springer berlin heidelberg springer berlin heidelberg aug 2006 (75 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 456 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Everyday life would be easier if we could simply talk with machines instead of having to program them. Before such talking robots can be built, however, there must be a theory of how communicating with natural language works. This requires not only a grammatical analysis of the language signs, but also a model of the cognitive agent, with interfaces for recognition and action, an internal database, and an algorithm for reading content in and out. In Database Semantics, these ingredients are used for reconstructing natural language communication as a mechanism for transferring content from the database of the speaker to the database of the hearer.Part I of this book presents a high-level description of an artificial agent which humans can freely communicate with in their accustomed language. Part II analyzes the major constructions of natural language, i.e., intra- and extrapropositional functor - argument structure, coordination, and coreference, in the speaker and the hearer mode. Part III defines declarative specifications for fragments of English, which are used for an implementation in Java.The book provides researchers, graduate students and software engineers with a functional framework for the theoretical analysis of natural language communication and for all practical applications of natural language processing.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 380 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second IAPR Workshop on Artificial Neural Networks in Pattern Recognition, ANNPR 2006, held in Ulm, Germany in August/September 2006. The 26 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 49 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on unsupervised learning, semi-supervised learning, supervised learning, support vector learning, multiple classifier systems, visual object recognition, and data mining in bioinformatics. 316 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Ten years after the rst ESO Workshop on light elements, and ve years after the IAU in conference in Natal (Brazil) on the same subject, we felt that it was time to have a new conference on this topic: a wealth of new observational data have become available from the 8-meter telescopes and in particular from the VLT, and, at the same time, in the last years new theoretical roads have also been inaugurated in the interpretation of the stellar data. It soon became clear, on the other hand, that in order to understand the evolution of the fragile Li and Be in stars and in the Galaxy, the whole problem of internal mixing in stars must be addressed and understood rst, and therefore a large number of elements must be investigated, in many di erent environments. Adding to this general context the fact that the FLAMES facility at the VLT was o ered to the community one year earlier, and that it was starting to produceanimpressivewealthofabundancedataofstarsintheGalaxyandinour neighborhoods, the broad concept of the ESO¿Arcetri workshop on ¿Chemical Abundances and Mixing in Stars in the Milky Way and its Satellites¿ was built. The location had to be in our beloved Toscana, and Castiglione della Pescaia was immediately identi ed as an ideal place. To achieve from this initial proposal a full conference, which gathered - gether from September 13 to 17 more than 150 attendees in a smooth orga- zation, was possible only due to the dedicated work of the conference SOC (J. 416 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -The Third International Workshop on Medical Imaging and Augmented Reality, MIAR 2006, was held in Shanghai, China at the Regal International East Asia Hotel during August 17-18, 2006. The goal of MIAR 2006 was to bring together researchers in medical image computing and intervention to present the state-of-the-art devel- ments in this ever-growing research area. The meeting consisted of a single track of oral/poster presentations, with each session led by an invited lecture from our dist- guished international faculty members. For MIAR 2006, we received 87 full subm- sions, which were subsequently reviewed by up to 5 reviewers, resulting in the acc- tance of 45 full papers included in this volume. For this workshop, we also included four papers from the invited speakers covering shape modeling, fMRI analysis, and study of cerebral connectivity and plasticity. Running such a workshop requires dedication, and we appreciate the commitment of the MIAR 2006 Programme Committee and reviewers who worked to a tight de- line in putting together this workshop. We would also like to thank members of the local Organizing Committee, who have been working so hard behind the scenes to make MIAR 2006 a great success. It was our great pleasure to welcome this year¿s MIAR attendees to Shanghai, which is the largest base of Chinese industrial technology, an important seaport and China's largest commercial and financial center. 420 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -We welcome you to the 7th International Conference on E-commerce and Web Technologies (EC-Web 2006) held in Krakow, Poland, in conjunction with DEXA 2006. This conference was organized for the first time in Greenwich, UK, in 2000, and it has been able to attract an increasing number of participants and interest, reflecting the progress made in the field. As in the previous years, EC-Web 2006 served as a forum bringing together researchers from academia and practitioners from industry to discuss the current state of the art in e-commerce and Web technologies. Inspiration and new ideas emerged from intensive discussions that took place during the keynote address, the formal sessions and the social events. The conference attracted 88 paper submissions and each paper was reviewed by three Program Committee members. The Program Committee selected 24 papers for presentation and publication (an acceptance and publication rate of 27%). We have to confess that this task was not that easy due to the high quality of the submitted papers. We would like to express our thanks to our colleagues who helped put together the technical program: the Program Committee members and external reviewers for their timely and rigorous reviews of the papers, and the Organizing Committee for their help in the administrative work and support. We owe special thanks to Gabriela Wagner for her helping hand concerning the administrative and organizational tasks of this conference. 264 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Overview The International Workshop on Haptic and Audio Interaction Design was - ganized as part of the EPSRC-funded MultiVis project. The main focus of the workshop was to investigate how the modalities of sound and haptics (touch) could be used together in interaction, and what novel interfaces could be p- vided when they are used in conjunction. What are the relative advantages of each of the modalities when used alone and together Are there reasons why haptic-based information is moreuseful in certain situations than equivalent - dio information How can di erent modalities be used together to create c- pelling and useful interaction with computer-based systems We posed these questions to researchers around the world, asking them to submit novel work which sought to discover answers. Thirty papers were submitted of which 15 were accepted. Each paper was peer reviewed at least twice using an esteemed set of leading international gures from both academia and industry, to whom we are grateful for the quality of their reviews, time, patience and responding within our tight schedule. Thepaperspresentedattheworkshopcomefromawidevarietyofdisciplines ranging from psychology to art, showcasing how haptics and sound can improve user interaction with computers; challenging us to move beyond simple mouse and keyboard metaphors to produce interfaces for devices and applications that allow for the full range of human interactivity. Below the papers are categorized and summarized based on their application and focus. 184 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This is a textbook version of my previous book [190]. Problems and solutions have been included, Appendix G has been added, more details have been presented, recent publications on evaluating Feynman integrals have been taken into account and the bibliography has been updated. 1 ThegoalofthebookistodescribeindetailhowFeynmanintegrals canbe evaluatedanalytically.TheproblemofevaluatingLorentz-covariantFeynman integrals over loop momenta originated in the early days of perturbative quantum eld theory. Over a span of more than fty years, a great variety of methodsforevaluatingFeynmanintegralshasbeendeveloped.Mostpowerful modern methods are described in this book. Iunderstandthatifanotherperson¿inparticularoneactivelyinvolvedin developing methods for Feynman integral evaluation ¿ wrote a book on this subject, he or she would probably concentrate on some other methods and would rank the methods as most important and less important in a di erent order. I believe, however, that my choice is reasonable. At least I have tried to concentrate on the methods that have been used recently in the most sophisticated calculations, in which world records in the Feynman integral ¿sport¿ were achieved.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 300 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -The field of bioinformatics has two main objectives: the creation and maintenance of biological databases, and the discovery of knowledge from life sciences data in order to unravel the mysteries of biological function, leading to new drugs and therapies for human disease. Life sciences data come in the form of biological sequences, structures, pathways, or literature. One major aspect of discovering biological knowledge is to search, predict, or model specific patterns of a given dataset, which have some relevance to an important biological phenomenon or another dataset. To date, many pattern recognition algorithms have been applied or catered to address a wide range of bioinformatics problems. The 2006 Workshop of Bioinformatics in Pattern Recognition (PRIB 2006) marks the beginning of a series of workshops that is aimed at gathering researchers applying pattern recognition algorithms in an attempt to resolve problems in computational biology and bioinformatics. This volume presentsthe proceedings of Workshop PRIB 2006 held in Hong Kong, China, on August 20, 2006. It includes 19 technical contributions that were selected by the Program Committee from 43 submissions. We give a brief introduction to pattern recognition in bioinformatics in the first paper. The rest of the volume consists of three parts. Part 1: signal and motif detection, and gene selection. Part 2: models of DNA, RNA, and protein structures. Part 3: biological databases and imaging. 200 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Metrics are paramount in every engineering discipline. Software engineering, however, is not considered a classical engineering activity for several reasons. In general, if a software system is seen to deliver the required functionality, only few people if any care about the internals. Moreover, defining, understanding and applying software metrics often looks like an overly complex activity, recommended only to 'trained professionals'.Lanza and Marinescu demystify the design metrics used to assess the size, quality and complexity of object-oriented software systems. Based on statistical information from many industrial projects and generally accepted semantics they deduce many single and combined threshold values. They show in detail how to identify collaboration and classification disharmony patterns in code, how to visualize their results using the freely available CodeCrawler visualization tool, and how to devise possible remedies.The combination of theoretically sound results and practically tested procedures and solution paths makes this book an ideal companion for professional software architects, developers and quality engineers. The pattern-oriented description of disharmonies offers easy access to detecting shortcomings and applying solution strategies.'This well-written book is an important piece of work that takes the seemingly forgotten art of object-oriented metrics to the next level in terms of relevance and usefulness.' Richard C. Gronback, Chief Scientist, Borland Software Corporation.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 224 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Cyclotomic fields have always occupied a central place in number theory, and the so called 'main conjecture' on cyclotomic fields is arguably the deepest and most beautiful theorem known about them. It is also the simplest example of a vast array of subsequent, unproven 'main conjectures'' in modern arithmetic geometry involving the arithmetic behaviour of motives over p-adic Lie extensions of number fields. These main conjectures are concerned with what one might loosely call the exact formulae of number theory which conjecturally link the special values of zeta and L-functions to purely arithmetic expressions.Written by two leading workers in the field, this short and elegant book presents in full detail the simplest proof of the 'main conjecture'' for cyclotomic fields. Its motivation stems not only from the inherent beauty of the subject, but also from the wider arithmetic interest of these questions. The masterly exposition is intended to be accessible to both graduatestudents and non-experts in Iwasawa theory.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 132 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -The year 2004 was a remarkable one for the growing eld of time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT). Not only did we celebrate the 40th - niversary of the Hohenberg-Kohn paper, which had laid the foundation for ground-state density functional theory (DFT), but it was also the 20th - niversary of the work by Runge and Gross, establishing a rm footing for the time-dependent theory. Because the eld has grown to such prominence, and has spread to so many areas of science (from materials to biochemistry), we feel that a volume dedicated to TDDFT is most timely. TDDFT is based on a set of ideas and theorems quite distinct from those governingground-stateDFT,butemployingsimilar techniques.Itisfarmore than just applying ground-state DFT to time-dependent problems, as it - volves its own exact theorems and new and di erent density functionals. Presently,themostpopularapplicationistheextractionofelectronicexcit- state properties, especially transition frequencies. By applying TDDFT after thegroundstateofamoleculehasbeenfound,wecanexploreandunderstand the complexity of its spectrum, thus providing much more information about the species. TDDFT has a especially strong impact in the photochemistry of biological molecules, where the molecules are too large to be handled by t- ditional quantum chemical methods, and are too complex to be understood with simple empirical frontier orbital theory.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 628 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -The dissemination of digital spatial databases, coupled with the ever wider use of GISystems, is stimulating increasing interest in spatial analysis from outside the spatial sciences. The recognition of the spatial dimension in social science research sometimes yields different and more meaningful results than analysis which ignores it. The emphasis in this book is on spatial analysis from the perspective of Geo- Computation. GeoComputation is a new computational-intensive paradigm that increasingly illustrates its potential to radically change current research practice in spatial analysis. This volume contains selected essays of Manfred M. Fischer. By drawing together a number of related papers, previously scattered in space and time, the collection aims to provide important insights into novel styles to perform spatial modelling and analysis tasks. Based on the latest developments in esti- tion theory, model selection and testing this volume develops neural networks into advanced tools for non-parametric modelling and spatial interaction modelling. Spatial Analysis and GeoComputation is essentially a multi-product und- taking, in the sense that most of the contributions are multi-authored publications. All these co-authors deserve the full credit for this volume, as they have been the scientific source of the research contributions included in the present volume. This book is being published simultaneously with Innovation, Networks and Knowledge Spillovers: Selected Essays. I would also like to thank Gudrun Decker, Thomas Seyffertitz and Petra Staufer- Steinnocher for their capable assistance in co-ordinating the various stages of the preparation of the book.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 348 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Parallel and distributed computer systems are built to close the gap between the demand for high-performance computing and the computing power available using standalone single-processor machines. Traffic in networks connecting such systems is typically characterized by its distribution in time and space. Three approaches can be applied to determine the related network performance: measurement, simulation, and mathematical methods.Dietmar Tutsch first introduces various network architectures that are widely proposed for parallel and distributed systems as well as for systems-on-chips including multicore processors. Their advantages and drawbacks are compared. Then, he gives an exhaustive survey of the available modeling techniques, including mathematical methods like Markov chains and Petri nets, and simulation methods. The main problems in modeling networks are that models are usually too large to be handled by a computer system, and, due to model complexity, model development is very time consuming. As a solution, the author systematically presents methods for complexity reduction, thus reducing the development time considerably. In addition, he presents a strategy for developing a generator for automatic model derivation. Finally, both simulation and mathematical models are applied to two major examples, a cellular network and a multistage interconnection network.This monograph mainly targets researchers in network architecture design and performance analysis, both from industry and academia. In addition, graduate students specializing in these areas will find a comprehensive overview of this field.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 256 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Asian Semantic Web Conference, ASWC 2006, held in Beijing, China, in September 2006. The 36 revised full papers and 36 revised short papers presented together with three invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 208 full paper submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 804 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -The theme of this symposium was operator algebras in a wide sense. In the last 40 years operator algebras has developed from a rather special dis- pline within functional analysis to become a central eld in mathematics often described as ¿non-commutative geometry¿ (see for example the book ¿Non-Commutative Geometry¿ by the Fields medalist Alain Connes). It has branched out in several sub-disciplines and made contact with other subjects like for example mathematical physics, algebraic topology, geometry, dyn- ical systems, knot theory, ergodic theory, wavelets, representations of groups and quantum groups. Norway has a relatively strong group of researchers in the subject, which contributed to the award of the rst symposium in the series of Abel Symposia to this group. The contributions to this volume give a state-of-the-art account of some of these sub-disciplines and the variety of topics re ect to some extent how the subject has branched out. We are happy that some of the top researchers in the eld were willing to contribute. The basic eld of operator algebras is classi ed within mathematics as part of functional analysis. Functional analysis treats analysis on in nite - mensional spaces by using topological concepts. A linear map between two such spaces is called an operator. Examples are di erential and integral - erators. An important feature is that the composition of two operators is a non-commutative operation.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 292 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -It is possible that there once was a time when scholars used to sit isolated with their cogitations in their attics, emerging now and then to publish their latest e- dite offerings which no one had ever thought of before. If such a time did once - ist, it certainly does so no longer. Writing a scientific or scholarly book in our era is to a large extent a team effort in which your team members are continually changing and you are unceasingly grateful for the privilege of enjoying and be- fiting from the exertions, ideas, comments and support of a large number of very able people. Scientific and scholarly work nowadays is a process impossible wi- out the existence and use of social capital. This book is no exception to the above stated. There are very many colleagues (some of them referees and thus anonymous) and friends who have made the book possible. The foremost of these is Roger Bolton, with whom I wrote my first paper on social capital. Most of that paper has found its way into various passages of this book, while Chapter 6, Social Capital and Entrepreneurship, comes almost c- pletely from Roger's pen. Thank you, Roger, for letting me use your text! The empirical studies of the biotech industries of Japan, California and Sweden would have been impossible without a great deal of help.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 224 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Long-rangedependent, or long-memory,time seriesarestationarytime series displaying a statistically signi cant dependence between very distant obs- vations. We formalize this dependence by assuming that the autocorrelation function of these stationary series decays very slowly, hyperbolically, as a function of the time lag. Many economic series display these empirical features: volatility of asset prices returns, future interest rates, etc. There is a huge statistical literature on long-memory processes, some of this research is highly technical, so that it is cited, but often misused in the applied econometrics and empirical e- nomics literature. The rst purpose of this book is to present in a formal and pedagogical way some statistical methods for studying long-range dependent processes. Furthermore, the occurrence of long-memory in economic time series might be a statistical artefact as the hyperbolic decay of the sample autoc- relation function does not necessarily derive from long-range dependent p- cesses. Indeed, the realizations of non-homogeneous processes, e.g., switching regime and change-point processes, display the same empirical features. We thus also present in this book recent statistical methods able to discriminate between the long-memory and change-point alternatives. Going beyond the purely statistical analysis of economic series, it is of interest to determine which economic mechanisms are generating the strong dependence properties of economic series, whether they are genuine, or spu- ous. The regularities of the long-memory and change-point properties across economic time series, e.g., common degree of long-range dependence and/or common change-points, suggest the existence of a common economic cause.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 404 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Our understanding of innovation processes has dramatically changed over the past decades. Interactive models of innovation, differing significantly from the linear approach, now emphasize both the importance of networking activities both within and across firms, and the centrality of knowledge spillovers which lie at the root of the formation of networks. The study of knowledge spillovers has become a major focus of research on innovative networks in recent years. Part of this research tradition can be traced back to the early work of Alfred Marshall on external economies through which 'industrial districts' ¿ as he termed them ¿ were integrated. This book brings together a collection of articles and book chapters which present an overview and synthesis of current knowledge in the Economics of Innovation. It both reviews what is known and accepted as the best thinking on selected topics in the field and provides research findings that offer valuable insights into the nature and process of innovation, network formation and network activities, knowledge generation and spillovers from a regional perspective. By presenting the articles and book chapters as a whole, this collection is a novel combination. It is being published simultaneously with Spatial Analysis and GeoComputation: Selected Essays. Innovation, Networks and Knowledge Spillovers is essentially a multi-product undertaking, in the sense that the various contributions are largely multi-authored publications. All these co-authors deserve the full credit for this volume, as they have been the scientific source of the research contributions included in the present volume.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 284 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Functions which are defined on finite sets occur in almost all fields of mathematics. For more than 80 years algebras whose universes are such functions (so-called function algebras), have been intensively studied.This book gives a broad introduction to the theory of function algebras and leads to the cutting edge of research. To familiarize the reader from the very beginning on with the algebraic side of function algebras the more general concepts of the Universal Algebra is given in the first part of the book. The second part on fuction algebras covers the following topics: Galois-connection between function algebras and relation algebras, completeness criterions, clone theory.This book is an insdispensible source on function algebras for graduate students and researchers in mathematical logic and theoretical computer science.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 688 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -F. J. Ynduráin's book on Quantum Chromodynamics has become a classic among advanced textbooks. First published in 1983, and translated into Russian in 1986, it now sees its fourth edition. It addresses readers with basic knowledge of field theory and particle phenomenology. The author presents the basic facts of quark and gluon physics in pedagogical form. Theory is always confronted with experimental findings. The reader will learn enough to be able to follow modern research articles. This fourth edition presents a new section on heavy quark effective theories, more material on lattice QCD and on chiral perturbation theory.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 500 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Between July 1999 and June 2005 a group of European companies, research institutes, and universities executed the EUREKA-ITEA projects ESAPS, CAFÉ, and FAMILIES on the topic of product line engineering. The projects originated from the need of the industry to improve software engineering performance by organizing product development in product lines. The results obtained within the projects have been implemented in several large industries (e.g., automotive, e-business, medical systems, and mobile phones). They involve a radical shift in software construction and production. The most important research results of the projects are collected in this book. Product line engineering was already applied within industry in the 1980s and presumably earlier. In the 1980s, good architects in many telecommunications c- panies based their architectures on the ideas of David Parnas, who published on the subject of program families . They were facilitated by the CHILL language widely used by the telecommunications companies. This language deploys the same modularity principles as the Modula programming language family. Modularity is a crucial ingredient for implementing systems with a component-based architecture. Being able to compose the products of components is an important mechanism in all product line architectures. In the 1990s, the product line ideas started to gain ground in other industries. Around 1995, the company experiences reached the academia and since then people in companies and academia have collaborated widely on this subject. The ESAPS, CAFÉ, and FAMILIES projects manifest an institutionalized form of this collaboration.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 672 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Ion implantation is one of the key processing steps in silicon integrated circuit technology. Some integrated circuits require up to 17 implantation steps and circuits are seldom processed with less than 10 implantation steps. Controlled doping at controlled depths is an essential feature of implantation. Ion beam processing can also be used to improve corrosion resistance, to harden surfaces, to reduce wear and, in general, to improve materials properties. This book presents the physics and materials science of ion implantation and ion beam modification of materials. It covers ion-solid interactions used to predict ion ranges, ion straggling and lattice disorder. Also treated are shallow-junction formation and slicing silicon with hydrogen ion beams. Topics important for materials modification, such as ion-beam mixing, stresses, and sputtering, are also described.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 280 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This collection of surveys present an overview of recent developments in Complex Geometry. Topics range from curve and surface theory through special varieties in higher dimensions, moduli theory, Kähler geometry, and group actions to Hodge theory and characteristic p-geometry.Written by established experts this book will be a must for mathematicians working in Complex GeometrySpringer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 516 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This volume contains papers presented at the 8th International Conference on Solid State Physics (SSP 2004), Workshop 'Mössbauer Spectroscopy of Locally Heterogeneous Systems', held in Almaty, Kazakhstan, 23¿26 August 2004.It should be of interest to researchers and PhD students working or interested in recent results in the locally inhomogeneous system investigations by Mössbauer Spectroscopy and the new concepts of data evaluation of complex Mössbauer spectra. 120 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -The past two decades have witnessed an explosion of ideas in the general eld of nonlinear dynamics. In fact, it has become increasingly clear that areas as diverse as signal processing, lasers, molecular motors, and biomedical anomalies have a c- mon underlying thread: the dynamics that underpin these systems are inh- ently nonlinear. Yet, while there has been signi cant progress in the theory of nonlinear phenomena under an assortment of system boundary conditions andpreparations,thereexistcomparativelyfewdevicesthatactually takethis rich behavior into account. In the presence of background noise (a given, for most practical appli- tions), the underlying dynamic phenomena become even richer, with the noise actually mediating cooperative behavior that, when properly understood, can lead to signi cant performance enhancements; a striking example of this - havior occurs, for example, when the underlying dynamics undergoes a bif- cation from static to oscillating behavior when a control parameter is swept through a critical value. If properly understood, theoretically, the (suitably quanti ed) system response can be signi cantly enhanced near the onset of the bifurcation. Examples of this behavior have been observed in a large n- ber of laboratory experiments on systems ranging from solid state lasers, to SQUIDs, and such behavior has been hypothesized to account for some of the more striking information processing properties of biological neurons. In many cases, background noise can precipitate this behavior, thereby playing a signi cant role in the optimization of the response of these systems to small external perturbations.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 252 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -The International Conference on Intelligent Computing (ICIC) was formed to provide an annual forum with dedication to the emerging and challenging topics in artificial intelligence, machine learning, bioinformatics, and computational biology, etc. It aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from both the academia and industry to share ideas, problems and solutions related to the multifaceted aspects of intelligent computing. The ICIC 2006 to be held in Kunming, Yunnan, China, 16-19 August 2006 is the second International Conference on Intelligent Computing, which is built upon the success of ICIC 2005 held in Hefei, China, 2005. This year, the conference mainly concentrates on the theories & methodologies as well as the emerging applications of intelligent computing. It intends to unify the contemporary intelligent computing techniques within an integral framework that highlights the trends in advanced computational intelligence and bridges the theoretical research with the applications. In particular, the bio-inspired computing emerges as a key role in pursuing for novel technology in recently years. The resulting techniques vitalize the life science engineering and daily life applications. In light of this trend, the theme for this conference is the Emerging Intelligent Computing Technology and Applications. Papers related to this theme were especially solicited, including theories, methodologies, and applications in science and technology. 1392 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 31st International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, MFCS 2006. The book presents 62 revised full papers together with the full papers or abstracts of 7 invited talks. All current aspects in theoretical computer science and its mathematical foundations are addressed, from algorithms and data structures, to complexity, automata, semantics, logic, formal specifications, models of computation, concurrency theory, computational geometry and more.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 836 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Plasma-Material Interaction in Controlled Fusion deals with the specific contact between the fourth state of matter, i.e. plasma, and the first state of matter, i.e. a solid wall, in controlled fusion experiments. A comprehensive analysis of the main processes of plasma-surface interaction is given together with an assessment of the most critical questions within the context of general criteria and operation limits. It is shown that the choice of plasma-facing materials can be reduced to a very limited list of possible candidates. Plasma-Material Interaction in Controlled Fusion emphasizes that a reliable solution of the material problem can only be found by adjusting the materials to suitable plasma scenarios and vice versa.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 280 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -The heart is a fantastic machine; during a normal lifetime it beats about 2.5 billion times and pumps 200.000 tons of blood through an enormous system of vessels extending 160.000 kilometres throughout the body. For centuries, man has tried to understand how the heart works, but there remain many unsolved problems, problems that have captured the attention of thousands of researchers worldwide. There is, for example, a huge amount of research being devoted to the analysis of single heart cells. Other areas of research include trying to understand how it works as a complete muscle, and how blood ows through the heart. The entire process is extremely complex. The history of bioelectricity can be traced back to the late eighteenth century and the experiments of Luigi Galvani. A century later, in 1887, Augustus Wallers managed to measure the electrical signal generated by the heart at the surface of the body [142]. His dog Jimmy earned a place in history by being the rst to have his heart measured in this way; see Figure 1.1. In 1903 Willem Einthoven [34] - veloped the rst commercial device for recording electrocardiograms (ECGs); see Figure 1.2.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 332 pp. Englisch.