This book constitutes thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the workshops of the 16th International Conference on Parallel Computing, Euro-Par 2010, held in Ischia, Italy, in August/September 2010. The papers of these 9 workshops HeteroPar, HPCC, HiBB, CoreGrid, UCHPC, HPCF, PROPER, CCPI, and VHPC focus on promotion and advancement of all aspects of parallel and distributed computing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Smart Homes and Health Telematics, ICOST 2011, held in Montreal, Canada, in June 2011. The 25 revised full papers presented together with 16 short papers and 8 student papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 94 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on smart home and village; health telematics and healthcare technology; wellbeing, ageing friendly and enabling technology; and medical health telematics and healthcare technology.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on GeoSpatial Semantics, GeoS 2011, held in Brest, France, in May 2011. The 13 papers presented together with 1 invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 23 submissions. The papers focus on formal and semantic approaches, time and activity-based patterns, ontologies, as well as quality, conflicts and semantic integration. They are organized in topical sections on ontologies and gazetteers, activity-based and temporal issues, models, quality and semantic similarities, and retrieval and discovery methods.

This book constitutes the joint refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Communication Technologies for Vehicles, Nets4Cars 2011and the First International Workshop on Communication Technologies for Vehicles in the Railway Transportation, Nets4Trains 2011, held in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, in March 2011. The 7 full papers of the rail track and 12 full papers of the road track presented together with a keynote were carefully reviewed and selected from 13 and 21 submissions respectively. They provide an overview over the latest technologies and research in the field of intra- and inter-vehicle communication and present original research results in areas relating to communication protocols and standards, mobility and traffic models, experimental and field operational testing, and performance analysis.

This book brings together the research of a number of researchers in the field of knoledge ceation and imparts a sense of order to that field.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the KR4HC 2010 workshop held at ECAI in Lisbon, Portugal, in August 2010. The 11 extended papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 19 submissions. The papers cover topics like ontologies, patient data, records, and guidelines, and clinical practice guidelines.

Innovation in Manufacturing Networks A fundamental concept of the emergent business, scientific and technological paradigms ces area, innovation the ability to apply new ideas to products, processes, organizational practices and business models - is crucial for the future competitiveness of organizations in a continually increasingly globalised, knowledge-intensive marketplace. Responsiveness, agility as well as the high performance of manufacturing systems is responsible for the recent changes in addition to the call for new approaches to achieve cost-effective responsiveness at all the levels of an enterprise. Moreover, creating appropriate frameworks for exploring the most effective synergies between human potential and automated systems represents an enormous challenge in terms of processes characterization, modelling, and the development of adequate support tools. The implementation and use of Automation Systems requires an ever increasing knowledge of enabling technologies and Business Practices. Moreover, the digital and networked world will surely trigger new business practices. In this context and in order to achieve the desired effective and efficiency performance levels, it is crucial to maintain a balance between both the technical aspects and the human and social aspects when developing and applying new innovations and innovative enabling technologies. BASYS conferences have been developed and organized so as to promote the development of balanced automation systems in an attempt to address the majority of the current open issues.

The papers in this volume comprise the refereed proceedings of the Second IFIP International Conference on Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture (CCTA2008), in Beijing, China, 2008. The conference on the Second IFIP International Conference on Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture (CCTA 2008) is cooperatively sponsored and organized by the China Agricultural University (CAU), the National Engineering Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture (NERCITA), the Chinese Society of Agricultural Engineering (CSAE) , International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), Beijing Society for Information Technology in Agriculture, China and Beijing Research Center for Agro-products Test and Farmland Inspection, China. The related departments of China's central government bodies like: Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Ministry of Education and the Beijing Municipal Natural Science Foundation, Beijing Academy of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences, etc. have greatly contributed and supported to this event. The conference is as good platform to bring together scientists and researchers, agronomists and information engineers, extension servers and entrepreneurs from a range of disciplines concerned with impact of Information technology for sustainable agriculture and rural development. The representatives of all the supporting organizations, a group of invited speakers, experts and researchers from more than 15 countries, such as: the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Germany, Greece, Australia, Estonia, Japan, Korea, India, Iran, Nigeria, Brazil, China, etc.

With the advent of portable and autonomous computing systems, power con sumption has emerged as a focal point in many research projects, commercial systems and DoD platforms. One current research initiative, which drew much attention to this area, is the Power Aware Computing and Communications (PAC/C) program sponsored by DARPA. Many of the chapters in this book include results from work that have been supported by the PACIC program. The performance of computer systems has been tremendously improving while the size and weight of such systems has been constantly shrinking. The capacities of batteries relative to their sizes and weights has been also improv ing but at a rate which is much slower than the rate of improvement in computer performance and the rate of shrinking in computer sizes. The relation between the power consumption of a computer system and it performance and size is a complex one which is very much dependent on the specific system and the technology used to build that system. We do not need a complex argument, however, to be convinced that energy and power, which is the rate of energy consumption, are becoming critical components in computer systems in gen eral, and portable and autonomous systems, in particular. Most of the early research on power consumption in computer systems ad dressed the issue of minimizing power in a given platform, which usually translates into minimizing energy consumption, and thus, longer battery life."

Behavioral Intervals in Embedded Software introduces a comprehensive approach to timing, power, and communication analysis of embedded software processes. Embedded software timing, power and communication are typically not unique but occur in intervals which result from data dependent behavior, environment timing and target system properties.
In system design, these intervals are used in many ways. In some cases, only the worst case is of interest, e.g. for single processor schedulability analysis, in another context both best and worst cases are relevant, such as for multiprocessor scheduling. In all these cases, these behavioral intervals of the individual software processes are fundamental data needed to analyze system behavior. With growing importance of embedded software, formal analysis of behavioral intervals has met increasing interest. Major contributions were the introduction of implicit path enumeration and the inclusion of cache analysis. While all approaches are conservative, i.e. all possible timing behavior (or communication, power consumption) is included in the resulting intervals, the main differences are in the architecture features that are covered by the hardware model and the width of the conservative interval. The closer this interval to the real timing bounds, the higher is the practical use of formal analysis.
The current analysis techniques leverage on previous work in compiler technology by using basic blocks as elementary units for architecture modeling and path analysis. The work presented here opens a new direction moving from basic block based analysis to an analysis based on larger program segments with a single execution path. Such program segments frequently extend over many basic blocks, in particular in embedded system applications.
The approach combines the generality and accuracy of formal analysis with the modeling precision of cycle true simulation without compromising formal completeness. The results show that with this combination of tracing and formal analysis both higher precision than previous approaches leading to tighter and more realistic intervals can be obtained and easier adaptation due to the use of standard off-the-shelf cache simulators, cycle-true processor models or evaluation boards is possible.
Behavioral Intervals in Embedded Software will be a useful reference for academics as well as research scientists who are active in the field of Design Automation and Embedded Systems.

The papers in this volume comprise the refereed proceedings of the Second IFIP International Conference on Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture (CCTA2008), in Beijing, China, 2008. The conference on the Second IFIP International Conference on Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture (CCTA 2008) is cooperatively sponsored and organized by the China Agricultural University (CAU), the National Engineering Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture (NERCITA), the Chinese Society of Agricultural Engineering (CSAE) , International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), Beijing Society for Information Technology in Agriculture, China and Beijing Research Center for Agro-products Test and Farmland Inspection, China. The related departments of China's central government bodies like: Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Ministry of Education and the Beijing Municipal Natural Science Foundation, Beijing Academy of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences, etc. have greatly contributed and supported to this event. The conference is as good platform to bring together scientists and researchers, agronomists and information engineers, extension servers and entrepreneurs from a range of disciplines concerned with impact of Information technology for sustainable agriculture and rural development. The representatives of all the supporting organizations, a group of invited speakers, experts and researchers from more than 15 countries, such as: the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Germany, Greece, Australia, Estonia, Japan, Korea, India, Iran, Nigeria, Brazil, China, etc.

Duration calculus constitutes a formal approach to the development of real-time systems; as an interval logic with special features for expressing and analyzing time durations of states in real-time systems, it allows for representing and formally reasoning about requirements and designs at an appropriate level of abstraction.

This book presents the logical foundations of duration calculus in a coherent and thorough manner. Through selective case studies it explains how duration calculus can be applied to the formal specification and verification of real-time systems. The book also contains an extensive survey of the current research in this field.

The material included in this book has been used for graduate and postgraduate courses, while it is also suitable for experienced researchers and professionals.

The main intention of this book is to give an impression of the state-of-the-art in system-level memory management (data transfer and storage) related issues for complex data-dominated real-time signal and data processing applications. The material is based on research at IMEC in this area in the period 1989- 1997. In order to deal with the stringent timing requirements and the data dominated characteristics of this domain, we have adopted a target architecture style and a systematic methodology to make the exploration and optimization of such systems feasible. Our approach is also very heavily application driven which is illustrated by several realistic demonstrators, partly used as red-thread examples in the book. Moreover, the book addresses only the steps above the traditional high-level synthesis (scheduling and allocation) or compilation (traditional or ILP oriented) tasks. The latter are mainly focussed on scalar or scalar stream operations and data where the internal structure of the complex data types is not exploited, in contrast to the approaches discussed here. The proposed methodologies are largely independent of the level of programmability in the data-path and controller so they are valuable for the realisation of both hardware and software systems. Our target domain consists of signal and data processing systems which deal with large amounts of data."

Many of the modern applications of microelectronics require hugeamounts of computations. Despite all recent improvements in fabrication technologies, some of these computations have to be performed in hardware in order to meet deadlines. However, controlling computations by software is frequently pre ferred due to the larger flexibility. Hence, in general, modern applications re quire a mix of software-based and hardware-based computations. Applications using this mix can be designed with the help of hardware/software co-design systems. Many such co-design systems have been described so far (references can be found in this book), but many of these are based on heuristics. In this book, Niemann describes a co-design system which is based on sound modeling techniques. This system has the following salient features: * Precise cost and performance figures Design decisions for implementing a certain function in hardware or software are based on 'cost and performance figures for the different design alterna tives. Hence, good designs can only be expected if these figures are accurate. In order to achieve excellent accuracy, Niemann takes a new approach: the cost of software implementations is derived from the data available about the target processors and from knowledge about the code size. the performance of software implement at ions is computed by compiling the given function and then using static analysis for computing worst case execution times. the cost of hardware implementation is estimated by running higher-Ievel synthesis tools. the performance of hardware implementations is again computed by us ing static analysis.

Ontology Managememt provides an up-to-date, scientifically correct, concise and easy-to-read reference on this topic. The book includes relevant tasks, practical and theoretical challenges, limitations and methodologies, plus available tooling support. The editors discuss integrating the conceptual and technical dimensions with a business view on using ontologies, stressing the cost dimension of ontology engineering and offering guidance on how to derive ontologies semi-automatically from existing standards and specifications.

The papers in this volume comprise the refereed proceedings of the the First International Conference on Computer and Computing Technologies in Ag- culture (CCTA 2007), in Wuyishan, China, 2007. This conference is organized by China Agricultural University, Chinese Society of Agricultural Engineering and the Beijing Society for Information Technology in Agriculture. The purpose of this conference is to facilitate the communication and cooperation between institutions and researchers on theories, methods and implementation of computer science and information technology. By researching information technology development and the - sources integration in rural areas in China, an innovative and effective approach is expected to be explored to promote the technology application to the development of modern agriculture and contribute to the construction of new countryside. The rapid development of information technology has induced substantial changes and impact on the development of China's rural areas. Western thoughts have exerted great impact on studies of Chinese information technology devel- ment and it helps more Chinese and western scholars to expand their studies in this academic and application area. Thus, this conference, with works by many prominent scholars, has covered computer science and technology and information development in China's rural areas; and probed into all the important issues and the newest research topics, such as Agricultural Decision Support System and Expert System, GIS, GPS, RS and Precision Farming, CT applications in Rural Area, Agricultural System Simulation, Evolutionary Computing, etc.

The papers in this volume comprise the refereed proceedings of the First Int- national Conference on Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture (CCTA 2007), in Wuyishan, China, 2007. This conference is organized by China Agricultural University, Chinese Society of Agricultural Engineering and the Beijing Society for Information Technology in Agriculture. The purpose of this conference is to facilitate the communication and cooperation between institutions and researchers on theories, methods and implementation of computer science and information technology. By researching information technology development and the - sources integration in rural areas in China, an innovative and effective approach is expected to be explored to promote the technology application to the development of modern agriculture and contribute to the construction of new countryside. The rapid development of information technology has induced substantial changes and impact on the development of China's rural areas. Western thoughts have exerted great impact on studies of Chinese information technology devel- ment and it helps more Chinese and western scholars to expand their studies in this academic and application area. Thus, this conference, with works by many prominent scholars, has covered computer science and technology and information development in China's rural areas; and probed into all the important issues and the newest research topics, such as Agricultural Decision Support System and Expert System, GIS, GPS, RS and Precision Farming, CT applications in Rural Area, Agricultural System Simulation, Evolutionary Computing, etc.

Integrated System-Level Modeling of Network-on-Chip Enabled Multi-Processor Platforms first gives a comprehensive update on recent developments in the area of SoC platforms and ESL design methodologies. The main contribution is the rigorous definition of a framework for modeling at the timing approximate level of abstraction. Subsequently this book presents a set of tools for the creation and exploration of timing approximate SoC platform models.

Avatars at Work and Play brings together contributions from leading social scientists and computer scientists who have conducted research on virtual environments used for collaboration and online gaming. They present a well-rounded and state-of-the-art overview of current applications of multi-user virtual environments, ranging from highly immersive virtual reality systems to internet-based virtual environments on personal computers. The volume is a follow-up to a previous essay collection, The Social Life of Avatars, which explored general issues in this field. This collection goes further, examining uses of shared virtual environments in practical settings such as scientific collaboration, distributed meetings, building models together, and others. It also covers online gaming in virtual environments, which has attracted hundreds of thousands of users and presents an opportunity for studying a myriad of social issues. Covering both work and play, the volume brings together issues common to the two areas, including:

What kind of avatar appearance is suitable for different kinds of interaction? How best to foster collaboration and promote usable shared virtual spaces? What kinds of activities work well in different types of virtual environments and systems?

Avatars at Work and Play will be required reading for computer scientists and social scientists who are researching and developing virtual worlds. It will be useful on courses in New Media and human-computer interaction"

Event-Triggered and Time-Triggered Control Paradigms presents a valuable survey about existing architectures for safety-critical applications and discusses the issues that must be considered when moving from a federated to an integrated architecture. The book focuses on one key topic - the amalgamation of the event-triggered and the time-triggered control paradigm into a coherent integrated architecture. The architecture provides for the integration of independent distributed application subsystems by introducing multi-criticality nodes and virtual networks of known temporal properties. The feasibility and the tangible advantages of this new architecture are demonstrated with practical examples taken from the automotive industry.

Event-Triggered and Time-Triggered Control Paradigms offers significant insights into the architecture and design of integrated embedded systems, both at the conceptual and at the practical level.

What is exactly "Safety"? A safety system should be defined as a system that will not endanger human life or the environment. A safety-critical system requires utmost care in their specification and design in order to avoid possible errors in their implementation that should result in unexpected system's behavior during his operating "life." An inappropriate method could lead to loss of life, and will almost certainly result in financial penalties in the long run, whether because of loss of business or because the imposition of fines. Risks of this kind are usually managed with the methods and tools of the "safety engineering." A life-critical system is designed to 9 lose less than one life per billion (10 ). Nowadays, computers are used at least an order of magnitude more in safety-critical applications compared to two decades ago. Increasingly electronic devices are being used in applications where their correct operation is vital to ensure the safety of the human life and the environment. These application ranging from the anti-lock braking systems (ABS) in automobiles, to the fly-by-wire aircrafts, to biomedical supports to the human care. Therefore, it is vital that electronic designers be aware of the safety implications of the systems they develop. State of the art electronic systems are increasingly adopting progr- mable devices for electronic applications on earthling system. In particular, the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices are becoming very interesting due to their characteristics in terms of performance, dimensions and cost.

Introduction The goal of this book is to introduce XML to a bioinformatics audience. It does so by introducing the fundamentals of XML, Document Type De?nitions (DTDs), XML Namespaces, XML Schema, and XML parsing, and illustrating these concepts with speci?c bioinformatics case studies. The book does not assume any previous knowledge of XML and is geared toward those who want a solid introduction to fundamental XML concepts. The book is divided into nine chapters: Chapter 1: Introduction to XML for Bioinformatics. This chapter provides an introduction to XML and describes the use of XML in biological data exchange. A bird's-eye view of our ?rst case study, the Distributed Annotation System (DAS), is provided and we examine a sample DAS XML document. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the pros and cons of using XML in bioinformatic applications. Chapter 2: Fundamentals of XML and BSML. This chapter introduces the fundamental concepts of XML and the Bioinformatic Sequence Markup Language (BSML). We explore the origins of XML, de?ne basic rules for XML document structure, and introduce XML Na- spaces. We also explore several sample BSML documents and visualize these documents in the TM Rescentris Genomic Workspace Viewer.

This book synthesizes the results of the seventh in a successful series of workshops that were established by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Technische Universitat Berlin, bringing together researchers from both universities in order to present research results to an international community. Aspects covered here include, among others, Models and specification; Simulation of different properties; Middleware for distributed real-time systems; Signal Analysis; Control methods; Applications in airborne and medical systems."

As computing devices proliferate, demand increases for an understanding of emerging computing paradigms and models based on natural phenomena. Neural networks, evolution-based models, quantum computing, and DNA-based computing and simulations are all a necessary part of modern computing analysis and systems development. Vast literature exists on these new paradigms and their implications for a wide array of applications.

This comprehensive handbook, the first of its kind to address the connection between nature-inspired and traditional computational paradigms, is a repository of case studies dealing with different problems in computing and solutions to these problems based on nature-inspired paradigms. The "Handbook of Nature-Inspired and Innovative Computing: Integrating Classical Models with Emerging Technologies" is an essential compilation of models, methods, and algorithms for researchers, professionals, and advanced-level students working in all areas of computer science, IT, biocomputing, and network engineering.

The term Wearable Technology encompasses a wide spectrum of devices, services and systems for wireless communications and the web. This book discusses characteristics and design elements required for wearable devices and systems to be embraced by the mainstream population for use in their everyday lives, introducing concepts such as Operational Inertia. The book discusses social and legal issues that may pose the greatest impediment to adoption of wearables. The book is structured to meet the needs of researchers and practitioners in industry, and can also be used as a secondary text in advanced-level courses in computer science and electrical engineering.