Conventional object-oriented data models are "closed". Although they allow users to define application-specific classes, they usually come with a fixed set of modeling primitives. This constitutes a major problem as different application domains have different requirements on a data model. For example, database integration...

This book began when I was assigned to help salvage an undergraduate computer organization course. The course had suffered years of neglect: it had been taught by a series of professors, mostly visitors, who had little or no interest or background in digital hardware, and the curriculum had deteriorated to a potpourri of topics that...

Recently, the rapid and fundamental advances in computing technologies have been driving the role and scope of software systems to a new level. A number of new types of software systems are emerging, among which service based systems, cloud computing, pervasive computing, and Internet of Things are eminent examples. For these systems,...

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...

Anybody following the discussions around “Web Services” in recent years is aware of the fuzzy definition of the term, and a little bit of history can quite easily explain some of the confusions around current terminology (or use of terminology). The general idea of using Web technologies to not only deliver Web pages (HTML...

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...

In recent years, tremendous research has been devoted to the design of database systems for real-time applications, called real-time database systems (RTDBS), where transactions are associated with deadlines on their completion times, and some of the data objects in the database are associated with temporal constraints on their validity....

Sensor processing is a central and an important problem in aerospace/defense, automation, medical imaging, and robotics, to name only a few areas. A surveillance system used in aerospace and defense is an example of a sensor processing system. It uses devices such as infrared sensors, microwave radars, and laser radars that are...

This book is all about wrangling a herd of network computers so that all display the correct time. This may seem like a really narrow business, but the issues go far beyond winding the clock on your display taskbar. Carefully coordinated, reliable, and accurate time is vital for traffic control in the air and on the ground, buying and...

The 13th IMA Conference on Cryptography and Coding was held at the Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, UK, during December 12–15, 2011. This event was a 25th anniversary celebration of the very successful biennial IMA conference series. Traditionally, the conference has taken place at the Royal Agricultural College,...

Hacking and electronic crimes sophistication has grown at an exponential rate in recent years. In fact, recent reports have indicated that cyber crime already surpasses the illegal drug trade! Unethical hackers better known as black hats are preying on information systems of government, corporate, public, and private networks and are...

This volume contains the proceedings of the 17th International SPIN Workshop on Model Checking Software (SPIN 2010). The workshop was organized by and held at the University of Twente, The Netherlands, on 27–29 September 2010. The workshop was co-located with the 5th International Conference on Graph Transformation (ICGT 2010)...