The Semantic Web, which is intended to establish a machine-understandable Web, is currently changing from being an emerging trend to a technology used in complex real-world applications. A number of standards and techniques have been developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), e.g., the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which...

The deluge of data observed throughout research and industry has turned the analysis of the resulting information into the primary limiting factor for the rapid progress of science, engineering, and medicine. The field of visualization strives to tackle this data analysis challenge by devising visual representations that afford users an...

With the introduction of multicore devices such as the iPad 2 and the quad-core Mac- Book Pro, writing multithreaded apps that take advantage of multiple cores on a device has become one of the biggest headaches for developers. Take, for instance, the introduction of iPad 2. On the launch day, only a few applications, basically those...

Why should a Java developer learn about functional programming (FP)? After all, hasn’t functional programming been safely hidden in academia for decades? Isn’t objectoriented programming (OOP) all we really need? This book explains why functional programming has become an important tool for the challenges of our time and how...

Web-based Support Systems (WSS) are an emerging multidisciplinary research area in which one studies the support of human activities with the Web as the common platform, medium and interface. The Internet affects every aspect of our modern life. Moving support systems to online is an increasing trend in many research domains. One of...

In the early days of pattern recognition and statistical data analysis life was rather simple: datasets were relatively small, collected from well-designed experiments, analyzed using a few methods that had good theoretical background. Explosive growth of the use of computers led to the creation of huge amounts of data of all kinds,...

This book originates from the desire to perpetuate expertise in the field of performance evaluation, particularly for telecommunication systems and networks. It is obviously impossible to translate into a single work all the facets of an activity which encompasses many systems and a great variety of domains such as standardization,...

THE “CLOUD” IS ONE OF THE MOST tossed-around words these days in any IT conversation. But what does it mean? And what are the implications of the cloud for SharePoint? In fact, there are many implications for SharePoint with the cloud, ranging from extending existing solutions to use code or services that are deployed to the...

Artificial Intelligence's long-term goal is to build the human level of artificial intelligence. AI was born 50 years ago, in the bumpy road has made encouraging progress, in particular, machine learning, data mining, computer vision, expert systems, natural language processing, planning, robotics and related applications have...

Over the course of the past twenty years I have learned many things relevant to this book while working in high-energy physics. As everyone in this field in the yearly to mid-90s, I was analyzing experimental data collected by particle colliders using the FORTRAN programming language. Then, gradually, I moved to C++ coding following...

Information technology (IT) quality engineering and quality improvement methods are constantly getting more attention from world corporate leaders, all levels of management, design engineers, and academia. This trend can be seen easily by the widespread of “Six Sigma” initiatives in many Fortune IT 500 companies. For a Six...