In the present thriving global economy a need has evolved for complex data analysis to enhance an organization’s production systems, decision-making tactics, and performance. In turn, data mining has emerged as one of the most active areas in information technologies. Domain Driven Data Mining offers state-of the-art research and development outcomes on methodologies, techniques, approaches and successful applications in domain driven, actionable knowledge discovery.

Organic semiconductors offer unique characteristics such as tunability of electronic properties via chemical synthesis, compatibility with mechanically flexible substrates, low-cost manufacturing, and facile integration with chemical and biological functionalities. These characteristics have prompted the application of organic semiconductors and their devices in physical, chemical, and biological sensors. This book covers this rapidly emerging field by discussing both optical and electrical sensor concepts. Novel transducers based on organic light-emitting diodes and organic thin-film transistors, as well as systems-on-a-chip architectures are presented. Functionalization techniques to enhance specificity are outlined, and models for the sensor response are described.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Developments in Language Theory, DLT 2008, held in Kyoto, Japan, September 2008. The 36 revised full papers presented together with 6 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 102 submissions. All important issues in language theory are addressed including grammars, acceptors and transducers for words, trees and graphs; algebraic theories of automata; algorithmic, combinatorial and algebraic properties of words and languages; variable length codes; symbolic dynamics; cellular automata; polyominoes and multidimensional patterns; decidability questions; image manipulation and compression; efficient text algorithms; relationships to cryptography, concurrency, complexity theory and logic; bio-inspired computing; quantum computing.

From August 27 to 31, 2000, the International Conference and Research Center for Computer Science in Schloss Dagstuhl, Dagstuhl for short, celebrated its 10th anniversary. Since its founding in 1990, the objective of the Center has been to promote world-class research in computer science, support leading-edge continuing education, and promote the exchange of knowledge and findings between academia and industry. It hosts research seminars at which promising young research scientists are afforded the opportunity of discussing their views and research findings with the international elite of their field in a specific cuttingedge field of computer science. The seminars enable new ideas to be showcased, topical problems to be discussed, and the course to be set for future development in this field. Roughly 15 000 scientists from all over the world and from all areas of computer science as well as from application areas have participated in about 500 meetings in Dagstuhl during these 10 years. They have all enjoyed the “Dagstuhl Magic”, as several guests have called it, guaranteeing creative and productive meetings.

This is the first book entirely dedicated to the problem of memory management in programming language implementation. Its originality stems from the diversity of languages and approaches presented: functional programming, logic programming, object oriented programming, and parallel and sequential programming. The book contains 29 selected and refereed papers including 3 survey papers, 4 on distributed systems, 4 on parallelism, 4 on functional languages, 3 on logic programming languages, 3 on object oriented languages, 3 on incremental garbage collection, 2 on improving locality, 2 on massively parallel architectures, and an invited paper on the thermodynamics of garbage collection. The book provides a snapshot of the latest research in the domain of memory management for high-level programming language implementations.

Legal Programming: Designing Legally Compliant RFID and Software Agent Architectures for Retail Processes and Beyond provides a process-oriented discussion of the legal concerns presented by agent-based technologies, processes and programming. It offers a general outline of the potential legal difficulties that could arise in relation to them, focusing on the programming of negotiation and contracting processes in a privacy, consumer and commercial context. The authors will elucidate how it is possible to create form of legal framework and design methodology for transaction agents, applicable in any environment and not just in a specific proprietary framework, that provides the right level of compliance and trust. Key elements considered include the design and programming of legally compliant methods, the determination of rights in respect of objects and variables, and ontologies and programming frameworks for agent interactions. Examples are used to illustrate the points made and provide a practical perspective.

For purposes of understanding its performance, a computer system is traditionally viewed as a processor coupled to one or more disk storage devices, and driven by externally generated requests (typically called transactions). Over the past several decades, very powerful techniques have become available to the performance analyst attempting to understand, at a high level, the operational behavior of such systems. Nevertheless, the ability of computers to rapidly deliver requested information, at the time it is needed, depends critically on an underlying structure whose operational behavior is not nearly as well understood: the memory hierarchy through which data stored on disk is made available to the processor. The memory hierarchy tends to consist of many levels, including one or more processor buffer memories (also called L1 and L2 cache), main processormemory, disk storage cache memory? disk storage, and often tape. A given level is usually configured to have both a much smaller storage capacity and a much faster access time than the level below it. The data stored in each memory level is managed dynamically, with new data being brought in as needed from the level below.

This monograph presents a novel concept of a mobile robot, which is a single-wheel, gyroscopically stabilized robot. The robot is balanced by a spinning wheel attached through a two-link manipulator at the wheel bearing, and actuated by a drive motor. This configuration conveys significant advantages including insensitivity to attitude disturbances, high maneuverability, low rolling resistance, ability to recover from falls, and amphibious capability for potential applications on both land and water. This book focuses on the dynamics and control aspects, including modeling, model-based control, learning-based control, and shared control with human operators. This novel mobile robot concept opens up the science of dynamically stable systems with a single wheel configuration. The book also presents considerations in concept, design implementations, and kinematics modeling, as well as experimental results from various algorithms and cases. The system is a nonholonomic, underactuated, and highly nonlinear system, so this book is appropriate for scientists and engineers with interests in mobile robot, dynamics and control, as a research reference and postgraduate textbook.

Information intermediation is the foundation stone of some of the most successful Internet companies, and is perhaps second only to the Internet Infrastructure companies. On the heels of information integration and interoperability, this book on information brokering discusses the next step in information interoperability and integration. The emerging Internet economy based on burgeoning B2B and B2C trading will soon demand semantics-based information intermediation for its feasibility and success. B2B ventures are involved in the `rationalization' of new vertical markets and construction of domain specific product catalogs. This book provides approaches for re-use of existing vocabularies and domain ontologies as a basis for this rationalization and provides a framework based on inter-ontology interoperation. Infrastructural trade-offs that identify optimizations in performance and scalability of web sites will soon give way to information based trade-offs as alternate rationalization schemes come into play and the necessity of interoperating across these schemes is realized. Information Brokering Across Heterogeneous Digital Data's intended readers are researchers, software architects and CTOs, advanced product developers dealing with information intermediation issues in the context of e-commerce (B2B and B2C), information technology professionals in various vertical markets (e.g., geo-spatial information, medicine, auto), and all librarians interested in information brokering.

Cells and Robots is an outcome of the multidisciplinary research extending over Biology, Robotics and Hybrid Systems Theory. It is inspired by modeling reactive behavior of the immune system cell population, where each cell is considered as an independent agent. In our modeling approach, there is no difference if the cells are naturally or artificially created agents, such as robots. This appears even more evident when we introduce a case study concerning a large-size robotic population scenario. Under this scenario, we also formulate the optimal control of maximizing the probability of robotic presence in a given region and discuss the application of the Minimum Principle for partial differential equations to this problem. Simultaneous consideration of cell and robotic populations is of mutual benefit for Biology and Robotics, as well as for the general understanding of multi-agent system dynamics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning, IJCAR 2008, held in Sydney, Australia, in August 2008. The 26 revised full research papers and 13 revised system descriptions presented together with 4 invited papers and a summary of the CASC-J4 systems competition were carefully reviewed and selected from 80 full paper and 17 system description submissions. The papers address the entire spectrum of research in automated reasoning and are organized in topical sections on specific theories, automated verification, protocol verification, system descriptions, modal logics, description logics, equational theories, theorem proving, CASC, the 4th IJCAR ATP system competition, logical frameworks, and tree automata.

Transformational programming and parallel computation are two emerging fields that may ultimately depend on each other for success. Perhaps because ad hoc programming on sequential machines is so straightforward, sequential programming methodology has had little impact outside the academic community, and transformational methodology has had little impact at all. However, because ad hoc programming for parallel machines is so hard, and because progress in software construction has lagged behind architectural advances for such machines, there is a much greater need to develop parallel programming and transformational methodologies. Parallel Algorithm Derivation and Program Transformation stimulates the investigation of formal ways to overcome problems of parallel computation, with respect to both software development and algorithm design. It represents perspectives from two different communities: transformational programming and parallel algorithm design, to discuss programming, transformational, and compiler methodologies for parallel architectures, and algorithmic paradigms, techniques, and tools for parallel machine models. Parallel Algorithm Derivation and Program Transformation is an excellent reference for graduate students and researchers in parallel programming and transformational methodology. Each chapter contains a few initial sections in the style of a first-year, graduate textbook with many illustrative examples. The book may also be used as the text for a graduate seminar course or as a reference book for courses in software engineering, parallel programming or formal methods in program development.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning, LPNMR 2007, held in Tempe, AZ, USA in May 2007. The 18 revised full papers, 5 revised poster papers, and 7 system descriptions presented together with 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected for presentation. As a forum for exchanging ideas on declarative logic programming, nonmonotonic reasoning, and knowledge representation, LPNMR encompasses theoretical studies, design and implementation of logic based programming languages and database systems, and development of experimental systems. Also contained in this volume are the results of this year's answer set programming competition.

This journal subline serves as a forum for stimulating and disseminating innovative research ideas, theories, emerging technologies, empirical investigations, state-of-the-art methods, and tools in all different genres of Edutainment, such as Game-based Learning and Serious Games, Interactive Storytelling, Virtual Learning Environments, VR-based Education, and related fields. It will cover aspects from Educational and Game Theories, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Graphics, Artificial Intelligence, and Systems Design. The first volume of this series contains a selection of outstanding contributions from Edutainment 2008, the 3rd International Conference on E-Learning and Games which took place in Nanjing, China, in June 2008. These papers are complemented by individual contributions from international experts in this field.

Foundations of Dependable Computing: System Implementation, explores the system infrastructure needed to support the various paradigms of Paradigms for Dependable Applications. Approaches to implementing support mechanisms and to incorporating additional appropriate levels of fault detection and fault tolerance at the processor, network, and operating system level are presented. A primary concern at these levels is balancing cost and performance against coverage and overall dependability. As these chapters demonstrate, low overhead, practical solutions are attainable and not necessarily incompatible with performance considerations. The section on innovative compiler support, in particular, demonstrates how the benefits of application specificity may be obtained while reducing hardware cost and run-time overhead. A companion to this volume (published by Kluwer) subtitled Models and Frameworks for Dependable Systems presents two comprehensive frameworks for reasoning about system dependability, thereby establishing a context for understanding the roles played by specific approaches presented in this book's two companion volumes. It then explores the range of models and analysis methods necessary to design, validate and analyze dependable systems. Another companion to this book (published by Kluwer), subtitled Paradigms for Dependable Applications, presents a variety of specific approaches to achieving dependability at the application level. Driven by the higher level fault models of Models and Frameworks for Dependable Systems, and built on the lower level abstractions implemented in a third companion book subtitled System Implementation, these approaches demonstrate how dependability may be tuned to the requirements of an application, the fault environment, and the characteristics of the target platform. Three classes of paradigms are considered: protocol-based paradigms for distributed applications, algorithm-based paradigms for parallel applications, and approaches to exploiting application semantics in embedded real-time control systems.