This book provides a fundamentally new approach to pattern recognition in which objects are characterized by relations to other objects instead of by using features or models. This 'dissimilarity representation' bridges the gap between the traditionally opposing approaches of statistical and structural pattern recognition.Physical phenomena, objects and events in the world are related in various and often complex ways. Such relations are usually modeled in the form of graphs or diagrams. While this is useful for communication between experts, such representation is difficult to combine and integrate by machine learning procedures. However, if the relations are captured by sets of dissimilarities, general data analysis procedures may be applied for analysis.With their detailed description of an unprecedented approach absent from traditional textbooks, the authors have crafted an essential book for every researcher and systems designer studying or developing pattern recognition systems.

Andrzej Mostowski was one of the leading 20th century logicians. His legacy is examined in this volume of papers devoted both to his extraordinary scientific heritage and to the memory of him as a great researcher, teacher, organizer of science and human. Professor Mostowski pioneered and mastered many areas of mathematical logic. His contributions spanned set theory, recursion theory, and model theory - the backbone of foundations of mathematics. He is best known of the Kleene-Mostowski and Davis-Mostowski hierarchies of properties of integers reflecting the complexity of their definitions, and of the very elegant concept of a generalized quantifier which inspired and keeps stimulating a stream of deep work on fundamental issues of logics, deduction and reasoning both in mathematics and in computer science, and also of the contributions and excellent lectures on undecidability, unprovability, consistency and independence of various statements in set theory and arithmetic following Gödel, Tarski and Cohen. The overall content of the volume is designed to cover the current main streams in the field. For many years after WWII, especially in the late sixties, till his untimely death in 1975, Warsaw - where he led the centre of foundational studies - was a place where many leading logicians visited, studied, and started their career. Their memories form an important part of this volume, attempting to bring back the extraordinary achievements and personality of Mostowski.

Universal Spaces and Mappings is devoted to universality problems. A new approach to these problems is given using some specific spaces. Since the construction of these specific spaces is set-theoretical, the given theory can be applied to different topics of Topology such as: universal mappings, dimension theory, action of groups, inverse spectra, isometrical embeddings, and so on. Universal spaces Universal mappings Dimension theory Actions of groups Isometric Universal Spaces

This open access book discusses several didactic traditions in mathematics education in countries across Europe, including France, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, the Czech and Slovakian Republics, and the Scandinavian states. It shows that while they all share common features both in the practice of learning and teaching at school and in research and development, they each have special features due to specific historical and cultural developments. The book also presents interesting historical facts about these didactic traditions, the theories and examples developed in these countries.

During the last three decades several different styles of semantics for program ming languages have been developed. This book compares two of them: the operational and the denotational approach. On the basis of several exam ples we show how to define operational and denotational semantic models for programming languages. Furthermore, we introduce a general technique for comparing various semantic models for a given language. We focus on different degrees of nondeterminism in programming lan guages. Nondeterminism arises naturally in concurrent languages. It is also an important concept in specification languages. In the examples discussed, the degree of non determinism ranges from a choice between two alternatives to a choice between a collection of alternatives indexed by a closed interval of the real numbers. The former arises in a language with nondeterministic choices. A real time language with dense choices gives rise to the latter. We also consider the nondeterministic random assignment and parallel composition, both couched in a simple language. Besides non determinism our four example languages contain some form of recursion, a key ingredient of programming languages.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Professor Zdzis{\l}aw Pawlak who passed away almost six year ago. He is the founder of the Polish school of Artificial Intelligence and one of the pioneers in Computer Engineering and Computer Science with worldwide influence. He was a truly great scientist, researcher, teacher and a human being. This book prepared in two volumes contains more than 50 chapters. This demonstrates that the scientific approaches discovered by of Professor Zdzis{\l}aw Pawlak, especially the rough set approach as a tool for dealing with imperfect knowledge, are vivid and intensively explored by many researchers in many places throughout the world. The submitted papers prove that interest in rough set research is growing and is possible to see many new excellent results both on theoretical foundations and applications of rough sets alone or in combination with other approaches. We are proud to offer the readers this book.

Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute, Trieste, Italy, July 10-August 1, 1980