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Stress reaction is likely to play a crucial role in a variety of degenerative diseases including cancer and cardiovascular diseases. The process of stress adaptation may appear to be simple, but in reality this is a very complex process and we are only beginning to understand the mechanism of adaptation. In January, 1998, scientists from around the world assembled to discuss the potential applicability of the concept of stress adaptation in the clinical arena. This volume contains original research papers presented on this subject during the conference Stress Adaptation, Prophylaxis and Treatment held in Calcutta, India, and serves as an up-to-date source of information for scientists, as well as clinicians interested in applying the concept of stress adaptation to the cure of diseases.

The volume is based on the papers that were presented at the Interna- tional Conference Model-Based Reasoning in Scientific Discovery (MBR'98), held at the Collegio Ghislieri, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy, in December 1998. The papers explore how scientific thinking uses models and explanatory reasoning to produce creative changes in theories and concepts. The study of diagnostic, visual, spatial, analogical, and temporal rea- soning has demonstrated that there are many ways of performing intelligent and creative reasoning that cannot be described with the help only of tradi- tional notions of reasoning such as classical logic. Traditional accounts of scientific reasoning have restricted the notion of reasoning primarily to de- ductive and inductive arguments. Understanding the contribution of model- ing practices to discovery and conceptual change in science requires ex- panding scientific reasoning to include complex forms of creative reasoning that are not always successful and can lead to incorrect solutions. The study of these heuristic ways of reasoning is situated at the crossroads of philoso- phy, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and logic; that is, at the heart of cognitive science. There are several key ingredients common to the various forms of model- based reasoning to be considered in this book. The models are intended as in- terpretations of target physical systems, processes, phenomena, or situations. The models are retrieved or constructed on the basis of potentially satisfying salient constraints of the target domain.

This volume contains a collection of review articles that are extended versions of invited lectures given at the First Pamporovo Winter Workshop on Cooperative Phe- nomena in Condensed Matter held in villa "e;Orlitza"e; (7th-15th March 1998, Pamporovo Ski Resort, Bulgaria). Selected research works reported at the Workshop have been published in the Journal of Physical Studies - a new International Journal for research papers in experimental and theoretical physics (Lviv University, Lviv, Ukraine). These reviews are supposed to be status reports and present new insights gained from the rapidly developing research of outstanding problems in condensed matter physics such as structural properties and phase transitions in fullerene crystals, super- conductivity ofstrongly interacting electrons in copper oxides, spin polarized Fermi liq- uids, chaotic vortex filaments in superfluid turbulent Helium-II, desorption induced by electronic transitions in ionic compounds, fluctuation phenomena in superconductors, and quantum critical phenomena in low dimensional magnets and quantum liquids. We have set the material according to the alphabetic order of authors' names although the high temperature superconductivity seems to be the hard kernel in condensed matter physics. The authors have taken care to present the recent advances in their research in a form which is readable and useful not only to experts in the respective field, but also to young scientists. That is why the lectures include a comprehensive introduction to the matter and also an extended discussion of methodical details.

Dependable Network Computing provides insights into various problems facing millions of global users resulting from the `internet revolution'. It covers real-time problems involving software, servers, and large-scale storage systems with adaptive fault-tolerant routing and dynamic reconfiguration techniques. Also included is material on routing protocols, QoS, and dead- and live-lock free related issues. All chapters are written by leading specialists in their respective fields. Dependable Network Computing provides useful information for scientists, researchers, and application developers building networks based on commercially off-the-shelf components.

Enabling Technologies for Computational Science assesses future application computing needs, identifies research directions in problem-solving environments (PSEs), addresses multi-disciplinary environments operating on the Web, proposes methodologies and software architectures for building adaptive and human-centered PSEs, and describes the role of symbolic computing in scientific and engineering PSEs. The book also includes an extensive bibliography of over 400 references. Enabling Technologies for Computational Science illustrates the extremely broad and interdisciplinary nature of the creation and application of PSEs. Authors represent academia, government laboratories and industry, and come from eight distinct disciplines (chemical engineering, computer science, ecology, electrical engineering, mathematics, mechanical engineering, psychology and wood sciences). This breadth and diversity extends into the computer science aspects of PSEs. These papers deal with topics such as artificial intelligence, computer-human interaction, control, data mining, graphics, language design and implementation, networking, numerical analysis, performance evaluation, and symbolic computing. Enabling Technologies for Computational Science provides an assessment of the state of the art and a road map to the future in the area of problem-solving environments for scientific computing. This book is suitable as a reference for scientists from a variety of disciplines interested in using PSEs for their research.

Discrete Event Systems: Analysis and Control is the proceedings of WODES2000 (the 5th Workshop on Discrete Event Systems, held in Ghent, Belgium, on August 21-23, 2000). This book provides a survey of the current state of the art in the field of modeling, analysis and control synthesis of discrete event systems, lecture notes for a mini course on sensitivity analysis for performance evaluation of timed discrete event systems, and 48 carefully selected papers covering all areas of discrete event theory and the most important applications domains. Topics include automata theory and supervisory control (12); Petri net based models for discrete event systems, and their control synthesis (11); (max,+) and timed automata models (9); applications papers related to scheduling, failure detection, and implementation of supervisory controllers (7); formal description of PLCs (6); and finally, stochastic models of discrete event systems (3).

The special issue of Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry focuses on `Control of Gene Expression by Catecholamines and the Renin-Angiotensin System' in health and disease. In recent years, great progress has been made in the understanding of catecholamine and angiotensin II modulated gene expression. There is also increasing evidence that catecholamine and angiotensin II induced cellular injury not solely arises from classical pathways but also from a perturbed gene expression. Taking into account that catecholamines and angiotensin II are vital for a balanced gene expression of many cells, the intriguing possibility arises that various disease are initiated or aggravated by such an imbalance. Catecholamine and angiotensin II influences can be in excess arising from, for example, hypercaloric food intake or psychosocial stress. During early progression of heart failure, sympathetic activity and angiotensin II influences also become increased. Due to beta-adrenergic receptor downregulation, depressed catecholamine influences are expected in the final stage of heart failure. An imbalanced influence of catecholamines and angiotensin II on gene expression leads to disordered molecular structures of the cell and an impaired cell function. This focused issue is organized into chapters concentrating on catecholamines, angiotensin II, and the interaction between catecholamines and angiotensin II. Basic biochemical processes are covered in detail and the potential of these pathways for explaining chronic diseases associated with excess catecholamine and angiotensin II influences should become apparent. It is hoped that this focussed issue triggers novel research into the development of drugs that are targeted at diseases characterized by an imbalanced gene expression involving catecholamines and angiotensin II.

The 1999 Joint Cryogenic Engineering Conference (CEC) and International Cryogenic Materials Conference (ICMC) were held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada from July 12th to July 16th. The joint conference theme was "e;Cryogenics into the Next Millennium"e;. The total conference attendance was 797 with participation from 28 countries. As with previous joint CEC and ICMC Conferences, the participants were able to benefit from the joint conference's coverage of cryogenic applications and materials and their interactions. The conference format of plenary, oral and poster presentations, and an extensive commercial exhibit, the largest in CEC-ICMC history, aimed to promote this synergy. The addition of short courses, workshops, and a discussion meeting enabled participants to focus on some of their specialties. The technical tour, organized by Suzanne Gendron, was of Hydro-Quebec's research institute laboratories near Montreal. In keeping with the conference venue the entertainment theme was Jazz, culminating in .the performance of Vic Vogel and his Jazz Big Band at the conference banquet. This 1999 ICMC Conference was chaired by Julian Cave of IREQ - Institut de recherche d'Hydro-Quebec, and the Program Chair and Vice-Chair were Michael Green of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Balu Balachandran of the Argonne National Laboratory respectively. We especially appreciate the contributions of both the CEC and ICMC Boards and the conference managers, Centennial Conferences, under the supervision of Paula Pair and Kim Bass, in making this conference a success.

This volume is one outcome of the 6th International Conference on Paleoceano- graphy (ICP VI). The conference was held August 23-28, 1998 in Lisbon, Portugal. The meeting followed the traditional format of a small number of invited oral presentations complemented by a large number ofcontributed posters. Over 550 participants attended, representing thirty countries and nearly 450 posters were presented. The invited speakers addressed the main themes of the 5oral sessions. The session topics were: Polar-Tropical and Interhemisphere Linkages; Does the Ocean Cause, or Respond to, Abrupt Climatic Changes?; Biotic Responses to Major Paleoceanographic Changes; Past Warm Climates; and Innovations In Monitoring Ocean History. This is the first time in ICP history that the Conference Proceedings are published. The aim of the organisers with the publication of this book is two-fold: to provide a useful review of the field and to document the ideas/controversies raised during the con- ference that may stimulate future work. The book reflects the initial intentions of the conference, but it is not a conven- tional conference proceedings, given that the papers have been reviewed by formal exter- nal referees. Each of the conference topics is introduced by a review article designed to summarize the state of the art in each theme followed by articles prepared by the invited speakers. As with most conference proceedings, each theme is covered heterogenously. Some topics have all the expected contributions, others are less well covered.

This book, Mechanisms in the Pathogenesis of Enteric Diseases 2, is an out- come of the Second International Rushmore Conference on Mechanisms in the Pathogenesis of Enteric Diseases, held September 3D-October 3, 1998 in Rapid City, South Dakota, USA. Its chapters represent many of the reviews and papers presented at the conference. The meeting was organized by members of the North-Central Regional Research Committee "e;NC-62"e;, a consortium of researchers of bovine and swine enteric diseases from land-grant institutions supported by the United States Department of Agriculture. The Rushmore Conferences were conceived as a forum for an interdiscipli- nary discussion of mechanisms of infectious enteric diseases. It was intended that such a discussion would stimulate cross-pollination of ideas, and nurture synergistic collabora- tions among scientists who might otherwise not interact. Enteric diseases are caused by widely divergent pathogens and parasites in broadly different settings, and affect multi- ple organ systems. Some enteric diseases affect a single species, while others may affect multiple species, perhaps including human beings. Some enteric diseases were present in antiquity, while others have recently emerged. Knowledge regarding a particular disease or pathogen has frequently proven useful in understanding another disease or pathogen, because common themes in pathogenesis exist. As this knowledge base grows,strategies in the prevention and control of various enteric diseases often converge. Cross-discipli- nary discussions and collaborations facilitate growth of this knowledge base, as well as development of tools for disease interdiction.

Climate and Environmental Database Systems contains the papers presented at the Second International Workshop on Climate and Environmental Database Systems, held November 21-23, 1995, in Hamburg, Germany. Climate and environmental data may be separated into two classes, large amounts of well structured data and smaller amounts of less structured data. The large amounts are produced by numerical climate models and by satellites, handling data in the order of magnitude of 100 Tbytes for the climate modelling sites and 1000 Tbytes for the recording and processing of satellite data. Smaller amounts of poorly structured data are the environmental data, which come mainly from observations and measurements. Present-day problems in data management are connected with a variety of data types. Climate and Environmental Database Systems addresses the state of the art, practical experience, and future perspectives for climate and environmental database systems, and may be used as a text for a graduate level course on the subject or as a reference for researchers or practitioners in industry.

The Generalized LR parsing algorithm (some call it "e;Tomita's algorithm"e;) was originally developed in 1985 as a part of my Ph.D thesis at Carnegie Mellon University. When I was a graduate student at CMU, I tried to build a couple of natural language systems based on existing parsing methods. Their parsing speed, however, always bothered me. I sometimes wondered whether it was ever possible to build a natural language parser that could parse reasonably long sentences in a reasonable time without help from large mainframe machines. At the same time, I was always amazed by the speed of programming language compilers, because they can parse very long sentences (i.e., programs) very quickly even on workstations. There are two reasons. First, programming languages are considerably simpler than natural languages. And secondly, they have very efficient parsing methods, most notably LR. The LR parsing algorithm first precompiles a grammar into an LR parsing table, and at the actual parsing time, it performs shift-reduce parsing guided deterministically by the parsing table. So, the key to the LR efficiency is the grammar precompilation; something that had never been tried for natural languages in 1985. Of course, there was a good reason why LR had never been applied for natural languages; it was simply impossible. If your context-free grammar is sufficiently more complex than programming languages, its LR parsing table will have multiple actions, and deterministic parsing will be no longer possible.

arise automatically as a result of the recursive structure of the task and the continuous nature of the SRN's state space. Elman also introduces a new graphical technique for study- ing network behavior based on principal components analysis. He shows that sentences with multiple levels of embedding produce state space trajectories with an intriguing self- similar structure. The development and shape of a recurrent network's state space is the subject of Pollack's paper, the most provocative in this collection. Pollack looks more closely at a connectionist network as a continuous dynamical system. He describes a new type of machine learning phenomenon: induction by phase transition. He then shows that under certain conditions, the state space created by these machines can have a fractal or chaotic structure, with a potentially infinite number of states. This is graphically illustrated using a higher-order recurrent network trained to recognize various regular languages over binary strings. Finally, Pollack suggests that it might be possible to exploit the fractal dynamics of these systems to achieve a generative capacity beyond that of finite-state machines.

The time has come for high-level synthesis. When research into synthesizing hardware from abstract, program-like de- scriptions started in the early 1970' s, there was no automated path from the register- transfer design produced by high-level synthesis to a complete hardware imple- mentation. As a result, it was very difficult to measure the effectiveness of high- level synthesis methods; it was also hard to justify to users the need to automate architecture design when low-level design had to be completed manually. Today's more mature CAD techniques help close the gap between an automat- ically synthesized design and a manufacturable design. Market pressures encour- age designers to make use of any and all automated tools. Layout synthesis, logic synthesis, and specialized datapath generators make it feasible to quickly imple- ment a register-transfer design in silicon,leaving designers more time to consider architectural improvements. As IC design becomes more automated, customers are increasing their demands; today's leading edge designers using logic synthesis systems are training themselves to be tomorrow's consumers of high-level synthe- sis systems. The need for very fast turnaround, a competitive fabrication market WhlCh makes small-quantity ASIC manufacturing possible, and the ever growing co:n- plexity of the systems being designed, all make higher-level design automaton inevitable.

Over the generations the skin has been the site for immunization against smallpox. This method of immunization was described in a letter written by Lady Mary Montagu on April 1, 1717 in Adrianopole, Turkey: "e;The small-pox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of ingrafting, which is the term they give it. . . The old woman comes with a nut-shell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox . . . She immediately rips open (the skin) with a large needle . . . and puts into the vein as much venom as can lie upon the head of her needle, and after binds up the wound. There is no example of anyone that died of it; and you may believe that I am satisfied of the safety of this experiment since I intend to try it on my dear little son"e; (Letters from the right Honourable Lady Mary Montagu 1709-1762. Published by J. M. Dent and Co. London, 2nd edition, September, 1906, p. 124. ) The "e;variolation"e; method was, 80 years later, markedly improved by the use of cowpox virus, as reported by Edward Jenner in 1796. The successful method of intradermal immunization against smallpox and later against other virus diseases is in fact based on the presence of anitigen-presenting dendritic cells in the skin.

The cardiac system represents one of the most exciting challenges to human ingenuity. Critical to our survival, it consists of a tantalizing array of interacting phenomena, from ionic microscopic transport, membrane channels and receptors through cellular metabolism, energy production to fiber mechanics, microcirculation, electrical activation to the global, clinically observed, function, which is measured by pressure, volume, coronary flow, heart rate, shape changes and responds to imposed loads and pharmaceutical challenges. It is a complex interdisciplinary system requiring the joint efforts of the life sciences, the exact sciences, engineering and technology to understand and control the pathologies involved. The Henry Goldberg Workshops were set up to address these challenges. Briefly, our goals are: 1. To foster interdisciplinary interaction between scientists from different areas of cardiology, identify missing links, and catalyze new questions. 2. To relate micro scale cellular phenomena to the global, clinically manifested cardiac function. 3. To relate conceptual modeling and quantitative analysis to experimental and clinical data. 4. To encourage international cooperation so as to disperse medical and technological know how and lead to better understanding of the cardiac system. Today we celebrate the 7th birthday of a dream come true; a dream to bring together the diversified expertise in the various fields of science, engineering and medicine, to relate to the numerous interactive parameters and disciplines involved in the performance of the heart.

This book reviews putative neurological and neuropsychological factors in aggressive behavior. Discussions focus on explanatory models, brain sites, and cognitive functions that appear to be associated with aggressive behavior. Attention is given to measurement and design problems that are frequently encountered in the study of aggression. Further, it is emphasized that any relationship between neuropsychological factors and aggressive behavior will be complex. Neuropsychological factors must be considered in the context of mediating and moderating (precipitating and buffering) variables from other ecological levels (e. g. , family support). Even if perpetrator neuro- psychological factors are found to be reliably associated with aggression, it will still be necessary to demonstrate the extent to which different neuro- psychological factors are marker or are causal variables in aggressive behavior. Finally, since there has been a major societal and professional interest in the study of aggression within the family, several chapters focus on the possible neurological, neuropsychological, and physiological aspects of family violence. Chapter 1, entitled "e;Biological Theories of Violence,"e; written by Adrian Raine and Angela Scerbo, provides a theoretical context for understanding the role of biological factors in aggression. This chapter begins with a discussion of conceptual issues and methodological problems that impede theory development and research in aggression. Following this discussion, the authors present theories that may lead to a better understanding of the ix x Preface neurological and cognitive components of aggression. The presentation of each theory is followed by a discussion of theory-related research.

A color time-varying image can be described as a three-dimensional vector (representing the colors in an appropriate color space) defined on a three-dimensional spatiotemporal space. In conventional analog television a one-dimensional signal suitable for transmission over a communication channel is obtained by sampling the scene in the vertical and tem- poral directions and by frequency-multiplexing the luminance and chrominance informa- tion. In digital processing and transmission systems, sampling is applied in the horizontal direction, too, on a signal which has been already scanned in the vertical and temporal directions or directly in three dimensions when using some solid-state sensor. As a conse- quence, in recent years it has been considered quite natural to assess the potential advan- tages arising from an entire multidimensional approach to the processing of video signals. As a simple but significant example, a composite color video signal, such as the conven- tional PAL or NTSC signal, possesses a three-dimensional spectrum which, by using suitable three-dimensional filters, permits horizontal sampling at a rate which is less than that re- quired for correctly sampling the equivalent one-dimensional signal. More recently it has been widely recognized that the improvement of the picture quality in current and advanced television systems requires well-chosen signal processing algorithms which are multidimen- sional in nature within the demanding constraints of a real-time implementation.

The success of VHDL since it has been balloted in 1987 as an IEEE standard may look incomprehensible to the large population of hardware designers, who had never heared of Hardware Description Languages before (for at least 90% of them), as well as to the few hundreds of specialists who had been working on these languages for a long time (25 years for some of them). Until 1988, only a very small subset of designers, in a few large companies, were used to describe their designs using a proprietary HDL, or sometimes a HDL inherited from a University when some software environment happened to be developped around it, allowing usability by third parties. A number of benefits were definitely recognized to this practice, such as functional verification of a specification through simulation, first performance evaluation of a tentative design, and sometimes automatic microprogram generation or even automatic high level synthesis. As there was apparently no market for HDL's, the ECAD vendors did not care about them, start-up companies were seldom able to survive in this area, and large users of proprietary tools were spending more and more people and money just to maintain their internal system.

In recent years there has been tremendous activity in computational neuroscience resulting from two parallel developments. On the one hand, our knowledge of real nervous systems has increased dramatically over the years; on the other, there is now enough computing power available to perform realistic simulations of actual neural circuits. This is leading to a revolution in quantitative neuroscience, which is attracting a growing number of scientists from non-biological disciplines. These scientists bring with them expertise in signal processing, information theory, and dynamical systems theory that has helped transform our ways of approaching neural systems. New developments in experimental techniques have enabled biologists to gather the data necessary to test these new theories. While we do not yet understand how the brain sees, hears or smells, we do have testable models of specific components of visual, auditory, and olfactory processing. Some of these models have been applied to help construct artificial vision and hearing systems. Similarly, our understanding of motor control has grown to the point where it has become a useful guide in the development of artificial robots. Many neuroscientists believe that we have only scratched the surface, and that a more complete understanding of biological information processing is likely to lead to technologies whose impact will propel another industrial revolution. Neural Systems: Analysis and Modeling contains the collected papers of the 1991 Conference on Analysis and Modeling of Neural Systems (AMNS), and the papers presented at the satellite symposium on compartmental modeling, held July 23-26, 1992, in San Francisco, California. The papers included, present an update of the most recent developments in quantitative analysis and modeling techniques for the study of neural systems.

Computer-Aided Verification is a collection of papers that begins with a general survey of hardware verification methods. Ms. Gupta starts with the issue of verification itself and develops a taxonomy of verification methodologies, focusing especially upon recent advances. Although her emphasis is hardware verification, most of what she reports applies to software verification as well. Graphical presentation is coming to be a de facto requirement for a `friendly' user interface. The second paper presents a generic format for graphical presentations of coordinating systems represented by automata. The last two papers as a pair, present a variety of generic techniques for reducing the computational cost of computer-aided verification based upon explicit computational memory: the first of the two gives a time-space trade-off, while the second gives a technique which trades space for a (sometimes predictable) probability of error. Computer-Aided Verification is an edited volume of original research. This research work has also been published as a special issue of the journal Formal Methods in System Design, 1:2-3.

This book encompasses basic and clinical reports on the cerebellum and its primary atrophic disorders, the cerebellar degenerations. Rapid progress has been made in undestanding the organization and function of the cerebellum at the neuronal, synaptic, and molecular level. Of particular importance has been the identification of the chemical transmitters utilized by the cer- ebellar cellular systems. More than any other brain region, the cerebellum utilizes amino acids as its main excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters. Excitatory amino acid transmitters, in addition to serving neuronal com- munication, may also mediate trophic and toxic effects, and as such, they may playa role in neurodegenerative processes. The cerebellar degenerations were among the first human disorders with primary system atrophy to be studied clinically and pathologically. This field of clinical cerebellar sciences, no longer confined to the previously known descriptive level, is now advancing rapidly, propelled by rapid advances in neuroimaging, immunology, and molecular biology. The advent of CT, MRI, and PET has in recent years permitted the study of central nervous system alterations in living patients, thus contributing substantially to the accuracy of the diagnosis and the classification of these disorders. The nosology of cerebellar degenerations, which has been the subject of much debate for over a century, is presently a dynamic field, with new entities being recognized and old "e;classic ataxias"e; being redefined in the light of new genetic evidence.

Speech coding has been an ongoing area of research for several decades, yet the level of activity and interest in this area has expanded dramatically in the last several years. Important advances in algorithmic techniques for speech coding have recently emerged and excellent progress has been achieved in producing high quality speech at bit rates as low as 4.8 kb/s. Although the complexity of the newer more sophisticated algorithms greatly exceeds that of older methods (such as ADPCM), today's powerful programmable signal processor chips allow rapid technology transfer from research to product development and permit many new cost-effective applications of speech coding. In particular, low bit rate voice technology is converging with the needs of the rapidly evolving digital telecom- munication networks. The IEEE Workshop on Speech Coding for Telecommunications was held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, from September 5 to 8, 1989. The objective of the workshop was to provide a forum for discussion of recent developments and future directions in speech coding. The workshop attracted over 130 researchers from several countries and its technical program included 51 papers.

Computer-Aided Design of Analog Circuits and Systems brings together in one place important contributions and state-of-the-art research results in the rapidly advancing area of computer-aided design of analog circuits and systems. This book serves as an excellent reference, providing insights into some of the most important issues in the field.

Application-Driven Architecture Synthesis describes the state of the art of architectural synthesis for complex real-time processing. In order to deal with the stringent timing requirements and the intricacies of complex real-time signal and data processing, target architecture styles and target application domains have been adopted to make the synthesis approach feasible. These approaches are also heavily application-driven, which is illustrated by many realistic demonstrations, used as examples in the book. The focus is on domains where application-specific solutions are attractive, such as significant parts of audio, telecom, instrumentation, speech, robotics, medical and automotive processing, image and video processing, TV, multi-media, radar, sonar. Application-Driven Architecture Synthesis is of interest to both academics and senior design engineers and CAD managers in industry. It provides an excellent overview of what capabilities to expect from future practical design tools, and includes an extensive bibliography.

This book brings together important contributions and state-of-the-art research results in the rapidly advancing area of symbolic analysis of analog circuits. It is also of interest to those working in analog CAD. The book is an excellent reference, providing insights into some of the most important issues in the symbolic analysis of analog circuits.

Speech and Audio Coding for Wireless and Network Applications contains 34 chapters, loosely grouped into six topical areas. The chapters in this volume reflect the progress and present the state of the art in low-bit-rate speech coding, primarily at bit rates from 2.4 kbit/s to 16 kbit/s. Together they represent important contributions from leading researchers in the speech coding community. Speech and Audio Coding for Wireless and Network Applications contains contributions describing technologies that are under consideration as standards for such applications as digital cellular communications (the half-rate American and European coding standards). A brief Introduction is followed by a section dedicated to low-delay speech coding, a research direction which emerged as a result of the CCITT requirement for a universal low-delay 16 kbit/s speech coding technology and now continues with the objective of achieving toll quality with moderate delay at a rate of 8 kbit/s. A section on the important topic of speech quality evaluation is then presented. This is followed by a section on speech coding for wireless transmission, and a section on audio coding which covers not only 7 kHz bandwidth speech, but also wideband coding applicable to high fidelity music. The book concludes with a section on speech coding for noisy transmission channels, followed by a section addressing future research directions. Speech and Audio Coding for Wireless and Network Applications presents a cross-section of the key contributions in speech and audio coding which have emerged recently. For this reason, the book is a valuable reference for all researchers and graduate students in the speech coding community.

Most machine learning research has been concerned with the development of systems that implememnt one type of inference within a single representational paradigm. Such systems, which can be called monostrategy learning systems, include those for empirical induction of decision trees or rules, explanation-based generalization, neural net learning from examples, genetic algorithm-based learning, and others. Monostrategy learning systems can be very effective and useful if learning problems to which they are applied are sufficiently narrowly defined. Many real-world applications, however, pose learning problems that go beyond the capability of monostrategy learning methods. In view of this, recent years have witnessed a growing interest in developing multistrategy systems, which integrate two or more inference types and/or paradigms within one learning system. Such multistrategy systems take advantage of the complementarity of different inference types or representational mechanisms. Therefore, they have a potential to be more versatile and more powerful than monostrategy systems. On the other hand, due to their greater complexity, their development is significantly more difficult and represents a new great challenge to the machine learning community. Multistrategy Learning contains contributions characteristic of the current research in this area.