The book examines patterns of participation in human rights treaties. International relations theory is divided on what motivates states to participate in treaties, specifically human rights treaties. Instead of examining the specific motivations, this dissertation examines patterns of participation. In doing so, it attempts to match theoretical expectations of state behavior with participation. This book provides significant evidence that there are multiple motivations that lead states to participate in human rights treaties.

Data compression is now indispensable to products and services of many industries including computers, communications, healthcare, publishing and entertainment. This invaluable resource introduces this area to information system managers and others who need to understand how it is changing the world of digital systems. For those who know the technology well, it reveals what happens when data compression is used in real-world applications and provides guidance for future technology development.

This book introduces quantitative intertextuality, a new approach to the algorithmic study of information reuse in text, sound and images. Employing a variety of tools from machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision, readers will learn to trace patterns of reuse across diverse sources for scholarly work and practical applications. The respective chapters share highly novel methodological insights in order to guide the reader through the basics of intertextuality. In Part 1, "Theory", the theoretical aspects of intertextuality are introduced, leading to a discussion of how they can be embodied by quantitative methods. In Part 2, "Practice", specific quantitative methods are described to establish a set of automated procedures for the practice of quantitative intertextuality. Each chapter in Part 2 begins with a general introduction to a major concept (e.g., lexical matching, sound matching, semantic matching), followed by a case study (e.g., detecting allusions to a popular television show in tweets, quantifying sound reuse in Romantic poetry, identifying influences in fan faction by thematic matching), and finally the development of an algorithm that can be used to reveal parallels in the relevant contexts. Because this book is intended as a "gentle" introduction, the emphasis is often on simple yet effective algorithms for a given matching task. A set of exercises is included at the end of each chapter, giving readers the chance to explore more cutting-edge solutions and novel aspects to the material at hand. Additionally, the book's companion website includes software (R and C++ library code) and all of the source data for the examples in the book, as well as supplemental content (slides, high-resolution images, additional results) that may prove helpful for exploring the different facets of quantitative intertextuality that are presented in each chapter. Given its interdisciplinary nature, the book will appeal to a broad audience. From practitioners specializing in forensics to students of cultural studies, readers with diverse backgrounds (e.g., in the social sciences, natural language processing, or computer vision) will find valuable insights.

Database and database systems have become an essential part of everyday life, such as in banking activities, online shopping, or reservations of airline tickets and hotels. These trends place more demands on the capabilities of future database systems, which need to evolve into decision making systems based on data from multiple sources with varying reliability. In this book a model for the next generation of database systems is presented. It is demonstrated how to quantize favorable and unfavorable qualitative facts so that they can be stored and processed efficiently, as well as how to use the reliability of the contributing sources in our decision makings. The concept of a confidence index set (ciset), is introduced in order to mathematically model the above issues. A simple introduction to relational database systems is given allowing anyone with no background in database theory to appreciate the further contents of this work, especially the extended relational operations and semantics of the ciset relational database model.

The IFIP World Computer Congress (WCC) is one of the most important conferences in the area of computer science at the worldwide level and it has a federated structure, which takes into account the rapidly growing and expanding interests in this area. Informatics is rapidly changing and becoming more and more connected to a number of human and social science disciplines. Human-computer interaction is now a mature and still dynamically evolving part of this area, which is represented in IFIP by the Technical Committee 13 on HCI. In this WCC edition it was interesting and useful to have again a Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction in order to p- sent and discuss a number of contributions in this field. There has been increasing awareness among designers of interactive systems of the importance of designing for usability, but we are still far from having products that are really usable, and usability can mean different things depending on the app- cation domain. We are all aware that too many users of current technology often feel frustrated because computer systems are not compatible with their abilities and needs in existing work practices. As designers of tomorrow's technology, we have the - sponsibility of creating computer artifacts that would permit better user experience with the various computing devices, so that users may enjoy more satisfying expe- ences with information and communications technologies.

Searching for Semantics: Data Mining, Reverse Engineering Stefano Spaccapietra Fred M aryanski Swiss Federal Institute of Technology University of Connecticut Lausanne, Switzerland Storrs, CT, USA REVIEW AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS In the last few years, database semantics research has turned sharply from a highly theoretical domain to one with more focus on practical aspects. The DS- 7 Working Conference held in October 1997 in Leysin, Switzerland, demon strated the more pragmatic orientation of the current generation of leading researchers. The papers presented at the meeting emphasized the two major areas: the discovery of semantics and semantic data modeling. The work in the latter category indicates that although object-oriented database management systems have emerged as commercially viable prod ucts, many fundamental modeling issues require further investigation. Today's object-oriented systems provide the capability to describe complex objects and include techniques for mapping from a relational database to objects. However, we must further explore the expression of information regarding the dimensions of time and space. Semantic models possess the richness to describe systems containing spatial and temporal data. The challenge of in corporating these features in a manner that promotes efficient manipulation by the subject specialist still requires extensive development."

Concurrency in Dependable Computing focuses on concurrency related issues in the area of dependable computing. Failures of system components, be hardware units or software modules, can be viewed as undesirable events occurring concurrently with a set of normal system events. Achieving dependability therefore is closely related to, and also benefits from, concurrency theory and formalisms. This beneficial relationship appears to manifest into three strands of work. Application level structuring of concurrent activities. Concepts such as atomic actions, conversations, exception handling, view synchrony, etc., are useful in structuring concurrent activities so as to facilitate attempts at coping with the effects of component failures. Replication induced concurrency management. Replication is a widely used technique for achieving reliability. Replica management essentially involves ensuring that replicas perceive concurrent events identically. Application of concurrency formalisms for dependability assurance. Fault-tolerant algorithms are harder to verify than their fault-free counterparts due to the fact that the impact of component faults at each state need to be considered in addition to valid state transitions. CSP, Petri nets, CCS are useful tools to specify and verify fault-tolerant designs and protocols. Concurrency in Dependable Computing explores many significant issues in all three strands. To this end, it is composed as a collection of papers written by authors well-known in their respective areas of research. To ensure quality, the papers are reviewed by a panel of at least three experts in the relevant area.

Fuzzy Databases: Modeling, Design and Implementation focuses on some semantic aspects which have not been studied in previous works and extends the EER model with fuzzy capabilities. The exposed model is called FuzzyEER model, and some of the studied extensions are: fuzzy attributes, fuzzy aggregations and different aspects on specializations, such as fuzzy degrees, fuzzy constraints, etc. All these fuzzy extensions offer greater expressiveness in conceptual design. This book, while providing a global and integrated view of fuzzy database constructions, serves as an introduction to fuzzy logic, fuzzy databases and fuzzy modeling in databases.

This book gathers high-quality research articles and reviews that reflect the latest advances in the smart network-inspired paradigm and address current issues in IoT applications as well as other emerging areas. Featuring work from both academic and industry researchers, the book provides a concise overview of the current state of the art and highlights some of the most promising and exciting new ideas and techniques. Accordingly, it offers a valuable resource for senior undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, policymakers, and IT professionals and providers working in areas that call for state-of-the-art networks and IoT applications.

Software product lines represent perhaps the most exciting paradigm shift in software development since the advent of high-level programming languages. Nowhere else in software engineering have we seen such breathtaking improvements in cost, quality, time to market, and developer productivity, often registering in the order-of-magnitude range. Here, the authors combine academic research results with real-world industrial experiences, thus presenting a broad view on product line engineering so that both managers and technical specialists will benefit from exposure to this work. They capture the wealth of knowledge that eight companies have gathered during the introduction of the software product line engineering approach in their daily practice.

This book provides a summary of the manifold audio- and web-based approaches to music information retrieval (MIR) research. In contrast to other books dealing solely with music signal processing, it addresses additional cultural and listener-centric aspects and thus provides a more holistic view. Consequently, the text includes methods operating on features extracted directly from the audio signal, as well as methods operating on features extracted from contextual information, either the cultural context of music as represented on the web or the user and usage context of music. Following the prevalent document-centered paradigm of information retrieval, the book addresses models of music similarity that extract computational features to describe an entity that represents music on any level (e.g., song, album, or artist), and methods to calculate the similarity between them. While this perspective and the representations discussed cannot describe all musical dimensions, they enable us to effectively find music of similar qualities by providing abstract summarizations of musical artifacts from different modalities. The text at hand provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the topics of music search, retrieval, and recommendation from an academic perspective. It will not only allow those new to the field to quickly access MIR from an information retrieval point of view but also raise awareness for the developments of the music domain within the greater IR community. In this regard, Part I deals with content-based MIR, in particular the extraction of features from the music signal and similarity calculation for content-based retrieval. Part II subsequently addresses MIR methods that make use of the digitally accessible cultural context of music. Part III addresses methods of collaborative filtering and user-aware and multi-modal retrieval, while Part IV explores current and future applications of music retrieval and recommendation.>

Advanced visual analysis and problem solving has been conducted successfully for millennia. The Pythagorean Theorem was proven using visual means more than 2000 years ago. In the 19th century, John Snow stopped a cholera epidemic in London by proposing that a specific water pump be shut down. He discovered that pump by visually correlating data on a city map. The goal of this book is to present the current trends in visual and spatial analysis for data mining, reasoning, problem solving and decision-making. This is the first book to focus on visual decision making and problem solving in general with specific applications in the geospatial domain - combining theory with real-world practice. The book is unique in its integration of modern symbolic and visual approaches to decision making and problem solving. As such, it ties together much of the monograph and textbook literature in these emerging areas.

This book contains 21 chapters that have been grouped into five parts: (1) visual problem solving and decision making, (2) visual and heterogeneous reasoning, (3) visual correlation, (4) visual and spatial data mining, and (5) visual and spatial problem solving in geospatial domains. Each chapter ends with a summary and exercises.

The book is intended for professionals and graduate students in computer science, applied mathematics, imaging science and Geospatial Information Systems (GIS). In addition to being a state-of-the-art research compilation, this book can be used a text for advanced courses on the subjects such as modeling, computer graphics, visualization, image processing, data mining, GIS, and algorithm analysis.

Automation is nothing new to industry. It has a long tradition on the factory floor, where its constant objective has been to increase the productivity of manufacturing processes. Only with the advent of computers could the focus of automation widen to include administrative and information-handling tasks. More recently, automation has been extended to the more intellectual tasks of production planning and control, material and resource planning, engineering design, and quality control. New challenges arise in the form of flexible manu facturing, assembly automation, and automated floor vehicles, to name just a few. The sheer complexity of the problems as well as the state of the art has led scientists and engineers to concentrate on issues that could easily be isolated. For example, it was much simpler to build CAD systems whose sole objective was to ease the task of drawing, rather than to worry at the same time about how the design results could be interfaced with the manufacturing or assembly processes. It was less problematic to gather statistics from quality control and to print reports than to react immediately to first hints of irregularities by inter facing with the designers or manufacturing control, or, even better, by auto matically diagnosing the causes from the design and planning data. A heav- though perhaps unavoidable - price must today be paid whenever one tries to assemble these isolated solutions into a larger, integrated system."

In 2013, the International Conference on Advance Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE) turns 25. Initially launched in 1989, for all these years the conference has provided a broad forum for researchers working in the area of Information Systems Engineering. To reflect on the work done so far and to examine prospects for future work, the CAiSE Steering Committee decided to present a selection of seminal papers published for the conference during these years and to ask their authors, all prominent researchers in the field, to comment on their work and how it has developed over the years.

The scope of the papers selected covers a broad range of topics related to modeling and designing information systems, collecting and managing requirements, and with special attention to how information systems are engineered towards their final development and deployment as software components.With this approach, the book provides not only a historical analysis on how information systems engineering evolved over the years, but also a fascinating social network analysis of the research community. Additionally, many inspiring ideas for future research and new perspectives in this area are sparked by the intriguing comments of the renowned authors.

Video on Demand Systems brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast moving area. Video on Demand Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.

This proceedings volume brings together the results of a corporate discussion on research, academic teaching and education in the field of business and economics in the context of globalization. The contributions examine leadership and sustainability, quality and governance and the internationalization of higher education. With a particular focus on business education and business schools, the book discusses the labor market and modernization as well as contemporary trends and challenges. By including both academic papers and contributions from industry, it forges research links between academia, business and industry.

Data mining involves the non-trivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from databases. Genetic Programming (GP) and Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) are two of the approaches for data mining. This book first sets the necessary backgrounds for the reader, including an overview of data mining, evolutionary algorithms and inductive logic programming. It then describes a framework, called GGP (Generic Genetic Programming), that integrates GP and ILP based on a formalism of logic grammars. The formalism is powerful enough to represent context- sensitive information and domain-dependent knowledge. This knowledge can be used to accelerate the learning speed and/or improve the quality of the knowledge induced. A grammar-based genetic programming system called LOGENPRO (The LOGic grammar based GENetic PROgramming system) is detailed and tested on many problems in data mining. It is found that LOGENPRO outperforms some ILP systems. We have also illustrated how to apply LOGENPRO to emulate Automatically Defined Functions (ADFs) to discover problem representation primitives automatically. By employing various knowledge about the problem being solved, LOGENPRO can find a solution much faster than ADFs and the computation required by LOGENPRO is much smaller than that of ADFs. Moreover, LOGENPRO can emulate the effects of Strongly Type Genetic Programming and ADFs simultaneously and effortlessly. Data Mining Using Grammar Based Genetic Programming and Applications is appropriate for researchers, practitioners and clinicians interested in genetic programming, data mining, and the extraction of data from databases.

Method Engineering focuses on the design, construction and evaluation of methods, techniques and support tools for information systems development It addresses a number of important topics, including: method representation formalisms; meta-modelling; situational methods; contingency approaches; system development practices of method engineering; terminology and reference models; ontologies; usability and experience reports; and organisational support and impact.

"JDBC Metadata, MySQL, and Oracle Recipes" is the only book that focuses on metadata or annotation-based code recipes for JDBC API for use with Oracle and MySQL. It continues where the authors other book, "JDBC Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach," leaves off.

This edition is also a Java EE 5-compliant book, perfect for lightweight Java database development. And it provides cut-and-paste code templates that can be immediately customized and applied in each developer's application development.

Mining Very Large Databases with Parallel Processing addresses the problem of large-scale data mining. It is an interdisciplinary text, describing advances in the integration of three computer science areas, namely intelligent' (machine learning-based) data mining techniques, relational databases and parallel processing. The basic idea is to use concepts and techniques of the latter two areas - particularly parallel processing - to speed up and scale up data mining algorithms. The book is divided into three parts. The first part presents a comprehensive review of intelligent data mining techniques such as rule induction, instance-based learning, neural networks and genetic algorithms. Likewise, the second part presents a comprehensive review of parallel processing and parallel databases. Each of these parts includes an overview of commercially-available, state-of-the-art tools. The third part deals with the application of parallel processing to data mining. The emphasis is on finding generic, cost-effective solutions for realistic data volumes. Two parallel computational environments are discussed, the first excluding the use of commercial-strength DBMS, and the second using parallel DBMS servers. It is assumed that the reader has a knowledge roughly equivalent to a first degree (BSc) in accurate sciences, so that (s)he is reasonably familiar with basic concepts of statistics and computer science. The primary audience for Mining Very Large Databases with Parallel Processing is industry data miners and practitioners in general, who would like to apply intelligent data mining techniques to large amounts of data. The book will also be of interest to academic researchers and postgraduate students, particularly database researchers, interested in advanced, intelligent database applications, and artificial intelligence researchers interested in industrial, real-world applications of machine learning.

Multimedia data comprising of images, audio and video is becoming increasingly common. The decreasing costs of consumer electronic devices such as digital cameras and digital camcorders, along with the ease of transportation facilitated by the Internet, has lead to a phenomenal rise in the amount of multimedia data generated and distributed. Given that this trend of increased use of multimedia data is likely to accelerate, there is an urgent need for providing a clear means of capturing, storing, indexing, retrieving, analyzing and summarizing such data. Content-based access to multimedia data is of primary importance since it is the natural way by which human beings interact with such information. To facilitate the content-based access of multimedia information, the first step is to derive feature measures from these data so that a feature space representation of the data content can be formed. This can subsequently allow for mapping the feature space to the symbol space (semantics) either automatically or through human intervention. Thus, signal to symbol mapping, useful for any practical system, can be successfully achieved. Perspectives on Content-Based Multimedia Systems provides a comprehensive set of techniques to tackle these important issues. This book offers detailed solutions to a wide range of practical problems in building real systems by providing specifics of three systems built by the authors. While providing a systems focus, it also equips the reader with a keen understanding of the fundamental issues, including a formalism for content-based multimedia database systems, multimedia feature extraction, object-based techniques, signature-based techniques and fuzzy retrieval techniques. The performance evaluation issues of practical systems is also explained. This book brings together essential elements of building a content-based multimedia database system in a way that makes them accessible to practitioners in computer science and electrical engineering. It can also serve as a textbook for graduate-level courses.

Database and Mobile Computing brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this important area. Databases and Mobile Computing serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most important research issues in the field.

This book outlines the consequences of digitization for peer-reviewed research articles published in electronic journals. It has often been argued that digitization will revolutionize scientific communication. However, this study shows that this is not the case as far as scientific journals are concerned. Authors make little or no use of the possibilities offered by the digital medium, new procedures for electronic peer review have not replaced traditional peer review, and users do not seem to accept new forms of interaction offered by some electronic journals. The main innovations are to be found at the level of the infrastructures developed by publishers. Scientists themselves appear to be reluctant to change their established patterns of behaviour in formal scientific communication.

Knowledge-based (KB) technology is being applied to complex problem-solving and critical tasks in many application domains. Concerns have naturally arisen as to the dependability of knowledge-based systems (KBS). As with any software, attention to quality and safety must be paid throughout development of a KBS and rigorous verification and validation (V&V) techniques must be employed. Research in V&V of KBS has emerged as a distinct field only in the last decade and is intended to address issues associated with quality and safety aspects of KBS and to credit such applications with the same degree of dependability as conventional applications. In recent years, V&V of KBS has been the topic of annual workshops associated with the main AI conferences, such as AAAI, IJACI and ECAI. Validation and Verification of Knowledge Based Systems contains a collection of papers, dealing with all aspects of KBS V&V, presented at the Fifth European Symposium on Verification and Validation of Knowledge Based Systems and Components (EUROVAV'99 - http: //www.dnv.no/research/safekbs/eurovav99/) which was held in Oslo in the summer of 1999, and was sponsored by Det Norske Veritas and the British Computer Society's Specialist Group on Expert Systems (SGES).

High Performance Data Mining: Scaling Algorithms, Applications and Systems brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast moving area. High Performance Data Mining: Scaling Algorithms, Applications and Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.