Recent years have seen an explosive growth in the use of new database applications such as CAD/CAM systems, spatial information systems, and multimedia information systems. The needs of these applications are far more complex than traditional business applications. They call for support of objects with complex data types, such as images and spatial objects, and for support of objects with wildly varying numbers of index terms, such as documents. Traditional indexing techniques such as the B-tree and its variants do not efficiently support these applications, and so new indexing mechanisms have been developed. As a result of the demand for database support for new applications, there has been a proliferation of new indexing techniques. The need for a book addressing indexing problems in advanced applications is evident. For practitioners and database and application developers, this book explains best practice, guiding the selection of appropriate indexes for each application. For researchers, this book provides a foundation for the development of new and more robust indexes. For newcomers, this book is an overview of the wide range of advanced indexing techniques. Indexing Techniques for Advanced Database Systems is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course on indexing techniques, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

Today we are witnessing an exponential growth of information accumulated within universities, corporations, and government organizations. Autonomous repositories that store different types of digital data in multiple formats are becoming available for use on the fast-evolving global information systems infrastructure. More concretely, with the World Wide Web and related internetworking technologies, there has been an explosion in the types, availability, and volume of data accessible to a global information system. However, this information overload makes it nearly impossible for users to be aware of the locations, organization or structures, query languages, and semantics of the information in various repositories. Available browsing and navigation tools assist users in locating information resources on the Internet. However, there is a real need to complement current browsing and keyword-based techniques with concept-based approaches. An important next step should be to support queries that do not contain information describing location or manipulation of relevant resources. Ontology-Based Query Processing for Global Information Systems describes an initiative for enhancing query processing in a global information system. The following are some of the relevant features: Providing semantic descriptions of data repositories using ontologies; Dealing with different vocabularies so that users are not forced to use a common one; Defining a strategy that permits the incremental enrichment of answers by visiting new ontologies; Managing imprecise answers and estimations of the incurred loss of information. In summary, technologies such as information brokerage, domain ontologies, andestimation of imprecision in answers based on vocabulary heterogeneity have been synthesized with Internet computing, representing an advance in developing semantics-based information access on the Web. Theoretical results are complemented by the presentation of a prototype that implements the main ideas presented in this book. Ontology-Based Query Processing for Global Information Systems is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate-level course, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

Real-Time Systems Engineering and Applications is a well-structured collection of chapters pertaining to present and future developments in real-time systems engineering. After an overview of real-time processing, theoretical foundations are presented. The book then introduces useful modeling concepts and tools. This is followed by concentration on the more practical aspects of real-time engineering with a thorough overview of the present state of the art, both in hardware and software, including related concepts in robotics. Examples are given of novel real-time applications which illustrate the present state of the art. The book concludes with a focus on future developments, giving direction for new research activities and an educational curriculum covering the subject. This book can be used as a source for academic and industrial researchers as well as a textbook for computing and engineering courses covering the topic of real-time systems engineering.

This book takes a unique approach to information retrieval by laying down the foundations for a modern algebra of information retrieval based on lattice theory. All major retrieval methods developed so far are described in detail a" Boolean, Vector Space and probabilistic methods, but also Web retrieval algorithms like PageRank, HITS, and SALSA a" and the author shows that they all can be treated elegantly in a unified formal way, using lattice theory as the one basic concept. Further, he also demonstrates that the lattice-based approach to information retrieval allows us to formulate new retrieval methods.

SAndor Dominicha (TM)s presentation is characterized by an engineering-like approach, describing all methods and technologies with as much mathematics as needed for clarity and exactness. His readers in both computer science and mathematics will learn how one single concept can be used to understand the most important retrieval methods, to propose new ones, and also to gain new insights into retrieval modeling in general. Thus, his book is appropriate for researchers and graduate students, who will additionally benefit from the many exercises at the end of each chapter.

Semistructured Database Design provides an essential reference for anyone interested in the effective management of semsistructured data. Since many new and advanced web applications consume a huge amount of such data, there is a growing need to properly design efficient databases.

This volume responds to that need by describing a semantically rich data model for semistructured data, called Object-Relationship-Attribute model for Semistructured data (ORA-SS). Focusing on this new model, the book discuss problems and present solutions for a number of topics, including schema extraction, the design of non-redundant storage organizations for semistructured data, and physical semsitructured database design, among others.

Semistructured Database Design, presents researchers and professionals with the most complete and up-to-date research in this fast-growing field.

Learn how to create, train, and tweak large language models (LLMs) by building one from the ground up!

In Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch) bestselling author Sebastian Raschka guides you step by step through creating your own LLM. Each stage is explained with clear text, diagrams, and examples. You’ll go from the initial design and creation, to pretraining on a general corpus, and on to fine-tuning for specific tasks.

Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch) teaches you how to:

• Plan and code all the parts of an LLM
• Prepare a dataset suitable for LLM training
• Fine-tune LLMs for text classification and with your own data
• Use human feedback to ensure your LLM follows instructions
• Load pretrained weights into an LLM

Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch) takes you inside the AI black box to tinker with the internal systems that power generative AI. As you work through each key stage of LLM creation, you’ll develop an in-depth understanding of how LLMs work, their limitations, and their customization methods. Your LLM can be developed on an ordinary laptop, and used as your own personal assistant.

This is the first book on brain-computer interfaces (BCI) that aims to explain how these BCI interfaces can be used for artistic goals. Devices that measure changes in brain activity in various regions of our brain are available and they make it possible to investigate how brain activity is related to experiencing and creating art. Brain activity can also be monitored in order to find out about the affective state of a performer or bystander and use this knowledge to create or adapt an interactive multi-sensorial (audio, visual, tactile) piece of art. Making use of the measured affective state is just one of the possible ways to use BCI for artistic expression. We can also stimulate brain activity. It can be evoked externally by exposing our brain to external events, whether they are visual, auditory, or tactile. Knowing about the stimuli and the effect on the brain makes it possible to translate such external stimuli to decisions and commands that help to design, implement, or adapt an artistic performance, or interactive installation. Stimulating brain activity can also be done internally. Brain activity can be voluntarily manipulated and changes can be translated into computer commands to realize an artistic vision. The chapters in this book have been written by researchers in human-computer interaction, brain-computer interaction, neuroscience, psychology and social sciences, often in cooperation with artists using BCI in their work. It is the perfect book for those seeking to learn about brain-computer interfaces used for artistic applications.

Metadata play a fundamental role in both DLs and SDIs. Commonly defined as "structured data about data" or "data which describe attributes of a resource" or, more simply, "information about data," it is an essential requirement for locating and evaluating available data. Therefore, this book focuses on the study of different metadata aspects, which contribute to a more efficient use of DLs and SDIs. The three main issues addressed are: the management of nested collections of resources, the interoperability between metadata schemas, and the integration of information retrieval techniques to the discovery services of geographic data catalogs (contributing in this way to avoid metadata content heterogeneity).

Mining Spatio-Temporal Information Systems, an edited volume is composed of chapters from leading experts in the field of Spatial-Temporal Information Systems and addresses the many issues in support of modeling, creation, querying, visualizing and mining. Mining Spatio-Temporal Information Systems is intended to bring together a coherent body of recent knowledge relating to STIS data modeling, design, implementation and STIS in knowledge discovery. In particular, the reader is exposed to the latest techniques for the practical design of STIS, essential for complex query processing.
Mining Spatio-Temporal Information Systems is structured to meet the needs of practitioners and researchers in industry and graduate-level students in Computer Science.

This book gathers selected research papers presented at the AICTE-sponsored International Conference on IoT Inclusive Life (ICIIL 2019), which was organized by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technical Teachers Training and Research, Chandigarh, India, on December 19-20, 2019. In contributions by active researchers, the book presents innovative findings and important developments in IoT-related studies, making it a valuable resource for researchers, engineers, and industrial professionals around the globe.

As consumer costs for multimedia devices such as digital cameras and Web phones have decreased and diversity in the market has skyrocketed, the amount of digital information has grown considerably. Intelligent Multimedia Databases and Information Retrieval: Advancing Applications and Technologies details the latest information retrieval technologies and applications, the research surrounding the field, and the methodologies and design related to multimedia databases. Together with academic researchers and developers from both information retrieval and artificial intelligence fields, this book details issues and semantics of data retrieval with contributions from around the globe. As the information and data from multimedia databases continues to expand, the research and documentation surrounding it should keep pace as best as possible, and this book provides an excellent resource for the latest developments.

This book presents a coherent, novel vision of Smart Cities, built around a value-driven architecture. It describes the limitations of the contemporary notion of the Smart City and argues that the next developmental step must actively include not only the physical infrastructure, but information technology and human infrastructure as well, requiring the intensive integration of technical solutions from the Internet of Things (IoT) and social computing. The book is divided into five major parts, the first of which provides both a general introduction and a coherent vision that ties together all the components that are required to realize the vision for Smart Cities. Part II then discusses the provisioning and governance of Smart City systems and infrastructures. In turn, Part III addresses the core technologies and technological enablers for managing the social component of the Smart City platform. Both parts combine state-of-the-art research with cutting-edge industrial efforts in the respective fields. Lastly, Part IV details a road map to achieving Cyber-Human Smart Cities. Rounding out the coverage, it discusses the concrete technological advances needed to move beyond contemporary Smart Cities and toward the Smart Cities of the future. Overall, the book provides an essential overview of the latest developments in the areas of IoT and social computing research, and outlines a research roadmap for a closer integration of the two areas in the context of the Smart City. As such, it offers a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students alike.

Motivation Modem enterprises rely on database management systems (DBMS) to collect, store and manage corporate data, which is considered a strategic corporate re source. Recently, with the proliferation of personal computers and departmen tal computing, the trend has been towards the decentralization and distribution of the computing infrastructure, with autonomy and responsibility for data now residing at the departmental and workgroup level of the organization. Users want their data delivered to their desktops, allowing them to incor porate data into their personal databases, spreadsheets, word processing doc uments, and most importantly, into their daily tasks and activities. They want to be able to share their information while retaining control over its access and distribution. There are also pressures from corporate leaders who wish to use information technology as a strategic resource in offering specialized value-added services to customers. Database technology is being used to manage the data associated with corporate processes and activities. Increasingly, the data being managed are not simply formatted tables in relational databases, but all types of ob jects, including unstructured text, images, audio, and video. Thus, the database management providers are being asked to extend the capabilities of DBMS to include object-relational models as well as full object-oriented database man agement systems."

Organizing websites is highly dynamic and often chaotic. Thus, it is crucial that host web servers manipulate URLs in order to cope with temporarily or permanently relocated resources, prevent attacks by automated worms, and control resource access.

The Apache mod_rewrite module has long inspired fits of joy because it offers an unparalleled toolset for manipulating URLs. "The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite" guides you through configuration and use of the module for a variety of purposes, including basic and conditional rewrites, access control, virtual host maintenance, and proxies.

This book was authored by Rich Bowen, noted Apache expert and Apache Software Foundation member, and draws on his years of experience administering, and regular speaking and writing about, the Apache server.

This book tackles the recent research directions in using the newly emerged technologies during the era of COVID-19 pandemic. It mainly focuses on using emerging technologies and their impact on health care, education, and society. It also provides insights into the current challenges and constraints in using technologies during the era of COVID-19 pandemic and exposes new opportunities for future research in the domain.

Modern applications are both data and computationally intensive and require the storage and manipulation of voluminous traditional (alphanumeric) and nontraditional data sets (images, text, geometric objects, time-series). Examples of such emerging application domains are: Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Multimedia Information Systems, CAD/CAM, Time-Series Analysis, Medical Information Sstems, On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), and Data Mining. These applications pose diverse requirements with respect to the information and the operations that need to be supported. From the database perspective, new techniques and tools therefore need to be developed towards increased processing efficiency.

This monograph explores the way spatial database management systems aim at supporting queries that involve the space characteristics of the underlying data, and discusses query processing techniques for nearest neighbor queries. It provides both basic concepts and state-of-the-art results in spatial databases and parallel processing research, and studies numerous applications of nearest neighbor queries.

The primary aim for this book is to gather and collate articles which represent the best and latest thinking in the domain of technology transfer, from research, academia and practice around the world. We envisage that the book will, as a result of this, represent an important source of knowledge in this domain to students (undergraduate and postgraduate), researchers, practitioners and consultants, chiefly in the software engineering and IT/industries, but also in management and other organisational and social disciplines. An important aspect of the book is the role that reflective practitioners (and not just academics) play. They will be involved in the production, and evaluation of contributions, as well as in the design and delivery of conference events, upon which of course, the book will be based.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st International TRIZ Future Conference on Automated Invention for Smart Industries, TFC 2021, held virtually in September 2021 and sponsored by IFIP WG 5.4. The 28 full papers and 8 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. They are organized in the following thematic sections: inventiveness and TRIZ for sustainable development; TRIZ, intellectual property and smart technologies; TRIZ: expansion in breadth and depth; TRIZ, data processing and artificial intelligence; and TRIZ use and divulgation for engineering design and beyond. Chapter 'Domain Analysis with TRIZ to Define an Effective "Design for Excellence' is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book highlights research that contributes to a better understanding of emerging challenges in information systems (IS) outsourcing. Important topics covered include: how to digitally innovate through IS outsourcing; how to govern outsourced digitalization projects; how to cope with complex multi-vendor and micro-services arrangements; how to manage data sourcing and data partnerships, including issues of cybersecurity; and how to cope with the increasing demands of internationalization and new sourcing models, such as crowdsourcing, cloud sourcing and robotic process automation. These issues are approached from the client's perspective, vendor's perspective, or both. Given its scope, the book will be of interest to all researchers and students in the fields of Information Systems, Management, and Organization, as well as corporate executives and professionals seeking a more profound analysis of the underlying factors and mechanisms of outsourcing.

Foundations of Dependable Computing: System Implementation, explores the system infrastructure needed to support the various paradigms of Paradigms for Dependable Applications. Approaches to implementing support mechanisms and to incorporating additional appropriate levels of fault detection and fault tolerance at the processor, network, and operating system level are presented. A primary concern at these levels is balancing cost and performance against coverage and overall dependability. As these chapters demonstrate, low overhead, practical solutions are attainable and not necessarily incompatible with performance considerations. The section on innovative compiler support, in particular, demonstrates how the benefits of application specificity may be obtained while reducing hardware cost and run-time overhead. A companion to this volume (published by Kluwer) subtitled Models and Frameworks for Dependable Systems presents two comprehensive frameworks for reasoning about system dependability, thereby establishing a context for understanding the roles played by specific approaches presented in this book's two companion volumes. It then explores the range of models and analysis methods necessary to design, validate and analyze dependable systems. Another companion to this book (published by Kluwer), subtitled Paradigms for Dependable Applications, presents a variety of specific approaches to achieving dependability at the application level. Driven by the higher level fault models of Models and Frameworks for Dependable Systems, and built on the lower level abstractions implemented in a third companion book subtitled System Implementation, these approaches demonstrate how dependability may be tuned to the requirements of an application, the fault environment, and the characteristics of the target platform. Three classes of paradigms are considered: protocol-based paradigms for distributed applications, algorithm-based paradigms for parallel applications, and approaches to exploiting application semantics in embedded real-time control systems.

Text Retrieval and Filtering: Analytical Models of Performance is the first book that addresses the problem of analytically computing the performance of retrieval and filtering systems. The book describes means by which retrieval may be studied analytically, allowing one to describe current performance, predict future performance, and to understand why systems perform as they do. The focus is on retrieving and filtering natural language text, with material addressing retrieval performance for the simple case of queries with a single term, the more complex case with multiple terms, both with term independence and term dependence, and for the use of grammatical information to improve performance. Unambiguous statements of the conditions under which one method or system will be more effective than another are developed. Text Retrieval and Filtering: Analytical Models of Performance focuses on the performance of systems that retrieve natural language text, considering full sentences as well as phrases and individual words. The last chapter explicitly addresses how grammatical constructs and methods may be studied in the context of retrieval or filtering system performance. The book builds toward solving this problem, although the material in earlier chapters is as useful to those addressing non-linguistic, statistical concerns as it is to linguists. Those interested in grammatical information should be cautioned to carefully examine earlier chapters, especially Chapters 7 and 8, which discuss purely statistical relationships between terms, before moving on to Chapter 10, which explicitly addresses linguistic issues. Text Retrieval and Filtering: Analytical Models of Performance is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course on Information Retrieval or Linguistics, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

This book discusses the advancements in artificial intelligent techniques used in the well-being of human healthcare. It details the techniques used in collection, storage and analysis of data and their usage in different healthcare solutions. It also discusses the techniques of predictive analysis in early diagnosis of critical diseases. The edited book is divided into four parts - part A discusses introduction to artificial intelligence and machine learning in healthcare; part B highlights different analytical techniques used in healthcare; part C provides various security and privacy mechanisms used in healthcare; and finally, part D exemplifies different tools used in visualization and data analytics.

This book discusses the current research and concepts in data science and how these can be addressed using different nature-inspired optimization techniques. Focusing on various data science problems, including classification, clustering, forecasting, and deep learning, it explores how researchers are using nature-inspired optimization techniques to find solutions to these problems in domains such as disease analysis and health care, object recognition, vehicular ad-hoc networking, high-dimensional data analysis, gene expression analysis, microgrids, and deep learning. As such it provides insights and inspiration for researchers to wanting to employ nature-inspired optimization techniques in their own endeavors.