In late 2001, Bill Gates was having dinner with a group of journalists on the night before Microsoft’s launch of the Windows XP operating system. At that time, the dotcom crash was just unfolding, and during dinner, Bill Gates said (correctly) that the dotcom bubble was a distraction and caused a lot of money to be wasted on...

Human computation is a new and evolving research area that centers around harnessing human intelligence to solve computational problems that are beyond the scope of existing Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms. With the growth of the Web, human computation systems can now leverage the abilities of an unprecedented number of people via the...

Cooperative network supercomputing is becoming increasingly popular for harnessing the power of the global Internet computing platform. A typical Internet supercomputer consists of a master computer or server and a large number of computers called workers, performing computation on behalf of the master. Despite the simplicity and benefits of...

This book provides an overview of steganography and digital watermarking, two areas of research which are generally referred to as "information hiding." Steganography studies ways to make communication invisible by hiding secrets in innocuous messages, whereas watermarking originated from the need for copyright protection of...

For many reasons, few books survive to reach their eighth edition. Authors and publishers who let the success of their earlier work produce the comfort of complacency usually pay the price of watching the marketplace dismantle their creations. This database systems book has been successful through seven editions because we–the...

Before the invention of the Internet and the creation of the Web, the vast majority of human conversations were in spoken form, with the only notable, but extremely limited, exception being epistolary exchanges. Some important spoken conversations, such as criminal trials and political debates (e.g., Hansard, the transcripts of...

3D scene understanding and object recognition are among the grandest challenges in computer vision. A wide variety of techniques and goals, such as structure from motion, optical flow, stereo, edge detection, and segmentation, could be viewed as subtasks within scene understanding and recognition. Many of these applicable methods are...

Too often I hear people say ‘ South Korea ’ and ‘ emerging market ’ in the same sentence, ” said Rich Wickham, the global head of Microsoft ’ s Windows games business. “ When it comes to gaming, Korea is the developed market, and it ’ s the rest of the world that ’ s playing...

After being shrouded in esoterica for a long time, Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) have become part of everyday life, especially the Global Positioning System (GPS). Having spent 40 years involved with the subject, it became clear to me that it would be useful to have a book about the business aspects of these systems. This...

My interest in oscillators started many years ago when I was an undergraduate student and one of the laboratory experiments was the design of a Colpitts oscillator. It was amazing to see how a sinusoidal signal appeared when the power supply was turned on. What an interesting way of controlling the motion of electrons in the circuit!...

Datacenter networks provide the communication substrate for large parallel computer systems that form the ecosystem for high performance computing (HPC) systems and modern Internet applications. The design of new datacenter networks is motivated by an array of applications ranging from communication intensive climatology, complex material...