The goal of the research out of which this monograph grew, was to make annealing as much as possible a general purpose optimization routine. At first glance this may seem a straight-forward task, for the formulation of its concept suggests applicability to any combinatorial optimization problem. All that is needed to run annealing on such a problem is a unique representation for each configuration, a procedure for measuring its quality, and a neighbor relation. Much more is needed however for obtaining acceptable results consistently in a reasonably short time. It is even doubtful whether the problem can be formulated such that annealing becomes an adequate approach for all instances of an optimization problem. Questions such as what is the best formulation for a given instance, and how should the process be controlled, have to be answered. Although much progress has been made in the years after the introduction of the concept into the field of combinatorial optimization in 1981, some important questions still do not have a definitive answer. In this book the reader will find the foundations of annealing in a self-contained and consistent presentation. Although the physical analogue from which the con cept emanated is mentioned in the first chapter, all theory is developed within the framework of markov chains. To achieve a high degree of instance independence adaptive strategies are introduced."

Features Combines all topics into one comprehensive introduction. Explores practical applications of theory to healthcare. Can be used to accompany the NHS Modernising Scientific Careers syllabus.

* Provides models of curricular integration and assessment practices to inform the design of and research on computational tools and practices. * Addresses critical areas of computational thinking such as challenges in implementation and unsubstantiated claims for effectiveness. * Covers a diversity of perspectives including unplugged CT, CT as a vehicle for learning, and CT in and across subjects.

Data is an intrinsic part of our daily lives. Everything we do is a data point. Many of these data points are recorded with the intent to help us lead more efficient lives. We have apps that track our workouts, sleep, food intake, and personal finance. We use the data to make changes to our lives based on goals we have set for ourselves. Businesses use vast collections of data to determine strategy and marketing. Data scientists take data, analyze it, and create models to help solve problems. You may have heard of companies having data management teams or chief information officers (CIOs) or chief data officers (CDOs), etc. They are all people who work with data, but their function is more related to vetting data and preparing it for use by data scientists. The jump from personal data usage for self-betterment to mass data analysis for business process improvement often feels bigger to us than it is. In turn, we often think big data analysis requires tools held only by advanced degree holders. Although advanced degrees are certainly valuable, this book illustrates how it is not a requirement to adequately run a data science project. Because we are all already data users, with some simple strategies and exposure to basic analytical software programs, anyone who has the proper tools and determination can solve data science problems. The process presented in this book will help empower individuals to work on and solve data-related challenges. The goal of this book is to provide a step-by-step guide to the data science process so that you can feel confident in leading your own data science project. To aid with clarity and understanding, the author presents a fictional restaurant chain to use as a case study, illustrating how the various topics discussed can be applied. Essentially, this book helps traditional businesspeople solve data-related problems on their own without any hesitation or fear. The powerful methods are presented in the form of conversations, examples, and case studies. The conversational style is engaging and provides clarity.

This book provides an essential update for experienced data processing professionals, transaction managers and database specialists who are seeking system solutions beyond the confines of traditional approaches. It provides practical advice on how to manage complex transactions and share distributed databases on client servers and the Internet. Based on extensive research in over 100 companies in the USA, Europe, Japan and the UK, topics covered include : * the challenge of global transaction requirements within an expanding business perspective *how to handle long transactions and their constituent elements *possible benefits from object-oriented solutions * the contribution of knowledge engineering in transaction management * the Internet, the World Wide Web and transaction handling * systems software and transaction-processing monitors * OSF/1 and the Encina transaction monitor * active data transfers and remote procedure calls * serialization in a transaction environment * transaction locks, two-phase commit and deadlocks * improving transaction-oriented database management * the successful development of an increasingly complex transaction environment.

L systems are language-theoretic models for developmental biology. They wereintroduced in 1968 by Aristid Lindenmayer (1925-1989) and have proved to be among the most beautiful examples of interdisciplinary science, where work in one area induces fruitful ideas and results in other areas. L systemsare based on relational and set-theoretic concepts, which are more suitable for the discrete and combinatorial structures of biology than mathematical models based on calculus or statistics. L systems have stimulated new work not only in the realistic simulation of developing organisms but also in the theory of automata and formal languages, formal power series, computer graphics, and combinatorics of words. This book contains research papers by almost all leading authorities and by many of the most promising young researchers in the field. The 28 contributions are organized in sections on basic L systems, computer graphics, graph grammars and map L systems, biological aspects and models, and variations and generalizations of L systems. The introductory paper by Lindenmayer and J}rgensen was written for a wide audience and is accessible to the non-specialist reader. The volume documents the state of the art in the theory of L systems and their applications. It will interest researchers and advanced students in theoretical computer science and developmental biology as well as professionals in computer graphics.

Computation theory is a discipline that uses mathematical concepts and tools to expose the nature of "computation" and to explain a broad range of computational phenomena: Why is it harder to perform some computations than others? Are the differences in difficulty that we observe inherent, or are they artifacts of the way we try to perform the computations? How does one reason about such questions? This unique textbook strives to endow students with conceptual and manipulative tools necessary to make computation theory part of their professional lives. The work achieves this goal by means of three stratagems that set its approach apart from most other texts on the subject. For starters, it develops the necessary mathematical concepts and tools from the concepts' simplest instances, thereby helping students gain operational control over the required mathematics. Secondly, it organizes development of theory around four "pillars," enabling students to see computational topics that have the same intellectual origins in physical proximity to one another. Finally, the text illustrates the "big ideas" that computation theory is built upon with applications of these ideas within "practical" domains in mathematics, computer science, computer engineering, and even further afield. Suitable for advanced undergraduate students and beginning graduates, this textbook augments the "classical" models that traditionally support courses on computation theory with novel models inspired by "real, modern" computational topics,such as crowd-sourced computing, mobile computing, robotic path planning, and volunteer computing. Arnold L. Rosenberg is Distinguished Univ. Professor Emeritus at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. Lenwood S. Heath is Professor at Virgina Tech, Blacksburg, USA.

Hilbert's Programs & Beyond presents the foundational work of David Hilbert in a sequence of thematically organized essays. They first trace the roots of Hilbert's work to the radical transformation of mathematics in the 19th century and bring out his pivotal role in creating mathematical logic and proof theory. They then analyze techniques and results of "classical" proof theory as well as their dramatic expansion in modern proof theory. This intellectual experience finally opens horizons for reflection on the nature of mathematics in the 21st century: Sieg articulates his position of reductive structuralism and explores mathematical capacities via computational models.

In a world that is awash in ubiquitous technology, even the least tech-savvy know that we must take care how that technology affects individuals and society. That governments and organizations around the world now focus on these issues, that universities and research institutes in many different languages dedicate significant resources to study the issues, and that international professional organizations have adopted standards and directed resources toward ethical issues in technology is in no small part the result of the work of Simon Rogerson. - Chuck Huff, Professor of Social Psychology at Saint Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota In 1995, Apple launched its first WWW server, Quick Time On-line. It was the year Microsoft released Internet Explorer and sold 7 million copies of Windows 95 in just 2 months. In March 1995, the author Simon Rogerson opened the first ETHICOMP conference with these words: We live in a turbulent society where there is social, political, economic and technological turbulence ... it is causing a vast amount of restructuring within all these organisations which impacts on individuals, which impacts on the way departments are set up, organisational hierarchies, job content, span of control, social interaction and so on and so forth. ... Information is very much the fuel of modern technological change. Almost anything now can be represented by the technology and transported to somewhere else. It's a situation where the more information a computer can process, the more of the world it can actually turn into information. That may well be very exciting, but it is also very concerning. That could be describing today. More than 25 years later, these issues are still at the forefront of how ethical digital technology can be developed and utilised. This book is an anthology of the author's work over the past 25 years of pioneering research in digital ethics. It is structured into five themes: Journey, Process, Product, Future and Education. Each theme commences with an introductory explanation of the papers, their relevance and their interrelationship. The anthology finishes with a concluding chapter which summarises the key messages and suggests what might happen in the future. Included in this chapter are insights from some younger leading academics who are part of the community charged with ensuring that ethical digital technology is realised.

Communication and commerce continue to connect people from different cultures through information technology. ""Information Technology Ethics: Cultural Perspectives"" is the single reference source to take a global approach to the diverse ethical issues evoked by information and communication technologies and their possible resolutions. The comprehensive chapters contained in this book describe the problems and possibilities of genuinely global information ethics, which are urgently needed as information and communication technologies continue their exponential growth. International experts from diverse backgrounds address both theoretical and culture-specific issues in explicit detail. This Premier Reference Source provides the most thorough examination of the information technology ethics field.

Technology is essential for access to learning and development of a knowledge society. Cases on Interactive Technology Environments and Transnational Collaboration: Concerns and Perspectives provides a comparative and comprehensive analysis of technologically enabled educational environments and various issues concerning education and collaborations across the world while also focusing on best practices and experiences from a varied range of countries.

Optical media are now widely used in the telecommunication networks, and the evolution of optical and optoelectronic technologies tends to show that their wide range of techniques could be successfully introduced in shorter-distance interconnection systems. This book bridges the existing gap between research in optical interconnects and research in high-performance computing and communication systems, of which parallel processing is just an example. It also provides a more comprehensive understanding of the advantages and limitations of optics as applied to high-speed communications. Audience: The book will be a vital resource for researchers and graduate students of optical interconnects, computer architectures and high-performance computing and communication systems who wish to understand the trends in the newest technologies, models and communication issues in the field.

IT-Enabled Strategic Management: Increasing Returns for the Organization includes outstanding contributions from leading intellectuals, exploring the crossroads of information technology systems and strategic management. This book presents research on: specific market enhancements, information management for decision making, inter-organizational efficiencies, the importance of maintaining crucial relationships, and broader societal and global ramifications. ""IT-Enabled Strategic Management: Increasing Returns for the Organization"" encourages continued deliberate cross-fertilization in these critical research areas at a very strategic point in history. Although the parallel development of these fields continues, globalization and technological advances have set the stage for convergence of these fields in a number of arenas.

This "hands-on" book is for people who are interested in immediately putting Maple to work. The reader is provided with a compact, fast and surveyable guide that introduces them to the extensive capabilities of the software. The book is sufficient for standard use of Maple and will provide techniques for extending Maple for more specialized work. The author discusses the reliability of results systematically and presents ways of testing questionable results. The book allows a reader to become a user almost immediately and helps him/her to grow gradually to a broader and more proficient use. As a consequence, some subjects are dealt with in an introductory way early in the book, with references to a more detailed discussion later on.

Containing practical tools and proven techniques for managing virtual teams for optimum performance, this text uses real-world examples and specific guidelines to show the reader how distributed work groups can be even more productive, effective and flexible than traditional co-located teams. The book looks at communication, control, monitoring, team buiding, cultural differences, and legal and process issues. There are step-by-step procedures for "transitioning teams", and tips on using high-speed networks and groupware as tools for solving problems. The software serves as an assessment tool to help make the distributed team more effective.

In today s increasingly complex and uncertain business environment, financial analysis is yet more critical to business managers who tackle problems of an economic or business nature. Knowledge based on formal logic and even experience becomes less sufficient. This volume systematically sets out the basic elements on which to base financial analysis for business in the new century. It incorporates a previous work that can serve as the basis and foundation for the new contributions that are now being made in the field of financial economy and intend to provide business with instruments and models suitable for dealing with the new economic context. In dealing with rapid and unpredictable changes in technological and business conditions, it postulates a growing reliance on the opinions of experts instead of past data or probabilistic forecasts, which is a radical change but may yield fruitful results. For this reason, much emphasis is devoted to the problem of aggregation of the opinion of experts in the financial field, with the object of limiting, wherever possible, the subjective component of the opinions and making sure that the decisions have the best guarantee of reaching the desired objectives."

Up to date with the fourth edition of PMI's Program Management Standard, PgMP (R) Practice Test Questions: 1000+ Practice Exam Questions for the PgMP (R) Examination contains more than 1,000 practice questions to help readers hone their knowledge and test their skills. It covers all five of the program management domains: Strategic Program Management, Program Management Life Cycle, Benefits Management, Stakeholder Management, and Governance. It also examines all of the sub domains of the lifecycle domain. With an easy-to-use format, this is an ideal resource for those preparing to take the PgMP (R) exam.

This book discusses the current research concerning public key cryptosystems. It begins with an introduction to the basic concepts of multivariate cryptography and the history of this field. The authors provide a detailed description and security analysis of the most important multivariate public key schemes, including the four multivariate signature schemes participating as second round candidates in the NIST standardization process for post-quantum cryptosystems. Furthermore, this book covers the Simple Matrix encryption scheme, which is currently the most promising multivariate public key encryption scheme. This book also covers the current state of security analysis methods for Multivariate Public Key Cryptosystems including the algorithms and theory of solving systems of multivariate polynomial equations over finite fields. Through the book's website, interested readers can find source code to the algorithms handled in this book. In 1994, Dr. Peter Shor from Bell Laboratories proposed a quantum algorithm solving the Integer Factorization and the Discrete Logarithm problem in polynomial time, thus making all of the currently used public key cryptosystems, such as RSA and ECC insecure. Therefore, there is an urgent need for alternative public key schemes which are resistant against quantum computer attacks. Researchers worldwide, as well as companies and governmental organizations have put a tremendous effort into the development of post-quantum public key cryptosystems to meet this challenge. One of the most promising candidates for this are Multivariate Public Key Cryptosystems (MPKCs). The public key of an MPKC is a set of multivariate polynomials over a small finite field. Especially for digital signatures, numerous well-studied multivariate schemes offering very short signatures and high efficiency exist. The fact that these schemes work over small finite fields, makes them suitable not only for interconnected computer systems, but also for small devices with limited resources, which are used in ubiquitous computing. This book gives a systematic introduction into the field of Multivariate Public Key Cryptosystems (MPKC), and presents the most promising multivariate schemes for digital signatures and encryption. Although, this book was written more from a computational perspective, the authors try to provide the necessary mathematical background. Therefore, this book is suitable for a broad audience. This would include researchers working in either computer science or mathematics interested in this exciting new field, or as a secondary textbook for a course in MPKC suitable for beginning graduate students in mathematics or computer science. Information security experts in industry, computer scientists and mathematicians would also find this book valuable as a guide for understanding the basic mathematical structures necessary to implement multivariate cryptosystems for practical applications.

Positive change in society depends highly on a variety of innovative technologies. Sustainability and transformation of the knowledge society helps create developing nations that can survive during times of global turbulence. Sustainable Economic Development and the Influence of Information Technologies: Dynamics of Knowledge Society Transformation provides relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings in the area of information technology as it relates to sustainable economic development and the development of knowledge societies. This innovative publication highlights the influence of information technologies and the significance of the knowledge society on economic development in the 21st century.

The book gives a thorough introduction into object orientated design and programming using C++. At the same time it can be used as a library of very useful programs chosen from the fields of finance, adminstration and statistics. These include programs for calculating loan periods, amortization, least squares fitting, a spelling checker, Gregorian calendar, data compression and encryption, searching and sorting. Basic C++ programming is introduced with simple introductory programs while object-oriented programming in C++ is explained as we develop useful classes. Finally we give an introduction into object orientated design and we demonstrate its power by developing a banking package.

Access and Control in Digital Humanities explores a range of important questions about who controls data, who is permitted to reproduce or manipulate data, and what sorts of challenges digital humanists face in making their work accessible and useful. Contributors to this volume present case studies and theoretical approaches from their experience with applications for digital technology in classrooms, museums, archives, in the field and with the general public. Offering potential answers to the issues of access and control from a variety of perspectives, the volume acknowledges that access is subject to competing interests of a variety of stakeholders. Museums, universities, archives, and some communities all place claims on how data can or cannot be shared through digital initiatives and, given the collaborative nature of most digital humanities projects, those in the field need to be cognizant of the various and often competing interests and rights that shape the nature of access and how it is controlled. Access and Control in Digital Humanities will be of interest to researchers, academics and graduate students working in a variety of fields, including digital humanities, library and information science, history, museum and heritage studies, conservation, English literature, geography and legal studies.

This book discusses the study and analysis of the physical aspects of social systems and models, inspired by the analogy with familiar models of physical systems and possible applications of statistical physics tools. Unlike the traditional analysis of the physics of macroscopic many-body or condensed matter systems, which is now an established and mature subject, the upsurge in the physical analysis and modelling of social systems, which are clearly many-body dynamical systems, is a recent phenomenon. Though the major developments in sociophysics have taken place only recently, the earliest attempts of proposing "Social Physics" as a discipline are more than one and a half centuries old. Various developments in the mainstream physics of condensed matter systems have inspired and induced the recent growth of sociophysical analysis and models. In spite of the tremendous efforts of many scientists in recent years, the subject is still in its infancy and major challenges are yet to be taken up. An introduction to these challenges is the main motivation for this book.

The theory of parsing is an important application area of the theory of formal languages and automata. The evolution of modem high-level programming languages created a need for a general and theoretically dean methodology for writing compilers for these languages. It was perceived that the compilation process had to be "syntax-directed," that is, the functioning of a programming language compiler had to be defined completely by the underlying formal syntax of the language. A program text to be compiled is "parsed" according to the syntax of the language, and the object code for the program is generated according to the semantics attached to the parsed syntactic entities. Context-free grammars were soon found to be the most convenient formalism for describing the syntax of programming languages, and accordingly methods for parsing context-free languages were devel oped. Practical considerations led to the definition of various kinds of restricted context-free grammars that are parsable by means of efficient deterministic linear-time algorithms."