing, integration, deployment and configuration management is demonstrated to offset cost overheads of integrating quality assurance process in the life cycle of mobile apps.

Written by a AAA industry expert with over twenty years of experience, this book offers comprehensive coverage of the practical skills that all successful level designers need to know. It covers everything from practical production skills to the social and soft skills required to thrive in the games industry. The book begins with a theoretical and abstract approach that sets a common language for the later hard-skill applications and practical examples. These later chapters cover a wealth of practical skills for use during the concept phase, while creating layouts, scripting, and working with AI. The book includes essential chapters on topics such as social and soft skills, world building, level design direction, production, as well as how to gain a job in the industry. This book will be of great interest to all level designers, content leads and directors looking to enhance their skillset. It will also appeal to students of level and game design looking for tips on how to break into the industry.

It is now more important than ever to implement approaches and methods that can be effective in extracting meaningful information from large data sets. Although data sets may be available for different aspects of society, we may not assess the intrinsic characteristics of their behavior effectively. Additionally, frameworks are needed that can store, process, and represent the data in such a manner that can be of practical significance. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Information Systems and Software Engineering is an essential reference publication that assesses the significance of robust information systems in characterizing events of varying nature and dimensions. Additionally, the book includes studies on the development and application of decision-making and prediction modeling frameworks using different approaches such as agent-based modeling, spatial decision support systems, and spatial data mining. Covering topics such as management information systems, knowledge discovery, and mathematical analysis, this book is ideal for professionals, researchers, and academicians in various disciplines including computer science, information technology, geographical information systems, remote sensing, and earth system sciences.

The rapidly growing volume of available digital documents of various formats and the possibility to access these through Internet-based technologies, have led to the necessity to develop solid methods to properly organize and structure documents in large digital libraries and repositories. Due to the extremely large volumes of documents and to their unstructured form, most of the research efforts in this direction are dedicated to automatically infer structure and schemas that can help to better organize huge collections of documents and data. This book covers the latest advances in structure inference in heterogeneous collections of documents and data. The book brings a comprehensive view of the state-of-the-art in the area, presents some lessons learned and identifies new research issues, challenges and opportunities for further research agenda and developments. The selected chapters cover a broad range of research issues, from theoretical approaches to case studies and best practices in the field. Researcher, software developers, practitioners and students interested in the field of learning structure and schemas from documents will find the comprehensive coverage of this book useful for their research, academic, development and practice activity.

All games are potentially transformative experiences because they engage the player in dynamic action. When repurposed in an educational context, even highly popular casual games played online to pass the time can engage players in a way that deepens learning. Games as Transformative Experiences for Critical Thinking, Cultural Awareness, and Deep Learning: Strategies & Resources examines the learning value of a wide variety of games across multiple disciplines. Organized just like a well-made game, the book is divided into four parts highlighting classroom experiences, community and culture, virtual learning, and interdisciplinary instruction. The author crosses between the high school and college classroom and addresses a range of disciplines, both online and classroom practice, the design of curriculum, and the transformation of assessment practices. In addition to a wealth of practical exercises, resources, and lesson ideas, the book explains how to use a wide and diverse range of games from casual to massively multiplayer online games for self-improvement as well as classroom situations.

This book introduces selected recent findings on the analysis and control of dynamical behaviors for coupled reaction-diffusion neural networks. It presents novel research ideas and essential definitions concerning coupled reaction-diffusion neural networks, such as passivity, adaptive coupling, spatial diffusion coupling, and the relationship between synchronization and output strict passivity. Further, it gathers research results previously published in many flagship journals, presenting them in a unified form. As such, the book will be of interest to all university researchers and graduate students in Engineering and Mathematics who wish to study the dynamical behaviors of coupled reaction-diffusion neural networks.

Evolutionary algorithms are general-purpose search procedures based on the mechanisms of natural selection and population genetics. They are appealing because they are simple, easy to interface, and easy to extend. This volume is concerned with applications of evolutionary algorithms and associated strategies in engineering. It will be useful for engineers, designers, developers, and researchers in any scientific discipline interested in the applications of evolutionary algorithms. The volume consists of five parts, each with four or five chapters. The topics are chosen to emphasize application areas in different fields of engineering. Each chapter can be used for self-study or as a reference by practitioners to help them apply evolutionary algorithms to problems in their engineering domains.

This book is about guaranteed numerical methods based on interval analysis for approximating sets, and about the application of these methods to vast classes of engineering problems. Guaranteed means here that inner and outer approximations of the sets of interest are obtained, which can be made as precise as desired, at the cost of increasing the computational effort. It thus becomes possible to achieve tasks still thought by many to be out of the reach of numerical methods, such as finding all solutions of sets of non-linear equations and inequality or all global optimizers of possibly multi-modal criteria.The basic methodology is explained as simply as possible, in a concrete and readily applicable way, with a large number of figures and illustrative examples. Some of the techniques reported appear in book format for the first time. The ability of the approach advocated here to solve non-trivial engineering problems is demonstrated through examples drawn from the fields of parameter and state estimation, robust control and robotics. Enough detail is provided to allow readers with other applications in mind to grasp their significance. An in-depth treatment of implementation issues facilitates the understanding and use of freely available software that makes interval computation about as easy as computation with floating-point numbers. The reader is even given the basic information needed to build his or her own C++ interval library.The CD-ROM contains a trial version of Sun Microsystems' Forte(TM) Developer 6 for use with Solaris(TM) SPARC(TM) Platform Edition 2.6, 2.7 and 2.8.

Successful games merge art and technology in truly unique ways. Fused under tight production deadlines and strict performance requirements, shaped by demanding player expectations, games are among the most complex software projects created today. Game AI Pro: Collected Wisdom of Game AI Professionals covers both the art and the technology of game AI. Nothing covered is theory or guesswork. The book brings together the accumulated wisdom, cutting-edge ideas, and clever tricks and techniques of 54 of today's top game AI professionals. Some chapters present techniques that have been developed and passed down within the community for years while others discuss the most exciting new research and ideas from today's most innovative games. The book includes core algorithms that you'll need to succeed, such as behavior trees, utility theory, spatial representation, path planning, motion control, and tactical reasoning. It also describes tricks and techniques that will truly bring your game to life, including perception systems, social modeling, smart camera systems, player prediction, and even an AI sound designer. Throughout, the book discusses the optimizations and performance enhancements that enable your game to run while maintaining 60 frames per second.

Modern electrical power systems are facing complex challenges, arising from distributed generation and intermittent renewable energy. Fuzzy logic is one approach to meeting this challenge and providing reliability and power quality. The book is about fuzzy logic control and its applications in managing, controlling and operating electrical energy systems. It provides a comprehensive overview of fuzzy logic concepts and techniques required for designing fuzzy logic controllers, and then discusses several applications to control and management in energy systems. The book incorporates a novel fuzzy logic controller design approach in both Matlab (R) and in Matlab Simulink (R) so that the user can study every step of the fuzzy logic processor, with the ability to modify the code. Fuzzy Logic Control in Energy Systems is an important read for researchers and practicing engineers in energy engineering and control, as well as advanced students involved with power system research and operation.

This book explores how corpus linguistic techniques can be applied to close analysis of videogames as a text, particularly examining how language is used to construct representations of gender in fantasy videogames. The author demonstrates a wide array of techniques which can be used to both build corpora of videogames and to analyse them, revealing broad patterns of representation within the genre, while also zooming in to focus on diachronic changes in the representation of gender within a best-selling videogame series and a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG). The book examines gender as a social variable, making use of corpus linguistic methods to demonstrate how the language used to depict gender is complex but often repeated. This book combines fields including language and gender studies, new media studies, ludolinguistics, and corpus linguistics, and it will be of interest to scholars in these and related disciplines.

With the rapid development of big data, it is necessary to transfer the massive data generated by end devices to the cloud under the traditional cloud computing model. However, the delays caused by massive data transmission no longer meet the requirements of various real-time mobile services. Therefore, the emergence of edge computing has been recently developed as a new computing paradigm that can collect and process data at the edge of the network, which brings significant convenience to solving problems such as delay, bandwidth, and off-loading in the traditional cloud computing paradigm. By extending the functions of the cloud to the edge of the network, edge computing provides effective data access control, computation, processing and storage for end devices. Furthermore, edge computing optimizes the seamless connection from the cloud to devices, which is considered the foundation for realizing the interconnection of everything. However, due to the open features of edge computing, such as content awareness, real-time computing and parallel processing, the existing problems of privacy in the edge computing environment have become more prominent. The access to multiple categories and large numbers of devices in edge computing also creates new privacy issues. In this book, we discuss on the research background and current research process of privacy protection in edge computing. In the first chapter, the state-of-the-art research of edge computing are reviewed. The second chapter discusses the data privacy issue and attack models in edge computing. Three categories of privacy preserving schemes will be further introduced in the following chapters. Chapter three introduces the context-aware privacy preserving scheme. Chapter four further introduces a location-aware differential privacy preserving scheme. Chapter five presents a new blockchain based decentralized privacy preserving in edge computing. Chapter six summarize this monograph and propose future research directions. In summary, this book introduces the following techniques in edge computing: 1) describe an MDP-based privacy-preserving model to solve context-aware data privacy in the hierarchical edge computing paradigm; 2) describe a SDN based clustering methods to solve the location-aware privacy problems in edge computing; 3) describe a novel blockchain based decentralized privacy-preserving scheme in edge computing. These techniques enable the rapid development of privacy-preserving in edge computing.

Decomposition methods aim to reduce large-scale problems to simpler problems. This monograph presents selected aspects of the dimension-reduction problem. Exact and approximate aggregations of multidimensional systems are developed and from a known model of input-output balance, aggregation methods are categorized. The issues of loss of accuracy, recovery of original variables (disaggregation), and compatibility conditions are analyzed in detail. The method of iterative aggregation in large-scale problems is studied. For fixed weights, successively simpler aggregated problems are solved and the convergence of their solution to that of the original problem is analyzed. An introduction to block integer programming is considered. Duality theory, which is widely used in continuous block programming, does not work for the integer problem. A survey of alternative methods is presented and special attention is given to combined methods of decomposition. Block problems in which the coupling variables do not enter the binding constraints are studied. These models are worthwhile because they permit a decomposition with respect to primal and dual variables by two-level algorithms instead of three-level algorithms. Audience: This book is addressed to specialists in operations research, optimization, and optimal control.

Single and Multi-Objective Evolutionary Computation (MOEA), Genetic Algorithms (GAs), Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), Fuzzy Controllers (FCs), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Ant colony Optimization (ACO) are becoming omnipresent in almost every intelligent system design. Unfortunately, the application of the majority of these techniques is complex and so requires a huge computational effort to yield useful and practical results. Therefore, dedicated hardware for evolutionary, neural and fuzzy computation is a key issue for designers. With the spread of reconfigurable hardware such as FPGAs, digital as well as analog hardware implementations of such computation become cost-effective.The idea behind this book is to offer a variety of hardware designs for soft computing techniques that can be embedded in any final product. Also, to introduce the successful application of soft computing technique to solve many hard problems encountered during the design of embedded hardware designs. Reconfigurable embedded designs for GAs, ANNs, FCs and PSO are presented and evaluated. Also, the application of quantum-based evolutionary computation and multi-objective evolutionary computation as well as ACO are applied to solve hard problems related to circuit synthesis, IP assignment, mapping and routing of applications on Network-On-Chip infrastructures."

Vim is a fast and efficient text editor that will make you a faster and more efficient developer. It's available on almost every OS, and if you master the techniques in this book, you'll never need another text editor. In more than 120 Vim tips, you'll quickly learn the editor's core functionality and tackle your trickiest editing and writing tasks. This beloved bestseller has been revised and updated to Vim 7.4 and includes two brand-new tips and five fully revised tips.A highly configurable, cross-platform text editor, Vim is a serious tool for programmers, web developers, and sysadmins who want to raise their game. No other text editor comes close to Vim for speed and efficiency; it runs on almost every system imaginable and supports most coding and markup languages.Learn how to edit text the "Vim way": complete a series of repetitive changes with The Dot Formula using one keystroke to strike the target, followed by one keystroke to execute the change. Automate complex tasks by recording your keystrokes as a macro. Discover the "very magic" switch that makes Vim's regular expression syntax more like Perl's. Build complex patterns by iterating on your search history. Search inside multiple files, then run Vim's substitute command on the result set for a project-wide search and replace. All without installing a single plugin! Two new tips explain how to run multiple ex commands as a batch and autocomplete sequences of words."Practical Vim, Second Edition" will show you new ways to work with Vim 7.4 more efficiently, whether you're a beginner or an intermediate Vim user. All this, without having to touch the mouse.What You Need: Vim version 7.4

The target audience of this book is students and researchers in computational sciences who need to develop computer codes for solving partial differential equations. The exposition is focused on numerics and software related to mathematical models in solid and fluid mechanics. The book teaches finite element methods, and basic finite difference methods from a computational point of view. The main emphasis regards development of flexible computer programs, using the numerical library Diffpack. The application of Diffpack is explained in detail for problems including model equations in applied mathematics, heat transfer, elasticity, and viscous fluid flow. Diffpack is a modern software development environment based on C++ and object-oriented programming. All the program examples, as well as a test version of Diffpack, are available for free over the Internet. The second edition contains several new applications and projects, improved explanations, correction of errors, and is up to date with Diffpack version 4.0.

This book addresses the role of appropriate, specialized, structured pedagogy for game-based learning. It is an important reference for researchers who have carried out studies in the field of game-based learning with a focus on the digital learning environment. The educational landscape has dramatically changed in times of global pandemic urging us to search for new solutions, new educational pathways, and new agents for knowledge development. There is a need to support learning by using digital learning materials during remote learning or distance learning, where pedagogically structured game-based learning elements can play a role in motivating students to achieve. Utilizing game-based learning in education is not new, but this book adds substantially to the research base of the topic. The book reveals many new concepts, such as, balancing games and learning, supporting knowledge development, supporting the development of motivation, supporting balanced cognitive load in an effort to avoid ineffective forms of game-based learning

Global optimization is concerned with the computation and characterization of global optima of nonlinear functions. During the past three decades the field of global optimization has been growing at a rapid pace, and the number of publications on all aspects of global optimization has been increasing steadily. Many applications, as well as new theoretical, algorithmic, and computational contributions have resulted. The Handbook of Global Optimization is the first comprehensive book to cover recent developments in global optimization. Each contribution in the Handbook is essentially expository in nature, but scholarly in its treatment. The chapters cover optimality conditions, complexity results, concave minimization, DC programming, general quadratic programming, nonlinear complementarity, minimax problems, multiplicative programming, Lipschitz optimization, fractional programming, network problems, trajectory methods, homotopy methods, interval methods, and stochastic approaches. The Handbook of Global Optimization is addressed to researchers in mathematical programming, as well as all scientists who use optimization methods to model and solve problems.

This volume presents state-of-the-art complementarity applications, algorithms, extensions and theory in the form of eighteen papers. These at the International Conference on Com invited papers were presented plementarity 99 (ICCP99) held in Madison, Wisconsin during June 9-12, 1999 with support from the National Science Foundation under Grant DMS-9970102. Complementarity is becoming more widely used in a variety of appli cation areas. In this volume, there are papers studying the impact of complementarity in such diverse fields as deregulation of electricity mar kets, engineering mechanics, optimal control and asset pricing. Further more, application of complementarity and optimization ideas to related problems in the burgeoning fields of machine learning and data mining are also covered in a series of three articles. In order to effectively process the complementarity problems that arise in such applications, various algorithmic, theoretical and computational extensions are covered in this volume. Nonsmooth analysis has an im portant role to play in this area as can be seen from articles using these tools to develop Newton and path following methods for constrained nonlinear systems and complementarity problems. Convergence issues are covered in the context of active set methods, global algorithms for pseudomonotone variational inequalities, successive convex relaxation and proximal point algorithms. Theoretical contributions to the connectedness of solution sets and constraint qualifications in the growing area of mathematical programs with equilibrium constraints are also presented. A relaxation approach is given for solving such problems. Finally, computational issues related to preprocessing mixed complementarity problems are addressed."

One service mathematics has rendered the 'Et moi, ... si j'avait su comment en revenir. je n'y serais point aIle.' human mee. It has put common sense back Jules Verne where it belongs, on the topmost shelf next to the dusty canister labelled 'discarded non The series is divergent; therefore we may be sense'. Eric T. Bell able to do something with it. O. Heaviside Mathematics is a tool for thought. A highly necessary tool in a world where both feedback and non linearities abound. Similarly, all kinds of parts of mathematics serve as tools for other parts and for other sciences. Applying a simple rewriting rule to the quote on the right above one finds such statements as: 'One service topology has rendered mathematical physics .. .'; 'One service logic has rendered com puter science .. .'; 'One service category theory has rendered mathematics .. .'. All arguably true. And all statements obtainable this way form part of the raison d'etre of this series."

This book provides an understanding of the impact of delay on cloud gaming Quality of Experience (QoE) and proposes techniques to compensate for this impact, leading to a better gaming experience when there are network delays. The author studies why some games in the cloud are more delay sensitive than others by identifying game characteristics influencing a user's delay perception and predicting the gaming QoE degraded by the delay. The author also investigates the impact of jitter and serial-position effects on gaming QoE and delay. Using the insight gained, the author presents delay compensation techniques that can mitigate the negative influence of delay on gaming QoE that use the game characteristics to adapt the games.

Elixir's straightforward syntax and this guided tour give you a clean, simple path to learn modern functional programming techniques. No previous functional programming experience required! This book walks you through the right concepts at the right pace, as you explore immutable values and explicit data transformation, functions, modules, recursive functions, pattern matching, high-order functions, polymorphism, and failure handling, all while avoiding side effects. Don't board the Elixir train with an imperative mindset! To get the most out of functional languages, you need to think functionally. This book will get you there. Functional programming offers useful techniques for building maintainable and scalable software that solves today's difficult problems. The demand for software written in this way is increasing - you don't want to miss out. In this book, you'll not only learn Elixir and its features, you'll also learn the mindset required to program functionally. Elixir's clean syntax is excellent for exploring the critical skills of using functions and concurrency. Start with the basic techniques of the functional way: working with immutable data, transforming data in discrete steps, and avoiding side effects. Next, take a deep look at values, expressions, functions, and modules. Then extend your programming with pattern matching and flow control with case, if, cond, and functions. Use recursive functions to create iterations. Work with data types such as lists, tuples, and maps. Improve code reusability and readability with Elixir's most common high-order functions. Explore how to use lazy computation with streams, design your data, and take advantage of polymorphism with protocols. Combine functions and handle failures in a maintainable way using Elixir features and libraries. Learn techniques that matter to make code that lives harmoniously with the language. What You Need: You'll need a computer and Elixir 1.4 or newer version installed. No previous functional programming or Elixir experience is required. Some experience with any programming language is recommended.

Get the latest information about online GIS using ArcGIS apps and functionality. Capabilities of Web GIS keep expanding, and Getting to Know Web GIS, fifth edition, describes some of the most cutting-edge and exciting innovations. From publishing data as services and configuring engaging web and mobile apps to automation, scripting, and real-world applications, this book shares how to use the most current software and apps for using ArcGIS in the cloud. In the newest edition of Getting to Know Web GIS, you can work with the latest releases of ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS StoryMaps , and ArcGIS mobile apps. You can experience ArcGIS Experience Builder, ArcGIS Field Maps, ArcGIS Instant Apps, ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Mission, and the latest advances in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and tools for spatial data science. No programming is required, but you can learn more about Web GIS programming in this book using JavaScript, webhooks, and ArcGIS Arcade. Use the fifth edition to: improve your online visual storytelling, work with 2D smart mapping and 3D web scenes, create informative web experiences and dashboards, support field operations and data collection using mobile apps, use new data science tools for spatial analysis and geoprocessing, detect objects using deep learning packages, program a triggered notification using a visual interface, and more. GIS expert, instructor, and author Pinde Fu provides lecture slides and additional resources in an online story using ArcGIS StoryMaps. Today's modern GIS is Web GIS-get onboard with one of the most interesting and creative areas of GIS