One of the principles to keep in mind when developing iPad and iPhone apps is designing for short bursts of activity. Think about how you use your own mobile device. Likely, you open an app, use it for a spell, and close it. This book is written using the same philosophy. Each chapter is bite-size, and exercises never span more than one...

Late in 2004 I received a telephone call from Hélène Potter, director of new product development for Macmillan Reference USA—an imprint of Gale. I did not realize immediately that it was the telephone call that would shape a large share of my intellectual activity for the next three years. In fact, I recall hearing about a...

FAST aims to foster cooperation among...

Progress in biology is dependent on the ability to observe, measure, and model the behavior of organisms at multiple levels of abstraction, from the microscopic to the macroscopic. There has been a tremendous growth recently in the techniques to probe the structure and workings of cellular and organ-level mechanisms. Significant advances have...

My first encounter with software configuration management was way back in the eighties while at university – and way before I knew that it was called software configuration management. We were doing a student project and were five people working on this group project. I was coding away, slipping into experiments that eventually took the...

As the demand for data and information management continues to grow, so does the need to maintain and improve the security of databases, applications, and information systems. In order to effectively protect this data against evolving threats, an up-to-date understanding of the mechanisms for securing semantic Web technologies is...

I first began developing social applications when Facebook opened up its developer platform in 2007, giving people like me a taste of the extensive social data that an application can use to improve growth and target personalization settings. At the time, I was building social fantasy sports applications for CBSSports.com, pulling user...

The rapid growth of the Web in the past two decades has made it the largest publicly accessible data source in the world. Web mining aims to discover useful information or knowledge from Web hyperlinks, page contents, and usage logs. Based on the primary kinds of data used in the mining process, Web mining tasks can be categorized...

The computer program exclusion from Article 52 of the European Patent Convention (EPC) proved impossible to uphold as industry moved over to digital technology, and the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Organisation (EPO) felt emboldened to circumvent the EPC in Vicom by creating the legal fiction of 'technical effect'. This...

Game playing is a powerful metaphor that fits many situations where interaction between autonomous agents plays a central role. Numerous tasks in computer science, such as design, synthesis, verification, testing, query evaluation, planning, etc. can be formulated in game-theoretic terms. Viewing them abstractly as games reveals the...