In the last decade, multi-agent systems have both become widely applied and also
increasingly complex. The applications include the use of agents as automous decision
makers in often safety-critical, dangerous, or high impact scenarios (traffic
control, autonomous satellites, computational markets). The complexity arises from
the fact...
Video segmentation has been a key technique for visual information extraction and
plays an important role in digital video processing, pattern recognition, and computer
vision. A wide range of video-based applications will benefit from advances
in video segmentation including security and surveillance, bank transactions monitoring,...
The origin of queueing theory and its application traces back to Erlang’s historical
work for telephony networks as recently celebrated by the Erlang Centennial, 100
Years of Queueing, Copenhagen, recalling his first paper in 1909. Ever since, the
simplicity and fundamental flavour of Erlang’s famous expressions, such as his...
There is probably no invention in the history of mankind that had such a profound
impact on our lives in such a short time as the World Wide Web. Twenty years ago,
Tim Berners-Lee has developed the first versions of HTML which allowed to weave
documents into the large hypertext document that we know today. It was soon realized
that...
Anybody following the discussions around “Web Services” in recent years is aware
of the fuzzy definition of the term, and a little bit of history can quite easily explain
some of the confusions around current terminology (or use of terminology). The
general idea of using Web technologies to not only deliver Web pages (HTML...
In the early 1990s, the establishment of the Internet brought forth a
revolutionary viewpoint of information storage, distribution, and processing:
the World-Wide Web is becoming an enormous and expanding
distributed digital library. Along with the development of the Web, image
indexing and retrieval have grown into research areas...
The chapters in this volume were presented at the July–August 2006 NATO
Advanced Study Institute on Imaging for Detection and Identification. The
conference was held at the beautiful Il Ciocco resort near Lucca, in the glorious
Tuscany region of northern Italy. For the eighth time we gathered at this
idyllic spot to explore and...
One of the most debated consequences regarding the increased availability and use
of information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially since the early
1990s, have been their impact on economic growth. Generally speaking, ICT can
serve to reduce transaction costs at all levels of a commercial transaction. With the
emergence...
The ultimate goal of computers is to help humans to solve problems. The solutions
for such problems are typically programmed by experts, and the computers need
only to follow the specified steps to solve the problem. However, the solution of
some problems may be too difficult to be explicitly programmed. In such difficult
cases,...
Grid Computing was a vision of using and sharing computers and data in the early
1990s. The integration, coordination, and sharing of computer resources which are
geographically disperse among different physical domains and organizations
became an every day reality. This emerging infrastructure aims to provide a mechanism
for sharing...
The roots of the project which culminates with the writing of
this book can be traced to the work on logic synthesis started in 1979 at
the IBM Watson Research Center and at University of California,
Berkeley. During the preliminary phases of these projects, the impor
tance of logic minimization for the synthesis of area and...
In recent years, tremendous research has been devoted to the design of database systems for real-time applications, called real-time database systems (RTDBS), where transactions are associated with deadlines on their completion times, and some of the data objects in the database are associated with temporal constraints on their validity....
