The so called information society is being shaped by products and services that either contain software as the core element, are themselves software, or have been designed and manufactured with the help of sophisticated software applications. The new global environment in which these systems are being developed and deployed, in addition to other pressing issues, such as time-to-market and dependability, are pushing the skills of software developers and engineers to the limit. With few exceptions, those products and services will influence the social environment where they will be deployed, because people will operate them or be affected by them, or both. So another challenging issue is the ability of these systems to integrate with their social environment in a way that is perceived as beneficial, trustworthy and acceptable. Given these challenges, defining the requirements that establish what a future system should do, and validating that the system has achieved its goals, is an immense task. In this book the reader will find a detailed account of the challenges posed by the elicitation, specification, validation and management of requirements for the definition of this kind of application: from embedded software in cars to internet-based applications, COTS packages, health-care, and others.

Generating Abstraction Hierarchies presents a completely automated approach to generating abstractions for problem solving. The abstractions are generated using a tractable, domain-independent algorithm whose only inputs are the definition of a problem space and the problem to be solved and whose output is an abstraction hierarchy that is tailored to the particular problem. The algorithm generates abstraction hierarchies that satisfy the `ordered monotonicity' property, which guarantees that the structure of an abstract solution is not changed in the process of refining it. An abstraction hierarchy with this property allows a problem to be decomposed such that the solution in an abstract space can be held invariant while the remaining parts of a problem are solved. The algorithm for generating abstractions is implemented in a system called ALPINE, which generates abstractions for a hierarchical version of the PRODIGY problem solver. Generating Abstraction Hierarchies formally defines this hierarchical problem solving method, shows that under certain assumptions this method can reduce the size of a search space from exponential to linear in the solution size, and describes the implementation of this method in PRODIGY. The abstractions generated by ALPINE are tested in multiple domains on large problem sets and are shown to produce shorter solutions with significantly less search than problem solving without using abstraction. Generating Abstraction Hierarchies will be of interest to researchers in machine learning, planning and problem reformation.

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.

Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) is becoming one of the great concerns of researchers and practitioners within the academic areas of computer science and the software industry. After the focus on object-oriented programming, design and modelling during the 90's, reuse and reusability of software entities is nowadays slowed down by new factors. The size of components, their deployment capability, their compatibility and interoperability features in order to be incorporated into heterogeneous cooperative environments, their faults tolerance, and above all, their ability to fulfill performance conditions, are critical expectations of software engineers.
Despite the maturity of the component market and some available results coming from academic research, software engineering and as a result CBSE, remain somehow, a backward discipline, since no modern technique of component composition has been recognized as satisfactory. Business Component-Based Software Engineering, an edited volume, aims to complement some other reputable books on CBSE, by stressing how components are built for large-scale applications, within dedicated development processes and for easy and direct combination. This book will emphasize these three facets and will offer a complete overview of some recent progresses. Projects and works explained herein will prompt graduate students, academics, software engineers, project managers and developers to adopt and to apply new component development methods gained from and validated by the authors. The authors of Business Component-Based Software Engineering are academic and professionals, experts in the field, who will introduce the state of the art on CBSE fromtheir shared experience by working on the same projects.
Business Component-Based Software Engineering is designed to meet the needs of practitioners and researchers in industry, and graduate-level students in Computer Science and Engineering.

This book presents different approaches on multi-modality imaging with a focus on biomedical applications. Medical imaging can be divided into two categories: functional (related to physiological body measurements) and anatomical (structural) imaging modalities. In particular, this book covers imaging combinations coming from the usual popular modalities (such as the anatomical modalities, e.g. X-ray, CT and MRI), and it also includes some promising and new imaging modalities that are still being developed and improved (such as infrared thermography (IRT) and photoplethysmography imaging (PPGI)), implying potential approaches for innovative biomedical applications. Moreover, this book includes a variety of tools on computer vision, imaging processing, and computer graphics, which led to the generation and visualization of 3D models, making the most recent advances in this area possible. This is an ideal book for students and biomedical engineering researchers covering the biomedical imaging field.

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.

Modern life is increasingly relying on digital technology, which in turn runs on mathematics. However, this underlying math is hidden from us. That is mostly a good thing since we do not want to be solving equations and calculating fractions just to get things done in our everyday business. But the mathematical details do matter for anyone who wants to understand how stuff works, or wishes to create something new in the jungle of apps and algorithms. This book takes a look at the mathematical models behind weather forecasting, climate change prediction, artificial intelligence, medical imaging and computer graphics. The reader is expected to have only a curious mind; technical math skills are not needed for enjoying this text.

Data Stewardship for Open Science: Implementing FAIR Principles has been written with the intention of making scientists, funders, and innovators in all disciplines and stages of their professional activities broadly aware of the need, complexity, and challenges associated with open science, modern science communication, and data stewardship. The FAIR principles are used as a guide throughout the text, and this book should leave experimentalists consciously incompetent about data stewardship and motivated to respect data stewards as representatives of a new profession, while possibly motivating others to consider a career in the field. The ebook, avalable for no additional cost when you buy the paperback, will be updated every 6 months on average (providing that significant updates are needed or avaialble). Readers will have the opportunity to contribute material towards these updates, and to develop their own data management plans, via the free Data Stewardship Wizard.

Automata Theory and its Applications is a uniform treatment of the theory of finite state machines on finite and infinite strings and trees. Many books deal with automata on finite strings, but there are very few expositions that prove the fundamental results of automata on infinite strings and trees. These results have important applications to modeling parallel computation and concurrency, the specification and verification of sequential and concurrent programs, databases, operating systems, computational complexity, and decision methods in logic and algebra. Thus, this textbook fills an important gap in the literature by exposing early fundamental results in automata theory and its applications.

Beginning with coverage of all standard fundamental results regarding finite automata, the book deals in great detail with BA1/4chi and Rabin automata and their applications to various logical theories such as S1S and S2S, and describes game-theoretic models of concurrent operating and communication systems.

The book is self-contained with numerous examples, illustrations, exercises, and is suitable for a two-semester undergraduate course for computer science or mathematics majors, or for a one-semester graduate course/seminar. Since no advanced mathematical background is required, the text is also useful for self-study by computer science professionals who wish to understand the foundations of modern formal approaches to software development, validation, and verification.

Global optimization is one of the fastest developing fields in mathematical optimization. In fact, an increasing number of remarkably efficient deterministic algorithms have been proposed in the last ten years for solving several classes of large scale specially structured problems encountered in such areas as chemical engineering, financial engineering, location and network optimization, production and inventory control, engineering design, computational geometry, and multi-objective and multi-level optimization. These new developments motivated the authors to write a new book devoted to global optimization problems with special structures. Most of these problems, though highly nonconvex, can be characterized by the property that they reduce to convex minimization problems when some of the variables are fixed. A number of recently developed algorithms have been proved surprisingly efficient for handling typical classes of problems exhibiting such structures, namely low rank nonconvex structures. Audience: The book will serve as a fundamental reference book for all those who are interested in mathematical optimization.

Game Audio Fundamentals takes the reader on a journey through game audio design: from analog and digital audio basics, to the art and execution of sound effects, soundtracks, and voice production, as well as learning how to make sense of a truly effective soundscape. Presuming no pre-existing knowledge, this accessible guide is accompanied by online resources - including practical examples and incremental DAW exercises - and presents the theory and practice of game audio in detail, and in a format anyone can understand. This is essential reading for any aspiring game audio designer, as well as students and professionals from a range of backgrounds, including music, audio engineering, and game design.

The contributions in this book survey results on combinations of probabilistic and various other classical, temporal and justification logical systems. Formal languages of these logics are extended with probabilistic operators. The aim is to provide a systematic overview and an accessible presentation of mathematical techniques used to obtain results on formalization, completeness, compactness and decidability. The book will be of value to researchers in logic and it can be used as a supplementary text in graduate courses on non-classical logics.

As Web services (any communication between two computers over a network) continue to evolve, publication and research related to the field must keep up in turn. Innovations, Standards and Practices of Web Services: Emerging Research Topics provides a vital new compendium of the latest research topics in the field of Web services. As a set of tools that can be used in a number of ways, Web services continue to evolve as the Internet expands its capabilities and users. Detailing the functions of service composition, and the most relevant models that modify its construction, this volume serves as a vital reference for practitioners, students, and academics alike.

A definitive guide to contemporary video game studies, this second edition has been fully revised and updated to address the ongoing theoretical and methodological development of game studies. Expertly compiled by well-known video game scholars Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, the Companion includes comprehensive and interdisciplinary models and approaches for analyzing video games, new perspectives on video games both as an art form and cultural phenomenon, explorations of the technical and creative dimensions of video games, and accounts of the political, social, and cultural dynamics of video games. Brand new to this second edition are essays examining topics such as preservation, augmented, mixed and virtual reality, eSports, disability, diversity, and identity, as well as a new section that specifically examines the industrial aspects of video games including digital distribution, game labor, triple-A games, indie games, and globalization. Each essay provides a lively and succinct summary of its target area, quickly bringing the reader up-to-date on the pertinent issues surrounding each aspect of the field, including references for further reading. A comprehensive overview of the present state of video game studies that will undoubtedly prove invaluable to students, scholars, and game designers alike.

It is frequently observed that most decision-making problems involve several objectives, and the aim of the decision makers is to find the best decision by fulfilling the aspiration levels of all the objectives. Multi-objective decision making is especially suitable for the design and planning steps and allows a decision maker to achieve the optimal or aspired goals by considering the various interactions of the given constraints. Multi-Objective Stochastic Programming in Fuzzy Environments discusses optimization problems with fuzzy random variables following several types of probability distributions and different types of fuzzy numbers with different defuzzification processes in probabilistic situations. The content within this publication examines such topics as waste management, agricultural systems, and fuzzy set theory. It is designed for academicians, researchers, and students.

This book presents the proceedings of the 10th International Parallel Tools Workshop, held October 4-5, 2016 in Stuttgart, Germany - a forum to discuss the latest advances in parallel tools. High-performance computing plays an increasingly important role for numerical simulation and modelling in academic and industrial research. At the same time, using large-scale parallel systems efficiently is becoming more difficult. A number of tools addressing parallel program development and analysis have emerged from the high-performance computing community over the last decade, and what may have started as collection of small helper script has now matured to production-grade frameworks. Powerful user interfaces and an extensive body of documentation allow easy usage by non-specialists.

This book is intended for individuals and students learning to program. You may already have done some programming in other languages, but not be familiar with Python. Novice programmers should work through the book sequentially, starting at Chapter 1. It will also be a useful reference book for students on a programming course or anyone working on a programming project. It teaches basic syntax and programming techniques, and introduces three inbuilt Python modules: "> Tkinter, used for building a graphical user interface, which is an option that some users may like to include in their project work. "> SQLite, which enables the creation and processing of a database from within a Python program. This provides an alternative to writing to a text file when data needs to be stored and retrieved "> .pdb, Python's debugging module, which can be used to help find elusive logic errors. Questions and exercises are included in every chapter. Answers to these as well as over 120 Python programs for all the examples and exercises given in the book may be downloaded from www.pgonline.co.uk. These programs enable users of the book to try out the in-text examples and check possible solutions to the exercises.

Working with Sound is an exploration of the ever-changing working practices of audio development in the era of hybrid collaboration in the games industry. Through learnings from the pre-pandemic remote and isolated worlds of audio work, sound designers, composers and dialogue designers find themselves equipped uniquely to thrive in the hybrid, remote, and studio-based realms of today's fast-evolving working landscapes. With unique insights into navigating the worlds of isolation and collaboration, this book explores ways of thinking and working in this world, equipping the reader with inspiration to sustainably tackle the many stages of the development process. Working with Sound is an essential guide for professionals working in dynamic audio teams of all sizes, as well as the designers, producers, artists, animators and programmers who collaborate closely with their colleagues working on game audio and sound.

This book presents the Android plug-in technology used in Android development. This technology is widely used by a majority of Chinese internet companies, and is becoming more widely used worldwide. The book fully describes the history of Android plug-in technology, the installation and startup process, and new features of the Android plug-in technology. It also explores plug-in solutions for peripheral technologies. The book is designed to help Android app developers better understand the underlying technology of the Android system. Features Introduces Android system knowledge, including the communication between AMS and four components Describes the Hook technique by Proxy.newProxyInstance and reflection, to modify Android system behavior, for example, to launch an activity not declared in the AndroidManifest. Shows how to use the Hook apk packaging process in Gradle Covers how to merge the resources in the plugin app and the host app, and how to merge dex of the host app and all the plugin apps Presents the SO technique and how to launch SO files dynamically

This book discusses the semantic foundations of concurrent systems with nondeterministic and probabilistic behaviour. Particular attention is given to clarifying the relationship between testing and simulation semantics and characterising bisimulations from metric, logical, and algorithmic perspectives. Besides presenting recent research outcomes in probabilistic concurrency theory, the book exemplifies the use of many mathematical techniques to solve problems in computer science, which is intended to be accessible to postgraduate students in Computer Science and Mathematics. It can also be used by researchers and practitioners either for advanced study or for technical reference.

The Game Music Toolbox provides readers with the tools, models and techniques to create and expand a compositional toolbox, through a collection of 20 iconic case studies taken from different eras of game music. Discover many of the composition and production techniques behind popular music themes from games such as Cyberpunk 2077, Mario Kart 8, The Legend of Zelda, Street Fighter II, Diablo, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, The Last of Us, and many others. The Game Music Toolbox features: Exclusive interviews from industry experts Transcriptions and harmonic analyses 101 music theory introductions for beginners Career development ideas and strategies Copyright and business fundamentals An introduction to audio implementation for composers Practical takeaway tasks to equip readers with techniques for their own game music The Game Music Toolbox is crucial reading for game music composers and audio professionals of all backgrounds, as well as undergraduates looking to forge a career in the video game industry.