Bücher veröffentlicht von Springer US

Synchronized Phasor Measurements and Their Applications is an account of the field of synchronized Phasor Measurement technology, its beginning, its technology and its principal applications. It is a book on wide Area Measurements (WAM) and their applications. The measurements are done using GPS systems and eventually will replace the existing technology. The authors created the field about 20 years ago and with the blackouts occurring in major power systems around the world, it is currently of great technical interest in electrical power engineering. Most of the installations planned or now in existance around the world are based on the authors' work.

Modern science and technology, from materials science to integrated circuit development, is directed toward the nanoscale. From thin films to field effect transistors, the emphasis is on reducing dimensions from the micro to the nanoscale. Fundamentals of Nanoscale Film Analysis concentrates on analysis of the structure and composition of the surface and the outer few tens to hundred nanometers in depth. It describes characterization techniques to quantify the structure, composition and depth distribution of materials with the use of energetic particles and photons.The book describes the fundamentals of materials characterization from the standpoint of the incident photons or particles which interrogate nanoscale structures. These induced reactions lead to the emission of a variety of detected of particles and photons. It is the energy and intensity of the detected beams that is the basis of the characterization of the materials. The array of experimental techniques used in nanoscale materials analysis covers a wide range of incident particle and detected beam interactions.Included are such important interactions as atomic collisions, Rutherford backscattering, ion channeling, diffraction, photon absorption, radiative and nonradiative transitions, and nuclear reactions. A variety of analytical and scanning probe microscopy techniques are presented in detail.

In the United States, hospitals annually report over 5 million cases of infectious-disease-related illnesses: clinical microbiology laboratories in these hospitals are engaged in detecting and identifying the pathogenic microorganisms in clinical specimens collected from these patients with suspected infections. Clearly, the timely and accurate detection/identification of these microbial pathogens is critical for patient treatment decisions and outcomes for millions of patients each year. Despite an appreciation that the outcome of an infectious-disease-related illness is directly related to the time required to detect and identify a microbial pathogen, clinical microbiology laboratories in the United States as well as worldwide have long been hampered by traditional culture-based assays, which may require prolonged incubation time for slowly growing microorganisms such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Moreover, traditional culture-based assays often require multiple steps with additional time needed for discernment of species and/or detection of antimicrobial resistance. Finally, these traditional, slow multistep culture-based assays are labor-intensive and required skilled clinical microbiologists at the bench.Over the past several decades, advanced molecular techniques in diagnostic microbiology quietly have been revolutionizing the practice of clinical microbiology in the hospital setting. Indeed, molecular diagnostic testing in general and nucleic-acid-based amplification methods in particular have been heralded as diagnostic tools for the new millennium. There is no question that the development of rapid molecular techniques for nucleic acid amplification/characterization combined with automation and user-friendly software has greatly broadened the diagnostic capabilities of the clinical microbiology laboratory. These technical advances in molecular microbiology over the first decade of the 21st Century have profoundly influenced the physical structure of clinical microbiology laboratories as well as their staffing patterns, workflow, and turnaround time. These molecular microbiology advances have also resulted in the need for a revised and updated second edition of Advanced Techniques in Diagnostic Microbiology. This second edition again provides an updated and comprehensive description of the ongoing evolution of molecular methods for the diagnosis of infectious diseases. In addition, many new chapters have been added, including a chapter on the clinical interpretation and relevance of advanced technique results. The second edition, like the first edition, includes both a "e;techniques"e; section describing the latest molecular techniques and an "e;applications"e; section describing how these advanced molecular techniques are being used in the clinical setting. Finally, the second edition, like the first edition, utilizes a diverse team of authors who have compiled chapters that provide the reader with comprehensive and useable information on advanced molecular microbiology techniques.

A fundamental assumption of work in artificial intelligence and machine learning is that knowledge is expressed in a computer with the help of knowledge representations. Since the proper choice of such representations is a difficult task that fundamentally affects the capabilities of a system, the problem of automatic representation change is an important topic in current research. Concept Formation and Knowledge Revision focuses on representation change as a concept formation task, regarding concepts as the elementary representational vocabulary from which further statements are constructed. Taking an interdisciplinary approach from psychological foundations to computer implementations, the book draws on existing psychological results about the nature of human concepts and concept formation to determine the scope of concept formation phenomena, and to identify potential components of computational concept formation models. The central idea of this work is that computational concept formation can usefully be understood as a process that is triggered in a demand-driven fashion by the representational needs of the learning system, and identify the knowledge revision activities of a system as a particular context for such a process. The book presents a detailed analysis of the revision problem for first-order clausal theories, and develops a set of postulates that any such operation should satisfy. It shows how a minimum theory revision operator can be realized by using exception sets, and that this operator is indeed maximally general. The book then shows that concept formation can be triggered from within the knowledge revision process whenever the existing representation does not permit the plausible reformulation of an exception set, demonstrating the usefulness of the approach both theoretically and empirically within the learning knowledge acquisition system MOBAL. In using a first-order representation, this book is part of the rapidly developing field of Inductive Logic Programming (ILP). By integrating the computational issues with psychological and fundamental discussions of concept formation phenomena, the book will be of interest to readers both theoretically and psychologically inclined. From the foreword by Katharina Morik: ` The ideal to combine the three sources of artificial intelligence research has almost never been reached. Such a combined and integrated research requires the researcher to master different ways of thinking, different work styles, different sets of literature, and different research procedures. It requires capabilities in software engineering for the application part, in theoretical computer science for the theory part, and in psychology for the cognitive part. The most important capability for artificial intelligence is to keep the integrative view and to create a true original work that goes beyond the collection of pieces from different fields. This book achieves such an integrative view of concept formation and knowledge revision by presenting the way from psychological investigations that indicate that concepts are theories and point at the important role of a demand for learning. to an implemented system which supports users in their tasks when working with a knowledge base and its theoretical foundation. '

This volume presents proceedings from the 19th IFIP World Computer Congress in Santiago, Chile. The proceedings of the World Computer Congress are a product of the gathering of 2,000 delegates from more than 70 countries to discuss a myriad of topics in the ICT domain. Of particular note, this marks the first time that a World Computer Congress has been held in a Latin American country. Topics in this series include:The 4th International Conference on Theoretical Computer ScienceEducation for the 21st Century- Impact of ICT and Digital ResourcesMobile and Wireless Communication NetworksAd-Hoc NetworkingNetwork Control and Engineering for QoS, Security, and MobilityThe Past and Future of Information Systems: 1976-2006 and BeyondHistory of Computing and Education Biologically Inspired Cooperative ComputingArtificial Intelligence in Theory and PracticeApplications in Artificial IntelligenceAdvanced Software Engineering: Expanding the Frontiers of SoftwareFor a complete list of the more than 300 titles in the IFIP Series, visit springer.com. For more information about IFIP, please visit ifip.org.