Managing Business Projects: The Essentials differs from many other project management textbooks. Foremost, it is about business projects as opposed to construction or engineering projects. Although many techniques, like schedule management, apply to both, they are usually applied differently. As its title conveys, the book explains the essential techniques and perspectives needed for business projects to be successful. The focus is on small- and medium-sized projects, up to $20 million, but often below $1 million. Some literature favors large and mega-projects, but for every mega-project, there are many thousands of smaller projects that are vital to the organization and could involve considerable complexity and risk. Nevertheless, the techniques outlined here also apply to mega-projects and their many subprojects; they even apply to some aspects of construction or engineering projects.

This book does not aim to cover all project management techniques. In real life there is simply no time for sophisticated ‘should-dos.' Rather, it covers the essentials that apply to almost all business projects; these are unlikely to change in the future even as technology and methodologies advance. The driving idea, which is stated repeatedly, is to do the essentials and to do them consistently and well.

Strong emphasis is placed on things that happen before, around, and after the project itself. So, while the basic disciplines like engaging with stakeholders, managing scope, schedules, costs, risks, issues, changes, and communication, are thoroughly explained, other important aspects are covered. These include: governance of a project and of a portfolio of projects, project selection with its financial and non-financial aspects, effective use of the business case through to benefits realization, procurement, outsourcing and partnership, and also the agile mindset that is valuable beyond Agile projects.

Besides project managers and sponsors, this book is intended for people who are working in business or government, at any level, or for MBA students. It offers perspectives that enable them to learn more from their everyday experience. It is not aimed at undergraduate students, although many would benefit from the contents.

Wireless Communication Networks Supported by Autonomous UAVs and Mobile Ground Robots covers wireless sensor networks and cellular networks. For wireless sensor networks, the book presents approaches using mobile robots or UAVs to collect sensory data from sensor nodes. For cellular networks, it discusses the approaches to using UAVs to work as aerial base stations to serve cellular users. In addition, the book covers the challenges involved in these two networks, existing approaches (e.g., how to use the public transportation vehicles to play the role of mobile sinks to collect sensory data from sensor nodes), and potential methods to address open questions.

Inclusive Radio Communication Networks for 5G and Beyond is based on the COST IRACON project that consists of 500 researchers from academia and industry, with 120 institutions from Europe, US and the Far East involved. The book presents state-of-the-art design and analysis methods for 5G (and beyond) radio communication networks, along with key challenges and issues related to the development of 5G networks. This book is Open Access and was funded by: CNIT - Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni European Association for Communications and Networking (EURACON), AISBL

Intelligent Image and Video Compression: Communicating Pictures, Second Edition explains the requirements, analysis, design and application of a modern video coding system. It draws on the authors' extensive academic and professional experience in this field to deliver a text that is algorithmically rigorous yet accessible, relevant to modern standards and practical. It builds on a thorough grounding in mathematical foundations and visual perception to demonstrate how modern image and video compression methods can be designed to meet the rate-quality performance levels demanded by today's applications and users, in the context of prevailing network constraints. "David Bull and Fan Zhang have written a timely and accessible book on the topic of image and video compression. Compression of visual signals is one of the great technological achievements of modern times, and has made possible the great successes of streaming and social media and digital cinema. Their book, Intelligent Image and Video Compression covers all the salient topics ranging over visual perception, information theory, bandpass transform theory, motion estimation and prediction, lossy and lossless compression, and of course the compression standards from MPEG (ranging from H.261 through the most modern H.266, or VVC) and the open standards VP9 and AV-1. The book is replete with clear explanations and figures, including color where appropriate, making it quite accessible and valuable to the advanced student as well as the expert practitioner. The book offers an excellent glossary and as a bonus, a set of tutorial problems. Highly recommended!" --Al Bovik

Each Student Book and ActiveBook have has clearly laid out pages with a range of supportive features to aid learning and teaching: Getting to know your unit sections ensure learners understand the grading criteria and unit requirements. Getting ready for Assessment sections focus on preparation for external assessment with guidance for learners on what to expect. Hints and tips will help them prepare for assessment and sample answers are provided for a range of question types including, short and long answer questions, all with a supporting commentary. Learners can also prepare for internal assessment using this feature. A case study of a learner completing the internal assessment for that unit covering 'How I got started', 'How I brought it all together' and 'What I got from the experience'. Pause Point feature provide opportunities for learners to self-evaluate their learning at regular intervals. Each Pause Point point feature gives learners a Hint or Extend option to either revisit and reinforce the topic or to encourage independent research or study skills. Case Study and Theory into Practice features enable development of problem-solving skills and place the theory into real life situations learners could encounter. Assessment Activity/Practice provide scaffolded assessment practice activities that help prepare learners for assessment. Within each assessment practice activity, a Plan, Do and Review section supports learners' formative assessment by making sure they fully understand what they are being asked to do, what their goals are and how to evaluate the task and consider how they could improve. Dedicated Think Future pages provide case studies from the industry, with a focus on aspects of skills development that can be put into practice in a real work environment and further study.

The key parameter that needs to be considered when planning the management of resources in futuristic wireless networks is a balanced approach to resource distribution. A balanced approach is necessary to provide an unbiased working environment for the distribution, sharing, allocation, and supply of resources among the devices of the wireless network. Equal resource distribution also maintains balance and stability between the operations of communication systems and thus improves the performance of wireless networks. Managing Resources for Futuristic Wireless Networks is a pivotal reference source that presents research related to the control and management of key parameters of bandwidth, spectrum sensing, channel selection, resource sharing, and task scheduling, which is necessary to ensure the efficient operation of wireless networks. Featuring topics that include vehicular ad-hoc networks, resource management, and the internet of things, this publication is ideal for professionals and researchers working in the field of networking, information and knowledge management, and communication sciences. Moreover, the book will provide insights and support executives concerned with the management of expertise, knowledge, information, and organizational development in different types of work communities and environments.

Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop describes the change from the current Internet, which focuses on the democratization of information independent of location or time, to the Tactile Internet, which democratizes skills to promote equity that is independent of age, gender, sociocultural background or physical limitations. The book promotes the concept of the Tactile Internet for remote closed-loop human-machine interaction and describes the main challenges and key technologies. Current standardization activities in the field for IEEE and IETF are also described, making this book an ideal resource for researchers, graduate students, and industry R&D engineers in communications engineering, electronic engineering, and computer engineering.

Computing in Communication Networks: From Theory to Practice provides comprehensive details and practical implementation tactics on the novel concepts and enabling technologies at the core of the paradigm shift from store and forward (dumb) to compute and forward (intelligent) in future communication networks and systems. The book explains how to create virtualized large scale testbeds using well-established open source software, such as Mininet and Docker. It shows how and where to place disruptive techniques, such as machine learning, compressed sensing, or network coding in a newly built testbed. In addition, it presents a comprehensive overview of current standardization activities. Specific chapters explore upcoming communication networks that support verticals in transportation, industry, construction, agriculture, health care and energy grids, underlying concepts, such as network slicing and mobile edge cloud, enabling technologies, such as SDN/NFV/ ICN, disruptive innovations, such as network coding, compressed sensing and machine learning, how to build a virtualized network infrastructure testbed on one's own computer, and more.

Wireless sensor networks have a range of applications, including military uses and in environmental monitoring. When an area of interest is inaccessible by conventional means, such a network can be deployed in ways resulting in a random distribution of the sensors. Randomly Deployed Wireless Sensor Networks offers a probabilistic method to model and analyze these networks. The book considers the network design, coverage, target detection, localization and tracking of sensors in randomly deployed wireless networks, and proposes a stochastic model. It quantifies the relationship between parameters of the network and its performance, and puts forward a communication protocol. The title provides analyses and formulas, giving engineering insight into randomly deployed wireless sensor networks. Five chapters consider the analysis of coverage performance; working modes and scheduling mechanisms; the relationship between sensor behavior and network performance properties; probabilistic forwarding routing protocols; localization methods for multiple targets and target number estimation; and experiments on target localization and tracking with a Mica sensor system.

Society's growing dependence on information technology for survival has elevated the importance of controlling and evaluating information systems. A sound plan for auditing information systems and the technology that supports them is a necessity for organizations to improve the IS benefits and allow the organization to manage the risks associated with technology. Auditing Information Systems gives a global vision of auditing and control, exposing the major techniques and methods. It provides guidelines for auditing the crucial areas of IT--databases, security, maintenance, quality, and communications.

4 zettabytes (4 billion terabytes) of data generated in 2013, 44 zettabytes predicted for 2020 and 185 zettabytes for 2025. These figures are staggering and perfectly illustrate this new era of data deluge. Data has become a major economic and social challenge. The speed of processing of these data is the weakest link in a computer system: the storage system. It is therefore crucial to optimize this operation. During the last decade, storage systems have experienced a major revolution: the advent of flash memory. Flash Memory Integration: Performance and Energy Issues contributes to a better understanding of these revolutions. The authors offer us an insight into the integration of flash memory in computer systems, their behavior in performance and in power consumption compared to traditional storage systems. The book also presents, in their entirety, various methods for measuring the performance and energy consumption of storage systems for embedded as well as desktop/server computer systems. We are invited on a journey to the memories of the future.

Autonomic networking aims to solve the mounting problems created by increasingly complex networks, by enabling devices and service-providers to decide, preferably without human intervention, what to do at any given moment, and ultimately to create self-managing networks that can interface with each other, adapting their behavior to provide the best service to the end-user in all situations. This book gives both an understanding and an assessment of the principles, methods and architectures in autonomous network management, as well as lessons learned from, the ongoing initiatives in the field. It includes contributions from industry groups at Orange Labs, Motorola, Ericsson, the ANA EU Project and leading universities. These groups all provide chapters examining the international research projects to which they are contributing, such as the EU Autonomic Network Architecture Project and Ambient Networks EU Project, reviewing current developments and demonstrating how autonomic management principles are used to define new architectures, models, protocols, and mechanisms for future network equipment.

This book gives a review of the principles, methods and techniques of important and emerging research topics and technologies in Channel Coding, including theory, algorithms, and applications. Edited by leading people in the field who, through their reputation, have been able to commission experts to write on a particular topic. With this reference source you will: Quickly grasp a new area of research Understand the underlying principles of a topic and its applications Ascertain how a topic relates to other areas and learn of the research issues yet to be resolved

Meeting People via WiFi and Bluetooth will contain an overview of how to track people using Wireless 802.11 Radio Frequencies (Wi-Fi) and Bluetooth 802.15 Radio Frequencies. The content contained here came from research and materials originally presented at Defcon Wireless CTF Village in August 2015 entitled "Meeting People Via Wi-Fi". The book will go over the hardware and software needed in order to do this tracking, how to use these particular tools in order to do attribution, and tips for protecting yourself from being attributed via those signals.

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are a popular form of network for data transfer due to the fact that they are dynamic, require no fixed infrastructure, and are scalable. However, MANETs are particularly susceptible to several different types of widely perpetrated cyberattack. One of the most common hacks aimed at MANETs is the Black Hole attack, in which a particular node within the network displays itself as having the shortest path for the node whose packets it wants to intercept. Once the packets are drawn to the Black Hole, they are then dropped instead of relayed, and the communication of the MANET is thereby disrupted, without knowledge of the other nodes in the network. Due to the sophistication of the Black Hole attack, there has been a lot of research conducted on how to detect it and prevent it. The authors of this short format title provide their research results on providing an effective solution to Black Hole attacks, including introduction of new MANET routing protocols that can be implemented in order to improve detection accuracy and network parameters such as total dropped packets, end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio, and routing request overhead.

This book presents a biographical history of the field of systems thinking, by examining the life and work of thirty of its major thinkers. It discusses each thinker's key contributions, the way this contribution was expressed in practice and the relationship between their life and ideas. This discussion is supported by an extract from the thinker's own writing, to give a flavour of their work and to give readers a sense of which thinkers are most relevant to their own interests.

Intelligent systems are required to enhance the capacities being made available to us by the internet and other computer based technologies. The theory necessary to help providing solutions to difficult problems in the construction of intelligent systems are discussed. In particular, attention is paid to situations in which the available information and data may be imprecise, uncertain, incomplete or of a linguistic nature. Various methodologies to manage such information are discussed. Among these are the probabilistic, possibilistic, fuzzy, logical, evidential and network-based frameworks.

One purpose of the book is not to consider these methodologies separately, but rather to consider how they can be used cooperatively to better represent the multiplicity of modes of information. Topics in the book include representation of imperfect knowledge, fundamental issues in uncertainty, reasoning, information retrieval, learning and mining, as well as various applications.

Key Features:

Tools for construction of intelligent systems
Contributions by world leading experts
Fundamental issues and applications
New technologies for web searching
Methods for modeling uncertain information
Future directions in web technologies
Transversal to methods and domains

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Since its birth in the late 1970s, the business recovery industry has continued to broaden, moving from original batch application processing on mainframes to include recovery for telecommunications connectivity, distributed processing on mid-range systems, and most recently, network and work area recovery. Whenever accidents, disasters and natural events interrupt business activities, one thing is certain: businesses lose money. How much money often depends on how prepared companies are for dealing with business interruptions. A Primer for Disaster Recovery Planning in an IT Environment is intended to help businesses plan for an occurrence that could mean a business stoppage. It helps you evaluate your business in terms of vulnerability to disaster and guides you through the process of creating a disaster recovery plan.

System administration is about the design, running and maintenance of human-computer systems. Examples of human-computer systems include business enterprises, service institutions and any extensive machinery that is operated by, or interacts with human beings. System administration is often thought of as the technological side of a system: the architecture, construction and optimization of the collaborating parts, but it also occasionally touches on softer factors such as user assistance (help desks), ethical considerations in deploying a system, and the larger implications of its design for others who come into contact with it.
This book summarizes the state of research and practice in this emerging field of network and system administration, in an anthology of chapters written by the top academics in the field. The authors include members of the IST-EMANICS Network of Excellence in Network Management.
This book will be a valuable reference work for researchers and senior system managers wanting to understand the essentials of system administration, whether in practical application of a data center or in the design of new systems and data centers.
- Covers data center planning and design
- Discusses configuration management
- Illustrates business modeling and system administration
- Provides the latest theoretical developments

Explores the full range of issues - moral, ethical, social, legal, and technological - involved in developing firm controls and best practices to secure the ever growing information infrastructure upon which societies and individuals depend.

XML in Data Management is for IT managers and technical staff involved in the creation, administration, or maintenance of a data management infrastructure that includes XML. For most IT staff, XML is either just a buzzword that is ignored or a silver bullet to be used in every nook and cranny of their organization. The truth is in between the two. This book provides the guidance necessary for data managers to make measured decisions about XML within their organizations. Readers will understand the uses of XML, its component architecture, its strategic implications, and how these apply to data management.
To view a sample chapter and read the Foreword by Thomas C. Redman, visit http: //books.elsevier.com/mk/?isbn=0120455994
* Takes a data-centric view of XML.
* Explains how, when, and why to apply XML to data management systems.
* Covers XML component architecture, data engineering, frameworks, metadata, legacy systems, and more.
* Discusses the various strengths and weaknesses of XML technologies in the context of organizational data management and integration.

In the age of increasing reliance on data and the importance of sensitive information, applications and technologies have arisen to appropriately deal with assuring the security of medical informatics and healthcare administration functions. In order for technology to progress, new systems are being installed globally to address this issue. Governance of Picture Archiving and Communications Systems: Data Security and Quality Management of Filmless Radiology examines information security management systems for the facilitation of picture archiving and communication systems (PACS). This valuable contribution to data security and quality management literature provides a comprehensive guide for all aspects of the implementation of PACS for the enhancement of modern practices in radiology.

As new technology continues to emerge, the training and education of learning new skills and strategies become important for professional development. Therefore, technology leadership plays a vital role for the use of technology in organizations by providing guidance in the many aspects of using technologies. Technology Integration and Foundations for Effective Leadership provides detailed information on the aspects of effective technology leadership, highlighting instructions on creating a technology plan as well as the successful integration of technology into the educational environment. This reference source aims to offer a sense of structure and basic information on designing, developing, and evaluating technology projects to ensure maximum success.

With the massive increase of data and traffic on the Internet within the 5G, IoT and smart cities frameworks, current network classification and analysis techniques are falling short. Novel approaches using machine learning algorithms are needed to cope with and manage real-world network traffic, including supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised classification techniques. Accurate and effective classification of network traffic will lead to better quality of service and more secure and manageable networks. This authored book investigates network traffic classification solutions by proposing transport-layer methods to achieve better run and operated enterprise-scale networks. The authors explore novel methods for enhancing network statistics at the transport layer, helping to identify optimal feature selection through a global optimization approach and providing automatic labelling for raw traffic through a SemTra framework to maintain provable privacy on information disclosure properties.

This resource discusses the management of complex technical projects through systems engineering. Written for a wide spectrum of readers, from novices to experienced practitioners, it explores solutions for delivering projects on time and within budget, avoiding the failures and inefficiencies of past efforts. It provides a framework that encapsulates all areas of systems engineering, showing where the multitude of systems engineering activities fit within the overall effort. The top-down approach introduces the reader to the philosophical aspects of this discipline, and offers an understanding of a plethora of important terms, standards and practices that have been developed independently. Moreover, the authors present key systems engineering issues in a manner that seeks to promote individual thinking and unique approaches to the various projects encountered in the field.