It is my pleasure and privilege to write the foreword for this book, whose results I have been following and awaiting for the last few years. This monograph represents the outcome of an ambitious project oriented towards advancing our knowledge of the way the human visual system processes images, and about the way it combines high...

Knowledge of problem solving and programming concepts is necessary for those who develop applications for users. Unfortunately, many students have greater difficulty with problem solving than they do with the syntax of computer languages. The art of programming is learning multiple techniques and applying those techniques to specific...

Programmable logic controllers (PLCs) continue to evolve as new technologies are added to their capabilities. The PLC started out as a replacement for hardwired relay control systems. Gradually, various math and logic manipulation functions were added. Today PLCs are the controller of choice for the vast majority of automated...

Different kinds of objects containing data are found on the Internet, including structured (e.g., relational) databases, collections of documents, and search engines. On the one hand, creating, storing, manipulating, and retrieving Internet documents can benefit from techniques known from the databases and data modeling...

In the early 1990s, the establishment of the Internet brought forth a revolutionary viewpoint of information storage, distribution, and processing: the World-Wide Web is becoming an enormous and expanding distributed digital library. Along with the development of the Web, image indexing and retrieval have grown into research areas...

One of the most debated consequences regarding the increased availability and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially since the early 1990s, have been their impact on economic growth. Generally speaking, ICT can serve to reduce transaction costs at all levels of a commercial transaction. With the emergence...

The development of Hypertext Markup Language stopped in 1999 with its final version, n.4, made by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Technology, however, has not stood still in the meantime: the W3C also worked on interesting projects such as the generic Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) to XML, as well as on new markup...

This book is written for the “information worker” businessperson who already uses Microsoft Office applications such as Excel, Word, or Visio to accomplish his or her daily work. Today, information workers most often work in the collaboration environment of SharePoint, where their spreadsheets and documents are saved 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...

With the increasing focus on IT Security comes a higher demand for identity management in the modern business. This requires a flexible, scalable, and secure authentication method. Identity control is made mandatory by many public standards, such as PCI, and PKI is an essential component to set up authentication in many technologies,...

Traditional software verification algorithms work by using a combination of Floyd-Hoare Logics, Model Checking and Abstract Interpretation, to check and infer suitable program invariants. However, these techniques are problematic in the presence of complex but ubiquitous constructs like generic data structures, first-class functions....

This book is aimed at helping Oracle DBAs understand and use PeopleSoft technology. For the typical DBA, the introduction to PeopleSoft is likely to include some surprises, not all of them agreeable. Many—if not most—DBAs have to deal with many different databases, usually supporting different applications. Often they will want to...