springer berlin heidelberg aug 2004 (196 risultati)

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This is the first book to provide a systematic exposition of promising techniques for the reconstruction of small inhomogeneities from boundary measurements. In particular, theoretical results and numerical procedures for the inverse problems for the conductivity equation, the Lamé system, as well as the Helmholtz equation are discussed in a readable and informative manner. The general approach developed in this book is based on layer potential techniques and modern asymptotic analysis of partial differential equations. The book is particularly suitable for graduate students in mathematics.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 252 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -The Europaische Akademie zur Erforschung von Folgen wissenschaftlich-techni scher Entwicklungen Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler GmbH (european academy) is con cerned with the scientific study of the consequences of scientific and technological advance for the individual and social life and for the natural environment. The main focus is to examine foreseeable mid-and long-term processes that are especially influenced by natural-and engineering sciences and the medical disciplines. The academy fulfills this task by organizing interdisciplinary expert discussions. Another important issue of the work of the Europaische Akademie concerns the methodology of Technology Assessment as a general issue. This is the main reason that the european academy organized during the past two years a project funded by the European Commission on Technology Assessment. Methods and Impact (TAMI). Together with partners from all over Europe a common understanding of what Tech nology Assessment (TA) is supposed to do was developed. Most importantly it was acknowledged that the core of any TA activity has to be a sound scientific under standing of the relevant phenomena. Communication then is of cordial importance to reach the relevant decision makers as well as the general public. It is true that this phase of the TA process has been treated with too little attention for many years. The communication processes between scientific advisers and policy makers have hence to be further scrutinized.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 268 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Das schonste GlUck des denkenden M ens chen ist, das Erforschliche erforscht zu haben und das Unerforschliche ruhig zu verehren JOHANN WOLFGANG VON Gm~THE In the sense of Goethe, I hope this book helps to shift the fine line between the inaccessible and the explorable a little bit in the direction of the latter. It has been accepted as a doctoral dissertation at the Faculty of Business Admin istration and Economics of the Catholic University of Eichstatt-Ingolstadt, Germany, and has been a great pleasure to write~at least most of the time. At the other times, the following people helped me to get around the moun tains that seemed too high to climb: First of all, these were my parents, whom I thank for their continuing support. This 'thank you' is extended to my brothers Marcel and Dominik and of course to Angelika, who has strengthened me with love through the sometimes arduous campaign. Further, I thank my academic advisor Prof. Dr. Heinrich Kuhn and my colleagues Dr. Georg N. Krieg and Florian Defregger for many fruitful discussions and helpful thoughts. I also thank Prof. Dr. Klaus D. Wilde for refereeing the thesis.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 252 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Statistical learning theory is aimed at analyzing complex data with necessarily approximate models. This book is intended for an audience with a graduate background in probability theory and statistics. It will be useful to any reader wondering why it may be a good idea, to use as is often done in practice a notoriously 'wrong'' (i.e. over-simplified) model to predict, estimate or classify. This point of view takes its roots in three fields: information theory, statistical mechanics, and PAC-Bayesian theorems. Results on the large deviations of trajectories of Markov chains with rare transitions are also included. They are meant to provide a better understanding of stochastic optimization algorithms of common use in computing estimators. The author focuses on non-asymptotic bounds of the statistical risk, allowing one to choose adaptively between rich and structured families of models and corresponding estimators. Two mathematical objects pervade the book: entropy and Gibbs measures. The goal is to show how to turn them into versatile and efficient technical tools, that will stimulate further studies and results.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 292 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -It is with great pleasure that we present to you this tutorial volume entitled Validation of Stochastic Systems.ItisoneoftheresultsoftheDutch-German- lateral cooperation project ¿Validation of Stochastic Systems¿ (VOSS), nanced by NWO and DFG (the Dutch and German science foundations, respectively). In the early days of 2002, the idea emerged to organize a seminar at Schloss Dagstuhl, not the usual Dagstuhl seminar with primarily invited participants, but a seminar aimed at young(er) people, and for which the organizers assign themes to be worked upon and presented on. Following an open call announced via the Internet in the spring of 2002, we received many applications for part- ipation. After a selection procedure, we decided to assign (mostly) teams of two researchers to work on speci c topics, roughly divided into the following four theme areas: ¿Modelling of Stochastic Systems,¿ ¿Model Checking of Stochastic Systems,¿ ¿Representing Large State Spaces,¿ and ¿Deductive Veri cation of Stochastic Systems.¿ These are the titles of the four parts of this volume. TheseminarwasheldinSchlossDagstuhlduringDecember8¿11,2002aspart of the so-called GI/Research Seminar series. This series of seminars is nancially supported by theGesellschaft fur ¿ Informatik, the German Computer Society. At that point in time the papers had already undergone a rst review round. Each of the tutorial papers was presented in a one-hour session, and on the basis of the presentations we decided to bring together a selection of them into a book.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 480 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This volume contains the papers that were accepted for presentation at the - ternationalConferenceonT X,XML, andDigitalTypography,jointlyheld with E the 25th Annual Meeting of the T X Users Group in Xanthi, Greece in the sum- E mer of2004.Theterm¿DigitalTypography¿refersto thepreparationofprinted matter using only electronic computers and electronic printing devices, such as laser-jetprinters.Thedocumentpreparationprocessinvolvesmainlytheuseofa digital typesetting system as well as data representation technologies. TXand E its o spring are beyond doubt the most successful current digital typesetters, while XML is the standard for text-based data representation for both business and scienti c activities. Allpapersappearinginthisvolumewerefullyrefereedbythemembersofthe program committee. The papers were carefully selected to re ect the research work that is being done in the eld of digital typography using T X and/or its E o spring. The problems for which comprehensivesolutions have been proposed include proper multilingual document preparation and XML document processing and generation. The proposed solutions deal not simply with typesetting issues, but also related issues in document preparation, such as the manipulation of c- plex bibliographic databases, and automatic conversion of text expressed in one grammaticalsystem to a more recent one (as for the Greek language,converting between monotonic Greek and polytonic Greek). The conference is being graciously hosted by the Democritus University of Thrace in Xanthi and by the Greek T X Friends. We wish to thank Basil K.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 280 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Thepapersinthisvolumewereselectedforpresentationatthe10thInternational Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON 2004), held on August 17¿20, 2004 in Jeju Island, Korea. Previous meetings were held in Xi¿an (1995), HongKong(1996),Shanghai(1997),Taipei(1998),Tokyo(1999),Sydney(2000), Guilin (2001), Singapore (2002), and Big Sky (2003). In response to the call for papers, 109 extended abstracts were submitted from 23 countries, of which 46 were accepted. The submitted papers were from Belgium (1), Canada (5), China (6), France (1), Germany (6), Hong Kong (8), India (6), Iran (1), Ireland (1), Israel (4), Italy (2), Japan (17), Korea (23), Mexico (3), New Zealand (1), Poland(1), Russia (1), Singapore (5), Sweden (2), Switzerland (3), Taiwan (2), the UK (1), and the USA (9). Each paper was evaluated by at least three program committee members, with the assistance of referees, as indicated by the referee list found in these proceedings. There were many more acceptable papers than there was space available in the conference schedule, and the program committee¿s task was extremely di cult. In addition to selected papers, the conference also included threeinvitedpresentationsbyLarsArge,JeongHanKim,andKokichiSugihara. We thank all program committee members and their referees for their - cellent work, especially given the demanding time constraints; they gave the conference its distinctive character. We thank all who submitted papers for c- sideration: they all contributed to the high quality of the conference. Finally,wethankallthepeoplewhoworkedhardtoputinplacethelogistical arrangements of the conference ¿ our colleagues and our graduate students. It is their hard work that made the conference possible and enjoyable.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 496 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -1 With its fourth edition, the ANTS series of workshops has changed its name. Theoriginal¿ANTS¿FromAntColoniestoArti cialAnts:InternationalWo- shop on Ant Algorithms¿ has become ¿ANTS ¿ International Workshop on Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence¿. This change is mainly due to the following reasons. First, the term ¿ant algorithms¿ was slower in spreading in the research community than the term ¿swarm intelligence¿, while at the sametime research inso-calledswarm robotics wasthesubjectofincreasingactivity:itwastherefore an obvious choice to substitute the term ant algorithms with the more accepted and used term swarm intelligence. Second, although swarm intelligence research has undoubtedly produced a 2 number of interesting and promising research directions , we think it is fair to say that its most successful strand is the one known as ¿ant colony optimi- tion¿.Ant colony optimization, rst introducedin the early1990sasa noveltool fortheapproximatesolutionofdiscreteoptimizationproblems,hasrecentlyseen an explosion in the number of its applications, both to academic and real-world problems, and is currently being extended to the realm of continuous optimi- tion (a few papers on this subject being published in these proceedings). It is therefore a reasonable choice to have the term ant colony optimization as part of the workshop name.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 452 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This volume contains the proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Software and Compilers for Embedded Systems (SCOPES 2004) held in A- terdam, The Netherlands, on September 2 and 3, 2004. Initially, the workshop was referred to as the International Workshop on Code Generation for Emb- ded Systems. The rst took place in 1994 in Schloß Dagstuhl, Germany. From its beginnings, the intention of the organizers has been to create an interactive atmosphere in which the participants can discuss and pro t from the assembly of international experts in the eld. The name SCOPES has been used since the fourth edition in St. Goar, G- many,in1999whenthescopeoftheworkshopwasextendedtoalsocovergeneral issues in embedded software design. Since then SCOPES has been held again in St. Goar in 2001; Berlin, Germany in 2002; Vienna, Austria in 2003; and now in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In response to the call for papers, almost 50 very strong papers were s- mitted from all over the world. All submitted papers were reviewed by at least three experts to ensure the quality of the workshop. In the end, the program committee selected 17 papers for presentation at the workshop. These papers are divided into the following categories: application-speci c (co)design, system and application synthesis, data ow analysis, data partitioning, task scheduling and code generation. In addition to the selected contributions, the keynote address was delivered by Mike Uhler from MIPS Technologies. An abstract of his talk is also included in this volume. 276 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Frank Valencia. ¿ MultiCPL2004, 3rd International Workshop on Multiparadigm Constraint, organized by Petra Hofstedt. ¿ TeachLP2004,1stInternationalWorkshoponTeachingLogicProgramming, organized by Dietmar Seipel.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 496 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This introductory text provides undergraduate and graduate students with a concise and practical introduction to the primary concepts and techniques of optimization. Practicing engineers and managers will also find useful its concentration on problems and examples relevant to them. With a strong emphasis on basic concepts and techniques throughout, the book explains the theory behind each technique as simply as possible, along with illustrations and worked examples. It gives a balanced treatment of both the linear and nonlinear programming, plus search techniques, geometric programming, and game theory. Some typical problems varying in difficulty level are solved so readers can appreciate intricacies of the underlying concepts useful for practical problem solving. Suitable for individual or group learning, the book also includes numerous end-of-chapter problems for study and review.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 596 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Process Management, with its key concepts of internal customer and process ownership, is becoming one of the most important competitive weapons for firms and can determine a strategic change in the way business is carried out (Business Process Reengineering - B.P.R.). In this context, the flow of information increases, passes through the internal departments, to then extend beyond the traditional boundaries of the enterprise and form operational and knowledge networks with other business units, selected suppliers and clients, etc. These (internal and external) networks harness the great power offered by Web technologies (Internet, Intranet, Extranet) and create the Extended Enterprise.This book explores innovative themes that will trace the business paths for many firms in the near future. It is based on research and experience in several major companies, in particular the Snaidero Group (Europe¿s leading company in the kitchen sector), with contributions by leading Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) companies.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 288 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Sincerely welcome to proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Trust and Privacy in Digital Business, Zaragoza, Spain, held from August 30th to September 1st, 2004. This conference was an outgrowth of the two successful TrustBus inter- tional workshops, held in 2002 and 2003 in conjunction with the DEXA conferences in Aix-en-Provence and in Prague. Being the first of a planned series of successful conferences it was our goal that this event would initiate a forum to bring together researchers from academia and commercial developers from industry to discuss the state of the art of technology for establishing trust and privacy in digital business. We thank you all the attendees for coming to Zaragoza to participate and debate the new emerging advances in this area. The conference program consisted of one invited talk and nine regular technical papers sessions. The invited talk and keynote speech was delivered by Ahmed Patel from the Computer Networks and Distributed Systems Research Group, University College Dublin, Ireland on ¿Developing Secure, Trusted and Auditable Services for E-Business: An Autonomic Computing Approach¿. A paper covering his talk is also contained in this book. The regular paper sessions covered a broad range of topics, from access control - sues to electronic voting, from trust and protocols to digital rights management. The conference attracted close to 100 submissions of which the program committee - cepted 29 papers for presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings. 316 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Due to the scarcity of reliable data, the existing literature on default risk still displays an imbalance between theoretical and empirical contributions. Consequently, the focus of this book is on empirical work. Within an intensity based modelling framework a broad range of promising specifications is tested using corporate bond data. The book provides one of the most comprehensive empirical studies in the field, from Kalman filtration of affine term structure models to the use of Efficient Method of Moments estimation of dynamic term structure models in a default risky context. Filling another gap in empirical research, the book devotes special attention to the identification factors that can explain credit default swap premia.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 152 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Research with radioactive ion beams has entered a new era with the advent of energetic beams of radioactive nuclei able to induce nuclear reactions. The present book is the first volume of edited lectures based on material presented at the Euroschool on Exotic Beams over the past years. It introduces the graduate student and nonspecialist scientist from related areas to various topics encompassing theoretical, experimental as well as application-related aspects of this growing field of research.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 508 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Thisvolumecontainspapersselectedforpresentationatthe6thIAPRWorkshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS 2004) held during September 8¿10, 2004 at the University of Florence, Italy. Several papers represent the state of the art in a broad range of ¿traditional¿ topics such as layout analysis, applications to graphics recognition, and handwritten documents. Other contributions address the description of complete working systems, which is one of the strengths of this workshop. Some papers extend the application domains to other media, like the processing of Internet documents. The peculiarity of this 6th workshop was the large number of papers related to digital libraries and to the processing of historical documents, a taste which frequently requires the analysis of color documents. A total of 17 papers are associated with these topics, whereas two yearsago (in DAS 2002) only a couple of papers dealt with these problems. In our view there are three main reasons for this new wave in the DAScommunity. From the scienti c point of view, several research elds reached a thorough knowledge of techniques and problems that can be e ectively solved, and this expertise can now be applied to new domains. Another incentive has been provided by several research projects funded by the EC and the NSF on topics related to digital libraries. 580 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -¿How often we recall, with regret¿, wrote Mark Twain about editors, ¿that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity, that his intentions were good. ¿ Fortunately, we live in more forgiving times, and are openly able to express our pleasure at being the editors of this volume containing the papers selected for presentation at the 14th International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming. ILP 2004 was held in Porto from the 6th to the 8th of September, under the auspices of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computing of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP), and the Laborat¿ orio de Intelig¿ encia Arti cial e Ci¿ encias da Computä c¿ ao (LIACC). This annual me- ing of ILP practitioners and curious outsiders is intended to act as the premier forum for presenting the most recent and exciting work in the eld. Six invited talks¿three from elds outside ILP, but nevertheless highly relevant to it¿ and 20 full presentations formed the nucleus of the conference. It is the full-length papersofthese20presentationsthatcomprisethebulkofthisvolume. Asisnow common with the ILP conference, presentations made to a ¿Work-in-Progress¿ track will, hopefully, be available elsewhere. We gratefully acknowledge the continued support of Kluwer Academic P- lishers for the ¿Best Student Paper¿ award on behalf of the Machine Lea- ing journal; and Springer-Verlag for continuing to publish the proceedings of these conferences.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 376 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This volume contains the postproceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Autonomy ¿ Potential, Risks, Solutions (AUTONOMY 2003), held at the 2nd International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agentSystems(AAMAS2003),July14,2003,Melbourne,Australia.Apart from revised versions of the accepted workshop papers, we have included invited contributions from leading experts in the eld. With this, the present volume represents the rst comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art of research on autonomy, capturing di erent theories of autonomy, perspectives on autonomy in di erent kinds of agent-based systems, and practical approaches to dealing with agent autonomy. Agent orientation refers to a software development perspective that has evolved in the past 25 years in the elds of computational agents and multiagent systems. The basic notion underlying this perspective is that of a computational agent, that is, an entity whose behavior deserves to be called exible, social, and autonomous. As an autonomous entity, an agent possesses action choice and is at least to some extent capable of deciding and acting under self-control. Through its emphasis on autonomy, agent orientation signi cantly di ers from traditional engineering perspectives such as structure orientation or object o- entation. These perspectives are targeted on the development of systems whose behavior is fully determined and controlled by external units (e.g., by a p- grammer at design time and/or a user at run time), and thus inherently fail to capture the notion of autonomy.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 292 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -The 11th Conference ¿Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Systems, Applications ¿ Semantic Web Challenges¿ (AIMSA 2004) continued successfully pursuing the main aim of the AIMSA series of conferences ¿ to foster the multidisciplinary community of artificial intelligence researchers, embracing both the theoretic underpinnings of the field and the practical issues involved in development, deployment, and maintenance of systems with intelligent behavior. Since the first conference in 1984 AIMSA has provided an ideal forum for international scientific exchange between Central/Eastern Europe and the rest of the world and it is even more important nowadays in the uni- ing Europe. The current AIMSA edition is focused on Semantic Web methods and technologies. The Internet is changing the everyday services landscape, and the way we do things in almost every domain of our life. Web services are rapidly becoming the enabling technology of today's e-business and e-commerce systems, and will soon transform the Web as it is now into a distributed computation and application framework. The emerging Semantic Web paradigm promises to annotate Web artefacts to enable automated reasoning about them. When applied to e-services, the paradigm hopes to provide substantial automation for activities such as discovery, invocation, assembly, and monitoring of e-services. One hundred and seventy-six interesting papers were submitted to the conference. 540 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Rapid technical advances in medical imaging, including its growing application to drug/gene therapy and invasive/interventional procedures, have attracted significant interest in close integration of research in life sciences, medicine, physical sciences and engineering. This is motivated by the clinical and basic science research requi- ment of obtaining more detailed physiological and pathological information about the body for establishing localized genesis and progression of diseases. Current research is also motivated by the fact that medical imaging is increasingly moving from a primarily diagnostic modality towards a therapeutic and interventional aid, driven by recent advances in minimal-access and robotic-assisted surgery. It was our great pleasure to welcome the attendees to MIAR 2004, the 2nd Int- national Workshop on Medical Imaging and Augmented Reality, held at the Xia- shan (Fragrant Hills) Hotel, Beijing, during August 19¿20, 2004. The goal of MIAR 2004 was to bring together researchers in computer vision, graphics, robotics, and medical imaging to present the state-of-the-art developments in this ever-growing research area. The meeting consisted of a single track of oral/poster presentations, with each session led by an invited lecture from our distinguished international f- ulty members. For MIAR 2004, we received 93 full submissions, which were sub- quently reviewed by up to 5 reviewers, resulting in the acceptance of the 41 full - pers included in this volume. 396 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -assisted us in the evaluation of the submitted papers.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 548 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -We are delighted to present the proceedings of DAGM 2004, and wish to - press our gratitude to the many people whose e orts made the success of the conference possible. We received 146 contributions of which we were able to - cept 22 as oral presentations and 48 as posters. Each paper received 3 reviews, upon which decisions were based. We are grateful for the dedicated work of the 38 members of the program committee and the numerous referees. The careful review process led to the exciting program which we are able to present in this volume. Among the highlights of the meeting were the talks of our four invited spe- ers, renowned experts in areas spanning learning in theory, in vision and in robotics: ¿ William T. Freeman, Arti cial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT: Sharing F- tures for Multi-class Object Detection ¿ PietroPerona,Caltech:TowardsUnsupervisedLearningofObjectCategories ¿ StefanSchaal,DepartmentofComputerScience,UniversityofSouthernC- ifornia: Real-Time Statistical Learning for Humanoid Robotics ¿ Vladimir Vapnik, NEC Research Institute: Empirical Inference WearegratefulforeconomicsupportfromHondaResearchInstituteEurope, ABW GmbH, Transtec AG, DaimlerChrysler, and Stemmer Imaging GmbH, which enabled us to nance best paper prizes and a limited number of travel grants. Many thanks to our local support Sabrina Nielebock and Dagmar Maier, who dealt with the unimaginably diverse range of practical tasks involved in planning a DAGM symposium. Thanks to Richard van de Stadt for providing excellent software and support for handling the reviewing process. A special thanks goes to Jeremy Hill, who wrote and maintained the conference website.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 604 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Administration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Ralf Klischewski Security Requirements Engineering for e-GovernmentApplications: Analysis of Current Frameworks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Christos Kalloniatis, Evangelia Kavakli, and Stefanos Gritzalis XII Table of Contents Semantic Lexicons for Accessing Legal Information. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Maria-Teresa Sagri and Daniela Tiscornia Impact of e-Government Interoperability in Local Governments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Norbert Benamou, Alain Busson, and Alain Keravel Process Management e-Government Intermediation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Aljosa Pasic, Anne-Marie Sassen, and Alicia Garcia Comprehensive Process Management in Public Administrations ¿ A Case Study .Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 608 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This book is a comprehensive survey of most of the theoretical and experimental achievements in the field of quantum estimation of states and operations. Albeit still quite young, this field has already been recognized as a necessary tool for research in quantum optics and quantum information, beyond being a fascinating subject in its own right since it touches upon the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics. The book consists of twelve extensive lectures that are essentially self-contained and modular, allowing combination of various chapters as a basis for advanced courses and seminars on theoretical or experimental aspects. The last two chapters, for instance, form a self-contained exposition on quantum discrimination problems. The book will benefit graduate students and newcomers to the field as a high-level but accessible textbook, lecturers in search for advanced course material and researchers wishing to consult a modern and authoritative source of reference.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 536 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -New concepts and technologies are being introduced continuously for application development in the World-Wide Web. Selecting the right implementation strategies and tools when building a Web application has become a tedious task, requiring in-depth knowledge and significant experience from both software developers and software managers.The mission of this book is to guide the reader through the opaque jungle of Web technologies. Based on their long industrial and academic experience, Stefan Jablonski and his coauthors provide a framework architecture for Web applications which helps choose the best strategy for a given project. The authors classify common technologies and standards like .NET, CORBA, J2EE, DCOM, WSDL and many more with respect to platform, architectural layer, and application package, and guide the reader through a three-phase development process consisting of preparation, design, and technology selection steps. The whole approach is exemplified using a real-world case: the architectural design of an order-entry management system.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 260 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This stimulating, carefully-researched book on The Late Life Legacy of Very Early Life by Dr. Gabriele Doblhammer is the second volume of a new series of Demographic Research Monographs published by Springer Verlag. The topic of the book is fascinating. Is a person's lifespan influ enced by health and nutrition in-utero and shortly after birth If so, why The answers uncovered by the diligence, demographic and statistical ex pertise, and probing intelligence of the author are surprising but convinc ing. To pry open the mystery of the lingering impact of very early life, Dr. Doblharnmer focuses on month of birth. It turns out that people born in some months live substantially longer on average than people born in other months, not because of astrological forces but for reasons of health and nutrition. Dr. Doblhammer was educated in statistics and demography and earlier this year was the first person ever to receive the 'Habilitation' de gree, the recognition given in the German-speaking world to proven scho lars who are qualified to become professors, in Demography. This book, which is evidence that she fully deserves this award, will not only provide important new fmdings about the legacy of early life but will also serve as a comprehensive foundation of knowledge on which future scholars can build. The series of Demographic Research Monographs is under the editorial supervision of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. Prof. James W. Vaupel, Founding Director of the Institute, is Editor-in-Chief.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 220 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Sovereign risk and financial crises play a key role in current international economic developments, particularly in the case of economic downturns. As the Asian economic crisis in the late 1990s revealed once again, financial crises are the rule rather than the exception in capitalist economies. The event also revealed that international public debt agreements are contingent claims. In a world of increasing economic interdependencies, the issues of financial crises and country defaults are of critical importance. This volume goes to the heart of the academic discussion on sovereign risk and financial crises by centering on quantitative-empirical aspects, evaluating prominent approaches, and by proposing new methods. Part I of the volume identifies key factors and processes that are central in analyzing sovereign risk while Part II focuses on the determinants and effects of financial crises.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 272 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This volume contains the Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, held in Brno, Czech Republic, in September 2004, under the auspices of the Masaryk University. This series of international conferences on text, speech and dialogue has come to c- stitute a major forum for presentation and discussion, not only of the latest developments in academic research in these elds, but also of practical and industrial applications. Uniquely, these conferences bring together researchers from a very wide area, both intellectually and geographically, including scientists working in speech technology, dialogue systems, text processing, lexicography, and other related elds. In recent years the conference has dev- oped into aprimary meetingplacefor speech and languagetechnologistsfrom manydifferent parts of the world and in particular it has enabled important and fruitful exchanges of ideas between Western and Eastern Europe. TSD 2004 offered a rich program of invited talks, tutorials, technical papers and poster sessions, aswellasworkshops andsystemdemonstrations. Atotalof78paperswereaccepted out of 127 submitted, contributed altogether by 190 authors from 26 countries. Our thanks as usual go to the Program Committee members and to the external reviewers for their conscientious and diligent assessment of submissions, and to the authors themselves for their high-quality contributions. We would also like to take this opportunity to express our appreciation to all the members of the Organizing Committee for their tireless efforts in organizing the conference and ensuring its smooth running. 688 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This volume contains the invited and contributed papers presented at the Fourth International Conference on Perspectives in Hadronic Physics and sent to the Editors within the deadline. The Conference was held at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, Italy, from May 12th to 16th, 2003, and was attended by about 100 scientists from 20 countries. The series ofConferences on Perspectives on Hadronic Physics takes place every two years since 1997 and follows the seven Workshops on Perspectives in Nuclear Physics at Intermediate Energies, organized every two years at ICTP since 1983. The aim of these Conferences is to discuss the status-of-the-art concerning the experimental and theoretical investigations of hadronic systems, from nucleons to nuclei and dense nuclear matter, in terms of the relevant underlying degrees of freedom. For such a reason the Fourth Conference has been focused on those experimental and theoretical topics which have been in the last few years the object of intensive investigations, viz. the various approaches employed to describe the structure of hadrons in terms of QCD and QCD inspired models, the recent developments in the treatment of the properties and propagations of hadronic states in the medium, the relevant progress done in the solution of the few- and many- hadron problems, the recent results in the experimental investigation of dense hadronic matter and, last but not least, the physics programs of existing Laboratories and the suggested projects for new Facilities.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 320 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -The dramatic impact of low dimensional semiconductor structures on c- rent and future device applications cannot be overstated. Research over the last decade has highlighted the use of quantum engineering to achieve p- viously unknown limits for device performance in research laboratories. The modi ed electronic structure of semiconductor quantum structures results in transport and optical properties, which di er from those of constituent bulk materials. The possibility to tailor properties, such as bandgap, strain, band o set etc. , of two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors, e. g. quantum wells, for speci c purposes has had an extensive impact on the electronics, which has resulted in a dramatic renewal process. For instance, 2D structures are today used in a large number of high speed electronics and optoelectronic appli- tions (e. g. detectors, light emitting diodes, modulators, switches and lasers) and in daily life, in e. g. LED-based tra c lights, CD-players, cash registers. The introduction of impurities, also in very small concentrations, in a semiconductor can change its optical and electrical properties entirely. This attribute of the semiconductor is utilized in the manifoldness of their app- cations. This fact constitutes the principal driving force for investigation of the properties of the impurities in semiconductors. While the impurities in bulk materials have been investigated for a long time, and their properties are fairly well established by now, the corresponding studies of impurities in quantum wells is a more recent research area.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 152 pp. Englisch.