For generations, humans have fantasized about the ability to create devices that can see into a person’s mind and thoughts, or to communicate and interact with machines through thought alone. Such ideas have long captured the imagination of humankind in the form of ancient myths and modern science fiction stories. Recent advances in...

In the final book of his astonishing career, Carl Sagan brilliantly examines the burning questions of our lives, our world, and the universe around us. These luminous, entertaining essays travel both the vastness of the cosmos and the intimacy of the human mind, posing such fascinating questions as how did the universe originate and how will...

Semantic Web and Knowledge Management has been accepted as a critical enabler aiming to increase knowledge-related performance...

Computer science, like other mathematical fields, cannot live without a tight relationship with reality. However, such a relationship is, frankly, not very common. This is probably why people so enthusiastically welcome a true meeting of theory and practice. In that sense, the coming together of XML and tree automata theory was a...

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...

A FEW YEARS AGO some students and I were looking at a map that pinpointed the locations of about loo cities. We asked ourselves, "Which of these cities are neighbors of each other?" We knew intuitively that some pairs of cities were neighbors and others were not; we wanted to find a formal mathematical characterization that...

Data mining has developed rapidly and has become very popular in the past two decades, but actually has its origin in the early stages of IT, then being mostly limited to one-dimensional searching in databases. The statistical basis of what is now also referred to as data mining has often been laid centuries ago. In corporate...

A number of forces are driving this explosion. The first is internationalization encompassing a dramatic growth in...

Acomputing cloudis more thana collection of computer resources, because it provides mechanisms to manage those resources. In a cloud computing platform, software is migrating from the desktop to the "clouds," promising users, at any time and anywhere, access to their...