Today’s society is completely dependent on critical networks such as  water supply, sewage, electricity, ICT and transportation. Risk and vulnerability analyses are needed to grasp the impact of threats and hazards. However, these become quite complex as there are strong interdependencies both within and between infrastructure...

Word sense disambiguation is a core research problem in computational linguistics, which was recognized at the beginning of the scientific interest in machine translation and artificial intelligence. And yet no book has been fully devoted to review the wide variety of approaches to solving the problem. The time is right for such a...

Vast amounts of data are nowadays collected, stored and processed, in an effort to assist in  making a variety of administrative and governmental decisions. These innovative steps considerably improve the speed, effectiveness and quality of decisions. Analyses are increasingly performed by data mining and profiling technologies that...

The IT community has always struggled with questions concerning the value of an organization’s investment in software and hardware. It is the goal of value-based software engineering (VBSE) to develop models and measures of value which are of use for managers, developers and users as they make tradeoff decisions between, for example,...

This book analyzes the European Great Recession of 2008-12, its economic and social causes, its historical roots, and the policies adopted by the European Union to find a way out of it. It contains explicit debates with several economists and analysts on some of the most controversial questions about the causes of the crisis and the policies...

The differential application of skin protection in occupational settings becomes increasingly complex. Due to new scientific results and technological aspects as well as European and US regulations that have to be considered in the context of cosmetics and personal protective equipment, the practical application of skin protection requires...

Recently, criterion functions based on information theoretic measures (entropy, mutual information, information divergence) have attracted attention and become an emerging area of study in signal processing and system identification domain. This book presents a systematic framework for system identification and information processing,...

Risk control, capital allocation, and realistic derivative pricing and hedging are critical concerns for major financial institutions and individual traders alike. Events from the collapse of Lehman Brothers to the Greek sovereign debt crisis demonstrate the urgent and abiding need for statistical tools...