A variety of problems m machine learning and digital communication deal with complex but structured natural or artificial systems. Natural patterns mat we wish to automatically classify' are a consequence of a hierarchical causal physical process. Learning about the world m which we live requires mat we extract useful sensor)'...

#^ecause you are reading this, 1 assume that you have recently become interested in database. Perhaps you would like to impress your friends by casually tossing out some big words that they have never heard before — words such as semantic object model, denormalization, or maybe even tuple. Perhaps your boss at work has just informed you...

ICALP 2011, the 38th edition of the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, was held in Z¨urich, Switzerland, during July 4–8, 2011. ICALP is a series of annual conferences of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) which first took place in 1972. This year, the ICALP...

One of the most important things an architect can do is reflection. That is, examine systems, organizations, people and ask “What alternatives were considered and why was that particular decision made?” Thinking about the response gives an architect insight into the motivations and decision processes that others have used...

Anticipatory optimization for dynamic decision making relies on a number of different scientific disciplines. On a general level, the foundations of the field may be localized at the intersection of operations research, computer science and decision theory. Closer inspection reveals the important role of branches such as simulation,...

"Modeling" has become one of the primary concerns in modern Software Engineering. The reason is simple: starting development processes from clear and succinct models has proven to foster not only quality but also productivity. With the advance of modeling there also came a desire for automatic code generation from models....

In developing the New Perspectives Series, our goal was to create books that give students the software concepts and...

This book presents current methods for dealing with software reliability, illustrating the advantages and disadvantages of each method. The description of the techniques is intended for a non-expert audience with some minimal technical background. It also describes some advanced techniques, aimed at researchers and practitioners in software...

Historically, computer security is related to both cryptography and access control in operating systems. Cryptography, although mostly applied in the military and diplomacy, was used to protect communication channels and storage facilities (especially the backups). In the seventies there was a breakthrough in cryptography - the...

Computational geometry concerns itself with designing and analyzing algorithms for solving geometric problems. The field has reached a high level of sophistication, and very complicated algorithms have been designed. However, it is also useful to develop more practical algorithms, so long as they are based on rigorous methods. One such method...

This monograph on Security in Computing Systems: Challenges, Approaches and Solutions aims at introducing, surveying and assessing the fundamentals of secu rity with respect to computing. Here, “computing” refers to all activities which individuals or groups directly or indirectly perform by means of computing sys tems,...

Computer vision seeks a process that starts with a noisy, ambiguous signal from a TV camera and ends with a high-level description of discrete objects located in 3-dimensional space and identified in a human classification. In this book we address this process at several levels. We first treat the low-level image-processing issues of...