The goal of this book is to provide an overview of the current state of knowledge of educational data mining (EDM). The primary goal of EDM is to use large-scale educational data sets to better understand learning and to provide information about the learning process. Although researchers have been studying human learning for over a...

This book is meant for research scholars, scientists and practitioners involved with the application of computer-based systems in critical applications. Ensuring dependability of systems used in critical applications is important due to the impact of their failures on human life, investment and environment. The individual aspects of...

A major part of natural language processing now depends on the use of text data to build linguistic analyzers. We consider statistical, computational approaches to modeling linguistic structure. We seek to unify across many approaches and many kinds of linguistic structures. Assuming a basic understanding of natural language processing and/or...

A constraint is a restriction on a space of possibilities; it is a piece of knowledge that narrows the scope of this space. Because constraints arise naturally in most areas of human endeavor, they are the most general means for formulating regularities that govern our computational, physical, biological, and social worlds. Some...

The analysis of experimental data is at heart of science from its beginnings. But it was the advent of digital computers in the second half of the 20th century that revolutionized scientific data analysis twofold: Tedious pencil and paper work could be successively transferred to the emerging software applications so sweat and tears...

The compiler is one of the most important aspects of system software. When any computer user develops a computer program, one must use some programming language, rather than using a computer instruction set. This implies that there must be the compiler of the programming language that has been installed on the computer one uses, and...

This unique event aims at bringing together researchers from software engineering and security engineering, which might help to unite and further develop the two communities in this and future...

This monograph on Security in Computing Systems: Challenges, Approaches and Solutions aims at introducing, surveying and assessing the fundamentals of secu rity with respect to computing. Here, “computing” refers to all activities which individuals or groups directly or indirectly perform by means of computing sys tems,...

The book reviews the principles of air quality assessment and management; primary sources of air pollution; air pollution effects on...

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,...

Image synthesis, or rendering, is a field of transformation: it changes geometry and physics into meaningful images. Because the most popular algorithms frequently change, it is increasingly important for researchers and implementors to have a basic understanding of the principles of image synthesis. Focusing on theory, Andrew...

Information networking has emerged as a multidisciplinary diversified area of research over the past few decades. From traditional wired telephony to cellular voice telephony and from wired access to wireless access to the Internet, information networks have profoundly impacted our lifestyle. At the time of writing, over 3 billion...