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Books > Computing & IT > Applications of computing > Artificial intelligence > Knowledge-based systems / expert systems
Most everything in our experience requires management in some form or other: our gardens, our automobiles, our minds, our bodies, our love lives, our businesses, our forests, our countries, etc. Sometimes we don't call it "management" per se. We seldom talk about managing our minds or automobiles. But if we think of management in terms of monitoring, maintaining, and cultivating with respect to some goal, then it makes sense. We certainly monitor an automobile, albeit unconsciously, to make sure that it doesn't exhibit signs of trouble. And we certainly try to cultivate our minds. This book is about managing networks. That itself is not a new concept. We've been managing the networks that support our telephones for about 100 years, and we've been managing the networks that support our computers for about 20 years. What is new (and what motivated me to write this book) is the following: (i) the enormous advancements in networking technology as we transition th st from the 20 century to the 21 century, (ii) the increasing dependence of human activities on networking technology, and (iii) the commercialization of services that depend on networking technology (e.g., email and electronic commerce).
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-worksop proceedings of the 8th International Workshop Radio Frequency Identification: Security and Privacy Issues, RFIDSec 2012, held in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, in July 2012. The 12 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 29 submissions for inclusion in the book. The papers focus on approaches to solve security and data protection issues in advanced contactless technologies.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES 2012, held in San Sebastian, Spain, in September 2012. The 21 revised papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 254 submissions. Topics of interest include the exploitation of AI techniques, most recent research in information technologies and dynamic ontologies.
Many real-time systems rely on static scheduling algorithms. This includes cyclic scheduling, rate monotonic scheduling and fixed schedules created by off-line scheduling techniques such as dynamic programming, heuristic search, and simulated annealing. However, for many real-time systems, static scheduling algorithms are quite restrictive and inflexible. For example, highly automated agile manufacturing, command, control and communications, and distributed real-time multimedia applications all operate over long lifetimes and in highly non-deterministic environments. Dynamic real-time scheduling algorithms are more appropriate for these systems and are used in such systems. Many of these algorithms are based on earliest deadline first (EDF) policies. There exists a wealth of literature on EDF-based scheduling with many extensions to deal with sophisticated issues such as precedence constraints, resource requirements, system overload, multi-processors, and distributed systems.Deadline Scheduling for Real-Time Systems: EDF and Related Algorithms aims at collecting a significant body of knowledge on EDF scheduling for real-time systems, but it does not try to be all-inclusive (the literature is too extensive). The book primarily presents the algorithms and associated analysis, but guidelines, rules, and implementation considerations are also discussed, especially for the more complicated situations where mathematical analysis is difficult. In general, it is very difficult to codify and taxonomize scheduling knowledge because there are many performance metrics, task characteristics, and system configurations. Also, adding to the complexity is the fact that a variety of algorithms have been designed for different combinations of these considerations. In spite of the recent advances there are still gaps in the solution space and there is a need to integrate the available solutions.For example, a list of issues to consider includes: * preemptive versus non-preemptive tasks, * uni-processors versus multi-processors, * using EDF at dispatch time versus EDF-based planning, * precedence constraints among tasks, * resource constraints, * periodic versus aperiodic versus sporadic tasks, * scheduling during overload, * fault tolerance requirements, and * providing guarantees and levels of guarantees (meeting quality of service requirements). Deadline Scheduling for Real-Time Systems: EDF and Related Algorithms should be of interest to researchers, real-time system designers, and instructors and students, either as a focussed course on deadline-based scheduling for real-time systems, or, more likely, as part of a more general course on real-time computing. The book serves as an invaluable reference in this fast-moving field.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computer Networks, CN 2014, held in Brunow, Poland, in June 2014. The 34 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers in these proceedings cover the following topics: computer networks, tele informatics and communications, new technologies, queueing theory, innovative applications and networked and IT-related aspects of e-business."
This volume forms the edited proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on Communications Interworking, held in Perth, Western Australia, from 13-16 October, 2002. In total, 39 research papers were submitted for consideration, and after full refereeing by international referees, 27 papers from authors in 11 countries were accepted for publication. Invited keynote addresses were presented by Dr Hugh Bradlow, Chief Technology Offleer for Telstra Corporation, Australia, and Dr Sathya Rao, Director ofTelscom A.G., Switzerland. The symposium brought together 60 active international researchers and telecommunications engineers to discuss the important questions as to whether there is a convergence of all communications, including real-time communications, over the Internet Protocol (IP), and whether existing IP technology is capable of supporting this convergence, or whether it requires further development of that technology. The papers selected to appear in this volume make an important and timely contribution to this debate. Specific symposium paper sessions were held to present and discuss ernerging research on the topics of converged networking, real-time communications over IP, quality of service, routing and metrics, ernerging issues in mobile networks, differentiated services, and wireless networking.
NATO's Division of Scientific and Environmental Affairs sponsored this Advan ced Study Institute because it was felt to be timely to cover this important and challengjng subject for the first time in the framework of NATO's ASI programme. The significance of real-time systems in everyones' life is rapidly growing. The vast spectrum of these systems can be characterised by just a few examples of increasing complexity: controllers in washing machines, air traffic control systems, control and safety systems of nuclear power plants and, finally, future military systems like the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The import ance of such systems for the well-being of people requires considerable efforts in research and development of highly reliable real-time systems. Furthermore, the competitiveness and prosperity of entire nations now depend on the early app lication and efficient utilisation of computer integrated manufacturing systems (CIM), of which real-time systems are an essential and decisive part. Owing to its key significance in computerised defence systems, real-time computing has also a special importance for the Alliance. The early research and development activities in this field in the 1960s and 1970s aimed towards improving the then unsatisfactory software situation. Thus, the first high-level real-time languages were defined and developed: RTL/2, Coral 66, Procol, LTR, and PEARL. In close connection with these language develop ments and with the utilisation of special purpose process control peripherals, the research on real-time operating systems advanced considerably."
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.
The Testability of Distributed Real-Time Systems starts by collecting and analyzing all principal problems, as well as their interrelations that one has to keep in mind wh4en testing a distributed real-time system. The book discusses them in some detail from the viewpoints of software engineering, distributed systems principles, and real-time system development. These problems are organization, observability, reproducibility, the host/target approach, environment simulation, and (test) representativity. Based on this framework, the book summarizes and evaluates the current work done in this area before going on to argue that the particular system architecture (hardware plus operating system) has a much greater influence on testing than is the case for 'ordinary', non-real-time software. The notions of event-triggered and time-triggered system architectures are introduced, and its is shown that time-triggered systems 'automatically' (i.e. by the nature of their system architecture) solve or greatly ease solving of some of the problems introduced earlier, i.e. observability, reproducibility, and (partly) representativity.A test methodology is derived for the time-triggered, distributed real-time system MARS. The book describes in detail how the author has taken advantage of its architecture, and shows how the remaining problems can be solved for this particular system architecture. Some experiments conducted to evaluate this test methodology are reported, including the experience gained from them, leading to a description of a number of prototype support tools. The Testability of Distributed Real-Time Systems can be used by both academic and industrial researchers interested in distributed and/or real-time systems, or in software engineering for such systems. This book can also be used as a text in advanced courses on distributed or real-time systems.
Real-time computer systems are very often subject to dependability requirements because of their application areas. Fly-by-wire airplane control systems, control of power plants, industrial process control systems and others are required to continue their function despite faults. Fault-tolerance and real-time requirements thus constitute a kind of natural combination in process control applications. Systematic fault-tolerance is based on redundancy, which is used to mask failures of individual components. The problem of replica determinism is thereby to ensure that replicated components show consistent behavior in the absence of faults. It might seem trivial that, given an identical sequence of inputs, replicated computer systems will produce consistent outputs. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The problem of replica non-determinism and the presentation of its possible solutions is the subject of Fault-Tolerant Real-Time Systems: The Problem of Replica Determinism. The field of automotive electronics is an important application area of fault-tolerant real-time systems. Systems like anti-lock braking, engine control, active suspension or vehicle dynamics control have demanding real-time and fault-tolerance requirements. These requirements have to be met even in the presence of very limited resources since cost is extremely important. Because of its interesting properties Fault-Tolerant Real-Time Systems gives an introduction to the application area of automotive electronics. The requirements of automotive electronics are a topic of discussion in the remainder of this work and are used as a benchmark to evaluate solutions to the problem of replica determinism.
This volume contains the papers presented. at the Third IFIP International Working Conference on Dependable Computing for Critical Applications, sponsored by IFIP Working Group 10.4 and held in Mondello (Sicily), Italy on September 14-16, 1992. System developers increasingly apply computers where they can affect the safety and security of people and equipment. The Third IFIP International Working Conference on Dependable Computing for Critical Applications, like its predecessors, addressed various aspects of computer system dependability, a broad term defined as the degree of trust that may justifiably be placed in a system's reliability, availability, safety, security, and performance. Because the scope of the conference was so broad, we hope the presentations and discussions will contribute to the integration of these concepts so that future computer-based systems will indeed be more dependable. The Program Committee selected 18 papers for presentation from a total of 7 4 submissions at a May meeting in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. The resulting program represented a broad spectrum of interests, with papers from universities, corporations, and government agencies in eight countries. Much diligent work by the Program Committee and the quality of reviews from more than a hundred external referees from around the world, for which we are most grateful, significantly eased the production of this technical program.
This book is written for software engineers, software project leaders, and software managers who would like to introduce a new advanced software technology, expert systems, into their product. Expert system technology brings into programming a new dimension in which "rule of thumb" or heuristic expert knowledge is encoded in the program. In contrast to conventional procedural languages {e. g. , Fortran or C}, expert systems employ high-level programming languages {Le. , expert system shells} that enable us to capture the judgmental knowledge of experts such as geologists, doctors, lawyers, bankers, or insurance underwriters. Past expert systems have been more successfully applied in the problem areas of analysis and synthesis where the boundary of lo;nowledge is well defined and where experts are available and can be identified. Early successful applications include diagnosis systems such as MYCIN, geological systems such as PROSPECTOR, or design/configu ration systems such as XC ON. These early expert systems were mainly applicable to scientific and engineering problems, which are not theoreti cally well understood in terms of decisionmaking processes by their experts and which therefore require judgmental assessment. The more recent expert systems are being applied to sophisticated synthesis problems that involve a large number of choices, such as how the elements are to be compared. These problems normally entailed a large search space and slower speed for the expert systems designed. Examples of these systems include factory scheduling applications such as ISIS, or legal reasoning applications such as TAXMAN.
At the beginning of the 1990s research started in how to combine soft comput ing with reconfigurable hardware in a quite unique way. One of the methods that was developed has been called evolvable hardware. Thanks to evolution ary algorithms researchers have started to evolve electronic circuits routinely. A number of interesting circuits - with features unreachable by means of con ventional techniques - have been developed. Evolvable hardware is quite pop ular right now; more than fifty research groups are spread out over the world. Evolvable hardware has become a part of the curriculum at some universi ties. Evolvable hardware is being commercialized and there are specialized conferences devoted to evolvable hardware. On the other hand, surprisingly, we can feel the lack of a theoretical background and consistent design methodology in the area. Furthermore, it is quite difficult to implement really innovative and practically successful evolvable systems using contemporary digital reconfigurable technology."
Business Component-Based Software Engineering, an edited volume, aims to complement some other reputable books on CBSE, by stressing how components are built for large-scale applications, within dedicated development processes and for easy and direct combination. This book will emphasize these three facets and will offer a complete overview of some recent progresses. Projects and works explained herein will prompt graduate students, academics, software engineers, project managers and developers to adopt and to apply new component development methods gained from and validated by the authors. The authors of Business Component-Based Software Engineering are academic and professionals, experts in the field, who will introduce the state of the art on CBSE from their shared experience by working on the same projects. Business Component-Based Software Engineering is designed to meet the needs of practitioners and researchers in industry, and graduate-level students in Computer Science and Engineering.
Real-time computing systems are vital to a wide range of applications. For example, they are used in the control of nuclear reactors and automated manufacturing facilities, in controlling and tracking air traffic, and in communication systems. In recent years, real-time systems have also grown larger and become more critical. For instance, advanced aircraft such as the space shuttle must depend heavily on computer sys tems Carlow 84]. The centralized control of manufacturing facilities and assembly plants operated by robots are other examples at the heart of which lie embedded real-time systems. Military defense systems deployed in the air, on the ocean surface, land and underwater, have also been increasingly relying upon real-time systems for monitoring and operational safety purposes, and for retaliatory and containment measures. In telecommunications and in multi-media applications, real time characteristics are essential to maintain the integrity of transmitted data, audio and video signals. Many of these systems control, monitor or perform critical operations, and must respond quickly to emergency events in a wide range of embedded applications. They are therefore required to process tasks with stringent timing requirements and must perform these tasks in a way that these timing requirements are guaranteed to be met. Real-time scheduling al gorithms attempt to ensure that system timing behavior meets its specifications, but typically assume that tasks do not share logical or physical resources. Since resource-sharing cannot be eliminated, synchronization primitives must be used to ensure that resource consis tency constraints are not violated."
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval, CMMR 2012, held in London, UK, in June 2012. The 28 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. The papers have been organized in the following topical sections: music emotion analysis; 3D audio and sound synthesis; computer models of music perception and cognition; music emotion recognition; music information retrieval; film soundtrack and music recommendation; and computational musicology and music education. The volume also includes selected papers from the Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Expressive Performance Workshop held within the framework of CMMR 2012.
Research into grid computing has been driven by the need to solve large-scale, increasingly complex problems for scientific applications. Yet the applications of grid computing for business and casual users did not begin to emerge until the development of the concept of cloud computing, fueled by advances in virtualization techniques, coupled with the increased availability of ever-greater Internet bandwidth. The appeal of this new paradigm is mainly based on its simplicity, and the affordable price for seamless access to both computational and storage resources. This timely text/reference introduces the fundamental principles and techniques underlying grids, clouds and virtualization technologies, as well as reviewing the latest research and expected future developments in the field. Readers are guided through the key topics by internationally recognized experts, enabling them to develop their understanding of an area likely to play an ever more significant role in coming years. Topics and features: presents contributions from an international selection of experts in the field; provides a thorough introduction and overview of existing technologies in grids, clouds and virtualization, including a brief history of the field; examines the basic requirements for performance isolation of virtual machines on multi-core servers, analyzing a selection of system virtualization technologies; examines both business and scientific applications of grids and clouds, including their use in the life sciences and for high-performance computing; explores cloud building technologies, architectures for enhancing grid infrastructures with cloud computing, and cloud performance; discusses energy aware grids and clouds, workflows on grids and clouds, and cloud and grid programming models. This useful text will enable interested readers to familiarize themselves with the key topics of grids, clouds and virtualization, and to contribute to new advances in the field. Researchers, undergraduate and graduate students, system designers and programmers, and IT policy makers will all benefit from the material covered.
Software architectures have gained wide popularity in the last decade. They generally play a fundamental role in coping with the inherent difficulties of the development of large-scale and complex software systems. Component-oriented and aspect-oriented programming enables software engineers to implement complex applications from a set of pre-defined components. Software Architectures and Component Technology collects excellent chapters on software architectures and component technologies from well-known authors, who not only explain the advantages, but also present the shortcomings of the current approaches while introducing novel solutions to overcome the shortcomings.The unique features of this book are: * evaluates the current architecture design methods and component composition techniques and explains their shortcomings; * presents three practical architecture design methods in detail; * gives four industrial architecture design examples; * presents conceptual models for distributed message-based architectures; * explains techniques for refining architectures into components; * presents the recent developments in component and aspect-oriented techniques; * explains the status of research on Piccola, Hyper/J(R), Pluggable Composite Adapters and Composition Filters. Software Architectures and Component Technology is a suitable text for graduate level students in computer science and engineering, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services, GECON 2012, held in Berlin, Germany, in November 2012. The 12 revised full papers presented together with 6 work in progress papers were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 36 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: market mechanisms, pricing and negotiation; resource allocation, scheduling and admission control; work in progress on tools and techniques for cost-efficient service selection; market modeling; trust; cloud computing in education; and work in progress on cloud adoption and business models.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Ad Hoc Networks, ADHOCNETS 2013, held in Barcelona, Spain, in October 2013. The 14 revised full papers presented were carefully selected and reviewed from numerous submissions and cover a wide range of applications, commercial and military such as mobile ad hoc networks, sensor networks, vehicular networks, underwater networks, underground networks, personal area networks, home networks and large-scale metropolitan networks for smart cities. They are organized in topical sections on wireless sensor networks, routing, applications and security.
Recommended by Bill Gates A thought-provoking and wide-ranging exploration of machine learning and the race to build computer intelligences as flexible as our own In the world's top research labs and universities, the race is on to invent the ultimate learning algorithm: one capable of discovering any knowledge from data, and doing anything we want, before we even ask. In The Master Algorithm, Pedro Domingos lifts the veil to give us a peek inside the learning machines that power Google, Amazon, and your smartphone. He assembles a blueprint for the future universal learner--the Master Algorithm--and discusses what it will mean for business, science, and society. If data-ism is today's philosophy, this book is its bible.
Challenges in Design and Implementation of Middlewares for Real-Time Systems brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast moving area. Challenges in Design and Implementation of Middlewares for Real-Time Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Data and Knowledge Engineering, ICDKE 2012, held in Wuyishan, Fujian, China, in November 2012. The conference was co-located with the 6th International Conference on Network and System Security, NSS 2012. The 13 revised full papers of ICDKE 2012 were carefully reviewed and selected from 53 submissions. The papers cover the following topics: artificial intelligence and data engineering; knowledge discovery and data management; information extraction and retrieval and data security.
Real-time systems are defined as those for which correctness depends not only on the logical properties of the produced results, but also on the temporal properties of these results. In a database, real-time means that in addition to typical logical consistency constraints, such as a constraint on a data item's value, there are constraints on when transactions execute and on the `freshness' of the data transactions access. The challenges and tradeoffs faced by the designers of real-time database systems are quite different from those faced by the designers of general-purpose database systems. To achieve the fundamental requirements of timeliness and predictability, not only do conventional methods for scheduling and transaction management have to be redesigned, but also new concepts that have not been considered in conventional database systems or in real-time systems need to be added. Real-Time Database and Information Systems: Research Advances is devoted to new techniques for scheduling of transactions, concurrency management, transaction logging, database languages, and new distributed database architectures. Real-Time Database and Information Systems: Research Advances is primarily intended for practicing engineers and researchers working in the growing area of real-time database and information retrieval systems. For practitioners, the book will provide a much needed bridge for technology transfer and continued education. For researchers, the book will provide a comprehensive reference for well-established results. The book can also be used in a senior or graduate level course on real-time systems, real-time database systems, and database systems, or closely related courses. |
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