Bücher veröffentlicht von Springer US

Spyware and Adware introduces detailed, organized, technical information exclusively on spyware and adware, including defensive techniques. This book not only brings together current sources of information on spyware and adware but also looks at the future direction of this field.Spyware and Adware is a reference book designed for researchers and professors in computer science, as well as a secondary text for advanced-level students. This book is also suitable for practitioners in industry.

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in Second Generation Image and Video Coding Techniques. These techniques introduce new concepts from image analysis that greatly improve the performance of the coding schemes for very high compression. This interest has been further emphasized by the future MPEG 4 standard. Second generation image and video coding techniques are the ensemble of approaches proposing new and more efficient image representations than the conventional canonical form. As a consequence, the human visual system becomes a fundamental part of the encoding/decoding chain. More insight to distinguish between first and second generation can be gained if it is noticed that image and video coding is basically carried out in two steps. First, image data are converted into a sequence of messages and, second, code words are assigned to the messages. Methods of the first generation put the emphasis on the second step, whereas methods of the second generation put it on the first step and use available results for the second step. As a result of including the human visual system, second generation can be also seen as an approach of seeing the image composed by different entities called objects. This implies that the image or sequence of images have first to be analyzed and/or segmented in order to find the entities. It is in this context that we have selected in this book three main approaches as second generation video coding techniques: Segmentation-based schemes Model Based Schemes Fractal Based Schemes GBP/LISTGBP Video Coding: The Second Generation Approach is an important introduction to the new coding techniques for video. As such, all researchers, students and practitioners working in image processing will find this book of interest.

This volume is an outgrowth of the research project "e;The Inverse Ga- lois Problem and its Application to Number Theory"e; which was carried out in three academic years from 1999 to 2001 with the support of the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) (1) No. 11440013. In September, 2001, an international conference "e;Galois Theory and Modular Forms"e; was held at Tokyo Metropolitan University after some preparatory work- shops and symposia in previous years. The title of this book came from that of the conference, and the authors were participants of those meet- All of the articles here were critically refereed by experts. Some of ings. these articles give well prepared surveys on branches of research areas, and many articles aim to bear the latest research results accompanied with carefully written expository introductions. When we started our re~earch project, we picked up three areas to investigate under the key word "e;Galois groups"e;; namely, "e;generic poly- nomials"e; to be applied to number theory, "e;Galois coverings of algebraic curves"e; to study new type of representations of absolute Galois groups, and explicitly described "e;Shimura varieties"e; to understand well the Ga- lois structures of some interesting polynomials including Brumer's sextic for the alternating group of degree 5. The topics of the articles in this volume are widely spread as a result. At a first glance, some readers may think this book somewhat unfocussed.

Transaction processing is an established technique for the concurrent and fault- tolerant access of persistent data. While this technique has been successful in standard database systems, factors such as time-critical applications, emerg- ing technologies, and a re-examination of existing systems suggest that the performance, functionality and applicability of transactions may be substan- tially enhanced if temporal considerations are taken into account. That is, transactions should not only execute in a "e;legal"e; (i.e., logically correct) man- ner, but they should meet certain constraints with regard to their invocation and completion times. Typically, these logical and temporal constraints are application-dependent, and we address some fundamental issues for the man- agement of transactions in the presence of such constraints. Our model for transaction-processing is based on extensions to established mod- els, and we briefly outline how logical and temporal constraints may be ex- pressed in it. For scheduling the transactions, we describe how legal schedules differ from one another in terms of meeting the temporal constraints. Exist- ing scheduling mechanisms do not differentiate among legal schedules, and are thereby inadequate with regard to meeting temporal constraints. This provides the basis for seeking scheduling strategies that attempt to meet the temporal constraints while continuing to produce legal schedules.

Despite the significant ongoing work in the development of new database systems, many of the basic architectural and performance tradeoffs involved in their design have not previously been explored in a systematic manner. The designers of the various systems have adopted a wide range of strategies in areas such as process structure, client-server interaction, concurrency control, transaction management, and memory management. This monograph investigates several fundamental aspects of the emerging generation of database systems. It describes and investigates implementation techniques to provide high performance and scalability while maintaining the transaction semantics, reliability, and availability associated with more traditional database architectures. The common theme of the techniques developed here is the exploitation of client resources through caching-based data replication. Client Data Caching: A Foundation for High Performance Object Database Systems should be a value to anyone interested in the performance and architecture of distributed information systems in general and Object-based Database Management Systems in particular. It provides useful information for designers of such systems, as well as for practitioners who need to understand the inherent tradeoffs among the architectural alternatives in order to evaluate existing systems. Furthermore, many of the issues addressed in this book are relevant to other systems beyond the ODBMS domain. Such systems include shared-disk parallel database systems, distributed file systems, and distributed virtual memory systems. The presentation is suitable for practitioners and advanced students in all of these areas, although a basic understanding of database transaction semantics and techniques is assumed.

The subject of sweeteners continues to advance and expand, but the progress that is being made may not be apparent for all to see, owing to changes that have been taking place in how research is funded and the locations where it is now mainly done. In former times scientific advancement was rated as a prized part of the output of academic research laboratories and institutions. Today, however, it is increasingly likely that major advances emanate chiefly from the research and development units of industrial and commercial enterprises and organisations. This means of course that the work becomes more focused on achieving specific marketing objectives, but because of the high level of commitment, cost and dedicated input required, publication of the findings tends to take a lower priority, and may actually be barred if there is any risk of loss of the commercial edge or advantage which has been one of the targets of the research. Thus one of the objects of preparing this book has been to collect together information that might otherwise remain unpublished on advances in the field of sweeteners. Of the fifteen contributions which form the chapters, only 13% originate from academic departments, whereas in earlier books of reviews on similar topics, contributions from academic sources accounted for as much as 50% (Developments in Sweeteners, vols 2 and 3, 1987 and 1989) and 64% (Progress in Sweeteners, 1989).

... a useful resource for anybody engaged in the manufacture and development of flatbread.'-Food Technology. This comprehensive reference provides a complete overview of flat bread, the most widely consumed bread type in the world. It brings together in-depth knowledge of the technology of flat bread production covering a wide range of topics, from the historic background of wheat, corn, rye, rice, barley, sorghum and millet cultivation to advanced research findings on flat bread technology. The author, a leading expert in the field, introduces a wealth of detailed information on flat bread technology, including: specific ingredients, formulations, production techniques, equipment requirements, quality assessment and shelf life of the final product . Both single and double layered products are explored providing developers with a thorough understanding of flat bread products from around the world and the opportunity to expand existing product lines. Special features of the text include: processing methods of over 45 types of flat breads, including pizza, pita, corn and wheat flour tortillas, foccacia, matzo, rye breads' dosai and injera; theory and practice of sourdough production; technology of synthetic and naturally occurring emulsifiers, and their applications in food and flat bread industries; and a multitude of illustrations of breads and processing steps, names and addresses of over 90 suppliers of ingredients and machinery used in the production of flat breads in United States and Canada. Flat Bread Technology is a welcome and invaluable resource to all those interested in the technical, scientific and historical background of flat breads; from the breeders of wheat and other cereal grains to technical personnel and suppliers of ingredients to milling and baking companies. It will also serve as an excellent guide to students attending baking schools and cereal and food institutions.

From the Foreword..... Modern digital signal processing applications provide a large challenge to the system designer. Algorithms are becoming increasingly complex, and yet they must be realized with tight performance constraints. Nevertheless, these DSP algorithms are often built from many constituent canonical subtasks (e.g., IIR and FIR filters, FFTs) that can be reused in other subtasks. Design is then a problem of composing these core entities into a cohesive whole to provide both the intended functionality and the required performance. In order to organize the design process, there have been two major approaches. The top-down approach starts with an abstract, concise, functional description which can be quickly generated. On the other hand, the bottom-up approach starts from a detailed low-level design where performance can be directly assessed, but where the requisite design and interface detail take a long time to generate. In this book, the authors show a way to effectively resolve this tension by retaining the high-level conciseness of VHDL while parameterizing it to get good fit to specific applications through reuse of core library components. Since they build on a pre-designed set of core elements, accurate area, speed and power estimates can be percolated to high- level design routines which explore the design space. Results are impressive, and the cost model provided will prove to be very useful. Overall, the authors have provided an up-to-date approach, doing a good job at getting performance out of high-level design. The methodology provided makes good use of extant design tools, and is realistic in terms of the industrial design process. The approach is interesting in its own right, but is also of direct utility, and it will give the existing DSP CAD tools a highly competitive alternative. The techniques described have been developed within ARPAs RASSP (Rapid Prototyping of Application Specific Signal Processors) project, and should be of great interest there, as well as to many industrial designers. Professor Jonathan Allen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Lifelong learning addresses situations in which a learner faces a series of different learning tasks providing the opportunity for synergy among them. Explanation-based neural network learning (EBNN) is a machine learning algorithm that transfers knowledge across multiple learning tasks. When faced with a new learning task, EBNN exploits domain knowledge accumulated in previous learning tasks to guide generalization in the new one. As a result, EBNN generalizes more accurately from less data than comparable methods. Explanation-Based Neural Network Learning: A Lifelong Learning Approach describes the basic EBNN paradigm and investigates it in the context of supervised learning, reinforcement learning, robotics, and chess. `The paradigm of lifelong learning - using earlier learned knowledge to improve subsequent learning - is a promising direction for a new generation of machine learning algorithms. Given the need for more accurate learning methods, it is difficult to imagine a future for machine learning that does not include this paradigm.' From the Foreword by Tom M. Mitchell.