Technological advances in the last five years have allowed organizations to use Business Analytics to provide insights, increase understanding and it is hoped, gain the elusive 'competitive edge'. The rapid development of Business Analytics is impacting all enterprise competences profoundly and classical business professions are being redefined by a much deeper interplay between business and information systems.As computing capabilities for analysis has moved outside the IT glass-house and into the sphere of individual workers, they are no longer the exclusive domain of IT professionals but rather accessible to all employees. Complex open-source data analytics packages and client-level visualization tools deployed in desktops and laptops equip virtually any end-user with the instruments to carry out significant analytical tasks. All the while, the drive to improve 'customer experience' has heightened the demand for data involving customers, providers and entire ecosystems.In response to the proliferation of Business Analytics, a new Center and Masters of Science Program was introduced at the National University of Singapore (NUS). The Center collaborates with over 40 different external partner organizations in Asia-Pacific with which all MSBA students undertake individual projects. Business Analytics: Progress on Applications in Asia Pacific provides a useful picture of the maturity of the Business Analytics domain in Asia Pacific. For more information about the Business Analytics Center at NUS, visit the website at: msba.nus.edu/

Technological advances in the last five years have allowed organizations to use Business Analytics to provide insights, increase understanding and it is hoped, gain the elusive 'competitive edge'. The rapid development of Business Analytics is impacting all enterprise competences profoundly and classical business professions are being redefined by a much deeper interplay between business and information systems.As computing capabilities for analysis has moved outside the IT glass-house and into the sphere of individual workers, they are no longer the exclusive domain of IT professionals but rather accessible to all employees. Complex open-source data analytics packages and client-level visualization tools deployed in desktops and laptops equip virtually any end-user with the instruments to carry out significant analytical tasks. All the while, the drive to improve 'customer experience' has heightened the demand for data involving customers, providers and entire ecosystems.In response to the proliferation of Business Analytics, a new Center and Masters of Science Program was introduced at the National University of Singapore (NUS). The Center collaborates with over 40 different external partner organizations in Asia-Pacific with which all MSBA students undertake individual projects. Business Analytics: Progress on Applications in Asia Pacific provides a useful picture of the maturity of the Business Analytics domain in Asia Pacific. For more information about the Business Analytics Center at NUS, visit the website at: msba.nus.edu/

Image processing and machine vision are fields of renewed interest in the commercial market. People in industry, managers, and technical engineers are looking for new technologies to move into the market. Many of the most promising developments are taking place in the field of image processing and its applications. The book offers a broad coverage of advances in a range of topics in image processing and machine vision.

This book deals with novel machine vision architecture ideas that make real-time projection-based algorithms a reality. The design is founded on raster-mode processing, which is exploited in a powerful and flexible pipeline. We concern ourselves with several image analysis algorithms for computing: projections of gray-level images along linear patterns (i. e., the Radon transform) and other curved contours; convex hull approximations; the Hough transform for line and curve detection; diameters; moments and principal components, etc. Addition ally, we deal with an extensive list of key image processing tasks, which involve generating: discrete approximations of the inverse Radon transform operator; computer tomography reconstructions; two-dimensional convolutions; rotations and translations; multi-color digital masks; the discrete Fourier transform in polar coordinates; autocorrelations, etc. Both the image analysis and image processing algorithms are supported by a similar architecture. We will also of some of the above algorithms to the solution of demonstrate the applicability various industrial visual inspection problems. The algorithms and architectural ideas surveyed here unleash the power of the Radon and other non-linear transformations for machine vision applications. We provide fast methods to transform images into projection space representa tions and to backtrace projection-space information into the image domain. The novelty of this approach is that the above algorithms are suitable for implementa tion in a pipeline architecture. Specifically, random access memory and other dedicated hardware components which are necessary for implementation of clas sical techniques are not needed for our algorithms."

1.1 Background There are many paradigmatic statements in the literature claiming that this is the decade of parallel computation. A great deal of research is being de voted to developing architectures and algorithms for parallel machines with thousands, or even millions, of processors. Such massively parallel computers have been made feasible by advances in VLSI (very large scale integration) technology. In fact, a number of computers having over one thousand pro cessors are commercially available. Furthermore, it is reasonable to expect that as VLSI technology continues to improve, massively parallel computers will become increasingly affordable and common. However, despite the significant progress made in the field, many funda mental issues still remain unresolved. One of the most significant of these is the issue of a general purpose parallel architecture. There is currently a huge variety of parallel architectures that are either being built or proposed. The problem is whether a single parallel computer can perform efficiently on all computing applications."

Machine Vision technology is becoming an indispensible part of the manufacturing industry. Biomedical and scientific applications of machine vision and imaging are becoming more and more sophisticated, and new applications continue to emerge. This book gives an overview of ongoing research in machine vision and presents the key issues of scientific and practical interest. A selected board of experts from the US, Japan and Europe provides an insight into some of the latest work done on machine vision systems and appliccations.

Image processing and machine vision are fields of renewed interest in the commercial market. People in industry, managers, and technical engineers are looking for new technologies to move into the market. Many of the most promising developments are taking place in the field of image processing and its applications. The book offers a broad coverage of advances in a range of topics in image processing and machine vision.

Machine Vision technology is becoming an indispensible part of the manufacturing industry. Biomedical and scientific applications of machine vision and imaging are becoming more and more sophisticated, and new applications continue to emerge. This book gives an overview of ongoing research in machine vision and presents the key issues of scientific and practical interest. A selected board of experts from the US, Japan and Europe provides an insight into some of the latest work done on machine vision systems and appliccations.

At the initiative of the IBM Almaden Research Center and the National Science Foundation, a workshop on "Opportunities and Constraints of Parallel Computing" was held in San Jose, California, on December 5-6, 1988. The Steering Committee of the workshop consisted of Prof. R. Karp (University of California at Berkeley), Prof. L. Snyder (University of Washington at Seattle), and Dr. J. L. C. Sanz (IBM Almaden Research Center). This workshop was intended to provide a vehicle for interaction for people in the technical community actively engaged in research on parallel computing. One major focus of the workshop was massive parallelism, covering theory and models of computing, algorithm design and analysis, routing architectures and interconnection networks, languages, and application requirements. More conventional issues involving the design and use of parallel computers with a few dozen processors were not addressed at the meeting. A driving force behind the realization of this workshop was the need for interaction between theoreticians and practitioners of parallel computation. Therefore, a group of selected participants from the theory community was invited to attend, together with well-known colleagues actively involved in parallelism from national laboratories, government agencies, and industry.