If you’re an application programmer you’ve probably run into a relational database at some point in your professional career. Whether you’re writing enterprise client-server applications or building the next Web 2.0 killer application, you need someplace to put the persistent data for your application, and relational...

Algebraic geometry has found fascinating applications to coding theory and cryptography in the last few decades. This book aims to provide the necessary theoretical background for reading the contemporary literature on these applications. An aspect that we emphasize, as it is very useful for the applications, is the interplay between...

Object tracking is a broad and important fi eld in computer science, addressing the most different applications in the educational, entertainment, industrial, and manufacturing areas. Since the early days of computer vision, the state of the art of visual object tracking has evolved greatly, along with the available imaging devices...

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If you’re already on Facebook, you’ve probably received dozens of invitations to play FarmVille from some of the game’s more than 50 million active players, complete with cryptic messages about sharing carrots; adopting lost, lonely animals; and hatching golden Mystery Eggs. Even if you aren’t on Facebook,...

MATLAB is an abbreviation for MATrix LABoratory and it is ideally suited for computations involving matrices. Since all of the sciences routinely collect data in the form of (spreadsheet) matrices, MATLAB turns out to be particularly suitable for the analysis of mathematical problems in an assortment of fields. MATLAB is very easy to...

This book covers the organization, design, and architecture of computers. Architecture is the ‘‘art or science of building; a method or style of building,’’ according to Webster’s. A computer architect develops the functional and performance specifications for the various blocks of a computer system and...

Audit and Trace Log Management: Consolidation and Analysis is both a timely and much needed compilation of useful information around a topic that is becoming more and more critical to not only IT professionals and security practitioners, but to many other departments, such as legal, risk, and compliance, as well as auditors and...

Cloud computing has recently emerged as one of the buzzwords in the ICT industry. Numerous IT vendors are promising to offer computation, storage, and application hosting services and to provide coverage in several continents, offering service-level agreements (SLA)-backed performance and uptime promises for their services. While...

There are many examples of the amazing evolutionary adaptations in the animal kingdom that aid survival, but the ability of animals to hibernate is one of the most incredible. Most vertebrates must keep warm, because hypothermia or loss of body heat is potentially fatal, but some have evolved to withstand a massive drop in...