Sose 2005

This Three-Volume-Set constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Software Engineering and Computer Systems, ICSECS 2011, held in Kuantan, Malaysia, in June 2011. The 190 revised full papers presented together with invited papers in the three volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on software engineering; network; bioinformatics and e-health; biometrics technologies; Web engineering; neural network; parallel and distributed; e-learning; ontology; image processing; information and data management; engineering; software security; graphics and multimedia; databases; algorithms; signal processing; software design/testing; e- technology; ad hoc networks; social networks; software process modeling; miscellaneous topics in software engineering and computer systems.

This Festschrift volume, published in honor of Ugo Montanari on the occasion of his 65th birthday, contains 43 papers that examine the research areas to which he has contributed, from logic programming to software engineering, as well as his many achievements.

The idea for this conference came from a meeting of the IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) Technical Committee for Information Systems (TC8) in Guimares, Portugal in June 2005. Our goal is to build an IFIP forum among the different Information Systems Communities of TC8 dealing with the increasing important area of Enterprise Information Systems. In this particular meeting the committee members intensively discussed the innovative and unique characteristics of Enterprise Information Systems as scientific sub-discipline. Hence, in this meeting it was decided by the TC8 members that the IFIP TC8 First International Conference on Research and Practical Issues of Enterprise Information Systems (CONFENIS 2006) would be held in April 2006 in Vienna, Austria. Dr. Li Xu (USA) and Dr. A Min Tjoa (IFIP TC8) were assigned to propose a concept for this conference in order to establish an IFIP platform for EIS researchers and practitioners in the field to share experience, and discussing opportunities and challenges. We are very pleased therefore to have this conference organised by the help of the Austrian Computer Society (OCG). OCG supports the idea of this conference due to the urgent need of research and dissemination of new techniques in this key area. We received 180 papers from more than 30 countries for CONFENIS and the Program Committee eventually selected xx papers or extended abstracts, making an acceptance rate of xx% of submitted papers. Each paper was thoroughly reviewed by at least two qualified reviewers.

This book collects a selection of the papers presented at the 21st International Tyrrhenian Workshop on Digital Communications, organized by CNIT and dedicated this year to the theme "Trustworthy Internet". The workshop provided a lively discussion on the challenges involved in reshaping the Internet into a trustworthy reality, articulated around the Internet by and for People, the Internet of Contents, the Internet of Services and the Internet of Things, supported by the Network Infrastructure foundation. The papers have been revised after the workshop to take account of feedbacks received by the audience. The book also includes: i) an introduction by the Editors, setting the scene and presenting evolution scenarios; ii) five papers written by the session chairmen, reputed scientists, and each dedicated to a facet of the trustworthy Internet vision; iii) a concluding paper, reporting the outcomes of a panel held at the conclusion of the workshop, written by the two keynote speakers.

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) allows software development time to be shortened by the composition of existing services across the Internet. Further exploitation of this revolutionary trend is feasible through automation, thanks to the use of software agents and techniques from distributed artificial intelligence. This book provides an overview of the related technologies and insight into state-of-the art research results in the field. The topics discussed cover the various stages in the life cycle of service-oriented software development using agent technologies to automate the development process and to manage services in a dynamic environment. The book presents both academic research results and the latest developments from industry. Researchers from academia and industry, as well as postgraduates, will find this cutting-edge volume indispensable in order to gain understanding of the issues associated with agent-based service-oriented computing along with recent, and likely future technology trends.

In this book, internationally recognized experts in philosophy of science, computer science, and modeling and simulation are contributing to the discussion on how ontology, epistemology, and teleology will contribute to enable the next generation of intelligent modeling and simulation applications. It is well understood that a simulation can provide the technical means to display the behavior of a system over time, including following observed trends to predict future possible states, but how reliable and trustworthy are such predictions? The questions about what we can know (ontology), how we gain new knowledge (epistemology), and what we do with this knowledge (teleology) are therefore illuminated from these very different perspectives, as each experts uses a different facet to look at these challenges. The result of bringing these perspectives into one book is a challenging compendium that gives room for a spectrum of challenges: from general philosophy questions, such as can we use modeling and simulation and other computational means at all to discover new knowledge, down to computational methods to improve semantic interoperability between systems or methods addressing how to apply the recent insights of service oriented approaches to support distributed artificial intelligence. As such, this book has been compiled as an entry point to new domains for students, scholars, and practitioners and to raise the curiosity in them to learn more to fully address the topics of ontology, epistemology, and teleology from philosophical, computational, and conceptual viewpoints.

Service-oriented computing has recently gained extensive momentum in both industry and academia, and major software vendors hook on to the service paradigm and tailor their software systems towards services in order to accommodate ever-changing process and product requirements in today’s dynamic market environments. While dynamic binding of services at runtime was identified as a core functionality of service-based environments as far back as 2000, its industrial-strength implementation has yet to be achieved. The main reason for this is the lack of rich service specifications, concepts, and tools to process them. This book introduces advanced concepts in service provisioning and service engineering, including semantic concepts, dynamic discovery and composition, and illustrates them in a concrete business use case scenario. To prove the validity of the concepts and technologies, a semantic service provisioning reference architecture framework as well as a prototypical implementation of its subsystems and a prototypical realization of a proper business scenario are presented. Thus the book goes way beyond current service-based software technologies by providing a coherent and consistent set of technologies and systems functionality that realizes advanced concepts in service provisioning. Both the use case scenario and the provisioning platform have already been substantiated and implemented by the EU-funded Adaptive Services Grid project. The book therefore presents state-of-the-art research results that have already passed a real industrial implementation evaluation which is based on the work of over 20 European partners cooperating in the field of semantic service provisioning.

For readers from both academia and industry wishing to pursue their studies and /or careers in planetary robotics, this book represents a one-stop tour of the history, evolution, key systems, and technologies of this emerging field. The book provides a comprehensive introduction to the key techniques and technologies that help to achieve autonomous space systems for cost-effective, high performing planetary robotic missions. Main topics covered include robotic vision, surface navigation, manipulation, mission operations and autonomy, being explained in both theoretical principles and practical use cases. The book recognizes the importance of system design hence discusses practices and tools that help take mission concepts to baseline design solutions, making it a practical piece of scientific reference suited to a variety of practitioners in planetary robotics.

Physical Activity Instruction of Older Adults, Second Edition, is the most comprehensive text available for current and future fitness professionals who want to design and implement effective, safe, and fun physical activity programs for older adults with diverse functional capabilities.

This book demonstrates the variation in the reaction of the UK’s ‘big four’ banks – RBS, Lloyds, Barclays and HSBC – to the Great Financial Crisis 2008. Over a decade on from the financial crisis, this book asks: have banks in the UK learned lessons from the crisis? Bank learning in the UK after the Great Financial Crisis is something we need to know more about. Whether banks are now safer and more likely to aid rather than disrupt the economy are important questions of social relevance. Through a documentary analysis of Britain’s ‘big four’ banks in the post-crisis decade (2008–2018), this book demonstrates that while some institutions have become more risk averse and display positive signs of learning, others have shown little evidence of change. The book uses notions of agency, path dependency and structural competitive pressures to explain these inter-bank variations of behaviour. This book contributes to wider post-crash structural debates about growth, markets, and regulatory reform, showing how the agency of banks has played a vital role in driving the reform process.