Optimization is a subject that is widely and increasingly used in science, engineering, economics, management, industry, and other areas. It deals with selecting the best of many possible decisions in real-life environment, constructing computational methods to find optimal solutions, exploring the theoretical properties, and studying...

Frustration—it seems for every victory we gain with...

We have been very pleased, beyond our expectations, with the reception of the first edition of this book. Bioinformatics, however, continues to evolve very rapidly, hence the need for a new edition. In the past three years, fullgenome sequencing has blossomed with the completion of the sequence of the fly and the first draft of the...

In this section you will learn to build a Flex application. You will discover that Macromedia Flex Markup Language (MXML) is a great markup language to quickly create a working application. The application will load data from RSS and will display information accordingly. To get to this result, we need some theory about the Flex framework and...

As the title of this book suggests, it is an update of the first edition of the Handbook of Natural Language Processing which was edited by Robert Dale, Hermann Moisl, and Harold Somers and published in the year 2000. The vigorous growth of new methods in Natural Language Processing (henceforth, NLP) since then, strongly suggested that...

The convergence of computing and communication has produced a society that feeds on information. Yet most of the information is in its raw form: data. If data is characterized as recorded facts, then information is the set of patterns, or expectations, that underlie the data. There is a huge amount of information locked up in...

Data communication networks are widely used today and are an integral part of our daily life. The Internet is a medium for business, personal, and government communication, and it is difficult to envision today’s society without this essential infrastructure. The continued success of the Internet is dependent on our ability to...

Standard advice for writing a preface tells the author to begin by answering the question, “Why did you write this book?” The published answers almost always include an explanation of how something is still missing in the already vast body of existing literature, and how the book in question represents a valiant attempt to...

PAKDD has been recognized as a major international conference in the areas of data mining (DM) and knowledge discovery in databases (KDD). It provides an international forum for researchers and industry practitioners to share their new ideas, original research results and practical development experiences from all KDD-related areas...

Operating systems are an essential part of any computer system. Similarly, a course on operating systems is an essential part of any computer-science education. This field is undergoing rapid change, as computers are now prevalent in virtually every application, from games for children through the most sophisticated planning tools for...

Going Corporate: A Geek's Guide shows technology workers how to gain the understanding and skills necessary for becoming an effective, promotable manager or sought-after consultant or freelancer. Technology professionals typically dive deeply into small pieces of technology—like lines of code or the design of...

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...