Distributed Infrastructure Support For E-Commerce And Distributed Applications is organized in three parts. The first part constitutes an overview, a more detailed motivation of the problem context, and a tutorial-like introduction to middleware systems. The second part is comprised of a set of chapters that study solutions to leverage the trade-off between a transparent programming model and application-level enabled resource control. The third part of this book presents three detailed distributed application case studies and demonstrates how standard middleware platforms fail to adequately cope with resource control needs of the application designer in these three cases:
-An electronic commerce framework for software leasing over the World Wide Web;
-A remote building energy management system that has been experimentally deployed on several building sites;
-A wireless computing infrastructure for efficient data transfer to non-stationary mobile clients that have been experimentally validated.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed joint proceedings of the Third and Fourth Workshop on Big Data Benchmarking. The third WBDB was held in Xi'an, China, in July 2013 and the Fourth WBDB was held in San Jose, CA, USA, in October, 2013. The 15 papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 33 presentations. They focus on big data benchmarks; applications and scenarios; tools, systems and surveys.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed revised selected papers of the First Workshop on Big Data Benchmarks, WBDB 2012, held in San Jose, CA, USA, in May 2012 and the Second Workshop on Big Data Benchmarks, WBDB 2012, held in Pune, India, in December 2012.
The 14 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 60 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on benchmarking, foundations and tools; domain specific benchmarking; benchmarking hardware and end-to-end big data benchmarks.

Distributed Infrastructure Support For E-Commerce And Distributed Applications is organized in three parts. The first part constitutes an overview, a more detailed motivation of the problem context, and a tutorial-like introduction to middleware systems. The second part is comprised of a set of chapters that study solutions to leverage the trade-off between a transparent programming model and application-level enabled resource control. The third part of this book presents three detailed distributed application case studies and demonstrates how standard middleware platforms fail to adequately cope with resource control needs of the application designer in these three cases: -An electronic commerce framework for software leasing over the World Wide Web; -A remote building energy management system that has been experimentally deployed on several building sites; -A wireless computing infrastructure for efficient data transfer to non-stationary mobile clients that have been experimentally validated.

Symbolic processing has limitations highlighted by the symbol grounding problem. Computational processing methods, like fuzzy logic, neural networks, and statistical methods have appeared to overcome these problems. However, they also suffer from drawbacks in that, for example, multi-stage inference is difficult to implement. Deep fusion of symbolic and computational processing is expected to open a new paradigm for intelligent systems. Symbolic processing and computational processing should interact at all abstract or computational levels. For this undertaking, attempts to combine, hybridize, and fuse these processing methods should be thoroughly investigated and the direction of novel fusion approaches should be clarified. This book contains the current status of this attempt and also discusses future directions.

Middleware systems compriseprogrammingmodels, abstractions, protocols, and services to facilitate the design, the development, the integration, and the - ployment of distributed applications in heterogeneous computing environments. Conceptually, the term middleware refers to a layer of software above the networking substrate and the operating system and below the (distributed) application. In practice these boundaries are not clear cut, with middleware functionality moving into and out of these layers. Remote communication, p- lish/subscribe, messaging, and (distributed) transaction constitute examples of common middleware abstractions and services. Middleware researchencompasses, builds on and extends a wide spectrum of concepts, techniques and ideas from a broad range of ?elds, including progr- ming languages, distributed systems, operating systems, networking, and data management. Following the success of the past conferences in this series in the Lake D- trict, UK (1998), in Palisades, NY (2000), in Heidelberg, Germany (2001), and in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2003), the 5th International Middleware Conference in Toronto, Canada aimed to be the premier conference for middleware research and technology in 2004. The broad scope of the conference included the design, the implementation, the deployment, and the evaluation of distributed systems platforms and architectures for emerging computing environments. The conf- ence gave an overview of research on middleware for peer-to-peer computing, middleware for mobility, middleware for replication and transactions, on p- lish/subscribesystems, onroutingprotocolsandoverlaynetworks, onapplication servers, resource management, and software engineering, and on Web services. This year, the technical program of Middleware drew from 194 submitted papers, among which 13 were explicitly submitted as work-in-progress papers."