Collaborative research in bioinformatics and systems biology is a key element of modern biology and health research. This book highlights and provides access to many of the methods, environments, results and resources involved, including integral laboratory data generation and experimentation and clinical activities. Collaborative projects embody a research paradigm that connects many of the top scientists, institutions, their resources and research worldwide, resulting in first-class contributions to bioinformatics and systems biology. Central themes include describing processes and results in collaborative research projects using computational biology and providing a guide for researchers to access them.

The book is also a practical guide on how science is managed. It shows how collaborative researchers are putting results together in a way accessible to the entire biomedical community.

This volume covers a variety of topics in the field of research in strategic management and information technology. These topics include organizational fit and flexibility and the determinants of business unit reliance on information technologies.

This book explores the intricate connection between the Single Market, characterized by the freedom of movement of goods, services, capital and labor within and across Europe, and the Digital Single Market, the virtual space that promotes freedom of movement of information and data. Both a result and catalyst of the Single Market, the Digital Single Market has become a different space from the Single Market, as the former is based on the application of information and communication technologies (ICTs), while the latter is the result of concerted actions and concessions by Member States in the European Union. The author argues that, similar to the Single Market, the Digital Single Market is an instrument, built by the influence of the Internet, which can provide a new means of socio-economic growth and development in Europe. While sharing many similar characteristics, the Single Market and the Digital Single Market diverge in important aspects, particularly with respect to policy. The research analyzes the interaction between policy actors, their influence in the European decision-making process, and their interests in order to establish a digital policy model, in comparison with market policy. Moreover, this volume considers the implementation process and the success of such initiatives under the current policy model, and puts forward policy recommendations. Ultimately, the author considers the utility of such research on digital policy, considering the current focus on migration, vulnerabilities to internal challenges (e.g., Brexit) and security threats, maintaining that the discussion of digital policies relates to an innovative vision of the European integration process and prospects for its future.

Computer-Aided Verification is a collection of papers that begins with a general survey of hardware verification methods. Ms. Gupta starts with the issue of verification itself and develops a taxonomy of verification methodologies, focusing especially upon recent advances. Although her emphasis is hardware verification, most of what she reports applies to software verification as well. Graphical presentation is coming to be a de facto requirement for a friendly' user interface. The second paper presents a generic format for graphical presentations of coordinating systems represented by automata. The last two papers as a pair, present a variety of generic techniques for reducing the computational cost of computer-aided verification based upon explicit computational memory: the first of the two gives a time-space trade-off, while the second gives a technique which trades space for a (sometimes predictable) probability of error. Computer-Aided Verification is an edited volume of original research. This research work has also been published as a special issue of the journal Formal Methods in System Design, 1:2-3.

The papers in this volume comprise the refereed proceedings of the First Int- national Conference on Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture (CCTA 2007), in Wuyishan, China, 2007. This conference is organized by China Agricultural University, Chinese Society of Agricultural Engineering and the Beijing Society for Information Technology in Agriculture. The purpose of this conference is to facilitate the communication and cooperation between institutions and researchers on theories, methods and implementation of computer science and information technology. By researching information technology development and the - sources integration in rural areas in China, an innovative and effective approach is expected to be explored to promote the technology application to the development of modern agriculture and contribute to the construction of new countryside. The rapid development of information technology has induced substantial changes and impact on the development of China's rural areas. Western thoughts have exerted great impact on studies of Chinese information technology devel- ment and it helps more Chinese and western scholars to expand their studies in this academic and application area. Thus, this conference, with works by many prominent scholars, has covered computer science and technology and information development in China's rural areas; and probed into all the important issues and the newest research topics, such as Agricultural Decision Support System and Expert System, GIS, GPS, RS and Precision Farming, CT applications in Rural Area, Agricultural System Simulation, Evolutionary Computing, etc.

This volume examines the application of swarm intelligence in data mining, addressing the issues of swarm intelligence and data mining using novel intelligent approaches. The book comprises 11 chapters including an introduction reviewing fundamental definitions and important research challenges. Important features include a detailed overview of swarm intelligence and data mining paradigms, focused coverage of timely, advanced data mining topics, state-of-the-art theoretical research and application developments and contributions by pioneers in the field.

This book encapsulates some work done in the DIRC project concerned with trust and responsibility in socio-technical systems. It brings together a range of disciplinary approaches - computer science, sociology and software engineering - to produce a socio-technical systems perspective on the issues surrounding trust in technology in complex settings. Computer systems can only bring about their purported benefits if functionality, users and usability are central to their design and deployment. Thus, technology can only be trusted in situ and in everyday use if these issues have been brought to bear on the process of technology design, implementation and use. The studies detailed in this book analyse the ways in which trust in technology is achieved and/or worked around in everyday situations in a range of settings - including hospitals, a steelworks, a public enquiry, the financial services sector and air traffic control.

The papers gathered in this book were published over a period of more than twenty years in widely scattered journals. They led to the discovery of randomness in arithmetic which was presented in the recently published monograph on "Algorithmic Information Theory" by the author. There the strongest possible version of Goedel's incompleteness theorem, using an information-theoretic approach based on the size of computer programs, was discussed. The present book is intended as a companion volume to the monograph and it will serve as a stimulus for work on complexity, randomness and unpredictability, in physics and biology as well as in metamathematics.

Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) CMOS technology has been regarded as another major technology for VLSI in addition to bulk CMOS technology. Owing to the buried oxide structure, SOI technology offers superior CMOS devices with higher speed, high density, and reduced second order effects for deep-submicron low-voltage, low-power VLSI circuits applications. In addition to VLSI applications, and because of its outstanding properties, SOI technology has been used to realize communication circuits, microwave devices, BICMOS devices, and even fiber optics applications. CMOS VLSI Engineering: Silicon-On-Insulator addresses three key factors in engineering SOI CMOS VLSI - processing technology, device modelling, and circuit designs are all covered with their mutual interactions. Starting from the SOI CMOS processing technology and the SOI CMOS digital and analog circuits, behaviors of the SOI CMOS devices are presented, followed by a CAD program, ST-SPICE, which incorporates models for deep-submicron fully-depleted mesa-isolated SOI CMOS devices and special purpose SOI devices including polysilicon TFTs. CMOS VLSI Engineering: Silicon-On-Insulator is written for undergraduate senior students and first-year graduate students interested in CMOS VLSI. It will also be suitable for electrical engineering professionals interested in microelectronics.

Much of the world's advanced data processing applications are now dependant on eXtensible Markup Language (XML), from publishing to medical information storage. Therefore, XML has become a de facto standard for data exchange and representation on the World Wide Web and in daily life. Applications and Structures in XML Processing: Label Streams, Semantics Utilization and Data Query Technologies reflects the significant research results and latest findings of scholars' worldwide, working to explore and expand the role of XML. This collection represents an understanding of XML processing technologies in connection with both advanced applications and the latest XML processing technologies that is of primary importance. It provides the opportunity to understand topics in detail and discover XML research at a comprehensive level.

th The 20 anniversary of the IFIP WG6. 1 Joint International Conference on Fonna! Methods for Distributed Systems and Communication Protocols (FORTE XIII / PSTV XX) was celebrated by the year 2000 edition of the Conference, which was held for the first time in Italy, at Pisa, October 10-13, 2000. In devising the subtitle for this special edition --'Fonna! Methods Implementation Under Test' --we wanted to convey two main concepts that, in our opinion, are reflected in the contents of this book. First, the early, pioneering phases in the development of Formal Methods (FM's), with their conflicts between evangelistic and agnostic attitudes, with their over optimistic applications to toy examples and over-skeptical views about scalability to industrial cases, with their misconceptions and myths . . . , all this is essentially over. Many FM's have successfully reached their maturity, having been 'implemented' into concrete development practice: a number of papers in this book report about successful experiences in specifYing and verifYing real distributed systems and protocols. Second, one of the several myths about FM's - the fact that their adoption would eventually eliminate the need for testing - is still quite far from becoming a reality, and, again, this book indicates that testing theory and applications are still remarkably healthy. A total of 63 papers have been submitted to FORTEIPSTV 2000, out of which the Programme Committee has selected 22 for presentation at the Conference and inclusion in the Proceedings.

The papers gathered in this book were published over a period of more than twenty years in widely scattered journals. They led to the discovery of randomness in arithmetic which was presented in the recently published monograph on "Algorithmic Information Theory" by the author. There the strongest possible version of Goedel's incompleteness theorem, using an information-theoretic approach based on the size of computer programs, was discussed. The present book is intended as a companion volume to the monograph and it will serve as a stimulus for work on complexity, randomness and unpredictability, in physics and biology as well as in metamathematics.

Sparse grids have gained increasing interest in recent years for the numerical treatment of high-dimensional problems. Whereas classical numerical discretization schemes fail in more than three or four dimensions, sparse grids make it possible to overcome the curse of dimensionality to some degree, extending the number of dimensions that can be dealt with. This volume of LNCSE collects the papers from the proceedings of the second workshop on sparse grids and applications, demonstrating once again the importance of this numerical discretization scheme. The selected articles present recent advances on the numerical analysis of sparse grids as well as efficient data structures, and the range of applications extends to uncertainty quantification settings and clustering, to name but a few examples.
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"Intelligent Data Mining Techniques and Applications" is an organized edited collection of contributed chapters covering basic knowledge for intelligent systems and data mining, applications in economic and management, industrial engineering and other related industrial applications. The main objective of this book is to gather a number of peer-reviewed high quality contributions in the relevant topic areas. The focus is especially on those chapters that provide theoretical/analytical solutions to the problems of real interest in intelligent techniques possibly combined with other traditional tools, for data mining and the corresponding applications to engineers and managers of different industrial sectors. Academic and applied researchers and research students working on data mining can also directly benefit from this book.

As miniaturisation deepens, and nanotechnology and its machines become more prevalent in the real world, the need to consider using quantum mechanical concepts to perform various tasks in computation increases. Such tasks include: the teleporting of information, breaking heretofore "unbreakable" codes, communicating with messages that betray eavesdropping, and the generation of random numbers. This is the first book to apply quantum physics to the basic operations of a computer, representing the ideal vehicle for explaining the complexities of quantum mechanics to students, researchers and computer engineers, alike, as they prepare to design and create the computing and information delivery systems for the future. Both authors have solid backgrounds in the subject matter at the theoretical and more practical level. While serving as a text for senior/grad level students in computer science/physics/engineering, this book has its primary use as an up-to-date reference work in the emerging interdisciplinary field of quantum computing - the only prerequisite being knowledge of calculus and familiarity with the concept of the Turing machine.

Driven by the request for increased productivity, flexibility, and competitiveness, modern civilization increasingly has created high-performance discrete event dynamic systems (DEDSs). These systems exhibit concurrent, sequential, competitive activities among their components. They are often complex and large in scale, and necessarily flexible and thus highly capital-intensive. Examples of systems are manufacturing systems, communication networks, traffic and logistic systems, and military command and control systems. Modeling and performance evaluation play a vital role in the design and operation of such high-performance DEDSs and thus have received widespread attention from researchers over the past two decades. One methodology resulting from this effort is based on timed Petri nets and related graphical and mathematical tools. The popularity that Petri nets have been gaining in modeling of DEDSs is due to their powerful representational ability of concurrency and synchronization; however these properties of DEDSs cannot be expressed easily in traditional formalisms developed for analysis of classical' systems with sequential behaviors. This book introduces the theories and applications of timed Petri nets systematically. Moreover, it also presents many practical applications in addition to theoretical developments, together with the latest research results and industrial applications of timed Petri nets. Timed Petri Nets: Theory and Application is intended for use by researchers and practitioners in the area of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems.

Modern electronics is driven by the explosive growth of digital communications and multi-media technology. A basic challenge is to design first-time-right complex digital systems, that meet stringent constraints on performance and power dissipation. In order to combine this growing system complexity with an increasingly short time-to-market, new system design technologies are emerging based on the paradigm of embedded programmable processors. This concept introduces modularity, flexibility and re-use in the electronic system design process. However, its success will critically depend on the availability of efficient and reliable CAD tools to design, programme and verify the functionality of embedded processors. Recently, new research efforts emerged on the edge between software compilation and hardware synthesis, to develop high-quality code generation tools for embedded processors. Code Generation for Embedded Systems provides a survey of these new developments. Although not limited to these targets, the main emphasis is on code generation for modern DSP processors. Important themes covered by the book include: the scope of general purpose versus application-specific processors, machine code quality for embedded applications, retargetability of the code generation process, machine description formalisms, and code generation methodologies. Code Generation for Embedded Systems is the essential introduction to this fast developing field of research for students, researchers, and practitioners alike.

The general concept of information is here, for the first time, defined mathematically by adding one single axiom to the probability theory. This Mathematical Theory of Information is explored in fourteen chapters: 1. Information can be measured in different units, in anything from bits to dollars. We will here argue that any measure is acceptable if it does not violate the Law of Diminishing Information. This law is supported by two independent arguments: one derived from the Bar-Hillel ideal receiver, the other is based on Shannon's noisy channel. The entropy in the 'classical information theory' is one of the measures conforming to the Law of Diminishing Information, but it has, however, properties such as being symmetric, which makes it unsuitable for some applications. The measure reliability is found to be a universal information measure. 2. For discrete and finite signals, the Law of Diminishing Information is defined mathematically, using probability theory and matrix algebra. 3. The Law of Diminishing Information is used as an axiom to derive essential properties of information. Byron's law: there is more information in a lie than in gibberish. Preservation: no information is lost in a reversible channel. Etc. The Mathematical Theory of Information supports colligation, i. e. the property to bind facts together making 'two plus two greater than four'. Colligation is a must when the information carries knowledge, or is a base for decisions. In such cases, reliability is always a useful information measure. Entropy does not allow colligation.

Collaboration is a form of electronic communication in which individuals work on the same documents or processes over a period of time. When applied to technologies development, collaboration often has a focus on user-centered design and rapid prototyping, with a strong people-orientation. ""Collaborative Technologies and Applications for Interactive Information Design: Emerging Trends in User Experiences"" covers a wide range of emerging topics in collaboration, Web 2.0, and social computing, with a focus on technologies that impact the user experience. This cutting-edge source provides the latest international findings useful to practitioners, researchers, and academicians involved in education, ontologies, open source communities, and trusted networks.

This book focuses like a laser beam on one of the hottest topics in evolutionary computation over the last decade or so: estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs). EDAs are an important current technique that is leading to breakthroughs in genetic and evolutionary computation and in optimization more generally. I'm putting Scalable Optimization via Probabilistic Modeling in a prominent place in my library, and I urge you to do so as well. This volume summarizes the state of the art at the same time it points to where that art is going. Buy it, read it, and take its lessons to heart.

David E Goldberg, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This book is an excellent compilation of carefully selected topics in estimation of distribution algorithms---search algorithms that combine ideas from evolutionary algorithms and machine learning. The book covers a broad spectrum of important subjects ranging from design of robust and scalable optimization algorithms to efficiency enhancements and applications of these algorithms. The book should be of interest to theoreticians and practitioners alike, and is a must-have resource for those interested in stochastic optimization in general, and genetic and evolutionary algorithms in particular.

John R. Koza, Stanford University

This edited book portrays population-based optimization algorithms and applications, covering the entire gamut of optimization problems having single and multiple objectives, discrete and continuous variables, serial and parallel computations, and simple and complex function models. Anyone interested in population-based optimization methods, either knowingly or unknowingly, use some form of an estimation ofdistribution algorithm (EDA). This book is an eye-opener and a must-read text, covering easy-to-read yet erudite articles on established and emerging EDA methodologies from real experts in the field.

Kalyanmoy Deb, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

This book is an excellent comprehensive resource on estimation of distribution algorithms. It can serve as the primary EDA resource for practitioner or researcher. The book includes chapters from all major contributors to EDA state-of-the-art and covers the spectrum from EDA design to applications. These algorithms strategically combine the advantages of genetic and evolutionary computation with the advantages of statistical, model building machine learning techniques. EDAs are useful to solve classes of difficult real-world problems in a robust and scalable manner.

Una-May O'Reilly, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Machine-learning methods continue to stir the public's imagination due to its futuristic implications. But, probability-based optimization methods can have great impact now on many scientific multiscale and engineering design problems, especially true with use of efficient and competent genetic algorithms (GA) which are the basis of the present volume. Even though efficient and competent GAs outperform standard techniques and prevent negative issues, such as solution stagnation, inherent in the older but more well-known GAs, they remain less known or embraced in the scientific and engineering communities. To that end, the editors have brought together a selection of experts that (1) introduce the current methodology and lexicography of the field with illustrative discussions and highly useful references, (2)exemplify these new techniques that dramatic improve performance in provable hard problems, and (3) provide real-world applications of these techniques, such as antenna design. As one who has strayed into the use of genetic algorithms and genetic programming for multiscale modeling in materials science, I can say it would have been personally more useful if this would have come out five years ago, but, for my students, it will be a boon.

Duane D. Johnson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In many countries, small businesses comprise over 95% of the proportion of private businesses and approximately half of the private workforce, with information technology being used in more than 90% of these businesses. As a result, governments worldwide are placing increasing importance upon the success of small business entrepreneurs and are providing increased resources to support this emphasis. Managing Information Technology in Small Business: Challenges and Solutions presents research in areas such as IT performance, electronic commerce, internet adoption, and IT planning methodologies and focuses on how these areas impact small businesses.

While a typical project manager s responsibility and accountability are both limited to a project with a clear start and end date, IT managers are responsible for an ongoing, ever-changing process for which they must adapt and evolve to stay updated, dependable, and secure in their field. Professional Advancements and Management Trends in the IT Sector offers the latest managerial trends within the field of information technology management. By collecting research from experts from around the world, in a variety of sectors and levels of technical expertise, this volume offers a broad variety of case studies, best practices, methodologies, and research within the field of information technology management. It will serve as a vital resource for practitioners and academics alike.