This book is intended...

In the first edition of this book, we focused on what we called the "High Availability Database Administrator." However, that term led G to the question of just what is meant by High Availability? As a term bandied about among database administrators, this can have different meanings depending on who is interpreting it, who has to...

The book presents a much needed approach to quality technical communication and a working plan for achieving quality. The examples are excellent and are easy to use and adapt. The editorial advice is simple and clear enough for tech writers who did not major in English or journalism. It is most worthy of a text in university programs, but it...

You are holding the first comprehensive book covering the Oracle Exadata Database Machine. You might be holding this book because of your desire to know more about exactly what this technology can do for you, but you and your fellow readers have come to this place from different starting points. You could be investigating the Exadata...

The third volume of the Handbook on Computer Vision and Applications is centered on system aspects and applications. The system aspect actually has two meanings. First, there is the question of how all components that make up a computer vision system and that have been discussed in the rst two volumes of the handbook are put together...

I hate management books. I do. People give them to me all the time saying: “You should read this one, it changed my life!” These books are all about 150 pages. They have 14 point type, double-spaced. They have lots of pictures. They have titles like: Open Locker Management, Management by not Managing, First Clean All The...

This...

This is the first comprehensive introduction to Support Vector Machines (SVMs), a new generation learning system based on recent advances in statistical learning theory. SVMs deliver state-of-the-art performance in real-world applications such as text categorisation, hand-written character recognition, image classification, biosequences...

Every organization, no matter what the business involved, to achieve efficiency needs efficient people working for them. For a long time now, operating systems and applications have represented important tools in the work of these people and organizations. And if we are not capable of providing users with the proper tools, gaining an...

A FEW YEARS AGO some students and I were looking at a map that pinpointed the locations of about loo cities. We asked ourselves, "Which of these cities are neighbors of each other?" We knew intuitively that some pairs of cities were neighbors and others were not; we wanted to find a formal mathematical characterization that...

The typical computational approach to object understanding derives shape information from the 2D outline of the objects. For complex object structures, however, such a planar approach cannot determine object shape; the structural edges have to be encoded in terms of their full 3D spatial configuration. Computer Vision: From Surfaces...