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.

It has been almost 5 years since the inauguration of the TRON project, a concept first proposed by Dr. K. Sakamura of the University of Tokyo. The TRON Association, which was founded as an independent organization in March 1988, has been taking over the activities of the earlier TRON Association, which was a division of Japan Electronic Industry Development Association (JEIDA). It has been expanding various operations to globalize the organizations activities. The number of member companies already exceeds 100, with increasing participation from overseas companies. It is truly an awaring historical event that so many members with the same qualifications and aims engaged in the research and development of the computer environment could be gathered together. The TRON concept aims at the creation of a new and complete environment beneficial to both computer and mankind. It has a very wide scope and great diversity. As it includes the open architecture concept and as the TRON machine should be able to work with various foreign languages, the TRON is targetted to be used internationally. In order for us to create a complete TRON world, at though there are several TRON products already on the market, continuous and aggressive participation from as members together with concentration as further development are indispensable. We, the TRON promoters, are much encouraged by such a driving force.

Autonomous agents or multiagent systems are computational systems in which several computational agents interact or work together to perform some set of tasks. These systems may involve computational agents having common goals or distinct goals. Real-Time Search for Learning Autonomous Agents focuses on extending real-time search algorithms for autonomous agents and for a multiagent world. Although real-time search provides an attractive framework for resource-bounded problem solving, the behavior of the problem solver is not rational enough for autonomous agents. The problem solver always keeps the record of its moves and the problem solver cannot utilize and improve previous experiments. Other problems are that although the algorithms interleave planning and execution, they cannot be directly applied to a multiagent world. The problem solver cannot adapt to the dynamically changing goals and the problem solver cannot cooperatively solve problems with other problem solvers. This book deals with all these issues. Real-Time Search for Learning Autonomous Agents serves as an excellent resource for researchers and engineers interested in both practical references and some theoretical basis for agent/multiagent systems. The book can also be used as a text for advanced courses on the subject.

Welcome to Middleware'98 and to one of England's most beautiful regions. In recent years the distributed systems community has witnessed a growth in the number of conferences, leading to difficulties in tracking the literature and a consequent loss of awareness of work done by others in this important field. The aim of Middleware'98 is to synthesise many of the smaller workshops and conferences in this area, bringing together research communities which were becoming fragmented. The conference has been designed to maximise the experience for attendees. This is reflected in the choice of a resort venue (rather than a big city) to ensure a strong focus on interaction with other distributed systems researchers. The programme format incorporates a question-and-answer panel in each session, enabling significant issues to be discussed in the context of related papers and presentations. The invited speakers and tutorials are intended to not only inform the attendees, but also to stimulate discussion and debate.

It is almost six years since the inauguration of the TRON project, a con cept first proposed by Dr. K. Sakamura of the University of Tokyo, and it is almost 2 years since the foundation of the TRON Association on March 1988. The number of regular member companies registered in the TRON Association as of November 1988 is 145 which is a new re cord for the Association. Some of this year's major activities that I would particularly like to mention are: - Over 50 TRON project-related products have been or are about to be introduced to the marketplace, according to a preliminary report from the Future Study Committee of the TRON Association. In par ticular, I am happy to say that the ITRON subproject, which is ahead of the other subprojects, has progressed so far that several papers on ITRON applications will be presented at this conference, which means that the ITRON specifications are now ready for application to em bedded commercial and industrial products."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the international competition aimed at the evaluation and assessment of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems and services, EvAAL 2011, which was organized in two major events, the Competition in Valencia, Spain, in July 2011, and the Final workshop in Lecce, Italy, in September 2011. The papers included in this book describe the organization and technical aspects of the competition, and provide a complete technical description of the competing artefacts and report on the experience lessons learned by the teams during the competition.

Artificial Intelligence and expert systems research, development, and demonstration have rapidly expanded over the past several years; as a result, new terminology is appearing at a phenomenal rate. This sourcebook provides an introduction to artificial intelligence and expert systems, it provides brief definitions, it includes brief descriptions of software products, and vendors, and notes leaders in the field. Extensive support material is provided by delineating points of contact for receiving additional information, acronyms, a detailed bibliography, and other reference data. The terminology includes artificial intelligence and expert system elements for: * Artificial Intelligence * Expert Systems * Natural language Processing * Smart Robots * Machine Vision * Speech Synthesis The Artificial Intelligence and Expert System Sourcebook is compiled from informa tion acquired from numerous books, journals, and authorities in the field of artificial intelligence and expert systems. I hope this compilation of information will help clarify the terminology for artificial intelligence and expert systems' activities. Your comments, revisions, or questions are welcome. V. Daniel Hunt Springfield, Virginia May, 1986 ix Acknowledgments The information in Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems Sourcebook has been compiled from a wide variety of authorities who are specialists in their respective fields. The following publications were used as the basic technical resources for this book. Portions of these publications may have been used in the book. Those definitions or artwork used have been reproduced with the permission to reprint of the respective publisher.

We describe in this book, new methods for intelligent manufacturing using soft computing techniques and fractal theory. Soft Computing (SC) consists of several computing paradigms, including fuzzy logic, neural networks, and genetic algorithms, which can be used to produce powerful hybrid intelligent systems. Fractal theory provides us with the mathematical tools to understand the geometrical complexity of natural objects and can be used for identification and modeling purposes. Combining SC techniques with fractal theory, we can take advantage of the "intelligence" provided by the computer methods and also take advantage of the descriptive power of the fractal mathematical tools. Industrial manufacturing systems can be considered as non-linear dynamical systems, and as a consequence can have highly complex dynamic behaviors. For this reason, the need for computational intelligence in these manufacturing systems has now been well recognized. We consider in this book the concept of "intelligent manufacturing" as the application of soft computing techniques and fractal theory for achieving the goals of manufacturing, which are production planning and control, monitoring and diagnosis of faults, and automated quality control. As a prelude, we provide a brief overview of the existing methodologies in Soft Computing. We then describe our own approach in dealing with the problems in achieving intelligent manufacturing. Our particular point of view is that to really achieve intelligent manufacturing in real-world applications we need to use SC techniques and fractal theory.

Transaction processing is an established technique for the concurrent and fault tolerant access of persistent data. While this technique has been successful in standard database systems, factors such as time-critical applications, emerg ing technologies, and a re-examination of existing systems suggest that the performance, functionality and applicability of transactions may be substan tially enhanced if temporal considerations are taken into account. That is, transactions should not only execute in a "legal" (i.e., logically correct) man ner, but they should meet certain constraints with regard to their invocation and completion times. Typically, these logical and temporal constraints are application-dependent, and we address some fundamental issues for the man agement of transactions in the presence of such constraints. Our model for transaction-processing is based on extensions to established mod els, and we briefly outline how logical and temporal constraints may be ex pressed in it. For scheduling the transactions, we describe how legal schedules differ from one another in terms of meeting the temporal constraints. Exist ing scheduling mechanisms do not differentiate among legal schedules, and are thereby inadequate with regard to meeting temporal constraints. This provides the basis for seeking scheduling strategies that attempt to meet the temporal constraints while continuing to produce legal schedules."

Real World Speech Processing brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast-moving area. The contributors to this work were selected from the leading researchers and practitioners in this field.
The work, originally published as Volume 36, Numbers 2-3 of the Journal of VLSI Signal Processing Systems for Signal, Image, and Video Technology, will be valuable to anyone working or researching in the field of speech processing. It serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging issues being examined today.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security, SAFECOMP 2011, held in Naples, Italy, in September 2011. The 34 full papers presented together were carefully reviewed and selected from 100 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on RAM evaluation, complex systems dependability, formal verification, risk and hazard analysis, cybersecurity and optimization methods.

The advent of multimedia technology is creating a number of new problems in the fields of computer and communication systems. Perhaps the most important of these problems in communication, and certainly the most interesting, is that of designing networks to carry multimedia traffic, including digital audio and video, with acceptable quality. The main challenge in integrating the different services needed by the different types of traffic into the same network (an objective that is made worthwhile by its obvious economic advantages) is to satisfy the performance requirements of continuous media applications, as the quality of audio and video streams at the receiver can be guaranteed only if bounds on delay, delay jitters, bandwidth, and reliability are guaranteed by the network. Since such guarantees cannot be provided by traditional packet-switching technology, a number of researchers and research groups during the last several years have tried to meet the challenge by proposing new protocols or modifications of old ones, to make packet-switching networks capable of delivering audio and video with good quality while carrying all sorts of other traffic. The focus of this book is on HeiTS (the Heidelberg Transport System), and its contributions to integrated services network design. The HeiTS architecture is based on using the Internet Stream Protocol Version 2 (ST-II) at the network layer. The Heidelberg researchers were the first to implement ST-II. The author documents this activity in the book and provides thorough coverage of the improvements made to the protocol. The book also includes coverage of HeiTP as used in error handling, error control, congestion control, and the full specification of ST2+, a new version of ST-II. The ideas and techniques implemented by the Heidelberg group and their coverage in this volume apply to many other approaches to multimedia networking.

The two-volume set LNCS 6852/6853 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Euro-Par Conference held in Bordeaux, France, in August/September 2011.The 81 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 271 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on support tools and environments; performance prediction and evaluation; scheduling and load-balancing; high-performance architectures and compilers; parallel and distributed data management; grid, cluster and cloud computing; peer to peer computing; distributed systems and algorithms; parallel and distributed programming; parallel numerical algorithms; multicore and manycore programming; theory and algorithms for parallel computation; high performance networks and mobile ubiquitous computing.

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 refereed proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Multi-Agent-Based Simulation, MABS 2011, held in Taipei, Taiwan, in May 2011. The 10 revised selected and extended papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. The topics covered are MABS in scientometrics; MABS in politics, transit and policy; pedestrian, crowds and large scale MABS; and MABS modeling.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 24th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference on Testing Software and Systems, ICTSS 2012, held in Aalborg, Denmark, in November 2012. The 16 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited talks were carefully selected from 48 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on testing in practice, test frameworks for distributed systems, testing of embedded systems, test optimization, and new testing methods.

This two-volume set LNCS 6771 and 6772 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Symposium on Human Interface 2011, held in Orlando, FL, USA in July 2011 in the framework of the 14th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2011 with 10 other thematically similar conferences. The 137 revised papers presented in the two volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the thematic area of human interface and the management of information. The 75 papers of this first volume address the following major topics: design and development methods and tools; information and user interfaces design; visualisation techniques and applications; security and privacy; touch and gesture interfaces; adaption and personalisation; and measuring and recognising human behavior.

With the rapid growth of networking and high-computing power, the demand for large-scale and complex software systems has increased dramatically. Many of the software systems support or supplant human control of safety-critical systems such as flight control systems, space shuttle control systems, aircraft avionics control systems, robotics, patient monitoring systems, nuclear power plant control systems, and so on. Failure of safety-critical systems could result in great disasters and loss of human life. Therefore, software used for safety critical systems should preserve high assurance properties. In order to comply with high assurance properties, a safety-critical system often shares resources between multiple concurrently active computing agents and must meet rigid real-time constraints. However, concurrency and timing constraints make the development of a safety-critical system much more error prone and arduous. The correctness of software systems nowadays depends mainly on the work of testing and debugging. Testing and debugging involve the process of de tecting, locating, analyzing, isolating, and correcting suspected faults using the runtime information of a system. However, testing and debugging are not sufficient to prove the correctness of a safety-critical system. In contrast, static analysis is supported by formalisms to specify the system precisely. Formal verification methods are then applied to prove the logical correctness of the system with respect to the specification. Formal verifica tion gives us greater confidence that safety-critical systems meet the desired assurance properties in order to avoid disastrous consequences.

This volume contains a selection of papers that focus on the state-of the-art in formal specification and verification of real-time computing systems. Preliminary versions of these papers were presented at a workshop on the foundations of real-time computing sponsored by the Office of Naval Research in October, 1990 in Washington, D. C. A companion volume by the title Foundations of Real-Time Computing: Scheduling and Resource Management complements this hook by addressing many of the recently devised techniques and approaches for scheduling tasks and managing resources in real-time systems. Together, these two texts provide a comprehensive snapshot of current insights into the process of designing and building real time computing systems on a scientific basis. The notion of real-time system has alternative interpretations, not all of which are intended usages in this collection of papers. Different communities of researchers variously use the term real-time to refer to either very fast computing, or immediate on-line data acquisition, or deadline-driven computing. This text is concerned with the formal specification and verification of computer software and systems whose correct performance is dependent on carefully orchestrated interactions with time, e. g., meeting deadlines and synchronizing with clocks. Such systems have been enabled for a rapidly increasing set of diverse end-uses by the unremitting advances in computing power per constant-dollar cost and per constant-unit-volume of space. End use applications of real-time computers span a spectrum that includes transportation systems, robotics and manufacturing, aerospace and defense, industrial process control, and telecommunications."

Operating Systems and Services brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast moving area. Operating Systems and Services serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.

Almost 4 years have elapsed since Dr. Ken Sakamura of The University of Tokyo first proposed the TRON (the realtime operating system nucleus) concept and 18 months since the foundation of the TRON Association on 16 June 1986. Members of the Association from Japan and overseas currently exceed 80 corporations. The TRON concept, as advocated by Dr. Ken Sakamura, is concerned with the problem of interaction between man and the computer (the man-machine inter face), which had not previously been given a great deal of attention. Dr. Sakamura has gone back to basics to create a new and complete cultural environment relative to computers and envisage a role for computers which will truly benefit mankind. This concept has indeed caused a stir in the computer field. The scope of the research work involved was initially regarded as being so extensive and diverse that the completion of activities was scheduled for the 1990s. However, I am happy to note that the enthusiasm expressed by individuals and organizations both within and outside Japan has permitted acceleration of the research and development activities. It is to be hoped that the presentations of the Third TRON Project Symposium will further the progress toward the creation of a computer environment that will be compatible with the aspirations of mankind."

Powerful new technology has been made available to researchers by an increasingly competitive workstation market. Papers from Canada, Japan, Italy, Germany, and the U.S., to name a few of the countries represented in this volume, discuss how workstations are used in experiments and what impact this new technology will have on experiments. As usual for IFIP workshops, the emphasis in this volume is on the formulation of strategies for future research, the determination of new market areas, and the identification of new areas for workstation research. This is the first volume of a book series reporting the work of IFIP WG 5.10. The mission of this IFIP work- ing group is to promote, develop and encourage advancement of the field of computer graphics as a basic tool, as an enabling technology and as an important part of various application areas.

The International Workshop on "The Internet Challenge: Technology and Applications" is the fifth in a successful series of workshops that were established by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Technische Universitat Berlin. The goal of those workshops is to bring together researchers from both universities in order to exchange research results achieved in common projects of the two partner universities or to present interesting new work that might lead to new cooperation. The series of workshops started in 1990 with the "International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence" and was continued with the "International Workshop on Advanced Software Technology" in 1994. Both workshops have been hosted by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. In 1998 the third workshop took place in Berlin. This "International Workshop on Communication Based Systems" was essentially based on results from the Graduiertenkolleg on Communication Based systems that was funded by the German Research Society (DFG) from 1991 to 2000. The fourth "International Workshop on Robotics and its Applications" was held in Shanghai in 2000 supported by VDIIVDE-GMA and GI.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval, CMMR 2011 and the 20th International Symposium on Frontiers of Research in Speech and Music, FRSM 2011. This year the 2 conferences merged for the first time and were held in Bhubanes, India, in March 2011. The 17 revised full papers presented were specially reviewed and revised for inclusion in this proceedings volume. The book is divided in four main chapters which reflect the high quality of the sessions of CMMR 2011, the collaboration with FRSM 2011 and the Indian influence, in the topics of Indian Music, Music Information Retrieval, Sound analysis synthesis and perception and Speech processing of Indian languages.