Since the first part of the twentieth century, cybernetics and systems research have been developed as scientific disciplines. Investigations, launched in the area of cybernetics, previously dealt with control and information processing. In a more narrow sense, they consisted in the consideration of analogies of the control and the...

A constraint is a restriction on a space of possibilities; it is a piece of knowledge that narrows the scope of this space. Because constraints arise naturally in most areas of human endeavor, they are the most general means for formulating regularities that govern our computational, physical, biological, and social worlds. Some...

The field of machine perception concerns the building of machines that sense and interpret their environments. This book is about visual perception. Potential applications for such systems include tasks such as automation of industrial processes of inspection and assembly, automated medical x-ray diagnosis, vehicle guidance and...

Researchers in Artificial Intelligence have traditionally been classified into two categories: the “neaties” and the “scruffies”. According to the scruffies, the neaties concentrate on building elegant formal frameworks, whose properties are beautifully expressed by means of definitions, lemmas, and theorems, but...

Textbook surgical education usually follows a predictable format involving fairly in-depth descriptions of various pathologic conditions including etiology, pathophysiology, symptomatology, diagnostic procedures, conservative management, and surgical treatment. Although there is variation in the emphasis different books place on each...

This book provides a general introduction to Bayesian networks,...