As night settled on April 20, 2010, a series of explosions rocked Deepwater Horizon, the immense semisubmersible drilling platform leased by British Petroleum, located 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. The ensuing inferno claimed 11 lives, and it would rage uncontained for two days, until its wreckage sank to a final resting place nearly a...

My interest in this subject started when I joined the broadcast equipment manufacturer, Chyron. For a few years I was the product manager for their playout automation and asset management product lines. These were one of the first applications that gave television broadcasters the means to manage the ingest, storage, archiving, and...

Simulation is an essential tool in any field related to engineering techniques, whether it is used lor teaching purposes or in research and development. When teaching technical subjects, lab works play an important role, as im portant as exercise sessions in helping students assimilate theory. The recent introduction of simulation...

Data mining and knowledge discovery can today be considered as stable fields with numerous efficient methods and studies that have been proposed to extract knowledge from data. Nevertheless, the famous golden nugget is still challenging. Actually, the context evolved since the first definition of the KDD process and knowledge has now...

Back in 1997, when I began my career as a professional web developer, I started working with Classic ASP. After a brief training period in a few different programming languages such as C++ and Java, I was thrown in at the deep end and assigned to a project to build an Intranet application for a large consultancy firm in the Netherlands...

In the last 15 years, some of us have witnessed mail becoming e-mail, grocery stores becoming www.store, and step-by-step technology becoming part of our daily life. Technology development has radically changed the enterprise's way of doing business. First, daily tasks such as sales, client, and vendor management became...

Ever since I spotted and started reading my first computer book in 1981, I knew Information Technology (IT) was going to be an important part of my life. I feel privileged to have been able to make a career out of something I enjoy, and the fact that it changes on what seems to be a monthly basis means it never gets boring. It still...

Which of these fields are involved in robotics? You may choose from the following: engineering, electronics, psychology, sociology, biology, physics, artificial intelligence, math, art, mechanical design, mechanical construction, computer programming, sound synthesis, vision, ultrasonics, linguistics, microelectronics, process control,...

In several practical circumstances we have to solve a problem whose instance is not a priori completely known. Situations of this kind occur in computer systems and networks management, in financial decision making, in robotics etc. Problems that have to be solved without a complete knowledge of the instance are called on-line...

CPUs are now scaling horizontally, adding more and more...

I can tell you how much I enjoy being a geek. I can tell you how fascinated I was with the punch-cards my dad showed me back in 1985. I can tell you how I got my first computer when I was seven. And I can tell you that I’ve loved programming since 1989. I can tell you a great many things about all that, but I’m not sure how...

Cutting planes (cuts) are very popular in the OR community, where they are used to strengthen the Linear Programming (LP) relaxation of Mixed-Integer Programs (MIPs) in the hope of improving the performance of an exact LPbased solver. In particular, an intense research effort has been devoted to the study of families of general cuts,...