The present book includes a set of selected papers from the fourth “International Conference on Informatics in Control Automation and Robotics” (ICINCO 2007), held at the University of Angers, France, from 9 to 12 May 2007. The conference was organized in three simultaneous tracks: “Intelligent Control Systems and...

The conceptualization of a problem (modeling) and the computational solution of this problem (simulation), is the foundation of Computational Science. This coupled endeavor is unique in several respects. It allows practically any complex system to be analyzed with predictive capability by invoking the multiscale paradigm linking...

The unparalleled author team...

The original (and key) innovation of Dashboard Design was to bring together the flexibility, power and ubiquity of Excel with the visualization of Flash. This meant that a whole new group of people (basically anyone who understood Excel formulas) could produce sophisticated Flash animations. Over the years, this has led to an incredible array...

I became interested in ML programming when I taught CS109, the introduc- tory Computer Science Foundations course at Stanford, starting in 1991. ML was used by several of the instructors of this course, including Stu Reges and Mike Cleron, to introduce concepts such as functional programming and type systems. It was also used for the...

One of the most challenging tasks in today’s business and information technology (IT) environments is to communicate a solution to an organizational problem in a simple manner that can be easily understood by business and IT personnel alike. Is it also arduous to explain in simple words how a remedy to an enterprise concern can be...

In contemporary globally competitive markets, the development of new products is considered a critical success factor for organizations. Significant efforts have been invested in the development of methods and tools for improving the management of design processes, being a key element in development processes, especially those related...

Humans receive the great majority of information about their environment through sight, and at least 50% of the human brain is dedicated to vision. Vision is also a key component for building artificial systems that can perceive and understand their environment. Computer vision is likely to change society in many ways; for example, it...

The second edition of Human-Computer Interaction established itself as one of the classic textbooks in the area, with its broad coverage and rigorous approach, this new edition builds on the existing strengths of the book, but giving the text a more student-friendly slant and improving the coverage in certain areas. The revised...

Competing in today's world requires a greater emphasis on strategy, long-range planning, and decision making, and this is why businesses are building data warehouses. Data warehouses are becoming more and more common as businesses have realized the need to mine the information that is stored in electronic form. Data warehouses provide...

Cognitive spatial concepts are qualitative in nature, i.e., they are based not so much on exact quantities but on comparisons between perceived magnitudes. We develop a qualitative model for the representation of spatial knowledge (in particular, of positional information about 2-dimensional projections) that is based only on locative...

What really makes a video game story interactive? What's the best way to create an interactive story? How much control should players be given? Do they really want that control in the first place? Do they even know what they want-or are their stated desires at odds with the unconscious preferences? All of these questions and more are...