This book provides a coherent methodology for Model-Driven Requirements Engineering which stresses the systematic treatment of requirements within the realm of modelling and model transformations. The underlying basic assumption is that detailed requirements models are used as first-class artefacts playing a direct role in constructing software. To this end, the book presents the Requirements Specification Language (RSL) that allows precision and formality, which eventually permits automation of the process of turning requirements into a working system by applying model transformations and code generation to RSL. The book is structured in eight chapters. The first two chapters present the main concepts and give an introduction to requirements modelling in RSL. The next two chapters concentrate on presenting RSL in a formal way, suitable for automated processing. Subsequently, chapters 5 and 6 concentrate on model transformations with the emphasis on those involving RSL and UML. Finally, chapters 7 and 8 provide a summary in the form of a systematic methodology with a comprehensive case study. Presenting technical details of requirements modelling and model transformations for requirements, this book is of interest to researchers, graduate students and advanced practitioners from industry. While researchers will benefit from the latest results and possible research directions in MDRE, students and practitioners can exploit the presented information and practical techniques in several areas, including requirements engineering, architectural design, software language construction and model transformation. Together with a tool suite available online, the book supplies the reader with what it promises: the means to get from requirements to code “in a snap�.

The book develops a general legal theory concerning the liability for offenses involving artificial intelligence systems. The involvement of the artificial intelligence systems in these offenses may be as perpetrators, accomplices or mere instruments. The general legal theory proposed in this book is based on the current criminal law in most modern legal systems. In most modern countries, unmanned vehicles, sophisticated surgical systems, industrial computing systems, trading algorithms and other artificial intelligence systems are commonly used for both industrial and personal purposes. The question of legal liability arises when something goes wrong, e.g. the unmanned vehicle is involved in a car accident, the surgical system is involved in a surgical error or the trading algorithm is involved in fraud, etc. Who is to be held liable for these offenses: the manufacturer, the programmer, the user, or, perhaps, the artificial intelligence system itself? The concept of liability for crimes involving artificial intelligence systems has not yet been widely researched. Advanced technologies are forcing society to face new challenges, both technical and legal. The idea of liability in the specific context of artificial intelligence systems is one such challenge that should be thoroughly explored.  

Web Dynpro ABAP, a NetWeaver web application user interface tool from SAP, enables web programming connected to SAP Systems. The authors’ main focus was to create a book based on their own practical experience. Each chapter includes examples which lead through the content step-by-step and enable the reader to gradually explore and grasp the Web Dynpro ABAP process. The authors explain in particular how to design Web Dynpro components, the data binding and interface methods, and the view controller methods. They also describe the other SAP NetWeaver Elements (ABAP Dictionary, Authorization) and the integration of the Web Dynpro Application into the SAP NetWeaver Portal. The new edition has been expanded to include chapters on subjects such as POWER Lists; creating the Modal Windows and External Windows; using Web Dynpro application parameters and Shared Objects to communicate between the Web Dynpro ABAP Application and Business Server Pages; and creating multi-language mails using Web Dynpro ABAP.

This monograph presents and analyzes the optimization, game-theoretic and simulation models of control mechanisms for ecological-economic systems. It is devoted to integrated assessment mechanisms for total risks and losses, penalty mechanisms, risk payment mechanisms, financing and costs compensation mechanisms for risk level reduction, sales mechanisms for risk level quotas, audit mechanisms, mechanisms for expected losses reduction, economic motivation mechanisms, optimization mechanisms for regional environmental (risk level reduction) programs, and mechanisms for authorities' interests coordination. The book is aiming at undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as at experts in mathematical modeling and control of ecological economic, socioeconomic and organizational systems.

The papers collected in this volume are selected as a sample of the progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP) performed within the Italian NLP community and especially attested by the PARLI project. PARLI (Portale per l’Accesso alle Risorse in Lingua Italiana) is a project partially funded by the Ministero Italiano per l’Università e la Ricerca (PRIN 2008) from 2008 to 2012 for monitoring and fostering the harmonic growth and coordination of the activities of Italian NLP. It was proposed by various teams of researchers working in Italian universities and research institutions. According to the spirit of the PARLI project, most of the resources and tools created within the project and here described are freely distributed and they did not terminate their life at the end of the project itself, hoping they could be a key factor in future development of computational linguistics.

The current work provides CIOs, software architects, project managers, developers, and cloud strategy initiatives with a set of architectural patterns that offer nuggets of advice on how to achieve common cloud computing-related goals. The cloud computing patterns capture knowledge and experience in an abstract format that is independent of concrete vendor products. Readers are provided with a toolbox to structure cloud computing strategies and design cloud application architectures. By using this book cloud-native applications can be implemented and best suited cloud vendors and tooling for individual usage scenarios can be selected. The cloud computing patterns offer a unique blend of academic knowledge and practical experience due to the mix of authors. Academic knowledge is brought in by Christoph Fehling and Professor Dr. Frank Leymann who work on cloud research at the University of Stuttgart. Practical experience in building cloud applications, selecting cloud vendors, and designing enterprise architecture as a cloud customer is brought in by Dr. Ralph Retter who works as an IT architect at T‑Systems, Walter Schupeck, who works as a Technology Manager in the field of Enterprise Architecture at Daimler AG,and Peter Arbitter, the former head of T Systems’ cloud architecture and IT portfolio team and now working for Microsoft.  Voices on Cloud Computing Patterns  Cloud computing is especially beneficial for large companies such as Daimler AG. Prerequisite is a thorough analysis of its impact on the existing applications and the IT architectures. During our collaborative research with the University of Stuttgart, we identified a vendor-neutral and structured approach to describe properties of cloud offerings and requirements on cloud environments. The resulting Cloud Computing Patterns have profoundly impacted our corporate IT strategy regarding the adoption of cloud computing. They help our architects, project managers and developers in the refinement of architectural guidelines and communicate requirements to our integration partners and software suppliers. Dr. Michael Gorriz – CIO Daimler AG  Ever since 2005 T-Systems has provided a flexible and reliable cloud platform with its “Dynamic Services�. Today these cloud services cover a huge variety of corporate applications, especially enterprise resource planning, business intelligence, video, voice communication, collaboration, messaging and mobility services. The book was written by senior cloud pioneers sharing their technology foresight combining essential information and practical experiences. This valuable compilation helps both practitioners and clients to really understand which new types of services are readily available, how they really work and importantly how to benefit from the cloud.  Dr. Marcus Hacke – Senior Vice President, T-Systems International GmbH This book provides a conceptual framework and very timely guidance for people and organizations building applications for the cloud. Patterns are a proven approach to building robust and sustainable applications and systems. The authors adapt and extend it to cloud computing, drawing on their own experience and deep contributions to the field. Each pattern includes an extensive discussion of the state of the art, with implementation considerations and practical examples that the reader can apply to their own projects. By capturing our collective knowledge about building good cloud applications and by providing a format to integrate new insights, this book provides an important tool not just for individual practitioners and teams, but for the cloud computing community at large.  Kristof Kloeckner – General Manager,Rational Software, IBMSoftware Group  

Computer simulation-based education and training is a multi-billion dollar industry. With the increased complexity of organizational decision making, projected demand for computer simulation-based decisional aids is on the rise. The objective of this book is to enhance systematically our understanding of and gain insights into the general process by which human facilitated ILEs are effectively designed and used in improving users’ decision making in dynamic tasks. This book is divided into four major parts. Part I serves as an introduction to the subject of “decision making in dynamic tasks�, its importance and its complexity. Part II provides background material, drawing upon the relevant literature, for the development of an integrated process model on the effectiveness of human facilitated ILEs in improving decision making in dynamic tasks. Part III focuses on the design, development and application of Fish Bank ILE, in laboratory experiments, to gather empirical evidence for the validity of the process model. Finally, part IV presents a comprehensive analysis of the gathered data to provide a powerful basis for understating important phenomena of training with human facilitated simulation-based learning environments, thereby, help to drive critical lessons to be learned. This book provides the reader with both a comprehensive understanding of the phenomena encountered in decision making with human facilitated ILEs and a unique way of studying the effects of these phenomena on people’s ability to make better decision in complex, dynamic tasks. This book is intended to be of use to managers and practitioners, researchers and students of dynamic decision making. The background material of Part II provides a solid base to understand and organize the existing experimental research literature and approaches.

Through a series of step-by-step tutorials and numerous hands-on exercises, this book aims to equip the reader with both a good understanding of the importance of space in the abstract world of engineers and the ability to create a model of a product in virtual space – a skill essential for any designer or engineer who needs to present ideas concerning a particular product within a professional environment. The exercises progress logically from the simple to the more complex; while Solid Works or NX is the software used, the underlying philosophy is applicable to all modeling software. In each case, the explanation covers the entire procedure from the basic idea and production capabilities through to the real model; the conversion from 3D model to 2D manufacturing drawing is also clearly explained. Topics covered include modeling of prism, axisymmetric, symmetric and sophisticated shapes; digitization of physical models using modeling software; creation of a CAD model starting from a physical model; free form surface modeling; modeling of product assemblies following bottom-up and top-down principles; and the presentation of a product in accordance with the rules of technical documentation. This book, which includes more than 500 figures, will be ideal for students wishing to gain a sound grasp of space modeling techniques. Academics and professionals will find it to be an excellent teaching and research aid, and an easy-to-use guide.

Management and enables them to deal with the demands and complexities of modern, agile systems/software/hardware development teams. The book examines the project/program manager beyond the concepts of leadership and aims to connect to employees' sense of identity. The text examines human psychological concepts such as “locus of control,� which will help the manager understand their team members’ view and how best to manage their “world� contributions. The authors cover new management tools and philosophies for agile systems/software/hardware development teams, with a specific focus on how this relates to engineering and computer science. This book also includes practical case studies. Discusses management skills needed as they relate to the advances in software development practices Examines how to manage an agile development team that includes teams across geographically, ethnically, and culturally diverse backgrounds Embraces all of the aspects of modern management and leadership

This book provides developers, engineers, researchers and students with detailed knowledge about the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. HEVC is the successor to the widely successful H.264/AVC video compression standard, and it provides around twice as much compression as H.264/AVC for the same level of quality. The applications for HEVC will not only cover the space of the well-known current uses and capabilities of digital video – they will also include the deployment of new services and the delivery of enhanced video quality, such as ultra-high-definition television (UHDTV) and video with higher dynamic range, wider range of representable color, and greater representation precision than what is typically found today. HEVC is the next major generation of video coding design – a flexible, reliable and robust solution that will support the next decade of video applications and ease the burden of video on world-wide network traffic. This book provides a detailed explanation of the various parts of the standard, insight into how it was developed, and in-depth discussion of algorithms and architectures for its implementation.

The present book includes extended and revised versions of a set of selected papers from the Fourth International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence (IJCCI 2012)., held in Barcelona, Spain, from 5 to 7 October, 2012. The conference was sponsored by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC) and was organized in cooperation with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The conference brought together researchers, engineers and practitioners in computational technologies, especially those related to the areas of fuzzy computation, evolutionary computation and neural computation. It is composed of three co-located conferences, each one specialized in one of the aforementioned -knowledge areas. Namely: - International Conference on Evolutionary Computation Theory and Applications (ECTA) - International Conference on Fuzzy Computation Theory and Applications (FCTA) - International Conference on Neural Computation Theory and Applications (NCTA) Recent progresses in scientific developments and applications in these three areas are reported in this book This book includes revised and extended versions of a strict selection of the best papers presented at the conference.

This thesis primarily focuses on how to carry out intelligent sensing and understand the high-dimensional and low-quality visual information. After exploring the inherent structures of the visual data, it proposes a number of computational models covering an extensive range of mathematical topics, including compressive sensing, graph theory, probabilistic learning and information theory. These computational models are also applied to address a number of real-world problems including biometric recognition, stereo signal reconstruction, natural scene parsing, and SAR image processing.

The book reports on the 11th International Workshop on Railway Noise, held on 9 – 13 September, 2013, in Uddevalla, Sweden. The event, which was jointly organized by the Competence Centre Chalmers Railway Mechanics (CHARMEC) and the Departments of Applied Mechanics and Applied Acoustics at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, covered a broad range of topics in the field of railway noise and vibration, including: prospects, legal regulations and perceptions; wheel and rail noise; prediction, measurements and monitoring; ground-borne vibration; squeal noise and structure-borne noise; and aerodynamic noise generated by high-speed trains. Further topics included: resilient track forms; grinding, corrugation and roughness; and interior noise and sound barriers. This book, which consists of a collection of peer-reviewed papers originally submitted to the workshop, not only provides readers with an overview of the latest developments in the field, but also offers scientists and engineers essential support in their daily efforts to identify, understand and solve a number of problems related to railway noise and vibration, and to achieve their ultimate goal of reducing the environmental impact of railway systems.

Enterprise modeling (EM) methods and techniques are indispensable for understanding the present situation of an enterprise and for preparing for its future – particularly in times of continuous organizational change, an increasing pace of innovation, new market challenges or technology advances. The authors combine a detailed description of the 4EM methodology with their concrete experience gathered in projects. Their book addresses the modeling procedure, modeling language and modeling practices in a uniquely integrated approach. It provides practical advice on common challenges faced by enterprises and offers a flexible EM method suitable for tackling those challenges. Much of the work presented stems from actual research projects and has been validated with scientific methods. The 4EM methodology has proven its practical value in a large number of successful development and/or change management projects in industry and the public sector. The book was written for anyone who wants to learn more about EM, with a specific focus on how to do it in practice and/or how to teach it. Its main target audience thus includes instructors in the field of EM or business information systems, students in Information Systems or Business Administration, and practitioners working in enterprise or change management. The authors describe a clear reading path for each of these audiences and complement the work with a set of slides and further teaching material available under www.4em-method.com.

The essays in this book, written by researchers from both humanities and science, describe various theoretical and experimental approaches to adding medical ethics to a machine, what design features are necessary in order to achieve this, philosophical and practical questions concerning justice, rights, decision-making and responsibility in medical contexts, and accurately modeling essential physician-machine-patient relationships. In medical settings, machines are in close proximity with human beings: with patients who are in vulnerable states of health, who have disabilities of various kinds, with the very young or very old and with medical professionals. Machines in these contexts are undertaking important medical tasks that require emotional sensitivity, knowledge of medical codes, human dignity and privacy. As machine technology advances, ethical concerns become more urgent: should medical machines be programmed to follow a code of medical ethics? What theory or theories should constrain medical machine conduct? What design features are required? Should machines share responsibility with humans for the ethical consequences of medical actions? How ought clinical relationships involving machines to be modeled? Is a capacity for empathy and emotion detection necessary? What about consciousness? This collection is the first book that addresses these 21st-century concerns.

This volume presents the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (COOP 2014). The conference is a venue for multidisciplinary research contributing to the design, assessment and analysis of cooperative systems and their integration in organizations, public venues, and everyday life. COOP emerged from the European tradition of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Cognitive Ergonomics as practiced in France.    These proceedings are a collection of 28 papers reflecting the variety of research activities in the field, as well as an increasing interest in investigating the use and design of ICT in all aspects of everyday life and society, and not merely in the workplace. The papers represent a variety of research topics, from healthcare to sustainable mobility to disaster response, in settings from all over the world. For the first time, the proceedings include papers presented in an Early-Career Researchers Track which was organized in order to give young researchers the opportunity to discuss their work with an international community.   This collection of papers provides a picture of new developments and classic topics of research around cooperative systems, based on the principle that a deep knowledge of cooperative practices is a key to understanding technology impacts and producing quality designs. The articles presented will appeal to researchers and practitioners alike, as they combine an understanding of the nature of work with the possibilities offered by novel digital technologies.  

Hacking Europe traces the user practices of chopping games in Warsaw, hacking software in Athens, creating chaos in Hamburg, producing demos in Turku, and partying with computing in Zagreb and Amsterdam. Focusing on several European countries at the end of the Cold War, the book shows the digital development was not an exclusively American affair. Local hacker communities appropriated the computer and forged new cultures around it like the hackers in Yugoslavia, Poland and Finland, who showed off their tricks and creating distinct “demoscenes.� Together the essays reflect a diverse palette of cultural practices by which European users domesticated computer technologies. Each chapter explores the mediating actors instrumental in introducing and spreading the cultures of computing around Europe. More generally, the “ludological� element--the role of mischief, humor, and play--discussed here as crucial for analysis of hacker culture, opens new vistas for the study of the history of technology.

This book is an edited collection of chapters based on the papers presented at the conference “Beyond AI: Artificial Dreams� held in Pilsen in November 2012. The aim of the conference was to question deep-rooted ideas of artificial intelligence and cast critical reflection on methods standing at its foundations. Artificial Dreams epitomize our controversial quest for non-biological intelligence and therefore the contributors of this book tried to fully exploit such a controversy in their respective chapters, which resulted in an interdisciplinary dialogue between experts from engineering, natural sciences and humanities. While pursuing the Artificial Dreams, it has become clear that it is still more and more difficult to draw a clear divide between human and machine. And therefore this book tries to portrait such an image of what lies beyond artificial intelligence: we can see the disappearing human-machine divide, a very important phenomenon of nowadays technological society, the phenomenon which is often uncritically praised, or hypocritically condemned. And so this phenomenon found its place in the subtitle of the whole volume as well as in the title of the chapter of Kevin Warwick, one of the keynote speakers at “Beyond AI: Artificial Dreams�.

This book explores the view that normative behaviour is part of a complex of social mechanisms, processes and narratives that are constantly shifting. From this perspective, norms are not a kind of self-contained social object or fact, but rather an interplay of many things that we label as norms when we ‘take a snapshot’ of them at a particular instant. Further, this book pursues the hypothesis that considering the dynamic aspects of these phenomena sheds new light on them. The sort of issues that this perspective opens to exploration include: Of what is this complex we call a "social norm" composed of? How do new social norms emerge and what kind of circumstances might facilitate such an appearance? How context-specific are the norms and patterns of normative behaviour that arise? How do the cognitive and the social aspects of norms interact over time? How do expectations, beliefs and individual rationality interact with social norm complexes to effect behaviour? How does our social embeddedness relate to social constraint upon behaviour? How might the socio-cognitive complexes that we call norms be usefully researched?

This book demonstrates how to describe and analyze a system's behavior and extract the desired prediction and control algorithms from this analysis. A typical prediction is based on observing similar situations in the past, knowing the outcomes of these past situations, and expecting that the future outcome of the current situation will be similar to these past observed outcomes. In mathematical terms, similarity corresponds to symmetry, and similarity of outcomes to invariance.   This book shows how symmetries can be used in all classes of algorithmic problems of sciences and engineering: from analysis to prediction to control. Applications cover chemistry, geosciences, intelligent control, neural networks, quantum physics, and thermal physics. Specifically, it is shown how the approach based on symmetry and similarity can be used in the analysis of real-life systems, in the algorithms of prediction, and in the algorithms of control.

This book presents a collection of computational intelligence algorithms that addresses issues in visual pattern recognition such as high computational complexity, abundance of pattern features, sensitivity to size and shape variations and poor performance against complex backgrounds. The book has 3 parts. Part 1 describes various research issues in the field with a survey of the related literature. Part 2 presents computational intelligence based algorithms for feature selection and classification. The algorithms are discriminative and fast. The main application area considered is hand posture recognition. The book also discusses utility of these algorithms in other visual as well as non-visual pattern recognition tasks including face recognition, general object recognition and cancer / tumor classification. Part 3 presents biologically inspired algorithms for feature extraction. The visual cortex model based features discussed have invariance with respect to appearance and size of the hand, and provide good inter class discrimination. A Bayesian model of visual attention is described which is effective in handling complex background problem in hand posture recognition. The book provides qualitative and quantitative performance comparisons for the algorithms outlined, with other standard methods in machine learning and computer vision. The book is self-contained with several figures, charts, tables and equations helping the reader to understand the material presented without instruction.

The book focuses on Social Collective Intelligence, a term used to denote a class of socio-technical systems that combine, in a coordinated way, the strengths of humans, machines and collectives in terms of competences, knowledge and problem solving capabilities with the communication, computing and storage capabilities of advanced ICT. Social Collective Intelligence opens a number of challenges for researchers in both computer science and social sciences; at the same time it provides an innovative approach to solve challenges in diverse application domains, ranging from health to education and organization of work. The book will provide a cohesive and holistic treatment of Social Collective Intelligence, including challenges emerging in various disciplines (computer science, sociology, ethics) and opportunities for innovating in various application areas. By going through the book the reader will gauge insight and knowledge into the challenges and opportunities provided by this new, exciting, field of investigation. Benefits for scientists will be in terms of accessing a comprehensive treatment of the open research challenges in a multidisciplinary perspective. Benefits for practitioners and applied researchers will be in terms of access to novel approaches to tackle relevant problems in their field. Benefits for policy-makers and public bodies representatives will be in terms of understanding how technological advances can support them in supporting the progress of society and economy.

This volume provides a concise reference to the state-of-the-art in software interoperability. Composed of over 90 papers, Enterprise Interoperability II ranges from academic research through case studies to industrial and administrative experience of interoperability. The international nature of the authorship continues to broaden. Many of the papers have examples and illustrations calculated to deepen understanding and generate new ideas.

This monograph presents the concept of agents and agent systems. It starts with a formal approach and then presents examples of practical applications. In order to form the principles of construction of autonomous agents, a model of the agent is introduced. Subsequent parts of the monograph include several examples of applications of the term agent. Descriptions of different examples of applications of agent systems in such fields as evolution systems, mobile robot systems, artificial intelligence systems are given. The book constitutes an outline of methodology of the design and realization of agent systems based on the M-agent architecture oriented on different areas of applications.                                                                                                                                                                            

This book offers the first detailed, comprehensible scientific presentation of Confabulation Theory, addressing a pressing scientific question: How does brain information processing, or cognition, work? With only elementary mathematics as a prerequisite, this book will prove accessible to technologists, scientists, and the educated public.