Petter Grenager is an anti-hero in the tradition of Dostoevsky's "Ridiculous Man," an existential being who decides to do away with himself for "lack of drama," for having led a trivial life, for "no reasons worthy of the act." "Mediocrity runs in our family," he writes, "and I'm no exception." Before he ends his ridiculous life, however, he wants one last day of flamboyant pleasure. He cashes in his pension and all his savings for a glorious final fling. But is a ridiculous mediocrity capable of experiencing flamboyant pleasure? Must he elevate his spirit in some way to live his last day to the fullest and if he does, would he no longer be ridiculous, and no longer need to end his life? The meaninglessness of pleasure begins to infiltrate his terminal celebration of sex, food, drugs, high living and petty revenge. As the day progresses, his fling plays out in unexpected ways, both comic and tragic, with dark twists and moral absurdities that give him both a reason to live and a reason to die. The Last Day of Petter Grenager (Exhibit A) is both silly and serious, the journal of an absurd, despicable, trivial, funny and thoroughly engaging human being.

The Immortal is a fantasy about a boy who can remember his past lives, going back hundreds, even thousands of years. At the age of seven, the boy realizes he can understand a language that he’s never heard before. Gradually, he remembers a whole different life in another country. He has barely processed these memories when an earlier life and another language comes to him. As he grows older, he remembers more and more lives, always in a different body. He remembers wives, husbands, children, parents, friends, enemies, his life as a slave, a doctor, a soldier, a shaman, a witch, a head hunter, even a temple prostitute. Physically, each life starts out fresh and ages normally from birth to death. Mentally, he bears the weight of centuries of experience, even in the body of a child. And with each life, he renews his quest to find someone like him. This life gives him a unique opportunity.

On the day her husband is sentenced to prison, Angela Santiago Hart gives up her newborn son for adoption. Eleven years later, she wants him back. This sets in motion a chain of events which engulfs the boy, Ethan, his sister, Abby, and a vast cast of memorable characters, in a maelstrom of legal, domestic and sexual nightmares. Although the novel deals with heady stuff, like the family courts, sexual slavery, murder, pedophilia, madness, prison, and a dark underworld of judicial and personal brutality, what draws one in is how the children endure and transcend their ordeals and the psychological consequences of doing so that emerge later on. Added to this are the stories of the childrens parents, Angelas husband, boyfriend and other children, a family court judge and her husband, the girls tricked or kidnapped into slavery, various judges and lawyers, all transformed by a single miscarriage of justice. The power of the book is in the courage, grit, determination and craftiness of its characters and and in their victories against impossible odds.

A top New York advertising agency is inhabited by gnomes – junior copywriters and art directors – ruled over by scumbags, rodents, weasels, hulking creatures and a resident genius. Into this madhouse comes an idealistic young art director from Iowa who endures the patronizing disdain of his fellow gnomes and takes on the powers that be on their own terms. When the agency gets a major new account, the stage is set for combat, with a dozen teams competing for prominence. Joel, the idealist, given no chance of reaching even the first stage, ignores all the rules and conventions and takes extraordinary risks to bring his concept to life. AC&D a Federated Company is witty look at the inner workings of a top ad agency, by an author who was a creative director of a top agency himself.

One day in June, two young people apply for a job in a mysterious building on the “billionaire’s row” of 57th Street in New York City. Unlike the other skyscrapers on the street, 211A West 57th is a self-contained universe built for single family, who are unknown to most of its inhabitants. There are schools, farms, restaurants, libraries, theaters, a hospital, industries, high, middle and low-income apartments, laboratories, gyms, markets, chapels, its own post office, a bank and 15 forbidden floors, off-limits to the residents. It is a world fueled by gossip, animated by scandal and powered by an unseen force. The building is capped by a glass dome enclosing a magnificent aviary, filled with exotic birds, including a world-renowned collection of hummingbirds. On the day the new employees are hired, the aviary is in turmoil. A rare hummingbird has gone missing. The two find themselves swept up in the search and caught in a flood of events that almost destroys the building, revealing its deepest secrets and threatening the lives of everyone inside.

This book provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to knowledge graphs, which have recently garnered notable attention from both industry and academia. Knowledge graphs are founded on the principle of applying a graph-based abstraction to data, and are now broadly deployed in scenarios that require integrating and extracting value from multiple, diverse sources of data at large scale. The book defines knowledge graphs and provides a high-level overview of how they are used. It presents and contrasts popular graph models that are commonly used to represent data as graphs, and the languages by which they can be queried before describing how the resulting data graph can be enhanced with notions of schema, identity, and context. The book discusses how ontologies and rules can be used to encode knowledge as well as how inductive techniques—based on statistics, graph analytics, machine learning, etc.—can be used to encode and extract knowledge. It covers techniques for the creation, enrichment, assessment, and refinement of knowledge graphs and surveys recent open and enterprise knowledge graphs and the industries or applications within which they have been most widely adopted. The book closes by discussing the current limitations and future directions along which knowledge graphs are likely to evolve. This book is aimed at students, researchers, and practitioners who wish to learn more about knowledge graphs and how they facilitate extracting value from diverse data at large scale. To make the book accessible for newcomers, running examples and graphical notation are used throughout. Formal definitions and extensive references are also provided for those who opt to delve more deeply into specific topics.

Multiagent systems is an expanding field that blends classical fields like game theory and decentralized control with modern fields like computer science and machine learning. This monograph provides a concise introduction to the subject, covering the theoretical foundations as well as more recent developments in a coherent and readable manner. The text is centered on the concept of an agent as decision maker. Chapter 1 is a short introduction to the field of multiagent systems. Chapter 2 covers the basic theory of singleagent decision making under uncertainty. Chapter 3 is a brief introduction to game theory, explaining classical concepts like Nash equilibrium. Chapter 4 deals with the fundamental problem of coordinating a team of collaborative agents. Chapter 5 studies the problem of multiagent reasoning and decision making under partial observability. Chapter 6 focuses on the design of protocols that are stable against manipulations by self-interested agents. Chapter 7 provides a short introduction to the rapidly expanding field of multiagent reinforcement learning. The material can be used for teaching a half-semester course on multiagent systems covering, roughly, one chapter per lecture.

The dream of automatic language translation is now closer thanks to recent advances in the techniques that underpin statistical machine translation. This class-tested textbook from an active researcher in the field, provides a clear and careful introduction to the latest methods and explains how to build machine translation systems for any two languages. It introduces the subject's building blocks from linguistics and probability, then covers the major models for machine translation: word-based, phrase-based, and tree-based, as well as machine translation evaluation, language modeling, discriminative training and advanced methods to integrate linguistic annotation. The book also reports the latest research, presents the major outstanding challenges, and enables novices as well as experienced researchers to make novel contributions to this exciting area. Ideal for students at undergraduate and graduate level, or for anyone interested in the latest developments in machine translation.

The field of Artificial Intelligence has changed a great deal since the 80s, and arguably no one has played a larger role in that change than Judea Pearl. Judea Pearl's work made probability the prevailing language of modern AI and, perhaps more significantly, it placed the elaboration of crisp and meaningful models, and of effective computational mechanisms, at the center of AI research. This book is a collection of articles in honor of Judea Pearl, written by close colleagues and former students. Its three main parts, heuristics, probabilistic reasoning, and causality, correspond to the titles of the three ground-breaking books authored by Judea, and are followed by a section of short reminiscences. In this volume, leading authors look at the state of the art in the fields of heuristic, probabilistic, and causal reasoning, in light of Judea's seminal contributors. The authors list include Blai Bonet, Eric Hansen, Robert Holte, Jonathan Schaeffer, Ariel Felner, Richard Korf, Austin Parker, Dana Nau, V. S. Subrahmanian, Hector Geffner, Ira Pohl, Adnan Darwiche, Thomas Dean, Rina Dechter, Bozhena Bidyuk, Robert Matescu, Emma Rollon, Michael I. Jordan, Michael Kearns, Daphne Koller, Brian Milch, Stuart Russell, Azaria Paz, David Poole, Ingrid Zukerman, Carlos Brito, Philip Dawid, Felix Elwert, Christopher Winship, Michael Gelfond, Nelson Rushton, Moises Goldszmidt, Sander Greenland, Joseph Y. Halpern, Christopher Hitchcock, David Heckerman, Ross Shachter, Vladimir Lifschitz, Thomas Richardson, James Robins, Yoav Shoham, Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour, Richard Scheines, Robert Tillman, Wolfgang Spohn, Jian Tian, Ilya Shpitser, Nils Nilsson, Edward T. Purcell, and David Spiegelhalter.