springer berlin heidelberg aug 2004 (98 results)

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Internationales Wirtschaftsrecht - schnell erfasst behandelt in einem Allgemeinen Teil zunächst die Rechtsquellen und -gebiete einschließlich des Verhältnisses zu nationalen Rechtsordnungen, sodann Grundlagen, nämlich wichtige Akteure (vor allem Staaten, Internationale Organisationen), die Einbindung in die allgemeine internationale Ordnung, einen Überblick über wesentliche Sektoren (Investitionen, geistiges Eigentum, Wettbewerb etc.), Fragen der Implementierung, schließlich der Streitbeilegung und des Rechtsschutzes. Der Besondere Teil befasst sich mit ausgewählten materiell-rechtlichen Problemen, wie dem (Völker-)Recht des Warenhandels, des internationalen Dienstleistungs-, Kapital- und Zahlungsverkehrs sowie des wirtschaftsrelevanten Personenverkehrs und abschließend mit Aspekten öffentlicher Aufträge. Das Werk verbindet zudem das Sachverzeichnis mit einem Glossar und bereitet die einzelnen Kapitel durch Fragen vor, die am jeweiligen Ende (den Text ergänzend) beantwortet werden. 328 pp. Deutsch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Thisvolume provides a self-contained introduction to some topics in orbit equivalence theory, a branch of ergodic theory. The first two chapters focus on hyperfiniteness and amenability. Included here are proofs of Dye's theorem that probability measure-preserving, ergodic actions of the integers are orbit equivalent and of the theorem of Connes-Feldman-Weiss identifying amenability and hyperfiniteness for non-singular equivalence relations. The presentation here is often influenced by descriptive set theory, and Borel and generic analogs of various results are discussed. The final chapter is a detailed account of Gaboriau's recent results on the theory of costs for equivalence relations and groups and its applications to proving rigidity theorems for actions of free groups. 148 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This is the first book to provide a systematic exposition of promising techniques for the reconstruction of small inhomogeneities from boundary measurements. In particular, theoretical results and numerical procedures for the inverse problems for the conductivity equation, the Lamé system, as well as the Helmholtz equation are discussed in a readable and informative manner. The general approach developed in this book is based on layer potential techniques and modern asymptotic analysis of partial differential equations. The book is particularly suitable for graduate students in mathematics. 252 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -The Europaische Akademie zur Erforschung von Folgen wissenschaftlich-techni scher Entwicklungen Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler GmbH (european academy) is con cerned with the scientific study of the consequences of scientific and technological advance for the individual and social life and for the natural environment. The main focus is to examine foreseeable mid-and long-term processes that are especially influenced by natural-and engineering sciences and the medical disciplines. The academy fulfills this task by organizing interdisciplinary expert discussions. Another important issue of the work of the Europaische Akademie concerns the methodology of Technology Assessment as a general issue. This is the main reason that the european academy organized during the past two years a project funded by the European Commission on Technology Assessment. Methods and Impact (TAMI). Together with partners from all over Europe a common understanding of what Tech nology Assessment (TA) is supposed to do was developed. Most importantly it was acknowledged that the core of any TA activity has to be a sound scientific under standing of the relevant phenomena. Communication then is of cordial importance to reach the relevant decision makers as well as the general public. It is true that this phase of the TA process has been treated with too little attention for many years. The communication processes between scientific advisers and policy makers have hence to be further scrutinized. 268 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Research with radioactive ion beams has entered a new era with the advent of energetic beams of radioactive nuclei able to induce nuclear reactions. The present book is the first volume of edited lectures based on material presented at the Euroschool on Exotic Beams over the past years. It introduces the graduate student and nonspecialist scientist from related areas to various topics encompassing theoretical, experimental as well as application-related aspects of this growing field of research. 508 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Modern database systems enhance the capabilities of traditional database systems by their ability to handle any kind of data, including text, image, audio, and video. Today, databasesystemsareparticularlyrelevanttotheWeb,astheycanprovideinputtocontent generators for Web pages, and can handle queries issued over the Internet. The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is used in applications running the gamut from content management through publishing to Web services and e-commerce. It is used as the universal communication language for exchanging music and graphics as well as purchase orders and technical documentation. As database systems increasingly talk to each other over the Web, there is a fa- growingdesiretouseXMLasthestandardexchangeformat.Asaresult,manyrelat ional database systems can export data as XML documents and import data from XML d- uments and provide query and update capabilities for XML data. In addition, so called native XML database and integration systems are appearing on the database market, whose claim is to be especially tailored to storing, maintaining, and easily accessing XML documents. After the huge success of the rst XML Database Symposium (XSym 2003) last year in Berlin (already then in conjunction withVLDB) it was decided to establish this symposiumasanannualeventthatissupposedtotakeplaceasanintegralpartofVLDB. Thegoalofthissymposiumistoprovideahigh-qualityplatformforthepresentation and discussion of new research results and system developments. It is targeted at scientists, practitioners, vendors and users of XML and database technologies. 252 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Static analysis is a research area aimed at developing principles and tools for veri cation, certi cation, semantics-based manipulation, and high-performance implementation of programming languages and systems. The series of Static Analysis symposia has served as the primary venue for presentation and disc- sion of theoretical, practical, and application advances in the area. This volume contains the papers accepted for presentation at the 11th Int- nationalStaticAnalysisSymposium(SAS2004),whichwasheldAugust26 28in Verona,Italy.Inresponse to the callfor papers,63contributions weresubmitted from 20 di erent countries. Following on-line discussions, the ProgramComm- tee met in Verona on May 06, and selected 23 papers, basing this choice on their scienti c quality, originality, and relevance to the symposium. Each paper was reviewed by at least 3 PC members or external referees. In addition to the contributed papers, this volume includes contributions by outstanding invited speakers: a full invited paper by Thomas Henzinger (University of Califorina at Berkeley), and abstracts of the talks given by the other invited speakers, Sheila McIlraith (University of Toronto), Ehud Shapiro (Weizmann Institute) and Yannis Smaragdakis (Georgia Institute of Technology). 412 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Rapid technical advances in medical imaging, including its growing application to drug/gene therapy and invasive/interventional procedures, have attracted significant interest in close integration of research in life sciences, medicine, physical sciences and engineering. This is motivated by the clinical and basic science research requi- ment of obtaining more detailed physiological and pathological information about the body for establishing localized genesis and progression of diseases. Current research is also motivated by the fact that medical imaging is increasingly moving from a primarily diagnostic modality towards a therapeutic and interventional aid, driven by recent advances in minimal-access and robotic-assisted surgery. It was our great pleasure to welcome the attendees to MIAR 2004, the 2nd Int- national Workshop on Medical Imaging and Augmented Reality, held at the Xia- shan (Fragrant Hills) Hotel, Beijing, during August 19-20, 2004. The goal of MIAR 2004 was to bring together researchers in computer vision, graphics, robotics, and medical imaging to present the state-of-the-art developments 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 distinguished international f- ulty members. For MIAR 2004, we received 93 full submissions, which were sub- quently reviewed by up to 5 reviewers, resulting in the acceptance of the 41 full - pers included in this volume. 396 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Within thelastfewyears,datawarehousingandknowledgediscoverytechnology has established itself as a key technology for enterprises that wish to improve the quality of the results obtained from data analysis, decision support, and the automatic extraction of knowledge from data. The 6th InternationalConference on Data Warehousing and KnowledgeD- covery (DaWaK 2004) continued a series of successful conferences dedicated to this topic. Its main objective was to bring together researchers and practiti- ers to discuss research issues and experience in developing and deploying data warehousing and knowledge discovery systems, applications, and solutions. The conference focused on the logical and physical design of data wareho- ing and knowledge discovery systems. The scope of the papers covers the most recent and relevant topics in the areas of data cubes and queries, multidim- sionaldatamodels,XMLdatamining,datasemanticsandclustering,associatio n rules, data mining techniques, data analysis and discovery, query optimization, datacleansing,datawarehousedesignandmaintenance,andapplications.These proceedings contain the technical papers selected for presentation at the conf- ence. We received more than 100 papers, including 12 industrial papers, from over 33 countries, and the program committee nally selected 40 papers. The conf- ence program included an invited talk by Kazuo Iwano, IBM Tokyo Research Lab, Japan. We would like to thank the DEXA 2004 Workshop General Chairs (Prof. 432 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -It was 1999 when Extreme Programming Explained was rst published, making this year s event arguably the fth anniversary of the birth of the XP/Agile movement in software development. Our fourth conference re ected the evolution and the learning that have occurred in these exciting ve years as agile practices have become part of the mainstream in software development. These pages are the proceedingsof XP Agile Universe 2004, held in beautiful Calgary, gateway to the Canadian Rockies, in Alberta, Canada. Evidentintheconferenceis thefactthatourlearningis still inits earlystages. While at times overlooked,adaptation has beena core principleof agile software development since the earliest literature on the subject. The conference and these proceedings re- force that principle. Although some organizations are able to practice agile methods in the near-pure form, most are not, re ecting just how radically innovativethese methods areto thisday. Anyinnovationmustcoexistwithan existingenvironmentandagileso- ware development is no different. There are numerous challenges confronting IT and software development organizations today, with many solutions pitched by a cadre of advocates. Be it CMM, offshoring, outsourcing, security, or one of many other current topics in the industry, teams using or transitioning to Extreme Programming and other agile practices must integrate with the rest of the organization in order to succeed. The papers here offer some of the latest experiences that teams are having in those efforts. XP Agile Universe 2004consisted of workshops,tutorials, papers, panels, the Open Space session, the Educators Symposium, keynotes, educational games and industry presentations. 252 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -The 7th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS2003)washeldduringDecember10 13,2003atLaMartinique,French WestIndies,andwasco-organizedbytheUniversit edesAntillesetdelaGuyane, La Martinique, French West Indies and by Chalmers University of Techn- ogy, Sweden. It continued a tradition of successful conferences with friendly and pleasant atmospheres. The earlier organizations of OPODIS were held in Luzarches (1997), Amiens (1998), Hanoi (1999), Paris (2000), Mexico (2001) and Reims (2002). OPODIS is an open forum for the exchange of state-of-the-art knowledge on distributed computing and systems among researchers from around the world. Following the tradition of the previous organizations, its program is composed of high-quality contributed and invited papers by experts of international caliber in this scienti c area. The topics of interest are theory, speci cations, design and implementation of distributed systems, including distributed and multiproc- sor algorithms; communication and synchronization protocols; coordination and consistency protocols; stabilization, reliability and fault-tolerance of distributed systems; performance analysis of distributed algorithms and systems; speci - tion and veri cation of distributed systems; security issues in distributed c- puting and systems; and applications of distributed computing, such as emb- ded distributed systems, real-time distributed systems, distributed collaborative environments, peer-to-peer systems, cluster and grid computing. 268 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Welcome to the proceedings of UbiComp 2004. In recent years the ubiquitous computing community has witnessed a sign- cant growth in the number of conferences in the area, each with its own disti- tive characteristics. For UbiComp these characteristics have always included a high-quality technical program and associated demonstrations and posters that cover the full range of research being carried out under the umbrella of ubiq- tous computing. Ours is a broaddiscipline andUbiComp aims to be aninclusive forum that welcomes submissions from researchers with many di erent ba- grounds. This year we received 145 submissions. Of these we accepted 26, an acceptance rate of just under 18%. Of course acceptance rate is simply a m- sure of selectivity rather than quality and we were particularly pleased this year to note that we had a large number of high-quality submissions from which to assemble the program for 2004. The broad nature of ubiquitous computing research makes reviewing Ubi- Comp submissions a particular challenge. This year we adopted a new process for review and selection that has, we hope, resulted in all authors obtaining - tremely detailed feedback on their submission whether or not it was accepted for publication. We believe the process enabled us to assemble the best pos- ble program for delegates at the conference. If you submitted a paper, we hope that you bene ted from the feedback that your peers have provided, and if you attended UbiComp 2004 we hope that you enjoyed the technical program. 476 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Welcome to NLDB04, the Ninth International Conference on the Application of Natural Language to Information Systems, held at the University of Salford, UK d- ing June 23-25, 2004. NLDB04 follows on the success of previous conferences held since 1995. Early conferences then known as Application of Natural Language to Databases, hence the acronym NLDB, were used as a forum to discuss and disse- nate research on the integration of natural language and databases and were mainly concerned with natural language based queries, database modelling and user int- faces that facilitate access to information. The conference has since moved to enc- pass all aspects of Information Systems and Software Engineering. Indeed, the use of natural language in systems modelling has greatly improved the development process and benefited both developers and users at all stages of the software development process. The latest developments in the field of natural language and the emergence of new technologies has seen a shift towards storage of large semantic electronic dictionaries, their exploitation and the advent of what is now known as the semantic web. Inf- mation extraction and retrieval, document and content management, ontology dev- opment and management and natural language conversational systems are becoming regular tracks in the last NLDB conferences. NLDB04 has seen a 50% increase in the number of submissions and has est- lished itself as one of the leading conferences in the area of applying natural language to information systems in its broader sense. 452 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This volume contains the proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Software and Compilers for Embedded Systems (SCOPES 2004) held in A- terdam, The Netherlands, on September 2 and 3, 2004. Initially, the workshop was referred to as the International Workshop on Code Generation for Emb- ded Systems. The rst took place in 1994 in Schloß Dagstuhl, Germany. From its beginnings, the intention of the organizers has been to create an interactive atmosphere in which the participants can discuss and pro t from the assembly of international experts in the eld. The name SCOPES has been used since the fourth edition in St. Goar, G- many,in1999whenthescopeoftheworkshopwasextendedtoalsocovergeneral issues in embedded software design. Since then SCOPES has been held again in St. Goar in 2001; Berlin, Germany in 2002; Vienna, Austria in 2003; and now in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In response to the call for papers, almost 50 very strong papers were s- mitted from all over the world. All submitted papers were reviewed by at least three experts to ensure the quality of the workshop. In the end, the program committee selected 17 papers for presentation at the workshop. These papers are divided into the following categories: application-speci c (co)design, system and application synthesis, data ow analysis, data partitioning, task scheduling and code generation. In addition to the selected contributions, the keynote address was delivered by Mike Uhler from MIPS Technologies. An abstract of his talk is also included in this volume. 276 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -On behalf of the AH 2004 Program Committee, we were pleased to welcome att- dees to Eindhoven for the 3rd International Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems. Similar to previous years, the number of research groups involved in research and innovative applications of personalization and adaptation functionalities has continued to grow, resulting in a further increase of 33% in the number of papers submitted to the conference, compared to the previous conference. From the 138 submissions we received, the program committee, in a rigorous review process, accepted 27 submissions (i.e., 20%) as full papers and 18 (i.e., 13%) as short papers. The large number of papers submitted generated a tremendous amount of work for the program committee members and the external reviewers, and we are immensely greatful for the effort they put into the process of selecting the very best papers. Together with three invited talks (by Emile Aarts, Philips Research, Candy Sidner, Mitsubishi Research, and Eric Horvitz, Microsoft Research), the AH 2004 - pers provide an excellent view on the successful approaches for innovative person- ization and adaptation functionalities in a variety of areas, including eLearning, eC- merce, mobile tourist guides and many more. They also show the integration of pers- alization functionalities being employed in Web environments, in ambient intelligence and intelligent agent contexts, and building upon adaptive hypermedia and Semantic Web technologies, Web search, Web services, social and peer-to-peer networks, and recommender systems, among others. 464 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This volume contains the proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2004) held in the Royal Society, London, UK, from the 31st August to the 3rd September, 2004. ThepurposeoftheCONCURconferencesistobringtogetherresearchers,- velopersandstudentsinordertoadvancethetheoryofconcurrencyandpromote its applications. Interest in this topic is continually growing, as a consequence of theimportanceandubiquityofconcurrentsystemsandtheirapplications,andof the scienti c relevance of their foundations. The scope covers all areas of sem- tics, logics, and veri cation techniques for concurrent systems. Topics include concurrency-related aspects of: models of computation, semantic domains, p- cess algebras, Petri nets, event structures, real-time systems, hybrid systems, - cidability, model-checking, veri cation techniques, re nement techniques, term and graph rewriting, distributed programming, logic constraint programming, object-oriented programming, typing systems and algorithms, case studies, tools and environments for programming and veri cation. This volume starts with four invited papers from Sriram Rajamani, Steve Brookes, Bengt Jonsson and Peter O Hearn. The remaining 29 papers were - lected by the program committee from 134 submissions, a record number of submissions to CONCUR. The standard was extremely high and the selection di cult. Each submission received at least three reports, reviewed by the p- gram committee members or their subreferees. Once the initial reviews were available, we had 16 days for paper selection and con ict resolution. We would like to thank all members of the CONCUR 2004 Program Committee for their excellent work throughout the intensive selection process, together with many subreferees who assisted us in the evaluation of the submitted papers. 548 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -How often we recall, with regret , wrote Mark Twain about editors, that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity, that his intentions were good. Fortunately, we live in more forgiving times, and are openly able to express our pleasure at being the editors of this volume containing the papers selected for presentation at the 14th International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming. ILP 2004 was held in Porto from the 6th to the 8th of September, under the auspices of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computing of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP), and the Laborat orio de Intelig encia Arti cial e Ci encias da Computa c ao (LIACC). This annual me- ing of ILP practitioners and curious outsiders is intended to act as the premier forum for presenting the most recent and exciting work in the eld. Six invited talks three from elds outside ILP, but nevertheless highly relevant to it and 20 full presentations formed the nucleus of the conference. It is the full-length papersofthese20presentationsthatcomprisethebulkofthisvolume. Asisnow common with the ILP conference, presentations made to a Work-in-Progress track will, hopefully, be available elsewhere. We gratefully acknowledge the continued support of Kluwer Academic P- lishers for the Best Student Paper award on behalf of the Machine Lea- ing journal; and Springer-Verlag for continuing to publish the proceedings of these conferences. 376 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -The 11th Conference 'Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Systems, Applications - Semantic Web Challenges' (AIMSA 2004) continued successfully pursuing the main aim of the AIMSA series of conferences - to foster the multidisciplinary community of artificial intelligence researchers, embracing both the theoretic underpinnings of the field and the practical issues involved in development, deployment, and maintenance of systems with intelligent behavior. Since the first conference in 1984 AIMSA has provided an ideal forum for international scientific exchange between Central/Eastern Europe and the rest of the world and it is even more important nowadays in the uni- ing Europe. The current AIMSA edition is focused on Semantic Web methods and technologies. The Internet is changing the everyday services landscape, and the way we do things in almost every domain of our life. Web services are rapidly becoming the enabling technology of today's e-business and e-commerce systems, and will soon transform the Web as it is now into a distributed computation and application framework. The emerging Semantic Web paradigm promises to annotate Web artefacts to enable automated reasoning about them. When applied to e-services, the paradigm hopes to provide substantial automation for activities such as discovery, invocation, assembly, and monitoring of e-services. One hundred and seventy-six interesting papers were submitted to the conference. 540 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Thisvolumecontainspapersselectedforpresentationatthe6thIAPRWorkshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS 2004) held during September 8-10, 2004 at the University of Florence, Italy. Several papers represent the state of the art in a broad range of 'traditional' topics such as layout analysis, applications to graphics recognition, and handwritten documents. Other contributions address the description of complete working systems, which is one of the strengths of this workshop. Some papers extend the application domains to other media, like the processing of Internet documents. The peculiarity of this 6th workshop was the large number of papers related to digital libraries and to the processing of historical documents, a taste which frequently requires the analysis of color documents. A total of 17 papers are associated with these topics, whereas two yearsago (in DAS 2002) only a couple of papers dealt with these problems. In our view there are three main reasons for this new wave in the DAS community. From the scienti c point of view, several research elds reached a thorough knowledge of techniques and problems that can be e ectively solved, and this expertise can now be applied to new domains. Another incentive has been provided by several research projects funded by the EC and the NSF on topics related to digital libraries. 580 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -We are delighted to present the proceedings of DAGM 2004, and wish to - press our gratitude to the many people whose e orts made the success of the conference possible. We received 146 contributions of which we were able to - cept 22 as oral presentations and 48 as posters. Each paper received 3 reviews, upon which decisions were based. We are grateful for the dedicated work of the 38 members of the program committee and the numerous referees. The careful review process led to the exciting program which we are able to present in this volume. Among the highlights of the meeting were the talks of our four invited spe- ers, renowned experts in areas spanning learning in theory, in vision and in robotics: William T. Freeman, Arti cial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT: Sharing F- tures for Multi-class Object Detection PietroPerona,Caltech:TowardsUnsupervisedLearningofObjectCategories StefanSchaal,DepartmentofComputerScience,UniversityofSouthernC- ifornia: Real-Time Statistical Learning for Humanoid Robotics Vladimir Vapnik, NEC Research Institute: Empirical Inference WearegratefulforeconomicsupportfromHondaResearchInstituteEurope, ABW GmbH, Transtec AG, DaimlerChrysler, and Stemmer Imaging GmbH, which enabled us to nance best paper prizes and a limited number of travel grants. Many thanks to our local support Sabrina Nielebock and Dagmar Maier, who dealt with the unimaginably diverse range of practical tasks involved in planning a DAGM symposium. Thanks to Richard van de Stadt for providing excellent software and support for handling the reviewing process. A special thanks goes to Jeremy Hill, who wrote and maintained the conference website. 604 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This volume contains the postproceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Autonomy - Potential, Risks, Solutions (AUTONOMY 2003), held at the 2nd International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agentSystems(AAMAS2003),July14,2003,Melbourne,Australia.Apart from revised versions of the accepted workshop papers, we have included invited contributions from leading experts in the eld. With this, the present volume represents the rst comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art of research on autonomy, capturing di erent theories of autonomy, perspectives on autonomy in di erent kinds of agent-based systems, and practical approaches to dealing with agent autonomy. Agent orientation refers to a software development perspective that has evolved in the past 25 years in the elds of computational agents and multiagent systems. The basic notion underlying this perspective is that of a computational agent, that is, an entity whose behavior deserves to be called exible, social, and autonomous. As an autonomous entity, an agent possesses action choice and is at least to some extent capable of deciding and acting under self-control. Through its emphasis on autonomy, agent orientation signi cantly di ers from traditional engineering perspectives such as structure orientation or object o- entation. These perspectives are targeted on the development of systems whose behavior is fully determined and controlled by external units (e.g., by a p- grammer at design time and/or a user at run time), and thus inherently fail to capture the notion of autonomy. 292 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -It is with great pleasure that we present to you this tutorial volume entitled Validation of Stochastic Systems.ItisoneoftheresultsoftheDutch-German- lateral cooperation project Validation of Stochastic Systems (VOSS), nanced by NWO and DFG (the Dutch and German science foundations, respectively). In the early days of 2002, the idea emerged to organize a seminar at Schloss Dagstuhl, not the usual Dagstuhl seminar with primarily invited participants, but a seminar aimed at young(er) people, and for which the organizers assign themes to be worked upon and presented on. Following an open call announced via the Internet in the spring of 2002, we received many applications for part- ipation. After a selection procedure, we decided to assign (mostly) teams of two researchers to work on speci c topics, roughly divided into the following four theme areas: Modelling of Stochastic Systems, Model Checking of Stochastic Systems, Representing Large State Spaces, and Deductive Veri cation of Stochastic Systems. These are the titles of the four parts of this volume. TheseminarwasheldinSchlossDagstuhlduringDecember8 11,2002aspart of the so-called GI/Research Seminar series. This series of seminars is nancially supported by theGesellschaft fur Informatik, the German Computer Society. At that point in time the papers had already undergone a rst review round. Each of the tutorial papers was presented in a one-hour session, and on the basis of the presentations we decided to bring together a selection of them into a book. 480 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Statistical learning theory is aimed at analyzing complex data with necessarily approximate models. This book is intended for an audience with a graduate background in probability theory and statistics. It will be useful to any reader wondering why it may be a good idea, to use asis often done in practice a notoriously 'wrong'' (i.e. over-simplified) model to predict, estimate or classify. This point of view takes its roots in three fields: information theory, statistical mechanics, and PAC-Bayesian theorems. Results on the large deviations of trajectories of Markov chains with rare transitions are also included. They are meant to provide a better understanding of stochastic optimization algorithms of common use in computing estimators. The author focuses on non-asymptotic bounds of the statistical risk, allowing one to choose adaptively between rich and structured families of models and corresponding estimators. Two mathematical objects pervade the book: entropy and Gibbs measures. The goal is to show how to turn them into versatile and efficient technical tools,that will stimulate further studies and results. 292 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This volume contains the papers presentedat the 20th InternationalConference onLogicProgramming,held in Saint-Malo,France,September 6 10,2004.Since the rst meeting in this series, held in Marseilles in 1982, ICLP has been the premier international conference for presenting research in logic programming. This year, we received 70 technical papers from countries all over the world, and the ProgramCommittee accepted 28 of them for presentation;they are included in this volume. A stand-by-your-postersession took place during the conference. It servedas aforumforpresentingworkinamoreinformalandinteractivesetting.Abstracts ofthe16postersselectedbytheProgramCommitteeareincludedinthisvolume as well. The conference program also included invited talks and invited tutorials. We were privileged to have talks by three outstanding researchers and excellent speakers: Nachum Dershowitz (Tel Aviv University, Israel) talked on Ter- nation by Abstraction, Michael Gelfond (Texas Tech University, USA) on - swer Set Programming and the Design of Deliberative Agents,andG erard Huet (INRIA, France) on Non-determinism Lessons. Two of the invited talks appear in these proceedings. The tutorials covered topics of high interest to the logic programming community: Ilkka Niemel a gave a tutorial on The Implementation of Answer Set Solvers, Andreas PodelskionTree Automata in Program Analysis and Veri cation, and Guillermo R. Simari onDefeasible Logic Programming and Belief Revision. Satelliteworkshopsmadetheconferenceevenmoreinteresting.Sixworkshops collocated with ICLP 2004: CICLOPS2004, Colloquium on Implementation of Constraint and Logic Programming Systems, organized by Manuel Carro. COLOPS2004,2ndInternationalWorkshoponConstraint&LogicProgr- ming in Security, organized by Frank Valencia. MultiCPL2004, 3rd International Workshop on Multiparadigm Constraint, organized by Petra Hofstedt. TeachLP2004,1stInternationalWorkshoponTeachingLogicProgramming, organized by Dietmar Seipel. 496 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Thepapersinthisvolumewereselectedforpresentationatthe10thInternational Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON 2004), held on August 17-20, 2004 in Jeju Island, Korea. Previous meetings were held in Xi'an (1995), HongKong(1996),Shanghai(1997),Taipei(1998),Tokyo(1999),Sydney(2000), Guilin (2001), Singapore (2002), and Big Sky (2003). In response to the call for papers, 109 extended abstracts were submitted from 23 countries, of which 46 were accepted. The submitted papers were from Belgium (1), Canada (5), China (6), France (1), Germany (6), Hong Kong (8), India (6), Iran (1), Ireland (1), Israel (4), Italy (2), Japan (17), Korea (23), Mexico (3), New Zealand (1), Poland(1), Russia (1), Singapore (5), Sweden (2), Switzerland (3), Taiwan (2), the UK (1), and the USA (9). Each paper was evaluated by at least three program committee members, with the assistance of referees, as indicated by the referee list found in these proceedings. There were many more acceptable papers than there was space available in the conference schedule, and the program committee's task was extremely di cult. In addition to selected papers, the conference also included threeinvitedpresentationsbyLarsArge,JeongHanKim,andKokichiSugihara. We thank all program committee members and their referees for their - cellent work, especially given the demanding time constraints; they gave the conference its distinctive character. We thank all who submitted papers for c- sideration: they all contributed to the high quality of the conference. Finally,wethankallthepeoplewhoworkedhardtoputinplacethelogistical arrangements of the conference - our colleagues and our graduate students. It is their hard work that made the conference possible and enjoyable. 496 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This volume contains invited and contributed papers presented at the eighth edition of the International Summer School on Neural Networks, dedicated to Prof.EduardoR.Caianiello.Theschoolwasestablishedin1996byProf.Antonio Zichichi, director of the Ettore Maiorana Centre for Scienti c Culture in Erice (Sicily), and Prof. Maria Marinaro, director of the International Institute for Advanced Scienti c Studies in Vietri sul Mare, in Italy. The school is held each year,alternatingbetweenEriceandVietri,proposingsurveysonseveralresear ch elds related to cybernetics studies and human-machine interaction. The eighth edition of the school was on cortical dynamics and was held in Erice. The contributions collected in this book are aimed at providing primarily high-level tutorial coverage of the elds related to cortical dynamics, repo- ing recent experimental and theoretical results investigating the processing, the transmission, and the imprinting of information in the brain, and important functions of the cortical area such as cortical rhythms, cortical neural plasticity, and their structural basis and functional signi cance. Height surveys, reporting the most recent original results, are o ered by specialists in the eld. Consequently, the volume may be used as a reference book on models of cortical dynamics from neuroscienceand physics. To this aim the volume is divided into two sections: fundamentals of cortical dynamics, and mathematical models of cortical dynamics. 176 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Concepts like ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence that exploit - creasingly interconnected networks and mobility put new requirements on data management. An important element in the connected world is that data will be accessible anytime anywhere. This also has its downside in that it becomes easier to get unauthorized data access. Furthermore, it will become easier to collect, store, and search personal information and endanger people's privacy. As a result security and privacy of data becomes more and more of an issue. Therefore, secure data management, which is also privacy-enhanced, turns out to be a challenging goal that will also seriously in uence the acceptance of ub- uitous computing and ambient intelligence concepts by society. With the above in mind, we organized the SDM 2004 workshop to initiate and promote secure data management as one of the important interdisciplinary - search elds that brings together people from the security research community and the data management research community. The call for papers attracted 28 submissions both from universities and industry. The program committee selected 15 researchpapers for presentation at the workshop.The technical c- tributions presented at the SDM workshop are collected in this volume, which, wehope,willserveasavaluableresearchandreferencebookinyourprofessional life. 232 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Thisvolumecontainsthepaperspresentedatthe7th International Workshop on Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems (APPROX 2004) and the 8th International Workshop on Randomization and Compu- tion (RANDOM 2004), which took place concurrently at Harvard University, Cambridge, on August 22 24, 2004. APPROX focuses on algorithmic and c- plexity issues surrounding the development of e cient approximate solutions to computationally hard problems, and this year s workshop was the seventh in the series after Aalborg (1998), Berkeley (1999), Saarbru cken (2000), Berkeley (2001), Rome (2002), and Princeton (2003). RANDOM is concerned with app- cations of randomness to computational and combinatorial problems, and this year sworkshopwasthe eighth in the seriesfollowing Bologna(1997),Barcelona (1998), Berkeley (1999), Geneva (2000), Berkeley (2001), Harvard (2002), and Princeton (2003). Topics of interest for APPROX and RANDOM are: design and analysis of approximation algorithms, inapproximability results, approximationclasses, - line problems, small space and data streaming algorithms, sub-linear time al- rithms, embeddings and metric space methods in approximation, math prog- ming in approximation algorithms, coloring and partitioning, cuts and conn- tivity, geometric problems, network design and routing, packing and covering, scheduling, game theory, design and analysis of randomized algorithms, r- domized complexity theory, pseudorandomness and derandomization, random combinatorial structures, random walks/Markov chains, expander graphs and randomness extractors,probabilistic proof systems,random projectionsand - beddings,error-correctingcodes,average-caseanalysis,propertytesting,com- tational learning theory, and other applications of approximation and rand- ness. The volumecontains19+18contributed papers,selected by the two program committees from 54+33 submissions received in response to the call for papers. 444 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -1 With its fourth edition, the ANTS series of workshops has changed its name. Theoriginal ANTS FromAntColoniestoArti cialAnts:InternationalWo- shop on Ant Algorithms has become ANTS International Workshop on Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence . This change is mainly due to the following reasons. First, the term ant algorithms was slower in spreading in the research community than the term swarm intelligence , while at the sametime research inso-calledswarm robotics wasthesubjectofincreasingactivity:itwastherefore an obvious choice to substitute the term ant algorithms with the more accepted and used term swarm intelligence. Second, although swarm intelligence research has undoubtedly produced a 2 number of interesting and promising research directions , we think it is fair to say that its most successful strand is the one known as ant colony optimi- tion .Ant colony optimization, rst introducedin the early1990sasa noveltool fortheapproximatesolutionofdiscreteoptimizationproblems,hasre centlyseen an explosion in the number of its applications, both to academic and real-world problems, and is currently being extended to the realm of continuous optimi- tion (a few papers on this subject being published in these proceedings). It is therefore a reasonable choice to have the term ant colony optimization as part of the workshop name. 452 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Groupware (CRIWG 2004). The conference was held in San Carlos, Costa Rica, and followed the traditional CRIWG spirit: a relatively small number of attendees, lively discussions and participation during and between paper p- sentations, and a constructive and friendly environment, which promoted a high level of learning and collaboration. The previous nine CRIWG workshops were organized in Lisbon, Portugal (1995), Puerto Varas, Chile (1996), El Escorial, Spain (1997), Buzios, Brazil (1998),Cancun,Mexico (1999),Madeira,Portugal(2000),Darmstadt,Germany (2001), La Serena, Chile (2002), and Autrans, France (2003). This 10th anniversary CRIWG exempli ed the continuing interest in the groupwareresearcharea.Groupwareresearchersfrom 14 di erent countriess- mitted a total of 71 papers. Each of the 71 papers was reviewed by two to three members of an international Program Committee, using a double-blind revi- ing process. Reviewers were carefully matched to paper submissions as much as possible to ensure expert assessments of the submitted research while avo- ing potential con icts of interest. Reviews were usually extensive and contained many constructive suggestions for improvement. Based on the reviewers rec- mendations 29 papers were nally accepted: 16 long papers presenting mature work,and13shortpapersdescribingworkinprogress.Theacceptedpaperswere grouped into seven themes that represent current pockets of interest in gro- wareresearch:knowledgemanagement,awareness,supportforcollaborationp- cesses,collaborativeapplications,groupwareinfrastructure,computer-supported collaborative learning, and mobile collaborative work. 396 pp. Englisch.