Optimization is an integral part to science and engineering. Most real-world applications involve complex optimization processes, which are difficult to solve without advanced computational tools. With the increasing challenges of fulfilling optimization goals of current applications there is a strong drive to advance the development of...

Being the de-facto standard for data representation and exchange over the Web, XML (Extensible Markup Language) allows the easy development of applications that exchange data over the Web. This creates a set of data management requirements involving XML. XML and related standards have been extensively applied in many business, service, and...

IN TRADITIONAL COMPUTER GRAPHICS, 3D objects are created using highlevel surface representations such as polygonal meshes, NURBS (nonuniform rational B-spline) patches, or subdivision surfaces. Using this modeling paradigm, visual properties of surfaces, such as color, roughness, and reflectance, are described by means of a shading...

Soft computing, as a collection of techniques exploiting approximation and tolerance for imprecision and uncertainty in traditionally intractable problems, has become very effective and popular especially because of the synergy derived from its components. The integration of constituent technologies provides complementary methods that allow...

Data mining has developed rapidly and has become very popular in the past two decades, but actually has its origin in the early stages of IT, then being mostly limited to one-dimensional searching in databases. The statistical basis of what is now also referred to as data mining has often been laid centuries ago. In corporate...

Recognizing patterns is at the core of man's attempts to understand the universe that we inhabit. Through the development of sensors and instruments, we have extended our ability to gather data far beyond the range and scale of man's natural senses. As a result we are now able to gather data on phenomena occurring in the far reaches...

What’s this book all about? Well, it’s about how to develop software, from a personal perspective. We’ll look at what it means for you to take a problem and produce a program to solve it from beginning to end. That said, this book focuses a lot on design. How do you design software? What things do you take into...

Computational intelligence is a fast-moving, multidisciplinary field - the nexus of diverse technical interest areas that include neural networks, fuzzy logic, and evolutionary computation. Keeping up with computational intelligence means understanding...

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...

Anybody following the discussions around “Web Services” in recent years is aware of the fuzzy definition of the term, and a little bit of history can quite easily explain some of the confusions around current terminology (or use of terminology). The general idea of using Web technologies to not only deliver Web pages (HTML...

With ever increasing frequency, financial studies in business are acquiring greater importance in the field of management as a consequence of the complexity of the problems arising in present day society. The old treaties that included certain aspects on the raising and placing of payment means have been relegated to history, leaving the way...

In the early days of pattern recognition and statistical data analysis life was rather simple: datasets were relatively small, collected from well-designed experiments, analyzed using a few methods that had good theoretical background. Explosive growth of the use of computers led to the creation of huge amounts of data of all kinds,...