I knew the Internet before it got famous. There were places but no paths, no maps, no search engines. Entry required a key in the form of an IP address and an incantation in the language of UNIX. It was a small world that felt big because it was so easy to get lost in the shadowy realm of texts and data, completely devoid of color....

QoS, short for "quality of service," is one of the most important goals a network designer or administrator will have. Ensuring that the network runs at optimal precision with data remaining accurate, traveling fast, and to the correct user are the main objectives of QoS. The various media that fly across the network including...

The classic definition of realism has been veridical realism. Does the picture pass the comparison test? That is, would an...

The practice of compiler construction changes continually, in part because the designs of processors and systems change. For example, when we began to write Engineering a Compiler (eac) in 1998, some of our colleagues questioned the wisdom of including a chapter on instruction scheduling because out-of-order execution threatened to make...

An API presents a...

A course in computer programming provides the typical student's first exposure to the field of computer science. Most students in such a course will have used computers all their lives, for email, games, web browsing, word processing, social networking, and a host of other tasks, but it is not until they write their first programs that...

What will data management technologies look like in ten years? While the future's difficult to predict, this book provides students, researchers and professionals alike with a brief and engaging look at one prescient trend: the convergence of search and database technologies. This convergence has given rise to a new breed of...

We believe that learning in computer science and engineering should reflect the current state of the field, as well as introduce the principles that are shaping computing. We also feel that readers in every specialty of computing need to appreciate the organizational paradigms that determine the capabilities, performance, and,...

Human computation is a new and evolving research area that centers around harnessing human intelligence to solve computational problems that are beyond the scope of existing Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms. With the growth of the Web, human computation systems can now leverage the abilities of an unprecedented number of people via the...

Cooperative network supercomputing is becoming increasingly popular for harnessing the power of the global Internet computing platform. A typical Internet supercomputer consists of a master computer or server and a large number of computers called workers, performing computation on behalf of the master. Despite the simplicity and benefits of...

Before the invention of the Internet and the creation of the Web, the vast majority of human conversations were in spoken form, with the only notable, but extremely limited, exception being epistolary exchanges. Some important spoken conversations, such as criminal trials and political debates (e.g., Hansard, the transcripts of...

3D scene understanding and object recognition are among the grandest challenges in computer vision. A wide variety of techniques and goals, such as structure from motion, optical flow, stereo, edge detection, and segmentation, could be viewed as subtasks within scene understanding and recognition. Many of these applicable methods are...