The idea of describing how to make multimodal computer systems usable arose in the European Network of Excellence SIMILAR – “Taskforce for creating human-machine...

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...

The modern world offers lots of readily available online resources for learning. Wikipedia, Google, news sources, millions of Web sites and blogs, even YouTube, offer access to information in nearly any subject that triggers your curiosity and interest. Nonetheless, I continue to believe that for deep understanding of something, nothing...

It teaches risk-driven architecting. There is no need for meticulous designs when risks are small, nor any excuse for sloppy designs when risks threaten your success. This book describes a way to do just...

The Internet already is the broadest and most used source of legal information: in the web one can find most statutory texts (all in some jurisdictions), a vast amount of case law, huge repertoires of doctrinal contributions, many blogs and fora discussing different legal issues. Moreover, as legal activities (legislative,...

The graphical nature of LabVIEW makes it ideal for test and measurement applications and its use brings significant improvements in productivity over conventional programming languages. However, comprehensive treatments of the more advanced topics have been scattered and difficult to find-until now. LabVIEW Advanced Programming...

Between 1997 and 2002, AliaslWavefront's Maya has found wide acceptance in the animation, visual effects, and games communities, in large part because of the tremendous extent that it encourages customization through developing plug-ins and scripting in Maya Embedded Language (MEL). Major studios, including Disney, Dreamworks,...

With the advent of computers, very large datasets have become routine. Standard statistical methods don’t have the power or flexibility to analyse these efficiently, and extract the required knowledge. An alternative approach is to summarize a large dataset in such a way that the resulting summary dataset is of a manageable size and yet...

In the field of IT, the markets, business activities, needs and requirements of internal and external service providers and customers are changing in ever-shortening cycles. This forces companies to increase their organizational flexibility not only as far as their structure is concerned but also with regard to established business...

Cultural heritages include rich information related to social, historical and cultural values. Affected by climate, environmental and other factors, some valuable heritage information is threatened through destruction or disappearance, and some is still not utilized sufficiently. How to investigate and utilize such information...

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We expect our readers to already understand basic programming concepts, and many...