This book presents some recent works on the application of Soft Computing techniques in information access on the World Wide Web. The book comprises 15 chapters from internationally known researchers and is divided in four parts reflecting the areas of research of the presented works such as Document Classification, Semantic Web, Web Information Retrieval and Web Applications. This book demonstrates that Web Information Retrieval is a stimulating area of research where Soft Computing technologies can be applied satisfactorily...

Coding for Wireless Channels is an accessible introduction to the theoretical foundations of modern coding theory, with applications to wireless transmission systems. State-of-the-art coding theory is explained using soft (maximum-likelihood) decoding rather than algebraic decoding. Convolutional codes, trellis-coded modulation, turbo codes, and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are also covered, with specific reference to the graphical structures through which they can be described and decoded (trellises and factor graphs). A special section is devoted to multiple-antenna systems and space-time codes. The author assumes that the reader has a firm grasp of the concepts usually presented in senior-level courses on digital communications, information theory, and random processes...

If you need to build Web and database applications quickly but you don't dream in computer code, take heart! Ruby on Rails was created for you, and this book will have you up and running in no time. The Ruby scripting language and the Rails framework let you create full-featured Web applications fast. It's even fun!...

The advent of multicore processors has renewed interest in the idea of incorporating transactions into the programming model used to write parallel programs. This approach, known as transactional memory, offers an alternative, and hopefully better, way to coordinate concurrent threads...

Business applications are designed using profound knowledge about the business domain, such as domain objects, fundamental domain-related principles, and domain patterns. Nonetheless, the pattern community's ideas for software engineering have not impacted at the application level, they are still mostly used for technical problems. This book takes exactly this step: it shows you how to apply the pattern ideas in business applications and presents more than 20 structural and behavioral business patterns that use the REA (resources, events, agents) pattern as a common backbone...

Expert guidance from well-known programming author Jeff Richter about the CLR and the .NET Framework 2.0. Your hands-on guide to developing applications with the common language runtime (CLR) and Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, with examples in Microsoft Visual C# 2005...

In this book, Windows programming legend Charles Petzold covers in parallel the two interfaces that make up the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). From the outset, the reader can shift focus seamlessly between Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) and C# to see them as flip sides of the same processes. Beginning in the first chapter, Petzold presents the general syntax of the XAML and corresponding programming code with numerous illuminating examples on how the two correspond and interrelate. The book builds on this base, providing the classic Petzold Windows user interface (UI) treatment, to show Windows developers how to create next-generation interfaces for their applications...

The purpose of this reviewarticle is to serve as an introduction and at the same time, as an invitation to the theory of towers of function fields over finite fields. More specifically, we treat here the case of explicit towers; i.e., towers where the function fields are given by explicit equations. The asymptotic behaviour of the genus and of the number of rational places in towers are important features for applications to coding theory and to cryptography...

The development of wireless telecommunication and ubiquitous computing technologies has led to a growing mobile population and dramatically changed patterns of working and everyday life. A smooth and safe mobility is only possible when the mobile person is well-informed of the happenings in his ambient environments. Location-sensitive maps have proved a strong enhancement to what a mobile user can directly perceive from his ambient environments. Since ancient times the map has been the favorite communication language of spatial information. It is even more the case for mobile applications where brand-new maps can be wirelessly retrieved or generated in real-time...

The conjunction of several factors having occurred throughout the past few years will make humans significantly change their behavior vis-à-vis machines.
In particular the use of speech technologies will become normal in the professional domain, but also in everyday life. The performance of speech recognition components has significantly improved: only within ten years we have passed from systems able to recognize isolated words uttered by a single speaker using a limited lexicon of around 50 words to systems able to recognize continuous speech with an unlimited vocabulary uttered by any speaker; or to systems able to carry a spontaneous dialog with a vocabulary of a few thousands of words over the telephone, on a well-defined topic (e.g., information on train or airplane schedules)...

This book presents the recent development of stochastic approximation algorithms with expanding truncations based on the TS (trajectory-subsequence) method, a newly developed method for convergence analysis. This approach is so powerful that conditions used for guaranteeing convergence have been considerably weakened in comparison with those applied in the classical probability and ODE methods...

Nowadays, real-time applications of Fuzzy Logic in different domains are being increasingly reported. ASIC-based analog hardware becomes an interesting solution for these kinds of applications because it benefits from: savings on silicon surface and power consumption, readily accomplishment with strict timing constraints and cost-effective production. This book focuses in-depth on the VLSI CMOS implementation and application of programmable analog Fuzzy Logic Controllers following a mixed-signal philosophy. This is to say, signals are processed in the analog domain whereas programmability is achieved by means of standard digital memories...

"Parallel Evolutionary Computation" focuses on the aspects related to the parallelization of evolutionary computations, such as parallel genetic operators, parallel fitness evaluation, distributed genetic algorithms, and parallel hardware implementations, as well as on their impact on several applications...