In these Messenger Lectures, originally delivered at Cornell University and recorded for television by the BBC, Richard Feynman offers an overview of selected physical laws and gathers their common features into one broad principle of invariance. He maintains at the outset that the importance of a physical law is not "how clever...

Robotics: Science and Systems V spans a wide spectrum of robotics, bringing together researchers working on the foundations of robotics, robotics applications, and the analysis of robotics systems. This volume presents the proceedings of the fifth annual Robotics: Science and Systems conference, held in 2009 at the University of...

The Internet's remarkable growth has been fueled by innovation. New applications continually enable new ways of using the Internet, and new physical networking technologies increase the range of networks over which the Internet can run. Questions about the relationship between innovation and the Internet's architecture have shaped the...

Political scientists have long been concerned about the tension between institutional fragmentation and policy coordination in the United States bureaucracy. The literature is rife with examples of agencies competing with each other or asserting their independence, while cooperation is relatively rare. This is of particular importance in...

Protocells offers a comprehensive resource on current attempts to create simple forms of life from scratch in the laboratory. These minimal versions of cells, known as protocells, are entities with lifelike properties created from nonliving materials, and the book provides in-depth investigations of processes at the interface between...

The complex social behaviors of ants have been much studied by science, and computer scientists are now finding that these behavior patterns can provide models for solving difficult combinatorial optimization problems. The attempt to develop algorithms inspired by one aspect of ant behavior, the ability to find what computer scientists would...

Vector Models for Data-Parallel Computing describes a model of parallelism that extends and formalizes the Data-Parallel model on which the Connection Machine and other supercomputers are based. It presents many algorithms based on the model, ranging from graph algorithms to numerical algorithms, and argues that data-parallel models...

Winner, 2009 Sally Hacker Prize given by the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). and Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2006

Technology matters, writes David Nye, because it is inseparable from being human. We have used tools for more than 100,000 years, and their central purpose has not always been to...

The aim of this book is to present the collective expertise of the neuromorphic engineering community. It presents the central concepts required for creative and successful design of analog very-large-scale-integrated (VLSI) circuits. The book could support teaching courses, and provides an efficient introduction to new practitioners who have...

Tracing a journey from the 1950s through the 1990s, N. Katherine Hayles uses the autobiographical persona of Kaye to explore how literature has transformed itself from inscriptions rendered as the flat durable marks of print to the dynamic images of CRT screens, from verbal texts to the diverse sensory modalities of multimedia works, from...

Some books on algorithms are rigorous but incomplete; others cover masses of material but lack rigor. Introduction to Algorithms uniquely combines rigor and comprehensiveness. The book covers a broad range of algorithms in depth, yet makes their design and analysis accessible to all levels of readers. Each chapter is relatively...

The Semantic Web is the realization of an aspect of the Web that was part of the original hopes and dreams of 1989, but whose development has, until now, taken a back seat to the Web of multimedia human-readable material. Even though at the first WWW conference, in 1994, I ended my talk with a few slides about the Semantic Web, the steps...