The last decade has witnessed a revolution in interdisciplinary research where the boundaries of different areas have overlapped or even disappeared. New fields of research emerge each day where two or more fields have integrated to form a new identity. Examples of these emerging areas include bioinformatics (synthesizing biology with...

Genetic algorithms are founded upon the principle of evolution, i.e., survival of the fittest. Hence evolution programming techniques, based on genetic algorithms, are applicable to many hard optimization problems, such as optimization of functions with linear and nonlinear constraints, the traveling salesman problem, and problems of...

Though the book is primarily theoretical in nature, it attempts to avoid the...

This book breaks new ground by doing something for digital photographers that’s never been done before—it cuts through the bull and shows you exactly “how to do it.” It’s not a bunch of theory; it doesn’t challenge you to come up with your own settings or figure things out on your own. Instead, it does...

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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...

Concepts like ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence that exploit increasingly interconnected networks and mobility put new requirements on data management. An important element in the connected world is that data will be accessible anytime anywhere. This also has its downside in that it becomes easier to get unauthorized data...

The typical computational approach to object understanding derives shape information from the 2D outline of the objects. For complex object structures, however, such a planar approach cannot determine object shape; the structural edges have to be encoded in terms of their full 3D spatial configuration. Computer Vision: From Surfaces...

This book is intended to be accessible to undergraduate students with two years of typical mathematics experience, most likely meaning calculus with a little linear algebra and differential equations. Thus, specifically, there is no assumption oLa background inabstr&;t algebra or number theory, nor of probability, nor of linear...

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 12th International Conference on the Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2006) was held in Nantes, France, September 24–29, 2006. Information about the conference can be found on theWeb at http://www.sciences. univ-nantes.fr/cp06/. Information about past conferences in the series can be found at...