The convergence of computing and communication has produced a society that feeds on information. Yet most of the information is in its raw form: data. If data is characterized as recorded facts, then information is the set of patterns, or expectations, that underlie the data. There is a huge amount of information locked up in...

Real time 3D games have been around for well over ten years now. We’ve played them, created assets in the style of our favorites, and maybe even “mod”ed a few of them. But until recently, the cost of licensing one of the premier game engines has ranged from several hundred thousand to several million dollars per title...

Progress in biology is dependent on the ability to observe, measure, and model the behavior of organisms at multiple levels of abstraction, from the microscopic to the macroscopic. There has been a tremendous growth recently in the techniques to probe the structure and workings of cellular and organ-level mechanisms. Significant advances have...

As depicted in David Lodge’s celebrated novel Small World, the perceived size of our world experienced a progressive decrease as jet airplanes became affordable to ever greater shares of the earth’s population. Yet, the really dramatic shrinking had to wait until the mid-1990s, when Internet became widespread and the information...

This book presents a comprehensive background to the technological challenges lying behind opportunistic routing. The...

Diseases of the pancreas have been extremely difficult to study. Until relatively recently, the pancreas was viewed by surgeons as an organ to be avoided, given its deep retroperitoneal location and the sometimes severe consequences of manipulation. Similar difficulties have plagued careful study of the pancreas. In humans, only inf- quently...