The book is addressed to young people interested in computer technologies and computer science. The objective of this book is to provide the reader with all the necessary elements to get him or her started in the modern field of informatics and to allow him or her to become aware of the relationship between key areas of computer science. The book is addressed not only to future software developers, but also to all who are interested in computing in a widely understood sense. The authors also expect that some computer professionals will want to review this book to lift themselves above the daily grind and to embrace the excellence of the whole field of computer science. Unlike existing books, this one bypasses issues concerning the construction of computers and focuses only on information processing. Recognizing the importance of the human factor in information processing, the authors intend to present the theoretical foundations of computer science, software development rules, and some business aspects of informatics in non-technocratic, humanistic terms.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed joint post-proceedings of five international workshops organized by the Japanese Society of Artificial Intelligence, JSAI in 2001.The 75 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the volume. In accordance with the five workshops documented, the book offers topical sections on social intelligence design, agent-based approaches in economic and complex social systems, rough set theory and granular computing, chance discovery, and challenges in knowledge discovery and data mining.

By taking corporate marketing concepts and applying them to countries, nation branding is a way for these regions to enhance their reputations and project a desired image for international recognition. New modes of publicity and marketing geared towards geographic location fall into this category, leading nation branding to have vast benefits for the economies and societies of countries. New marketing strategies have emerged and are being adopted to consequently brand countries with the purpose of economic growth. By studying these emerging strategies and methods, nations can best develop a desired brand and reputation to foster growth and prosperity. Global Developments in Nation Branding and Promotion: Theoretical and Practical Approaches presents the functionality of nation branding in benefiting the positioning and identity promotion of nations. The chapters address theoretical considerations of the nature of nation brands and their implications in measuring branding inference. Covering topics such as country of origin association, memory politics, and international relations, this premier reference source is an excellent resource for brand managers, politicians, government officials, marketers, communication consultants, business leaders and executives, students and educators of higher education, researchers, and academicians.

Health IT is a major field of investment in support of healthcare delivery, but patients and professionals tend to have systems imposed upon them by organizational policy or as a result of even higher policy decision. And, while many health IT systems are efficient and welcomed by their users, and are essential to modern healthcare, this is not the case for all. Unfortunately, some systems cause user frustration and result in inefficiency in use, and a few are known to have inconvenienced patients or even caused harm, including the occasional death. This book seeks to answer the need for better understanding of the importance of robust evidence to support health IT and to optimize investment in it; to give insight into health IT evidence and evaluation as its primary source; and to promote health informatics as an underpinning science demonstrating the same ethical rigour and proof of net benefit as is expected of other applied health technologies. The book is divided into three parts: the context and importance of evidence-based health informatics; methodological considerations of health IT evaluation as the source of evidence; and ensuring the relevance and application of evidence. A number of cross cutting themes emerge in each of these sections. This book seeks to inform the reader on the wide range of knowledge available, and the appropriateness of its use according to the circumstances. It is aimed at a wide readership and will be of interest to health policymakers, clinicians, health informaticians, the academic health informatics community, members of patient and policy organisations, and members of the vendor industry.

This book examines the nature of emergence in context of man-made (i.e. engineered) systems, in general, and system of systems engineering applications, specifically. It investigates emergence to interrogate or explore the domain space from a modeling and simulation perspective to facilitate understanding, detection, classification, prediction, control, and visualization of the phenomenon. Written by leading international experts, the text is the first to address emergence from an engineering perspective. "System engineering has a long and proud tradition of establishing the integrative view of systems. The field, however, has not always embraced and assimilated well the lessons and implications from research on complex adaptive systems. As the editors’ note, there have been no texts on Engineering Emergence: Principles and Applications. It is therefore especially useful to have this new, edited book that pulls together so many of the key elements, ranging from the theoretical to the practical, and tapping into advances in methods, tools, and ways to study system complexity. Drs. Rainey and Jamshidi are to be congratulated both for their vision of the book and their success in recruiting contributors with so much to say. Most notable, however, is that this is a book with engineering at its core. It uses modeling and simulation as the language in which to express principles and insights in ways that include tight thinking and rigor despite dealing with notably untidy and often surprising phenomena." — Paul K. Davis, RAND and Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School The first chapter is an introduction and overview to the text. The book provides 12 chapters that have a theoretical foundation for this subject. Includes 7 specific example chapters of how various modeling and simulation paradigms/techniques can be used to investigate emergence in an engineering context to facilitate understanding, detection, classification, prediction, control and visualization of emergent behavior. The final chapter offers lessons learned and the proposed way-ahead for this discipline.

After 20 years of pursuing rough set theory and its applications a look on its present state and further prospects is badly needed. The monograph Rough Set Theory and Granular Computing edited by Masahiro Inuiguchi, Shoji Hirano and Shusaku Tsumoto meets this demand. It presents the newest developments in this area and gives fair picture of the state of the art in this domain. Firstly, in the keynote papers by Zdzislaw Pawlak, Andrzej Skowron and Sankar K. Pal the relationship of rough sets with other important methods of data analysis -Bayes theorem, neuro computing and pattern recognitio- is thoroughly examined. Next, several interesting generalizations of the the ory and new directions of research are presented. Furthermore application of rough sets in data mining, in particular, rule induction methods based on rough set theory is presented and discussed. Further important issue dis cussed in the monograph is rough set based data analysis, including study of decisions making in conflict situations. Last but not least, some recent engi neering applications of rough set theory are given. They include a proposal of rough set processor architecture organization for fast implementation of ba sic rough set operations and discussion of results concerning advanced image processing for unmanned aerial vehicle. Thus the monograph beside presenting wide spectrum of ongoing research in this area also points out new emerging areas of study and applications, which makes it a valuable source of information to all interested in this do main.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Distributed Computing, IWDC 2002, held in Calcutta, India, in December 2002. The 31 revised full papers and 3 student papers presented together with 3 keynote papers were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 90 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on Web caching, distributed computing, wireless networks, wireless mobile systems, VLSI and parallel systems, optical networks, and distributed systems.