Semirings as an algebraic structure have been known since 1934, but remained unapplied for mathematical purposes for a long time. It has only been in the past decade that they have been used in cryptography. The advantage of (additively) idempotent semirings is that the additive operation does not have an inverse, which can help in preventing the breakage of a cryptosystem. This book describes a number of cryptographic protocols, as well as the hard mathematical problems on which their security is based. It will appeal to cryptographers and specialists in applied algebra.

Research results from industry-academic collaborative projects in service-oriented computing describe practical, achievable solutions. Service-Oriented Applications and Architectures (SOAs) have captured the interest of industry as a way to support business-to-business interaction, and the SOA market grew by $4.9 billion in 2005. SOAs and in particular service-oriented computing (SOC) represent a promising approach in the development of adaptive distributed systems. With SOC, applications can open themselves to services offered by third parties and accessed through standard, well-defined interfaces. The binding between the applications and the services can be, in this context, extremely loose--enabling the ad hoc creation of new services when the need arises. This book offers an overview of some current research in the field, presenting the results of eighteen research projects funded by the European Community's Information Society Technologies Program (IST). The projects, collaborations between industry and academia, have produced practical, achievable results that point the way to real-world applications and future research. The chapters address such issues as requirement analysis, design, governance, interoperability, and the dependability of systems made up of components owned by third parties. The results are presented in the context of two roadmaps for research, one developed by European industry involved in software development and the other by researchers working in the service area. The contributors report first on the "Infrastructure Layer," then (in the bulk of the book) on the "Service Integration Layer," the "Semantic Layer," and finally on the issues that cut across the different layers. The book concludes by looking at ongoing research on both roadmaps.

This book offers a comprehensive introduction by three of the leading experts in the field, collecting fundamental results and open problems in a single volume. Since Leavitt path algebras were first defined in 2005, interest in these algebras has grown substantially, with ring theorists as well as researchers working in graph C*-algebras, group theory and symbolic dynamics attracted to the topic. Providing a historical perspective on the subject, the authors review existing arguments, establish new results, and outline the major themes and ring-theoretic concepts, such as the ideal structure, Z-grading and the close link between Leavitt path algebras and graph C*-algebras. The book also presents key lines of current research, including the Algebraic Kirchberg Phillips Question, various additional classification questions, and connections to noncommutative algebraic geometry. Leavitt Path Algebras will appeal to graduate students and researchers working in the field and related areas, such as C*-algebras and symbolic dynamics. With its descriptive writing style, this book is highly accessible.

This comprehensive textbook presents a clean and coherent account of most fundamental tools and techniques in Parameterized Algorithms and is a self-contained guide to the area. The book covers many of the recent developments of the field, including application of important separators, branching based on linear programming, Cut & Count to obtain faster algorithms on tree decompositions, algorithms based on representative families of matroids, and use of the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis. A number of older results are revisited and explained in a modern and didactic way. The book provides a toolbox of algorithmic techniques. Part I is an overview of basic techniques, each chapter discussing a certain algorithmic paradigm. The material covered in this part can be used for an introductory course on fixed-parameter tractability. Part II discusses more advanced and specialized algorithmic ideas, bringing the reader to the cutting edge of current research. Part III presents complexity results and lower bounds, giving negative evidence by way of W[1]-hardness, the Exponential Time Hypothesis, and kernelization lower bounds. All the results and concepts are introduced at a level accessible to graduate students and advanced undergraduate students. Every chapter is accompanied by exercises, many with hints, while the bibliographic notes point to original publications and related work.

This work is an updated and considerably expanded version of the author's book The Theory of Semirings, with Applications to Mathematics and Theoretical Science, which has been recognized as the definitive reference work in this area. This edition includes many of the new results in this area, as well as further applications of semiring theory in such areas as idempotent analysis, discrete dynamical systems, formal language theory, fuzzy set theory, optimization etc. The book contains an extensive bibliography and a large number of examples. Audience: This book is aimed both at mathematicians and at researchers in applied mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is also suitable for use as a graduate-level textbook.

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.

This practical, tool-independent guide to designing digital circuits takes a unique, top-down approach, reflecting the nature of the design process in industry. Starting with architecture design, the book comprehensively explains the why and how of digital circuit design, using the physics designers need to know, and no more.

A large class of problems in symbolic computation can be expressed as the task of computing some polynomials; and arithmetic circuits form the most standard model for studying the complexity of such computations. This algebraic model of computation attracted a large amount of research in the last five decades, partially due to its simplicity and elegance. Being a more structured model than Boolean circuits, one could hope that the fundamental problems of theoretical computer science, such as separating P from NP, will be easier to solve for arithmetic circuits. However, in spite of the appearing simplicity and the vast amount of mathematical tools available, no major breakthrough has been seen. In fact, all the fundamental questions are still open for this model as well. Nevertheless, there has been a lot of progress in the area and beautiful results have been found, some in the last few years. As examples we mention the connection between polynomial identity testing and lower bounds of Kabanets and Impagliazzo, the lower bounds of Raz for multilinear formulas, and two new approaches for proving lower bounds: Geometric Complexity Theory and Elusive Functions. The goal of this monograph is to survey the field of arithmetic circuit complexity, focusing mainly on what we find to be the most interesting and accessible research directions. We aim to cover the main results and techniques, with an emphasis on works from the last two decades. In particular, we discuss the recent lower bounds for multilinear circuits and formulas, the advances in the question of deterministically checking polynomial identities, and the results regarding reconstruction of arithmetic circuits. We do, however, also cover part of the classical works on arithmetic circuits. In order to keep this monograph at a reasonable length, we do not give full proofs of most theorems, but rather try to convey the main ideas behind each proof and demonstrate it, where possible, by proving some special cases.

The primary objective of this essential text is to emphasize the deep relations existing between the semiring and dioïd structures with graphs and their combinatorial properties. It does so at the same time as demonstrating the modeling and problem-solving flexibility of these structures. In addition the book provides an extensive overview of the mathematical properties employed by "nonclassical" algebraic structures which either extend usual algebra or form a new branch of it.

This fantastic and deep book about how to use Sage for learning and doing mathematics at all levels perfectly complements the existing Sage documentation. It is filled with many carefully thought through examples and exercises, and great care has been taken to put computational functionality into proper mathematical context. Flip to almost any random page in this amazing book, and you will learn how to play with and visualize some beautiful part of mathematics. --- William A. Stein, CEO, SageMath, and professor of mathematics, University of Washington SageMath, or Sage for short, is an open-source mathematical software system based on the Python language and developed by an international community comprising hundreds of teachers and researchers, whose aim is to provide an alternative to the commercial products Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and MATLAB. To achieve this, Sage relies on many open-source programs, including GAP, Maxima, PARI, and various scientific libraries for Python, to which thousands of new functions have been added. Sage is freely available and is supported by all modern operating systems. Sage provides a wonderful scientific and graphical calculator for high school students, and it efficiently supports undergraduates in their computations in analysis, linear algebra, calculus, etc. For graduate students, researchers, and engineers in various mathematical specialties, Sage provides the most recent algorithms and tools, which is why several universities around the world already use Sage at the undergraduate level.