Over the last few decades, energy minimization methods have become an established paradigm to resolve a variety of challenges in the fields of computer vision and pattern recognition. While traditional approaches to computer vision were often based on a heuristic sequence of processing steps and merely allowed a very limited...

This volume is based on the International Conference Logic at Work, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in December 1992. The 14 papers in this volume are selected from 86 submissions and 8 invited contributions and are all devoted to knowledge representation and reasoning under uncertainty, which are core issues of formal artificial...

This book is the revised and extended version of a Pfr.D. dissertation submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California at Berkeley. Many of the ideas presented in this book have their roots in discussions with Eugene Wong, my mentor and thesis advisor. I would like to thank Gene...

Beautiful mathematical ideas abound in multimedia software! Some are not encountered until late in undergraduate or even postgraduate study, whereas they can be appreciated and used much earlier. This book presents a few dozen such pearls, strung together by their ubiquity in many applications. It is based on the course Topics in...

The second, revised edition of this book covers all aspects of non-uniform rational B-splines necessary to design geometry in a computer-aided environment. Basic B-spline features, curve and surface algorithms, and state-of-the-art geometry tools are all discussed. Detailed code for design algorithms and computational tricks are covered, too,...

This Ph.D. dissertation presents the result of research carried out between 1985 and 1992, first at Leiden University as a scientific assistant researcher, and later at CWI (Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science), Amsterdam, as a researcher on the NFI IIICAD project, funded by NWO (Dutch Organization for Scientific Research)...

Pro SQL Server 2012 Practices is an anthology of high-end wisdom from a group of accomplished database administrators who are quietly but relentlessly pushing the performance and feature envelope of Microsoft SQL Server 2012. With an emphasis upon performance—but also branching into release...

Real selling is about understanding customers’ goals and helping them to buy, not topping off a template presentation with a pushy attitude. So...

SQL is the internationally recognized standard language for dealing with data in relational databases. Developed by IBM, SQL became an international standard in 1986. The standard was updated in 1989, 1992, 1999, 2003, and 2008. It continues to evolve and gain capability. Database vendors continually update their products to incorporate the...