Cutting planes (cuts) are very popular in the OR community, where they are used to strengthen the Linear Programming (LP) relaxation of Mixed-Integer Programs (MIPs) in the hope of improving the performance of an exact LPbased solver. In particular, an intense research effort has been devoted to the study of families of general cuts,...

The availability of geographic and geo-spatial information and services, especially on the openWeb, has become abundant in the last several yearswith the proliferation of online maps, geo-coding services, geospatial Web services and geospatially enabled applications. Concurrently, the need for geo-spatial reasoning has significantly...

If you’re reading this book, chances are you’ve already downloaded the free Instagram app for your iPhone, have snapped a few photos on your own, and probably posted a handful as well. Maybe you have some followers, maybe you don’t... perhaps you’ve found a few interesting Instagram photographers to follow and have...

Computer vision seeks a process that starts with a noisy, ambiguous signal from a TV camera and ends with a high-level description of discrete objects located in 3-dimensional space and identified in a human classification. In this book we address this process at several levels. We first treat the low-level image-processing issues of...

This has been a very long journey. We found that writing this book was a challenging task, a much harder one than we had anticipated, but there were also moments of joy and discovery along the way! The idea for the book first came to us 18 months ago, and many days and nights have come and gone between the first sentence we wrote and...

Business process management (BPM) is an established research domain for computer science, information systems, and management scholars. The record number and wide scope of submissions to the eighth installation of the International Conference on Business Process Management was an indication of the vibrancy of the area and the varied...

Additives are added to food to perform different technological functions, for example, to increase shelf life (preservatives), or to protect against rancidity (antioxidants). The use of additives in food is controlled by separate legislation relating to, for example, colours in food, sweeteners, miscellaneous additives (other than...

In April 2009, one of the authors of this book, Thomas Meinl, was attending the World Wide Web conference in Madrid, Spain. There, he gave a talk, in which he presented the idea of Web service reservation via derivative mechanisms. During the following discussions, it became clear that for many researchers, practitioners and managers...

The area of pattern recognition and computer vision, after over 35 years of continued development, has now reached its maturity. The theories, techniques and algorithms are mostly well developed. There are a number of applications which are still being explored. New approaches motivated by applications and new computer architectures...

It was a real pleasure to have taken part in organizing the 10th International Conference on Cryptography and Network Security (CANS 2011). It was held during December 10–12, 2011, at the International Asia Pacific Convention Center in Sanya, on the subtropical island of Hainan (China). CANS 2011 was sponsored by the National...