Moodle is the leading open source learning management system. Using Moodle, teachers can easily construct richly-textured web-based courses. A course can consist of a number of lessons, with each lesson including reading materials; activities such as quizzes, tests, surveys, and projects; and social elements that encourage interaction and...

The IBM Vienna Laboratory has made a significant contribution to the work on the semantic description of computer systems. Both the operational semantics descriptions ("VDL") and the later work on denotational semantics ("Meta-IV", "VEM") contain interesting scientific ideas. Partly because of the large...

In the last three decades, machine learning research and practice have focused on batch learning usually using small datasets. In batch learning, the whole training data is available to the algorithm, which outputs a decision model after processing the data eventually (or most of the times) multiple times. The rationale behind this...

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, or PHP, is an open source programming language that is used for developing interactive Web sites. More specifi cally, PHP is a scripting language that is executed from a Web server. Created in 1995, PHP is one of the fastest-growing programming languages today. Th e TIOBE Programming Community Index1...

Visual Studio 2010 is an exciting version for the Visual Basic language, which reaches a double digit version in Visual Basic 10. This is a phenomenal achievement for a programming language, and it demonstrates the enormous utility that the language continues to provide, year after year. Visual Basic has always been a premier tool for...

Embedded computer systems are electronic systems that include a microcomputer to perform specific dedicated tasks. The computer is hidden inside these products. Embedded systems are ubiquitous. Every week millions of tiny computer chips come pouring out of factories like Freescale, Microchip, Philips, Texas Instruments, Silicon Labs,...

This book presents a wide-spectrum illustration of what research in Information Retrieval has produced or will produce in the next years. The book content includes chapters on Aggregated Search, Digital Advertising, Digital Libraries, Discovery of Spam and Opinions in the Web, Evaluation, Information Retrieval in Context, Multimedia...

RATHER THAN SIMPLY REPLACING PHONES and instant messages, Microsoft Lync, Microsoft ’ s Unifi ed Communications platform, makes communicating in completely new ways possible. Lync users can see whether a contact is available and where he or she is located before reaching out. After a user has decided to contact someone, he can...

AutoCAD, developed by Autodesk Inc., is the most popular PC-CAD system available in the market. Today, over 7 million people use AutoCAD and other AutoCAD based design products. 100% of the Fortune 100 firms are Autodesk customers and 98% of the Fortune 500 firms are Autodesk customers. AutoCAD’s open architecture has allowed...

As I look back on my career at Microsoft, I feel fortunate to have had a front-row seat to witness an incredible shift in how people and organizations communicate and interact. I started at Microsoft in October 1994—about a year after America Online released AOL 1.0 for Windows. As early adopters of social media,...

More than 50 years ago when I was studying to become an electrical engineer, I came across complex numbers, which were used to represent out-of-phase voltages and currents using the j operator. I believe that the letter j was used, rather than i, because the latter stood for electrical current. So from the very start of my studies I...

pfSense is an open source distribution of FreeBSD-based firewall which provides a platform for flexible and powerful routing and firewalling. The versatility of pfSense presents us with a wide array of configuration options which, compared to other offerings, makes determining requirements a little more difficult and a lot more important....