The Simula Research Laboratory, located just outside Oslo in Norway, is rightly famed as a highly successful research facility, despite being, at only eight years old, a very young institution. This fascinating book tells the history of Simula, detailing the culture and values that have been the guiding principles of the laboratory throughout...

The issue of global climate change has risen to the top of the international...

Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) surveillance is one of the fastest growing areas in the security industry. This book is an essential guide for professionals involved the installation and maintenance of CCTV systems, system design, specification and purchasing and the management of CCTV systems. Unlike most existing books on CCTV, this title...

Modern consumers carry many electronic devices, like a mobile phone, digital camera, GPS, PDA and an MP3 player. The functionality of each of these devices has gone through an important evolution over recent years, with a steep increase in both the number of features as in the quality of the services that they provide. However, providing the...

Health and safety is of prime importance to all people working in manufacturing or engineering workplaces. Engineering can be, potentially, one of the most dangerous occupations workers can undertake because of the nature of the machinery, equipment, tools and techniques used. All workers should be protected from danger and risks to their...

This unique book takes good ASP.NET (MVC/Webforms) application construction one step further by emphasizing loosely coupled and highly cohesive ASP.NET web application architectural design. Each chapter
addresses a layer in an enterprise ASP.NET (MVC/Webforms) application and shows how proven patterns, principles, and best...

Nowadays, there is software everywhere in our life. It controls cars, airplanes, factories, medical implants. Without software, banking, logistics and transportation, media, and even scientific research would not function in the accustomed way. Building and maintaining software is a knowledge-intensive endeavour and requires that specific...

The computer program exclusion from Article 52 of the European Patent Convention (EPC) proved impossible to uphold as industry moved over to digital technology, and the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Organisation (EPO) felt emboldened to circumvent the EPC in Vicom by creating the legal fiction of 'technical effect'. This...

Since the first part of the twentieth century, cybernetics and systems research have been developed as scientific disciplines. Investigations, launched in the area of cybernetics, previously dealt with control and information processing. In a more narrow sense, they consisted in the consideration of analogies of the control and the...

In the last decade, multi-agent systems have both become widely applied and also increasingly complex. The applications include the use of agents as automous decision makers in often safety-critical, dangerous, or high impact scenarios (traffic control, autonomous satellites, computational markets). The complexity arises from the fact...