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Morgan Kaufmann

Teaching and Learning Formal Methods
1st Edition
September 6, 1996
C. Neville Dean
English
As computer systems continue to advance, the positions they hold in human society continue to gain power. Computers now control the flight of aircraft, the cooling systems in chemical plants, and feedback loops in nuclear reactors. Because of the vital roles these systems play, there has been growing concern about the reliability and safety of these advanced computers.Formal methods are now widely recognized as the most successful means of assuring the reliability of complex computer systems. Because formal methods are being mandated in more and more international standards, it is critical that engineers, managers, and industrial project leaders are well trained and conversant in the application of these methods.This book covers a broad range of issues relating to the pedagogy of formal methods. The contributors, all acknowledged experts, have based their contributions on extensive experiences teaching and applying formal methods in both academia and industry.The two editors, both well known in this area, propose various techniques that can help to dismiss myths that formal methods are difficult to use and hard to learn.Teaching and Learning Formal Methods will be an indispensable text for educators in the fields of computer science, mathematics, software engineering, and electronic engineering as well as to management and product leaders concerned with trainingrecent graduates.
Interactive Curves and Surfaces
A Multimedia Tutorial on CAGD
1st Edition
August 22, 1996
Alyn Rockwood + 1 more
English
The growing importance of animation and 3D design has caused computer-aided geometric design (CAGD) to be of interest to a wide audience of programmers and designers.This interactive software/book tutorial teaches fundamental CAGD concepts and discusses the growing number of applications in such areas as geological modeling, molecular modeling, commercial advertising, and animation. Using interactive examples and animations to illustrate the mathematical concepts, this hands-on multimedia tutorial enables users without a substantial mathematical background to quickly gain intuition about CAGD.Interactive Curves and Surfaces guides you in* Learning the uses of CAGD as it is applied in computer graphics and engineering.* Creating curved lines and surfaces using Bezier curves, B-Splines, and parametric surface patches.* Understanding the mathematical tools behind the generation of these objects, and the development of computer-based CAGD algorithms.* Experimenting with powerful interactive test benches to explore the behavior and characteristics of the most popular CAGD curves.Application oriented readers will find this animated tutorial presentation more accessible than the standard formal texts on the subject.
Wavelets for Computer Graphics
Theory and Applications
1st Edition
August 1, 1996
Eric J. Stollnitz + 2 more
English
This distinctly accessible introduction to wavelets provides computer graphics professionals and researchers with the mathematical foundations for understanding and applying this powerful tool.Wavelets are rapidly becoming a core technique in computer graphics, with applications for* Image editing and compression* Automatic level-of-detail control for editing and rendering curves and surfaces* Surface reconstruction from contours* Physical simulation for global illumination and animationStressing intuition and clarity, this book offers a solid understanding of the theory of wavelets and their proven applications in computer graphics.Although previous introductions to wavelets have presented an elegant mathematical framework, that framework is too restrictive to apply to many problems in graphics. In contrast, this book focuses on a generalized theory that naturally accommodates the kinds of objects that commonly arise in computer graphics, including images, open curves, and surfaces of arbitrary topology.This book also contains a foreword by Ingrid Daubechies and an appendix covering the necessary background material in linear algebra.
Jim Blinn's Corner: A Trip Down the Graphics Pipeline
1st Edition
July 1, 1996
Jim Blinn
English
For almost three decades eminent computer graphicist Jim Blinn has coupled his scientific knowledge and artistic abilities to foster the growth of the computer graphics field. His many contributions include the Voyager Fly-by animations of space missions to Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus; The Mechanical Universe, a 52-part telecourse of animated physics; and the computer animation of Carl Sagan's PBS series Cosmos. In addition, Blinn, the recipient of the first SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, has developed many widely used graphics techniques, including bump mapping, environment mapping, and blobby modeling.Blinn shares his insight and experience in "Jim Blinn's Corner," an award-winning column in the technical magazine IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications in which he unveils his most useful graphics methods and observations. This book, a compendium of 20 of the column's articles, leads you through the "graphics pipeline" offering a wealth of tips and tricks. It explores common graphics problems, many of which have never before been addressed.An invaluable resource for any graphics professionalIn his entertaining and inspirational style, Blinn examines a variety of topics to help computer graphics software and application developers recognize and solve graphics programming problems. Focusing on geometry and the graphics pipeline, he shares:easy to understand explanations of difficult concepts gleaned from years of teachinginteresting examples of tricky special cases that cause conventional algorithms to failhighly refined algorithms for clipping, viewing, lighting, and rendering
Applying Neural Networks
A Practical Guide
1st Edition
April 16, 1996
Kevin Swingler
English
In this computer-based era, neural networks are an invaluable tool. They have been applied extensively in business forecasting, machine health monitoring, process control, and laboratory data analysis due to their modeling capabilities. There are numerous applications for neural networks, but a great deal of care and expertise is necessary to keep a neural-based project in working order.This all-inclusive coverage gives you everything you need to put neural networks into practice. This informative book shows the reader how to plan, run, and benefit from a neural-based project without running into the roadblocks that often crop up. Theauthor uses the most popular type of neural network, the Multi-Layer Perceptron, and presents every step of its development. Each chapter presents a subsequent stage in network development through easy-to-follow discussion. Every decision and possible problem is considered in depth, and solutions are offered. The book includes a how-to-do-it reference section, and a set of worked examples. The second half of the book examines the sucessful application of neural networks in fields including signal processing, financial prediction, business decision support, and process monitoring and control. The book comes complete with a disk containing C and C++ programs to get you started.
Web Server Technology
1st Edition
March 1, 1996
Nancy J. Yeager + 1 more
English
The success of the web depends not only on the creation of stimulating and valuable information, but also on the speed, efficiency and convenient delivery of this information to the Web consumer. This authoritative presentation of web server technology takes you beyond the basics to provide the underlying principles and technical details of how WWW servers really work. It explains current technology and suggests enhanced and expanded methods for disseminating information via the Web.
Distributed Algorithms
1st Edition
March 1, 1996
Nancy A. Lynch
English
In Distributed Algorithms, Nancy Lynch provides a blueprint for designing, implementing, and analyzing distributed algorithms. She directs her book at a wide audience, including students, programmers, system designers, and researchers.Distribu... Algorithms contains the most significant algorithms and impossibility results in the area, all in a simple automata-theoretic setting. The algorithms are proved correct, and their complexity is analyzed according to precisely defined complexity measures. The problems covered include resource allocation, communication, consensus among distributed processes, data consistency, deadlock detection, leader election, global snapshots, and many others.The material is organized according to the system model—first by the timing model and then by the interprocess communication mechanism. The material on system models is isolated in separate chapters for easy reference.The presentation is completely rigorous, yet is intuitive enough for immediate comprehension. This book familiarizes readers with important problems, algorithms, and impossibility results in the area: readers can then recognize the problems when they arise in practice, apply the algorithms to solve them, and use the impossibility results to determine whether problems are unsolvable. The book also provides readers with the basic mathematical tools for designing new algorithms and proving new impossibility results. In addition, it teaches readers how to reason carefully about distributed algorithms—to model them formally, devise precise specifications for their required behavior, prove their correctness, and evaluate their performance with realistic measures.
Computerization and Controversy
Value Conflicts and Social Choices
2nd Edition
February 22, 1996
Rob Kling
English
The Second Edition of Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices is a collection of 78 articles that examine the social aspects of computerization from a variety of perspectives, many presenting important viewpoints not often discussed in the conventional literature. A number of paired articles comprise thought-provoking head-on debate. Fields represented include computer science, information systems, management, journalism, psychology, law, library science, and sociology. This volume introduces some of the major controversies surrounding the computerization of society and helps readers recognize the social processes that drive and shape computerization. Division into eight provocatively titled sections facilitates course planning for classroom or seminar use. A lead article for each section frames the major controversies, locates the selections within the debates, and points to other relevant literature.
DARPA Speech/Language Proceedings 1994
1st Edition
January 8, 1996
DARPA
English
Multimedia and Imaging Databases
1st Edition
November 29, 1995
Setrag Khoshafian + 1 more
English
Affordable and mainstream manipulation of multimedia data types will lead to tremendous growth in imaging and multimedia data in general computing environments. Multimedia and imaging applications can now provide benefits to common business applications by integrating voice, sound, images, animation and digitized video. Ultimately, it will be possible to convert all information thatis currently stored on paper, video and film into a digitized environment. This will allow users to organize, search and route multimedia objects over local and wide area networks in real time. The authors' introductory level presentation of this new class of data types supplies the database technology required for effective manipulation and storage. Multimedia and database experts, Khoshafian and Baker aptly illustrate the ability of multimedia database systemsto concurrently share, access, and query large collections of multimedia information. They introduce the elemental concepts of object and relational databases and then apply them to multimedia and imagingdatabases. Fundamental database topics discussed include querying, transaction support, recovery, security, and storage. This book provides information essential to the incorporation of multimedia databases that will improve the quantity and quality ofinformation manipulated by computer users in many areas including medicine, computer aided design, and information retrieval systems.

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