Privacy is a basic human need, and losing privacy is perceived as an extremely threatening experience. Privacy embraces solitude, personal space, or intimacy with family and friends and as such, it is a ubiquitous and trans-cultural phenomenon. Privacy leverages well-being; without privacy we are at risk of becoming physically or...

You use word processors to write documents, Web browsers to explore the Internet, and email programs to send email. These are all examples of software that runs on computers. Software is developed using programming languages. There are many programming languages—so why Java? The answer is that Java enables...

The 16th edition of the International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies – Ada-Europe 2011—took place in the John McIntyre Conference Centre, Edinburgh (UK). Previous editions of the conference were held in Switzerland (Montreux 1996 and Geneva 2007), United Kingdom (London 1997 and York 2005), Sweden (Uppsala...

What is security? Is it a mindset? Is it a measurable and actionable posture or position? Or is it a bit of both? People, as a race, learn from doing; they learn by example. Ingrained into our psyche is a process that builds new information upon previous knowledge as we learn. As Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further than...

Welcome to Internet Research—Illustrated, Fifth Edition. If this is your first experience with the Illustrated series, you’ll see that this book has a unique design: each skill is presented on two facing pages, with steps on the left and screens on the right. The layout makes it easy to learn a skill without having to...

The past few decades have seen a proliferation of organizations that rely heavily on information technology. These organizations...

These days, any attempt to write a full-blown encyclopedia or dictionary of computer terminology would be an exercise in futility. New terms and buzzwords appear every day, and information technology fi elds overlap with so many other fi elds it can be hard to determine if a word is IT, telecommunications, or graphics arts, and so on....

It is my pleasure and privilege to write the foreword for this book, whose results I have been following and awaiting for the last few years. This monograph represents the outcome of an ambitious project oriented towards advancing our knowledge of the way the human visual system processes images, and about the way it combines high...

Speed. Aside from caffeine, nothing quickens the pulse of a programmer as much as the blazingly fast execution of a piece of code. How can we fulfill the need for computational speed? Moore’s law takes us some of the way, but multicore is the real future. To take full advantage of multicore, we need to program with concurrency...

We are all familiar with the time-honored idea of a Virtual Machine that is neutral with respect to computer architecture and can be used to execute a high-level language, after its translation to the VM byte-code. This approach can be found in several successful mono-language systems, that support popular languages such as Java or...

Soft Computing (SC) techniques have been recognized nowadays as attractive solutions for modeling highly nonlinear or partially defined complex systems and processes. These techniques resemble biological processes more closely than conventional (more formal) techniques. However, despite its increasing popularity, soft computing lacks...

Augmented reality (AR) is a direct or indirect view of real world scenes in which physical objects are annotated with, or overlaid by computer generated digital information. The past two decades have seen a fast growing body of research and development dedicated to techniques and technologies for AR. In particular, due to the recent...