‘Hello Computer’ is a story of a working-class girl who begins a life-long love affair with technology after seeing a computer for the first time in 1967. Her journey takes us through exciting times and epic events, from the dawn of the internet to the dotcom boom, from punch cards to the raspberry pi and virtual worlds. Linda shares her experiences of computing through real life stories where systems are designed to make a difference to people’s lives. Demonstrating that although technology changes constantly, fundamentally, people don’t change that much. Against a backdrop of unspoken bias the story captures the struggles faced by many young women, then and now. It is positive, heart-warming and full of hope that women will become more influential within tech. A story of ambition, passion and programming, inspirational for future generations of women and girls in STEM.

There are many textbooks on algorithms focusing on big-O notation and basic design principles. This book offers a unique approach to taking the design and analyses to the level of predictable practical efficiency, discussing core and classic algorithmic problems that arise in the development of big data applications, and presenting elegant solutions of increasing sophistication and efficiency. Solutions are analyzed within the classic RAM model, and the more practically significant external-memory model that allows one to perform I/O-complexity evaluations. Chapters cover various data types, including integers, strings, trees, and graphs, algorithmic tools such as sampling, sorting, data compression, and searching in dictionaries and texts, and lastly, recent developments regarding compressed data structures. Algorithmic solutions are accompanied by detailed pseudocode and many running examples, thus enriching the toolboxes of students, researchers, and professionals interested in effective and efficient processing of big data.

- one of the first books to focus on the role of AI in and for Africa - tackles a wide range of issues including algorithmic bias and regulation - includes cross-disciplinary expertise from both the humanities and sciences

Here is a book containing information about more than 500 Web sites about dinosaurs. Sites are rated for quality and cross-referenced by type, level of complexity, and availability of special features.

How long does it take for your website to load? Web performance is just as critical for small and medium-sized websites as it is for massive websites that receive tons of hits. Before you pour money and time into rewriting your code or replacing your infrastructure, first consider a reverse-caching proxy server like Varnish. With this practical book, you'll learn how Varnish can give your website or API an immediate performance boost. Varnish mimicks the behavior of your webserver, caches its output in memory, and serves the result directly to clients without having to access your webserver. If you're a web developer familiar with HTTP, this book helps you master Varnish basics, so you can get up and running in no time. You'll learn how to use the Varnish Configuration Language and HTTP best practices to achieve faster performance and a higher hit rate.Understand how Varnish helps you gain optimum web performance Use HTTP to improve the cache-ability of your websites, web applications, and APIs Properly invalidate your cache when the origin data changes Optimize access to your backend servers Avoid common mistakes when using Varnish in the wild Use logging and debugging tools to examine the behavior of Varnish

This book is both a reference for engineers and scientists and a teaching resource, featuring tutorial chapters and research papers on feature extraction. Until now there has been insufficient consideration of feature selection algorithms, no unified presentation of leading methods, and no systematic comparisons.

This book contains the full papers on which the invited lectures of the 4th International Conference on Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering (4ICEGE) were based. The conference was held in Thessaloniki, Greece, from 25 to 28 June, 2007. The papers offer a comprehensive overview of the progress achieved in soil dynamics and geotechnical earthquake engineering, examine ongoing and unresolved issues, and discuss ideas for the future.

What is combinatorial optimization? Traditionally, a problem is considered to be c- binatorial if its set of feasible solutions is both ?nite and discrete, i. e. , enumerable. For example, the traveling salesman problem asks in what order a salesman should visit the cities in his territory if he wants to minimize his total mileage (see Sect. 2. 2. 2). The traveling salesman problem’s feasible solutions - permutations of city labels - c- prise a ?nite, discrete set. By contrast, Differential Evolution was originally designed to optimize functions de?ned on real spaces. Unlike combinatorial problems, the set of feasible solutions for real parameter optimization is continuous. Although Differential Evolution operates internally with ?oating-point precision, it has been applied with success to many numerical optimization problems that have t- ditionally been classi?ed as combinatorial because their feasible sets are discrete. For example, the knapsack problem’s goal is to pack objects of differing weight and value so that the knapsack’s total weight is less than a given maximum and the value of the items inside is maximized (see Sect. 2. 2. 1). The set of feasible solutions - vectors whose components are nonnegative integers - is both numerical and discrete. To handle such problems while retaining full precision, Differential Evolution copies ?oating-point - lutions to a temporary vector that, prior to being evaluated, is truncated to the nearest feasible solution, e. g. , by rounding the temporary parameters to the nearest nonnegative integer.

This book provides an original graph theoretical approach to the fundamental properties of wireless mobile ad-hoc networks. This approach is combined with a realistic radio model for physical links between nodes to produce new insight into network characteristics like connectivity, degree distribution, hopcount, interference and capacity. The book establishes directives for designing ad-hoc networks and sensor networks. It will interest the academic community, and engineers who roll out ad-hoc and sensor networks.

Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM) constitute cognitive models in the form of fuzzy directed graphs consisting of two basic elements: the nodes, which basically correspond to “concepts� bearing different states of activation depending on the knowledge they represent, and the “edges� denoting the causal effects that each source node exercises on the receiving concept expressed through weights. Weights take values in the interval [-1,1], which denotes the positive, negative or neutral causal relationship between two concepts. An FCM can be typically obtained through linguistic terms, inherent to fuzzy systems, but with a structure similar to the neural networks, which facilitates data processing, and has capabilities for training and adaptation. During the last 10 years, an exponential growth of published papers in FCMs was followed showing great impact potential. Different FCM structures and learning schemes have been developed, while numerous studies report their use in many contexts with highly successful modeling results.   The aim of this book is to fill the existing gap in the literature concerning fundamentals, models, extensions and learning algorithms for FCMs in knowledge engineering. It comprehensively covers the state-of-the-art FCM modeling and learning methods, with algorithms, codes and software tools, and provides a set of applications that demonstrate their various usages in applied sciences and engineering.

                                                                                                                                  

Approaches in Integrative Bioinformatics provides a basic introduction to biological information systems, as well as guidance for the computational analysis of systems biology. This book also covers a range of issues and methods that reveal the multitude of omics data integration types and the relevance that integrative bioinformatics has today. Topics include biological data integration and manipulation, modeling and simulation of metabolic networks, transcriptomics and phenomics, and virtual cell approaches, as well as a number of applications of network biology. It helps to illustrate the value of integrative bioinformatics approaches to the life sciences. This book is intended for researchers and graduate students in the field of Bioinformatics. Professor Ming Chen is the Director of the Bioinformatics Laboratory at the College of Life Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. Professor Ralf Hofestädt is the Chair of the Department of Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics, Bielefeld University, Germany.

This book is devoted to a novel approach for dimensionality reduction based on the famous nearest neighbor method that is a powerful classification and regression approach. It starts with an introduction to machine learning concepts and a real-world application from the energy domain. Then, unsupervised nearest neighbors (UNN) is introduced as efficient iterative method for dimensionality reduction. Various UNN models are developed step by step, reaching from a simple iterative strategy for discrete latent spaces to a stochastic kernel-based algorithm for learning submanifolds with independent parameterizations. Extensions that allow the embedding of incomplete and noisy patterns are introduced. Various optimization approaches are compared, from evolutionary to swarm-based heuristics. Experimental comparisons to related methodologies taking into account artificial test data sets and also real-world data demonstrate the behavior of UNN in practical scenarios. The book contains numerous color figures to illustrate the introduced concepts and to highlight the experimental results.  

The Chaos Machine is an essential book for our times - Ezra Klein The Chaos Machine is the story of how the world was driven mad by social media. The election of populists like Trump and Bolsonaro; strife and genocide in countries like Myanmar; the rampant spread of COVID-19 conspiracy theories as deadly as the pandemic itself; all of these are products of a breakdown in our social and political lives, a breakdown driven by the apps, companies and algorithms that compete constantly for our attention. Max Fisher is a leading New York Times technology reporter whose work has covered the way that social media sites - driven increasingly by artificial intelligence rather than human ingenuity - push users towards more and more extreme positions, deepening the divisions in society in pursuit of greater engagement and profit. With extraordinary access to the most powerful players in Silicon Valley, and with testimonies from around the world of the havoc being wreaked by our online selves, The Chaos Machine shows us how we got to this uniquely perilous moment - and how we might get out of it.

There are many books on the use of numerical methods for solving engineering problems and for modeling of engineering artifacts. In addition there are many styles of such presentations ranging from books with a major emphasis on theory to books with an emphasis on applications. The purpose of this book is hopefully to present a somewhat different approach to the use of numerical methods for - gineering applications. Engineering models are in general nonlinear models where the response of some appropriate engineering variable depends in a nonlinear manner on the - plication of some independent parameter. It is certainly true that for many types of engineering models it is sufficient to approximate the real physical world by some linear model. However, when engineering environments are pushed to - treme conditions, nonlinear effects are always encountered. It is also such - treme conditions that are of major importance in determining the reliability or failure limits of engineering systems. Hence it is essential than engineers have a toolbox of modeling techniques that can be used to model nonlinear engineering systems. Such a set of basic numerical methods is the topic of this book. For each subject area treated, nonlinear models are incorporated into the discussion from the very beginning and linear models are simply treated as special cases of more general nonlinear models. This is a basic and fundamental difference in this book from most books on numerical methods.

This textbook teaches crucial statistical methods to answer research questions using a unique range of statistical software programs, including MINITAB and R. This textbook is developed for undergraduate students in agriculture, nursing, biology and biomedical research. Graduate students will also find it to be a useful way to refresh their statistics skills and to reference software options. The unique combination of examples is approached using MINITAB and R for their individual strengths. Subjects covered include among others data description, probability distributions, experimental design, regression analysis, randomized design and biological assay. Unlike other biostatistics textbooks, this text also includes outliers, influential observations in regression and an introduction to survival analysis. Material is taken from the author's extensive teaching and research in Africa, USA and the UK. Sample problems, references and electronic supplementary material accompany each chapter.

Learn to write C++ programs by interfacing a computer to a wide range of popular and fundamental real-world technologies. Unique and original approach to use the PC to do real things- not just number crunching and graphics – but writing programs to interact with the outside world. Learn C++ programming in an enjoyable and powerful way. Includes a purpose-designed circuit board

The aim of this book is to unlock the power of the freeware R language to advanced university students and researchers dealing with whole-rock geochemistry of (meta-) igneous rocks. The first part covers data input/output, calculation of commonly used indexes and plotting in R. The core of the book then focusses on the presentation and practical implementations of modelling techniques used for fingerprinting processes such as partial melting, fractional crystallization, binary mixing or AFC using major-, trace-element and radiogenic isotope data. The reader will be given a firm theoretical basis for forward/reverse modelling, followed by exercises dealing with typical problems likely to be encountered in real life, and their solutions using R. The concluding sections demonstrate, using practical examples, how a researcher can proceed in developing a realistic model simulating natural systems. The appendices outline the fundamentals of the R language and provide a quick introduction to the open-source R-package GCDkit for interpretation of whole-rock geochemical data from igneous and metamorphic rocks.

Patricia Lotz behandelt Rechtsfragen zum Einsatz moderner Marketingformen und gibt einen ersten Überblick über die Fallstricke, die sich dem E-Commerce in Zukunft vor allem im Bereich des Datenschutzes stellen werden. Die Autorin zeigt gleichzeitig mögliche Lösungswege auf. Aus rechtlicher Sicht bespricht sie Webtracking, Geolokalisierung und Social Plugins. Zudem gibt sie eine Übersicht über die Integration von E-Payment-Lösungen.

The aims of these proceedings are to provide a complete coverage of the areas outlined, and to bring together researchers from academic and industry to share ideas, challenges, and solutions relating to the multifaceted aspects of this field. New multimedia standards (for example, MPEG-21) facilitate the seamless integration of multiple modalities into interoperable multimedia frameworks, transforming the way people work and interact with multimedia data. These key technologies and multimedia solutions interact and collaborate with each other in increasingly effective ways, contributing to the multimedia revolution and having a significant impact across a wide spectrum of consumer, business, healthcare, education, and governmental domains.

This book covers the basic theory, practical details and advanced research of the implementation of evolutionary methods on physical substrates. Most of the examples are from electronic engineering applications, including transistor-level design and system-level implementation. The authors present an overview of the successes achieved, and the book will act as a point of reference for both academic and industrial researchers.

In this book, experts from academia and industry present the latest advances in scientific theory relating to applied electromagnetics and examine current and emerging applications particularly within the fields of electronics, communications, and computer technology. The book is based on presentations delivered at APPEIC 2014, the 1st Applied Electromagnetic International Conference, held in Bandung, Indonesia in December 2014. The conference provided an ideal platform for researchers and specialists to deliver both theoretically and practically oriented contributions on a wide range of topics relevant to the theme of nurturing applied electromagnetics for human technology. Many novel aspects were addressed, and the contributions selected for this book highlight the relevance of advances in applied electromagnetics to a variety of industrial engineering problems and identify exciting future directions for research.

This book contains innovative research from leading researchers who presented their work at the 17th International Conference on Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES 2013, held in Kitakyusha, Japan, in September 2013. The conference provided a competitive field of 236 contributors, from which 38 authors expanded their contributions and only 21 published. A plethora of techniques and innovative applications are represented within this volume. The chapters are organized using four themes. These topics include: data mining, knowledge management, advanced information processes and system modelling applications. Each topic contains multiple contributions and many offer case studies or innovative examples. Anyone that wants to work with information repositories or process knowledge should consider reading one or more chapters focused on their technique of choice. They may also benefit from reading other chapters to assess if an alternative technique represents a more suitable approach. This book will benefit anyone already working with Knowledge-Based or Intelligent Information Systems, however is suitable for students and researchers seeking to learn more about modern Artificial Intelligence techniques.