From feng shui to holistic medicine, from aromatherapy candles to yoga weekends, from Christian mystics to New Age gurus, spirituality is big business. There has been an explosion of interest and popular literature on mind, body and spirit and ‘personal development’. We now see the introduction of modes of ‘spirituality’...

Energy and environmental issues have caused a marked increase in electricity production from renewable energy sources since the beginning of the 21st Century. The concept of sustainable development and concern for future generations challenge us every day to produce new technologies for energy production, and new patterns of use for these...

Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of artificial intelligence as a serious science and engineering discipline. Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents is a textbook aimed at junior to senior undergraduate students and first-year graduate students. It presents artificial intelligence (AI) using a coherent...

The next several years will see a massive emergence of hydrogen fuel cells as an alterative energy option in both transportation and domestic use. The long-range expectation is that hydrogen will be used as a fuel, produced either from renewable energy, fossil, or nuclear sources, offering an environmentally acceptable and efficient source of...

The emergence of key second-generation Web services standards has positioned service-oriented architecture (SOA) as the foremost platform for contemporary business automation solutions. The integration of SOA...

The IT community has always struggled with questions concerning the value of an organization’s investment in software and hardware. It is the goal of value-based software engineering (VBSE) to develop models and measures of value which are of use for managers, developers and users as they make tradeoff decisions between, for example,...

Both the editors of this book were exposed to human-in-the-loop simulations while pursuing their doctoral degrees in the Center for Human-Machine Systems at Georgia Tech. In fact, S. Narayanan served as Ling Rothrock’s teaching assistant for the simulation course taught by Prof. Christine Mitchell. It has been over 15 years...

This book is about how to model software systems and how to use those models. It is rooted in that emerging intellectual "ecosystem" comprising the various networks (the Internet, intranets, extranets, and so on), distributed objects, piecemeal development based on short development cycles, and something called...