Physical design of integrated circuits remains one of the most interesting and challenging arenas in the field of Electronic Design Automation. The ability to integrate more and more devices on our silicon chips requires the algorithms to continuously scale up. Nowadays we can integrate 2e9 transistors on a single 45nm-technology chip. This...

People often ask me why I chose to publish this work. Primarily, this book was motivated by my experience in industry after having been in the academic world for many years. We often hear about the need to bridge the gap between industry and academia, but one can easily intellectually understand something without having experienced it...

Current search paradigms for the Web, direct access through search engines and navigational access via static taxonomies, have recently been strongly criticized. A third paradigm, dynamic taxonomies or faceted search, is gaining acceptance to the extent that it is now the de facto standard in product selection for e-commerce. This new...

Sequencing and scheduling is a formof decision-making that plays a crucial role in manufacturing and service industries. In the current competitive environment effective sequencing and scheduling has become a necessity for survival in the market-place. Companies have to meet shipping dates that have been committed to customers, as failure to...

We would like to welcome you to the proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Security Technology (SecTech 2009), which was organized as part of the 2009 International Mega-Conference on Future Generation Information Technology (FGIT 2009), held during December 10–12, 2009, at the International Convention Center Jeju,...

...

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...

More than 50 years ago when I was studying to become an electrical engineer, I came across complex numbers, which were used to represent out-of-phase voltages and currents using the j operator. I believe that the letter j was used, rather than i, because the latter stood for electrical current. So from the very start of my studies I...

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...

Automatic speech recognition suffers from a lack of robustness with respect to noise, reverberation and interfering speech. The growing field of speech recognition in the presence of missing or uncertain input data seeks to ameliorate those problems by using not only a preprocessed speech signal but also an estimate of its...

The first author, Said Elnashaie, and his wife, Shadia Elshishini, moved next door to the second author, Frank Uhlig, and his family in 2000. The two families became good neighbors and friends. Their chats covered the usual topics and occasionally included random teaching, departmental, and...

Every year ESWC brings together researchers and practitioners dealing with different aspects of semantic technologies. Following a successful re-launch in 2010 as a multi-track conference, the 8th Extended Semantic Web Conference built on the success of the ESWC conference series initiated in 2004. Through its extended concept this...