Information Systems: The e-Business Challenge Indisputable, e-Business is shaping the future inspiring a growing range of innovative business models. To bring it to the point: the Internet has redefined the way electronic business is performed. In an electronic supported business all relationships are transformed -may it be a seller-to buyer relationship or a an agency-to-citizen relationship. So for instance in commerce new business models incorporate various activities: promoting and communicating company and product information to a global user base; accepting orders and payments for goods and services; providing ongoing customer support; getting feedback and spurring collaboration for a new product development. There are several ways of further differentiating e-Business such as sketching some diversions on various levels: e-Commerce, e-Government; B2C, B2B, B2G, G2C; Customer Relationship Management, Business Intelligence and so on. Further distinctions may follow divergent criteria such as separating in business stages. Thus particular problem domains emerge. They all state of its own guiding the development of adequate information systems."

This informative text/reference presents a detailed review of the state of the art in industrial sensor and control networks. The book examines a broad range of applications, along with their design objectives and technical challenges. The coverage includes fieldbus technologies, wireless communication technologies, network architectures, and resource management and optimization for industrial networks. Discussions are also provided on industrial communication standards for both wired and wireless technologies, as well as for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Topics and features: describes the FlexRay, CAN, and Modbus fieldbus protocols for industrial control networks, as well as the MIL-STD-1553 standard; proposes a dual fieldbus approach, incorporating both CAN and ModBus fieldbus technologies, for a ship engine distributed control system; reviews a range of industrial wireless sensor network (IWSN) applications, from environmental sensing and condition monitoring, to process automation; examines the wireless networking performance, design requirements, and technical limitations of IWSN applications; presents a survey of IWSN commercial solutions and service providers, and summarizes the emerging trends in this area; discusses the latest technologies and open challenges in realizing the vision of the IIoT, highlighting various applications of the IIoT in industrial domains; introduces a logistics paradigm for adopting IIoT technology on the Physical Internet. This unique work will be of great value to all researchers involved in industrial sensor and control networks, wireless networking, and the Internet of Things.

Congestion Control in Data Transmission Networks details the modeling and control of data traffic in communication networks. It shows how various networking phenomena can be represented in a consistent mathematical framework suitable for rigorous formal analysis. The monograph differentiates between fluid-flow continuous-time traffic models, discrete-time processes with constant sampling rates, and sampled-data systems with variable discretization periods.
The authors address a number of difficult real-life problems, such as:
optimal control of flows with disparate, time-varying delay;
the existence of source and channel nonlinearities;
the balancing of quality of service and fairness requirements; and
the incorporation of variable rate allocation policies.
Appropriate control mechanisms which can handle congestion and guarantee high throughput in various traffic scenarios (with different networking phenomena being considered) are proposed. Systematic design procedures using sound control-theoretic foundations are adopted. Since robustness issues are of major concern in providing efficient data-flow regulation in today s networks, sliding-mode control is selected as the principal technique to be applied in creating the control solutions. The controller derivation is given extensive analytical treatment and is supported with numerous realistic simulations. A comparison with existing solutions is also provided. The concepts applied are discussed in a number of illustrative examples, and supported by many figures, tables, and graphs walking the reader through the ideas and introducing their relevance in real networks.
Academic researchers and graduate students working in computer networks and telecommunications and in control (especially time-delay systems and discrete-time optimal and sliding-mode control) will find this text a valuable assistance in ensuring smooth data-flow within communications networks."

The ubiquitous nature of the Internet of Things allows for enhanced connectivity between people in modern society. When applied to various industries, these current networking capabilities create opportunities for new applications. Internet of Things and Advanced Application in Healthcare is a critical reference source for emerging research on the implementation of the latest networking and technological trends within the healthcare industry. Featuring in-depth coverage across the broad scope of the Internet of Things in specialized settings, such as context-aware computing, reliability, and healthcare support systems, this publication is an ideal resource for professionals, researchers, upper-level students, practitioners, and technology developers seeking innovative material on the Internet of Things and its distinct applications. Topics Covered: Assistive Technologies Context-Aware Computing Systems Health Risk Management Healthcare Support Systems Reliability Concerns Smart Healthcare Wearable Sensors

This volume contains the lectures given in honor to Georg Farber as tribute to his contributions in the area of real-time and embedded systems. The chapters of many leading scientists cover a wide range of aspects, like robot or automotive vision systems or medical aspects. "

Web Search: Public Searching of the Web, co-authored by Drs. Amanda Spink and Bernard J. Jansen, is one of the first manuscripts that address the human - system interaction of Web searching in a thorough and complete manner. The authors provide an examination of Web searching from multiple levels of analysis, from theoretical overview to detailed study of term usage, and integrate these different levels of analysis into a coherent picture of how people locate information on the Web using search engines.

Drawing primarily on their own research and work in the field, the authors present the temporal changes in, the growth of, and the stability of how people interact with Web search engines. Drs. Spink and Jansen present results from an analysis of multiple search engine data sets over a six year period, giving a firsthand account of the emergence of Web searching. They also compare and contrast their findings to the results of other researchers in the field, providing a valuable bibliographic resource.

This research is directly relevant to those interested in providing information or services on the Web, along with those who research and study the Web as an information resource. Graduate students, academic and corporate researchers, search engine designers, information architects, and search engine optimizers will find the book of particular benefit.

Collecting and Conserving Net Art explores the qualities and characteristics of net art and its influence on conservation practices. By addressing and answering some of the challenges facing net art and providing an exploration of its intersection with conservation, the book casts a new light on net art, conservation, curating and museum studies. Viewing net art as a process rather than as a fixed object, the book considers how this is influenced by and executed through other systems and users. Arguing that these processes and networks are imbued with ambiguity, the book suggests that this is strategically used to create suspense, obfuscate existing systems and disrupt power structures. The rapid obsolescence of hard and software, the existence of many net artworks within restricted platforms and the fact that artworks often act as assemblages that change or mutate, make net art a challenging case for conservation. Taking the performative and interpretive roles conservators play into account, the book demonstrates how practitioners can make more informed decisions when responding to, critically analysing or working with net art, particularly software-based processes. Collecting and Conserving Net Art is intended for researchers, academics and postgraduate students, especially those engaged in the study of museum studies, conservation and heritage studies, curatorial studies, digital art and art history. The book should also be interesting to professionals who are involved in the conservation and curation of digital arts, performance, media and software.

This book presents effective ways to partition mobile devices such that the enterprise system access and its information are completely separated from the personal information. For those using mobile devices for personal and business purposes, the ability to keep the data secure and separate is critical. The applications for security in smart platforms range from personal email accounts to global enterprise systems. Several approaches for mobile virtualization are described, all creating secure and secluded environments for enterprise information. The authors present a reference architecture that allows for integration with existing enterprise mobile device management systems and provides a lightweight solution for containerizing mobile applications. This solution is then benchmarked with several of the existing mobile virtualization solutions across a range of mobile devices. Virtualization Techniques for Mobile Systems is an excellent resource for researchers and professionals working in mobile systems. Advanced-level students studying computer science and electrical engineering will also find the content helpful.

This edited volume comprises invited chapters that cover five areas of the current and the future development of intelligent systems and information sciences. Half of the chapters were presented as invited talks at the Workshop "Future Directions for Intelligent Systems and Information Sciences" held in Dunedin, New Zealand, 22-23 November 1999 after the International Conference on Neuro-Information Processing (lCONIPI ANZIISI ANNES '99) held in Perth, Australia. In order to make this volume useful for researchers and academics in the broad area of information sciences I invited prominent researchers to submit materials and present their view about future paradigms, future trends and directions. Part I contains chapters on adaptive, evolving, learning systems. These are systems that learn in a life-long, on-line mode and in a changing environment. The first chapter, written by the editor, presents briefly the paradigm of Evolving Connectionist Systems (ECOS) and some of their applications. The chapter by Sung-Bae Cho presents the paradigms of artificial life and evolutionary programming in the context of several applications (mobile robots, adaptive agents of the WWW). The following three chapters written by R.Duro, J.Santos and J.A.Becerra (chapter 3), GCoghill . (chapter 4), Y.Maeda (chapter 5) introduce new techniques for building adaptive, learning robots.

Peer to Peer Accommodation networks presents a new conceptual framework which offers an initial explanation for the continuing and rapid success of 'disruptive innovators' and their effects on the international hospitality industry, with a specific focus on Airbnb, in the international context. Using her first-hand experience as a host on both traditional holiday accommodation webpages and a peer-to-peer accommodation network, respected tourism academic Sara Dolnicar examines possible reasons for the explosive success of peer to peer accommodation networks, investigates related topics which are less frequently discussed - such as charitable activities and social activism - and offers a future research agenda. Using first hand empirical results, this text provides much needed insight into this 'disruptive innovator' for those studying and working within the tourism and hospitality industries. This book discusses a wealth of issues including: * The disruptive innovation model - the criteria for identifying and understanding new disruptive innovators, and how peer-to-peer accommodation networks comply with these; * The factors postulated to drive the success of these networks and the celebration of variation; * Who are genuine networks members, tourist motivators and the chance of the 'perfect match'; * Pricing, discrimination and stimulation of the creation of new businesses.

This book is an attempt to bring closer the greater vision of the development of Social Informatics. Social Informatics can be de?ned as a discipline of informatics that studies how information systems can realize social goals, use social concepts, or become sources of information about social phenomena. All of these research directions are present in this book: fairness is a social goal; trust is a social concept; and much of this book bases on the study of traces of Internet auctions (used also to drive social simulations) that are a rich source of information about social phenomena. The book has been written for an audience of graduate students working in the area of informatics and the social sciences, in an attempt to bridge the gap between the two disciplines. Because of this, the book avoids the use of excessive mathematical formalism, especially in Chapter 2 that attempts to summarize the theoretical basis of the two disciplines of trust and fa- ness management. Readers are usually directed to quoted literature for the purpose of studying mathematical proofs of the cited theorems.

This easy-to-follow text/reference presents a practical guide to the configuration of Cisco routers, from tasks for beginners to advanced operations. The work starts with the simple step-by-step task of connecting the router and performing basic configuration, before building up to complex and sensitive operations such as router IOS upgrade and Site-to-Site VPNs. This updated and expanded new edition has been enhanced with a more detailed treatment of each topic, supported by a set of training scenarios. Features: discusses basic configuration, domestic duties, standard and advanced routing, WAN technologies, security, router management, remote connectivity, and practical tips; explains in detail the steps required to configure different protocols on Cisco routers; includes coverage of MPLS, multicasting, GRE, HSRP, reflexive and timed-access lists, and configuration steps for IPv6 (NEW); provides an extensive selection of training scenarios, designed to offer hands-on practice in the relevant tasks (NEW).

Communication protocols form the operational basis of computer networks and tele communication systems. They are behavior conventions that describe how com munication systems inter act with each other, defining the temporal order of the interactions and the formats of the data units exchanged - essentially they determine the efficiency and reliability of computer networks. Protocol Engineering is an important discipline covering the design, validation, and implementation of communication protocols. Part I of this book is devoted to the fundamentals of communication protocols, describing their working principles and implicitly also those of computer networks. The author introduces the concepts of service, protocol, layer, and layered architecture, and introduces the main elements required in the description of protocols using a model language. He then presents the most important protocol functions. Part II deals with the description of communication proto cols, offering an overview of the various formal methods, the essence of Protocol Engineering. The author introduces the fundamental description methods, such as finite state machines, Petri nets, process calculi, and temporal logics, that are in part used as semantic models for formal description techniques. He then introduces one represen tative technique for each of the main description approaches, among others SDL and LOTOS, and surveys the use of UML for describing protocols. Part III covers the protocol life cycle and the most important development stages, presenting the reader with approaches for systematic protocol design, with various verification methods, with the main implementation techniques, and with strategies for their testing, in particular with conformance and interoperability tests, and the test description language TTCN. The author uses the simple data transfer example protocol XDT (eXample Data Transfer) throughout the book as a reference protocol to exemplify the various description techniques and to demonstrate important validation and implementation approaches. The book is an introduction to communication protocols and their development for undergraduate and graduate students of computer science and communication technology, and it is also a suitable reference for engineers and programmers. Most chapters contain exercises, and the author's accompanying website provides further online material including a complete formal description of the XDT protocol and an animated simulation visualizing its behavior.

Both Java and .NET use the idea of a virtual machine (VM) rather than a true executable. While very useful for some purposes, VMs make your source code and hence your intellectual property (IP) inherently less secure because the process can be reversed or decompiled. This book is useful because you must understand how decompilation works in order to properly protect your IP. Anyone interested in protecting Java code from prying eyes will want to buy this one of a kind book as it separates fact from fiction about just how ineffective obfuscators are at protecting your corporate secrets.While it is very easy for anyone to decompile Java code and almost as easy to run it through an obfuscation protection tool, there is very little information on just what happens when you do this. How secure is your code after you run an obfuscator, for example? bytecodes and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) than in any book yet published. This book redresses the imbalance by providing insights into the features and limitations of todays decompilers and obfuscators, as well as offering a detailed look at what JVMs actually do.Virtual machine is the computer science term used when (most often in an attempt to gain greater portability) you create an abstract virtual processor and write code for it instead of having your compiler generate actual machine language for a chip like the Pentium 4. want the code to run. This translates the virtual machine language to the real machine language of your processor. The intermediary code for the virtual machine is what can more easily be decompiled, although with a loss of security, since in order for the code to be converted to real machine language it must be relatively transparent and not just a sequence of 0s and 1s

Genetic algorithms provide a powerful range of methods for solving complex engineering search and optimization algorithms. Their power can also lead to difficulty for new researchers and students who wish to apply such evolution-based methods. "Applied Evolutionary Algorithms in Java" offers a practical, hands-on guide to applying such algorithms to engineering and scientific problems. The concepts are illustrated through clear examples, ranging from simple to more complex problems domains; all based on real-world industrial problems. Examples are taken from image processing, fuzzy-logic control systems, mobile robots, and telecommunication network optimization problems. The Java-based toolkit provides an easy-to-use and essential visual interface, with integrated graphing and analysis tools. Topics and features: *inclusion of a complete Java toolkit for exploring evolutionary algorithms *strong use of visualization techniques, to increase understanding *coverage of all major evolutionary algorithms in common usage *broad range of industrially based example applications *includes examples and an appendix based on fuzzy logic This book is intended for students, researchers, and professionals interested in using evolutionary algorithms in their work. No mathematics beyond basic algebra and Cartesian graphs methods are required, as the aim is to encourage applying the Java toolkit to develop the power of these techniques.

With a growing number of mobile devices offering Flash support, it is an increasingly viable platform for the development of mobile applications. Foundation Flash Applications for Mobile Devices is just the book you need to learn how to take advantage of this new audience of mobile application users. Inside, it covers every facet of mobile Flash, from the essentials of the Flash Lite 1.1 and 2.X platforms and writing applications to testing your work and deploying to mobile users.

Applications presented include screensavers, wallpapers, data-consuming informational programs (such as movie, news, and stock tickers), quiz games, action games, and more. You are given tips on mobile Flash development best practices, and all of the essential topics are covered, including creating and using sound, vector graphics, and bitmaps; optimizing assets for the small screen; coding realistic physics for games; and consuming web services using PHP, Java, ColdFusion, and .NET.

Throughout the book, there are many samples to put together and learn from, and several bonus applications are also available to download and check out.

This book provides a source of inspiration and a manual for designers, entrepreneurs and professionals who are looking into the practical application of product configurators. In this growing profession, there is a need for a book which focuses on the configuration process from a design perspective. The book delves into the practical application of configurators using case studies of selected firms that present their most significant works. It offers the reader tips, suggestions, technical details and critical issues which need to be considered, from experienced actors and pioneers worldwide, which include: Unfold, Belgium In-flexions, France Nervous System, USA Okinlab, Germany SkimLab, France Twikit, Belgium INDG, The Netherlands ZeroLight, United Kingdom 3Dimerce, The Netherlands 3DSource, USA Bagaar, Belgium MyCustomizer, Canada Combeenation, Austria

The author's aim in this textbook is to provide students with a clear understanding of the relationship between the principles of object-oriented programming and software engineering. Professor Zeigler takes an approach based on state representation to formal specification. Consequently, this book is unique through its - emphasis on formulating primitives from which all other functionality can be built; - integral use of a semi-formal behaviour specification language based on state transition concepts; -differentiation between behaviour and implementation; -a reusable heterogeneous container class library; -ability to show the elegance and power of ensemble methods with non-trivial examples. As a result, students studying software engineering will find this a distinctive and valuable approach to programming and systems engineering.

Aims to strengthen the reader's knowledge of the fundamental concepts and technical details necessary to develop, implement, or debug e-mail software. The text explains the underlying technology and describes the key Internet e-mail protocols and extensions such as SMTP, POP3, IMAP, MIME and DSN. It aims to help the reader build a sound understanding of e-mail archtitecture, message flow and tracing protocols, and includes real-world examples of message exchanges with program code that they can refer to when developing or debugging their own systems. The reader should also gain valuable insight into various security topics, including public and secret key encryption, digital signatures and key management. Each chapter begins with a detailed definition list to help speed the reader's understanding of technical terms and acronyms. The CD-ROM contains a listing of related Internet RFCs, as well as RSA PKCS documents, Eudora 3.0 freeware client, and the free user version of Software.com.Post.Office Server for Windows NT 3.0.

Using database-driven web pages or web content management (WCM) systems to manage increasingly diverse web content and to streamline workflows is a commonly practiced solution recognized in libraries to-day. However, limited library web content management models and funding constraints prevent many libraries from purchasing commercially available WCM systems. And, the lack of much needed technical expertise in building in-house WCM systems presents a great challenge for libraries of all types. Content and Workflow Management for Library Websites: Case Studies provides practical and applicable web content management solutions through case studies. It contains successful database-to-web applications as employed in a variety of academic libraries. The applications vary in scope and cover a range of practical how-to-do-it examples from database-driven web development, locally created web content management systems, systems for distributing content management responsibilities, dynamic content delivery, to open source tools, such as MySQL and PHP to manage the content. Issues and challenges associated with the development process are discussed. Authors will also discuss detours, sand traps, and missteps necessary to a real learning process.

Compression and Coding Algorithms describes in detail the coding mechanisms that are available for use in data compression systems. The well known Huffman coding technique is one mechanism, but there have been many others developed over the past few decades, and this book describes, explains and assesses them. People undertaking research of software development in the areas of compression and coding algorithms will find this book an indispensable reference. In particular, the careful and detailed description of algorithms and their implementation, plus accompanying pseudo-code that can be readily implemented on computer, make this book a definitive reference in an area currently without one.