Stable and dependable IT services and infrastructures are nowadays of paramount importance not only for modern enterprises but also for home users. However, as distributed information infrastructures continue to spread and grow, resulting in Internet-based, wireless and mobile systems, traditional solutions for managing and...

Soft Computing (SC) techniques have been recognized nowadays as attractive solutions for modeling highly nonlinear or partially defined complex systems and processes. These techniques resemble biological processes more closely than conventional (more formal) techniques. However, despite its increasing popularity, soft computing lacks...

The idea of describing how to make multimodal computer systems usable arose in the European Network of Excellence SIMILAR – “Taskforce for creating human-machine...

The integration of technology into public library services has been a continual process across the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, in which libraries have responded to new technologies, altering the ways that information could be recorded, accessed, and used. The Internet is a prominent recent example,...

There is probably no invention in the history of mankind that had such a profound impact on our lives in such a short time as the World Wide Web. Twenty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee has developed the first versions of HTML which allowed to weave documents into the large hypertext document that we know today. It was soon realized that...

The technology of voice over IP provides for making telephone calls over data networks such as the Internet and it has now reached critical mass. I know this because as a technology instructor I spend more and more time teaching Voice over IP or “VoIP.” I wrote this book because I couldn’t find any material suitable...

The ultimate goal of computers is to help humans to solve problems. The solutions for such problems are typically programmed by experts, and the computers need only to follow the specified steps to solve the problem. However, the solution of some problems may be too difficult to be explicitly programmed. In such difficult cases,...

Why is astronomy considered a science while astrology is considered only a pseudoscience? In other words, how can we prove that a theory faithfully describes reality, and that this theory can then be used to predict unknown facts? Karl Popper, the well-known philosopher, studied these problems and summarized his conclusions in one...

Grid Computing was a vision of using and sharing computers and data in the early 1990s. The integration, coordination, and sharing of computer resources which are geographically disperse among different physical domains and organizations became an every day reality. This emerging infrastructure aims to provide a mechanism for sharing...

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is a powerful tool that enables you to automate operations in the Microsoft Offi ce applications and in other applications that host VBA. By automating operations using VBA, you can save yourself and your colleagues huge amounts of time and effort. Getting more work done in less time is usually good...

This book is primarily an introduction to the design of algorithms for problem solving. Its prominent feature is to use a functional language as an implementation language. Because of the high level of abstraction provided, functional programs tend to be shorter, clearer and faster to develop than their imperative counterparts. This...

At the beginning of our research we thought that a solution for the problem of...