Distributed and communicating objects are becoming ubiquitous. In global, Grid and Peer-to-Peer computing environments, extensive use is made of objects interacting through method calls. So far, no general formalism has been proposed for the foundation of such systems. Caromel and Henrio are the first to define a calculus for distributed objects interacting using asynchronous method calls with generalized futures, i.e., wait-by-necessity -- a must in large-scale systems, providing both high structuring and low coupling, and thus scalability. The authors provide very generic results on expressiveness and determinism, and the potential of their approach is further demonstrated by its capacity to cope with advanced issues such as mobility, groups, and components. Researchers and graduate students will find here an extensive review of concurrent languages and calculi, with comprehensive figures and summaries. Developers of distributed systems can adopt the many implementation strategies that are presented and analyzed in detail. Preface by Luca Cardelli

One of the most influential anthropological works of the last two decades, Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency is a provocative and ambitious work that both challenged and reshaped anthropological understandings of art, agency, creativity and the social. It has become a touchstone in contemporary artifact-based scholarship. This volume brings together leading anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians and other scholars into an interdisciplinary dialogue with Art and Agency, generating a timely re-engagement with the themes, issues and arguments at the heart of Gell’s work, which remains salient, and controversial, in the social sciences and humanities. Extending his theory into new territory – from music to literary technology and ontology to technological change – the contributors do not simply take stock, but also provoke, critically reassessing this important work while using it to challenge conceptual and disciplinary boundaries.

By developing object calculi in which objects are treated as primitives, the authors are able to explain both the semantics of objects and their typing rules, and also demonstrate how to develop all of the most important concepts of object-oriented programming languages: self, dynamic dispatch, classes, inheritance, protected and private methods, prototyping, subtyping, covariance and contravariance, and method specialization. An innovative and important approach to the subject for researchers and graduates.

This is a philosophical work that develops a general theory of ontological objects and object-relations. It does this by examining concepts as acquired dispositions, and then focuses on perhaps the most important of these: the concept of learning. This concept is important because everything that we know and do in the world is predicated on a prior act of learning. A concept can have many meanings and can be used in a number of different ways, and this creates difficulty when considering the nature of objects and the relationships between them. To enable this, David Scott answers a series of questions about concepts in general and the concept of learning in particular. Some of these questions are: What is learning? What different meanings can be given to the notion of learning? How does the concept of learning relate to other concepts, such as innatism, development and progression? The book offers a counter-argument to empiricist conceptions of learning, to the propagation of simple messages about learning, knowledge, curriculum and assessment, and to the denial that values are central to understanding how we live. It argues that values permeate everything: our descriptions of the world, the attempts we make at creating better futures and our relations with other people.

Although the theory of object-oriented programming languages is far from complete, this book brings together the most important contributions to its development to date, focusing in particular on how advances in type systems and semantic models can contribute to new language designs.The fifteen chapters are divided into five parts: Objects and Subtypes, Type Inference, Coherence, Record Calculi, and Inheritance. The chapters are organized approximately in order of increasing complexity of the programming language constructs they consider - beginning with variations on Pascal- and Algol-like languages, developing the theory of illustrative record object models, and concluding with research directions for building a more comprehensive theory of object-oriented programming languages.Part I discusses the similarities and differences between "objects" and algebraic-style abstract data types, and the fundamental concept of a subtype. Parts II-IV are concerned with the "record model" of object-oriented languages. Specifically, these chapters discuss static and dynamic semantics of languages with simple object models that include a type or class hierarchy but do not explicitly provide what is often called dynamic binding. Part V considers extensions and modifications to record object models, moving closer to the full complexity of practical object-oriented languages.Carl A. Gunter is Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. John C. Mitchell is Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University.

N etwork-based computing domain unifies all best research efforts presented from single computer systems to networked systems to render overwhelming computational power for several modern day applications. Although this power is expected to grow with respect to time due to tech nological advancements, application requirements impose a continuous thrust on network utilization and on the resources to deliver supreme quality of service. Strictly speaking, network-based computing dornain has no confined scope and each element offers considerable challenges. Any modern day networked application strongly thrives on efficient data storage and management system, which is essentially a Database System. There have been nurnber of books-to-date in this domain that discuss fundamental principles of designing a database systern. Research in this dornain is now far matured and rnany researchers are venturing in this dornain continuously due to a wide variety of challenges posed. In this book, our dornain of interest is in exposing the underlying key challenges in designing algorithms to handle unpredictable requests that arrive at a Distributed Database System(DDBS) and evaluating their performance. These requests are otherwise called as on-line requests arriving at a system to process. Transactions in an on-line Banking service, Airline Reservation systern, Video-on-Demand systern, etc, are few examples of on-line requests.

The refereed proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets, ICATPN 2003, held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in June 2003. The 25 revised full papers presented together with 6 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 77 submissions. All current issues on research and development in the area of Petri nets are addressed, in particular concurrent systems design and analysis, model checking, networking, business process modeling, formal methods in software engineering, agent systems, systems specification, systems validation, discrete event systems, protocols, and prototyping.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2000) held in State College, Pennsylvania, USA, during 22-25 August 2000. The purpose of the CONCUR conferences is to bring together researchers, developers, and students in order to advance the theory of concurrency and promote its applications. Interest in this topic is continuously growing, as a consequence of the importance and ubiquity of concurrent systems and their - plications, and of the scienti?c relevance of their foundations. The scope covers all areas of semantics, logics, and veri?cation techniques for concurrent systems. Topics include concurrency related aspects of: models of computation, semantic domains, process algebras, Petri nets, event structures, real-time systems, hybrid systems, decidability, model-checking, veri?cation techniques, re?nement te- niques, term and graph rewriting, distributed programming, logic constraint p- gramming, object-oriented programming, typing systems and algorithms, case studies, tools, and environments for programming and veri?cation. The ?rst two CONCUR conferences were held in Amsterdam (NL) in 1990 and 1991. The following ones in Stony Brook (USA), Hildesheim (D), Uppsala (S), Philadelphia (USA), Pisa (I), Warsaw (PL), Nice (F), and Eindhoven (NL). The proceedings have appeared in Springer LNCS, as Volumes 458, 527, 630, 715, 836, 962, 1119, 1243, 1466, and 1664.

This Festschrift volume, published in honor of Carolyn Talcott on the occasion of her 70th birthday, contains a collection of papers presented at a symposium held in Menlo Park, California, USA, in November 2011. Carolyn Talcott is a leading researcher and mentor of international renown among computer scientists. She has made key contributions to a number of areas of computer science including: semantics and verification of progamming languages; foundations of actor-based systems; middleware, meta-architectures, and systems; Maude and rewriting logic; and computational biology. The 21 papers presented are organized in topical sections named: Essays on Carolyn Talcott; actors and programming languages; cyberphysical systems; middleware and meta-architectures; formal methods and reasoning tools; and computational biology.

This concisely written book gives an elementary introduction to a classical area of mathematics—approximation theory—in a way that naturally leads to the modern field of wavelets. The exposition, driven by ideas rather than technical details and proofs, demonstrates the dynamic nature of mathematics and the influence of classical disciplines on many areas of modern mathematics and applications. Key features and topics: * Description of wavelets in words rather than mathematical symbols * Elementary introduction to approximation using polynomials (Weierstrass’ and Taylor’s theorems) * Introduction to infinite series, with emphasis on approximation-theoretic aspects * Introduction to Fourier analysis * Numerous classical, illustrative examples and constructions * Discussion of the role of wavelets in digital signal processing and data compression, such as the FBI’s use of wavelets to store fingerprints * Minimal prerequisites: elementary calculus * Exercises that may be used in undergraduate and graduate courses on infinite series and Fourier series Approximation Theory: From Taylor Polynomials to Wavelets will be an excellent textbook or self-study reference for students and instructors in pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and engineering. Readers will find motivation and background material pointing toward advanced literature and research topics in pure and applied harmonic analysis and related areas.