This book presents a comprehensive process for visualization of interface metaphor for software. It is helpful in designing interactive user interfaces with magical super-affordances and definitive user experiences. As per the ancient Indian Vedic literature, metaphors are always conceived out of Vastu (entities having existence in our world). The visualization process given in the book shows how metaphorization could help in innovating highly experiential user interfaces, as one can create Avastu (non entities) by combining different objects and imaginative properties together. The main highlights of this process are selection and dissection of interface metaphor, pre-facto analysis, qualitative and quantitative evaluation, mapping between user and application domain lexicons, specialized...

Starting with a summary of the history of Artificial Intelligence, this book makes the bridge to the modern debate on the definition of Intelligence and the path to building Intelligent Machines. Since the definition of Intelligence is itself subject to open debate, the quest for Intelligent machines is pursuing a moving target. Apparently, intelligent behaviour is, to a great extent, the result of using a sophisticated associative memory, more than the result of heavy processing. The book describes theories on how the brain works, associative memory models and how a particular model - the Sparse Distributed Memory (SDM) - can be used to navigate a robot based on visual memories. Other robot navigation methods are also comprehensively revised and compared to the method proposed. The per...

This study analyzes experimental data generated by human subjects using the Perspecta 3D Volumetric Display and a 2D flat screen liquid crystal display (LCD). The analysis reveals differences in how experiment participants used the display technologies.

The problem of automatic toponym resolution, or computing the mapping from occurrences of names for places as found in a text to an unambiguous spatial footprint of the location referred to, such as a geographic latitude/longitude centroid is difficult to automate due to insufficient and error-prone geographic databases, and a large degree of place name ambiguity: common words need to be distinguished from proper names (geo/non-geo ambiguity), and the mapping between names and locations is ambiguous (London can refer to the capital of the UK or to London, Ontario, Canada, or to about forty other Londons on earth). This thesis investigates how referentially ambiguous spatial named entities can be grounded, or resolved, with respect to an extensional coordinate model robustly on open-domain...

Applying the principles in this book unleashes ingenuity that achieves, solidifies and perpetuates a new performance culture of mutual benefit. In this culture, project teams will prepare their work in task packages and enable workflow necessary to leave inefficiency of time and resource, literally, no place to hide. Project examples will help teams implement the principles that shorten cycle times, eliminate error, improve quality and reduce costs to succeed in meeting project commitments. Emerging Lean enterprise relationships between clients, EPC contractors and their entire supply chain will advance what constitutes the new, market-differentiating performance of individuals, project teams and companies - justifying high levels of trust and inter-organizational efforts to improve. Clie...

Shape classification is a challenging image processing problem because shapes can occur in any position, at any orientation, and at any scale in an image. Shapes can also be obscured by gaps in their boundaries, occlusions, and noise. General shape classifiers often suffer from low precision, and specialized shape classifiers rely on specific features, like vertices or connected boundaries, making them difficult to generalize. The objective of this research is to design, implement, and test a general, high-precision two-dimensional shape classifier that is invariant to translation, scale, and rotation, as well as robust to gaps in the shape boundary, occlusions, and noise. To achieve this objective, the radial feature token (RFT) is implemented as the ALISA Shape Module, which learns to cl...

Generally, construction of dams is regarded as means of economic progress in many countries. However, major consequences of such projects are the inundation of upstream areas and the resettlement of entire communities in newly built environments where they experience dramatic transformation in their lifestyles. The present study takes the Nubian resettlement experience after the creation of Lake Nasser that submerged their old settlements, along the river Nile. Following their resettlement, the design of the newly-built environment disrupted the Nubian traditional lifestyles and patterns of privacy mechanisms, territoriality and social interaction. However, the inadequacy of the newly-built environment was mainly attributed to the Nubians' transfer from spacious homes in the old village...

This book was written with the novice or intermediate 8052 developer in mind. Assuming no prior knowledge of the 8052, it takes the reader step-by-step through the architecture including discussions and explanations of concepts such as internal RAM, external RAM, Special Function Registers (SFRs), addressing modes, timers, serial I/O, and interrupts. This is followed by an in-depth section on assembly language which explains each instruction in the 8052 instruction set as well as related concepts such as assembly language syntax, expressions, assembly language directives, and how to implement 16-bit mathematical functions. The book continues with a thorough explanation of the 8052 hardware itself, reviewing the function of each pin on the microcontroller and follows this with the design ...

This thesis is concerned with the theoretical and practical development of reliable and robust localisation algorithms for autonomous land vehicles operating at high speeds in unstructured, expansive and harsh environments. Localisation is the ability of a vehicle to determine its position and orientation within an operating environment. The need for such a localisation system is motivated by the requirement of developing autonomous vehicles in applications such as mining, agriculture and cargo handling. The main drivers in these applications are for safety, efficiency and productivity. The approach taken to the localisation problem in this thesis guarantees that the safety and reliability requirements imposed by such applications are achieved. The ...

The book provides a complete guide to the protocols that comprise the Internet Protocol Suite, more commonly referred to as TCP/IP. The work assumes no prior knowledge of TCP/IP and only a rudimentary understanding of LAN/WAN access methods. The book is split into a number of sections; the manner in which data is transported between systems, routing principles and protocols, applications and services, security, and Wide Area communications. Each section builds on the last in a tutorial manner and describes the protocols in detail so serving as a reference for students and networking professionals of all levels. Volume I - Data Delivery & Routing Section A: Introduction Section B: The Internet Protocol Section C: Reliable and Unreliable Data Delivery Section D: Quality of Service S...

The book provides a complete guide to the protocols that comprise the Internet Protocol Suite, more commonly referred to as TCP/IP. The work assumes no prior knowledge of TCP/IP and only a rudimentary understanding of LAN/WAN access methods. The book is split into a number of sections; the manner in which data is transported between systems, routing principles and protocols, applications and services, security, and Wide Area communications. Each section builds on the last in a tutorial manner and describes the protocols in detail so serving as a reference for students and networking professionals of all levels. Volume I - Data Delivery & Routing Section A: Introduction Section B: The Internet Protocol Section C: Reliable and Unreliable Data Delivery Section D: Quality of Service ...

This is the complete 2 volume set, containing both volumes one (ISBN: 9781599424910) and two (ISBN: 9781599425436) packaged together. The book provides a complete guide to the protocols that comprise the Internet Protocol Suite, more commonly referred to as TCP/IP. The work assumes no prior knowledge of TCP/IP and only a rudimentary understanding of LAN/WAN access methods. The book is split into a number of sections; the manner in which data is transported between systems, routing principles and protocols, applications and services, security, and Wide Area communications. Each section builds on the last in a tutorial manner and describes the protocols in detail so serving as a reference for students and networking professionals of all levels. Volume I - Data Delivery & Routing Sectio...

A system-specific feedback control theory for fluid process control and for motion control has been developed to enable analytical tuning. The system-specific theory enables the determination of the coefficients required to implement (i.e., tune) a proportional-integral (PI) control system analytically from physical characteristics of the fluid or motion system. PI control is essentially PID control with the derivative (D) coefficient set equal to zero. (A derivative coefficient is not essential and may have a detrimental effect on system response characteristics.) System-specific theory, based on the fundamental algorithm for PID control systems, was developed from a 'back-to-basics' perspective considering digital, not analog, control of fluid systems and motion systems independe...

"Liberal order and software-agents" - long-established ideas and modern technology are bridged. The impulse for undertaking this effort comes from the observation that it becomes difficult for computer science alone to create order for and within machines. The growing complexity of computer systems, open networks like the Internet, and the increasingly social role of software entities push the traditional quest for total global control out of reach. Economic theory of social order offers extensive experience with such conditions, so that it can complement and guide research in computer science. It is shown that a common understanding between economics and computer science's sub-field of distributed artificial intelligence is possible on the level of software-agents. On this basis, four fun...

Computer systems play an important role in our society. Software drives those systems. Massive investments of time and resources are made in developing and implementing these systems. Maintenance is inevitable. It is hard and costly. Considerable resources are required to keep the systems active and dependable. We cannot maintain software unless maintainability characters are built into the products and processes. There is an urgent need to reinforce software development practices based on quality and reliability principles. Though maintenance is a mini development lifecycle, it has its own problems. Maintenance issues need corresponding tools and techniques to address them. Software professionals are key players in maintenance. While development is an art and science, maintenan...

Computational Finance, an exciting new cross-disciplinary research area, depends extensively on the tools and techniques of computer science, statistics, information systems and financial economics for educating the next generation of financial researchers, analysts, risk managers, and financial information technology professionals. This new discipline, sometimes also referred to as “Financial Engineering” or “Quantitative Finance” needs professionals with extensive skills both in finance and mathematics along with specialization in computer science. Soft-Computing in Capital Market hopes to fulfill the need of applications of this offshoot of the technology by providing a diverse collection of cross-disciplinary research. This edited volume covers most of the recent, advanced r...

Search engine optimization requires strong organization. Organization will put you above your competition. This book teaches you a successful optimization process. Some highlights are: - How search engines work - Variables that will affect search engine ranks - Link popularity - Five samples of pages that work in the engines - How to submit - How to analyze your progress - A troubleshooting section - A great glossary of terms

This research is dedicated to two main problems in finding shortest paths in the graphs. The first problem is to find shortest paths from an origin to all other vertices in non-negatively weighted graph. The second problem is the same, except it is allowed that some edges are negative. This is a more difficult problem that can be solved by relatively complicated algorithms. We attack the first problem by introducing a new data structure - Relaxed Heaps that implements efficiently two main operations critical for the improvement of Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm. R²heaps with suspended relaxation proposed in this research gives the best known worst-case time bounds of O(1) for a decrease_key operation and O(logn) for a delete_min operation. That results in the best worst-case runnin...

Trends and perspectives in dynamic environments point towards a need for optimal operating levels in reconfigurable manufacturing activities. Central to the goal of meeting this need is the issue of appropriate techniques for manufacturing process planning optimization in reconfigurable manufacturing, i.e. (i) what decision making models and (ii) what computational techniques, provide an optimal manufacturing process planning solution in a multidimensional decision variables space? Conventional optimization techniques are not robust, hence; they are not suitable for handling multidimensional search spaces. On the other hand, process planning optimization for reconfigurable manufacturing is not amenable to classical modeling approaches due to the presence of complex system dynamics. Therefo...

The 2012 International Conference on Contemporary Issues in Computer and Information Science (CICIS 2012) is a conference where new advances and research results in the fields of computer science and information technology are presented. CICIS 2012 brought together leading researchers, engineers and scientists from around the world engaged in computer science and related interests. This, the third annual conference, was held with special concentration on Graph and Geometrical Algorithms, Intelligent Systems, Bioinformatics, and IT and Society.

This book is a collection of papers from the 2009 International Conference on Signals, Systems and Automation (ICSSA 2009). The conference at a glance: - Pre-conference Workshops/Tutorials on 27th Dec, 2009 - Five Plenary talks - Paper/Poster Presentation: 28-29 Dec, 2009 - Demonstrations by SKYVIEWInc, SLS Inc., BSNL, Baroda Electric Meters, SIS - On line paper submission facility on website - 200+ papers are received from India and abroad - Delegates from different countries including Poland, Iran, USA - Delegates from 16 states of India - Conference website is seen by more than 3000 persons across the world (27 countries and 120 cities)

The purpose of this thesis is to develop new hybrid admission decision prediction models by using different machine learning methods including Support Vector Machines (SVM), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Radial Basis Function (RBF) Network, TreeBoost (TB) and K-Means Clustering (KMC) combined with feature selection algorithms to investigate the effect of the predictor variables on the admission decision of a candidate to the School of Physical Education and Sports at Cukurova University. Three feature selection algorithms including Relief-F, F-Score and Correlation-based Feature Selection (CFS) have been considered. Experiments have been conducted on the datasets, which contain data of participants who applied to the School in 2006 and 2007. The datasets have been randomly split into train...

The modern FPGAs enable system designers to develop high-performance computing (HPC) applications with a large amount of parallelism. Real-time image processing is such a requirement that demands much more processing power than a conventional processor can deliver. In this research, we implemented software and hardware based architectures on FPGA to achieve real-time image processing. Furthermore, we benchmark and compare our implemented architectures with existing architectures. The operational structures of those systems consist of on-chip processors or custom vision coprocessors implemented in a parallel manner with efficient memory and bus architectures. The performance properties such as the accuracy, throughput and efficiency are measured and presented. According to results, FPGA ...

The aim of this project is to start creating awareness and to convey the idea that optical sensor technologies are now technically and economically mature enough to provide safety enhancement features in the residential environment and market. A first application of these technologies can be that of real time building structural health diagnosis: a utility company or telecommunications operator is in a position to provide it as a service by means of its urban optical fiber infrastructure and service management expertise. There are several advantages accruing from continuously monitoring the structural health of buildings. However, among them there is one that stands up as the overriding driver for the long term measurement of mechanical strain in key points of building structures: the p...

The book has an introductory chapter that gets the reader started quickly with programming in Perl. The initial part of the book discusses Perl expressions, statements, control flow, built-in data types such as arrays and hashes, and complex data structures built using references. The chapter on regular expressions is exemplary with about fifty well-motivated example programs that make this useful topic particularly accessible. The book has an excellent chapter on modules and object-oriented programming. On Perl has several chapters covering specialized topics. The chapter on socket-based network programming deals with forking and using fork to write complex interactive client-server programs. There is a chapter with in-depth discussion of CGI programming including error-ha...

Nanotechnology is a highly inter- and multi- disciplinary application oriented research area. Not only does it find its use in nanomedicine, solar cells, sensor development and so on, but can also be effectively utilized to prevent water pollution. Nanostructured materials such as magnetic nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes, silver-impregnated cyclodextrin nanocomposites, nanostructured iron-zeolites, carbo-iron nanomaterials, photocatalytic titania nanoparticles, nanofiltration membranes and functionalized silica nanoparticles can be employed in water treatment to remove heavy metals, sediments, chemical effluents, charged particles, bacteria and other pathogens. This edited book comprises several review-style chapters written by world experts. The chapters are devoted to each of these nanot...

This book shows you one thing: How to deal with moisture problems in buildings and their components: Roofs, walls, attics, heating/ventilation/air conditioning systems, etc.; as well as how to deal with moisture problems in insulated chilled water pipes and underground pipes. You'll discover the basics of moisture control in an easy-to-understand manner through real-life moisture problems that the author himself has been through, and managed to solve. Not only does Mr. William A. Lotz, P.E. write about his extensive moisture control experience with 2000 buildings and projects, but also convey the moisture control facts in a forthright, solution-oriented, jargon-free language. This language can be grasped by all building professionals: Architects, engineers, builders, facility managers, con...

The complexity requirements of future wireless communication systems now indeed demand a more general theoretically robust design methodology for nonlinear circuits, such as the power amplifiers. The present design methodology for nonlinear Radio Frequency components and circuits has become a key hindrance in the evaluation, development and testing of modern communication systems. The fundamental nature of this engineering challenge makes it highly unlikely to be addressed within the competitive Radio Frequency industry with short-term profitability, time to market and risk aversion considerations.The book, therefore, includes developing advanced waveform measurement setups, multi-tone measurement techniques, characterization and modelling of nonlinear distortion in microwave power transis...

(Dissertation is written in Spanish.) Using PSpice of MiscroSim to simulate power converters sometimes brings awkward complications such as the simulation of real magnetic components. It deals a little bit of work to bring a good agreement between experimental and simulated results. Simulation with linear inductors or transformers does not produce good results. The reason is that real magnetic components present saturation and hysteresis, a phenomenon that characterises magnetic materials. The hysteresis or B-H loop of a magnetic component is highly dependent on frequency, waveform (not very important for ferrite material), temperature, excitation level, etc. Although PSpice includes in its magnetic library a list of non-linear components, rarely these parameters are coincident with our w...

The purpose of this book is to provide readers with a thorough introduction to the essential design and operation aspects of olefins plants. For this purpose, it is necessary to develop the knowledge of the readers who are interested to know more about olefins plants employing steam-cracking technology. The author has gathered and developed this book based on extensive experience in many olefins projects as well as olefins operating plants. Included with this book are valuable materials provided by some contributions representing top and reputable olefins licensors and olefins equipment manufacturers for readers to gain insight information and content about steam-cracker plants. The contributors are Linde, Chevron Phillips Chemical Company (CP-Chem), TSKE, Graham, NATCO, SNM, and YJ-TMC...