Browse Results

Select your format based upon: 1) how you want to read your book, and 2) compatibility with your reading tool. To learn more about using Bookshare with your device, visit the Help Center.

Here is an overview of the specialized formats that Bookshare offers its members with links that go to the Help Center for more information.

• Bookshare Web Reader - A customized reading tool for Bookshare members offering all the features of DAISY with a single click of the "Read Now" link.
• DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) - A digital book file format. DAISY books from Bookshare are DAISY 3.0 text files that work with just about every type of access technology that reads text. Books that contain images will have the download option of ‘DAISY Text with Images’.
• BRF (Braille Refreshable Format) - Digital Braille for use with refreshable Braille devices and Braille embossers.
• MP3 (MPEG audio layer 3) - Provides audio only with no text. These books are created with a text-to-speech engine and spoken by Kendra, a high quality synthetic voice from Ivona. Any device that supports MP3 playback is compatible.
• DAISY Audio - Similar to the DAISY option above; however, this option uses MP3 files created with our text-to-speech engine that utilizes Ivonas Kendra voice. This format will work with Daisy Audio compatible players such as Victor Reader Stream and Read2Go.
• EPUB - A standard e-book format that can be read on many tools, such as iBooks, Readium or others.
• Word - Accessible Word output, which can be unzipped and opened in any tool that allows .docx files

Advances in Information Retrieval: 25th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2003, Pisa, Italy, April 14-16, 2003, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science #2633)

The European Conference on Information Retrieval Research, now in its 25th “Silver Jubilee” edition, was initiallyestablished bythe Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the British Computer Society(BCS-IRSG) under the name “Annual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research,” and was always held in the United Kingdom until 1997. Since 1998 the location of the colloquium has alternated between the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe, in order to re?ect the growing European orientation of the event. For the same reason, in 2001 the event was renamed “European Annual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research.” Since 2002, the proceedings of the Colloquium have been published bySpringer-Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. In 2003 BCS-IRSG decided to rename the event “European Conference on Information Retrieval Research,” in order to re?ect what the event had slowly turned into, i.e., a full-blown conference with a European program committee, strong peer reviewing, and a (mostly) European audience. However, ECIR still retains the strong student focus that has characterized the Colloquia since their inception: student fees are kept particularlylow, a s- dent travel grant program is available in order to encourage students to attend the conference (and encourage student authors to present their papers pers- ally), and a Best Student Paper Award is assigned (conversely, ECIR has no best paper award).

Advances in Intelligent Data Analysis V: 5th International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis, IDA 2003, Berlin, Germany, August 28-30, 2003, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science #2810)

We are glad to present the proceedings of the 5th biennial conference in the Intelligent Data Analysis series. The conference took place in Berlin, Germany, August 28–30, 2003. IDA has by now clearly grown up. Started as a small si- symposium of a larger conference in 1995 in Baden-Baden (Germany) it quickly attractedmoreinterest(bothsubmission-andattendance-wise),andmovedfrom London (1997) to Amsterdam (1999), and two years ago to Lisbon. Submission ratesalongwiththeeverimprovingqualityofpapershaveenabledtheor- nizers to assemble increasingly consistent and high-quality programs. This year we were again overwhelmed by yet another record-breaking submission rate of 180 papers. At the Program Chairs meeting we were – based on roughly 500 reviews – in the lucky position of carefully selecting 17 papers for oral and 42 for poster presentation. Poster presenters were given the opportunity to summarize their papers in 3-minute spotlight presentations. The oral, spotlight and poster presentations were then scheduled in a single-track, 2. 5-day conference program, summarized in this book. In accordance with the goal of IDA, “to bring together researchers from diverse disciplines,” we achieved a nice balance of presentations from the more theoreticalside(bothstatisticsandcomputerscience)aswellasmoreapplicati- oriented areas that illustrate how these techniques can be used in practice. Work presented in these proceedings ranges from theoretical contributions dealing, for example, with data cleaning and compression all the way to papers addressing practical problems in the areas of text classi?cation and sales-rate predictions. A considerable number of papers also center around the currently so popular applications in bioinformatics.

Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: 7th Pacific-Asia Conference, PAKDD 2003. Seoul, Korea, April 30 - May 2, 2003, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science #2637)

The 7th Paci?c Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD) was held from April 30 to May 2, 2003 in the Convention and Ex- bition Center (COEX), Seoul, Korea. The PAKDD conference is a major forum for academic researchers and industry practitioners in the Paci?c Asia region to share original research results and development experiences from di?erent KDD-related areas such as data mining, data warehousing, machine learning, databases, statistics, knowledge acquisition and discovery, data visualization, and knowledge-based systems. The conference was organized by the Advanced Information Technology Research Center (AITrc) at KAIST and the Statistical Research Center for Complex Systems (SRCCS) at Seoul National University. It was sponsored by the Korean Datamining Society (KDMS), the Korea Inf- mation Science Society (KISS), the United States Air Force O?ce of Scienti?c Research, the Asian O?ce of Aerospace Research & Development, and KAIST. It was held with cooperation from ACM’s Special Group on Knowledge Dis- very and Data Mining (SIGKDD).

Advances in Learning Software Organizations: 4th International Workshop, LSO 2002, Chicago, IL, USA, August 6, 2002, Revised Papers (Lecture Notes in Computer Science #2640)

The theme of the 4th International Workshop on Learning Software Organizations (LSO 2002) was “BalancingAgile Processes and Long-Term Learning in Software - ganizations.”The LSOWorkshop series focuses on technical, organizational, and social solutions to problems of learning from past experiences and codifying the resulting best practicessotheycanbesystematicallyusedinsubsequentsoftwaredevelopmentefforts. Through paper presentations, panels, and discussions, the workshop explored the issues of managing knowledge in dynamic domains requiring signi?cant differences betweenorganizationsandbetweenprojects.Challengesdiscussedrangedfromrealistic assumptions on the added documentation burden LSO techniques may require to how effectively repositories have been used in the past to the team and social issues involved in applying solutions created by others. Experience-based approaches were discussed extensively and some reports of initial successes were given along with some instances where the experience base was underutilized. Enabling organizational learning involves more than repositories, search engines, and training. At its core, it involves creating new work practices that value current practices while searching for improvements. The issues involved are both technical and behavioral,aseffectivetechnologymayenticeutilization,butexperiencehasshownthat other factors weigh in just as heavily. There are currently no profound or ?nal answers on these questions, nor are they expected for some time to come, if at all. Hence the need for continued research into these dif?cult issues. This workshop, and others to follow hope to begin to shed light on the issues so an effective and fruitful dialog can begin that can lead to signi?cant contributions to the software engineering and knowledge management ?elds, amongst others.

Advances in Soft Computing: Engineering Design and Manufacturing

Soft computing embraces methodologies for the development of intelligent systems that have been successfully applied to a large number of real-word problems. This collection of keynote papers, presented at the 7th On-line World Conference on Soft Computing in Engineering Design and Manufacturing, provides a comprehensive overview of recent advances in fuzzy, neural and evolutionary computing techniques and applications in engineering design and manufacturing. Features:- New and highly advanced research results at the forefront of soft computing in engineering design and manufacturing. - Keynote papers by world-renowned researchers in the field. - A good overview of current soft computing research around the world. A collection of methodologies aimed at researchers and professional design and manufacturing engineers who develop and apply intelligent systems in computer engineering.

Advances in Spatial and Temporal Databases: 8th International Symposium, SSTD 2003, Santorini Island, Greece, July 24 - 27, 2003. Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science #2750)

The refereed proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases, SSTD 2003, held at Santorini Island, Greece in July 2003. The 28 revised full papers presented together with a keynote paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 105 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on access methods, advanced query processing, data mining and data warehousing, distance-based queries, mobility and moving points management, modeling and languages, similarity processing, systems and implementation issues.

Advances in Web-Age Information Management: 4th International Conference, WAIM 2003, Chengdu, China, August 17-19, 2003, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science #2762)

With advances in the Internet and technologies around the World-Wide Web, research on design, implementation, and management of Internet- and W- based information systems has become increasingly important. As more and more information of diverse type becomes available on the Internet and Web, query and retrieval as well as the management of information over the Internet become more complex and extremely di?cult. Novel approaches to develop and manage Internet and Web information systems are in high demand. Following the successful conferences in 2000, 2001 and 2002, WAIM 2003 continued to provide a forum for researchers, professionals, and industrial practitioners from around the world to share their rapidly evolving knowledge and to report on new advances in Web-based information systems. WAIM 2003 received an overwhelming 258 submissions from Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Pakistan, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, UK, USA, and Vietnam. Through careful review by the program committee, 30 papers were selected as regular papers, and 16 papers as short papers. As indicated by these numbers, WAIM 2003 is extremely selective: 11 and 17 areas, respectively, including text management, data mining, information ?ltering, moving objects, views, bioinformatics, Web and XML, multimedia, peer-to-peer systems, service networks, time-series streams, and ontologies. Two invited talks by Sushil Ja- dia (George Mason University, USA) and Beng Chin Ooi (National University of Singapore) were on access control models and peer-to-peer systems.

Advances in Web-Based Learning -- ICWL 2003: Second International Conference, Melbourne, Australia, August 18-20, 2003, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science #2783)

nd The 2 International Conference on Web-Based Learning (ICWL 2003) took place in Melbourne, Australia. ICWL 2003 followed the tradition of the successful ICWL 2002 held in Hong Kong and aimed at providing an in-depth study of the technical and pedago- cal issues, as well as incorporating management issues of Web-based learning. Additionally, there was a focus on issues of interest to the learner, o?ering the optimal Web based learning environment to achieve high academic results. - akin University organized this conference in conjunction with the Hong Kong WebSociety,toprovideaforumwhichgatherededucators,researchers,techno- gists and implementers of Web-based learning from around the world to discuss, collaborate and advance all relevant issues pertaining to this area of research. The main focus of ICWL 2003 was on the most critical areas of Web-based learning, in particular, Web-based learning environments, virtual universities, pedagogical issues related to Web-based learning, multimedia-based e-learning, interactive e-learning systems, intelligence in on-line education, e-learning so- tions, CSCL, and authoring tools for e-learning. In total, the conference received 118 papers from researchers and practitioners from 13 countries. Each paper was reviewed by at least three internationally renowned referees. Papers were ri- rously examined and selected based on their originality, signi?cance, correctness, relevance, and clarity of presentation. Among the high-quality submissions, 50 papers were accepted and included in the proceedings. Later, the proceedings editors will recommend that some high-quality papers from the conference be published in a special issue of an international journal.

Advances in Web Intelligence: First International Atlantic Web Intelligence Conference, AWIC 2003, Madrid, Spain, May 5-6, 2003, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science #2663)

We are pleased to present the proceedings of the 2003 Atlantic Web Intelligence C- ference, AWIC 2003. The conference was located in Madrid, Spain during May 5–6, 2003, organized locally by the Technical University of Madrid. AWIC 2003 aimed to be the rst of a series of conferences on Web Intelligence, to be celebrated annually, alternatively in Europe and America, starting in Madrid. It was born as an activity of the recently created WIC-Poland Research Centre and the WIC-Spain Research Centre, bothbelongingtotheWebIntelligenceConsortium(WIC) (http://wi-consortium.org).AWIC 2003 was supported with grants from the S- nish Ministry for Science and Technology and the European Network of Excellence in Knowledge Discovery, KDNet. AWIC 2003 brought together scientists, engineers, computer users, and students to exchange and share their experiences, new ideas, and research results about all aspects (theory,applications,andtools)ofarti cialintelligencetechniquesappliedtoWeb-based systems, and to discuss the practical challenges encountered and the solutions adopted. Almost 70 contributions were submitted. After a preliminary evaluation, 60 of these papers were accepted to the conference and were assigned at least two reviewers from the international program committee. Out of this 60, 33 were conditionally accepted, and 32 of them were nally accepted after the conditions set by the reviewers had been met, which resulted in an acceptance ratio of 45%.

Agent Autonomy (Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies, and Simulated Organizations #7)

Autonomy is a characterizing notion of agents, and intuitively it is rather unambiguous. The quality of autonomy is recognized when it is perceived or experienced, yet it is difficult to limit autonomy in a definition. The desire to build agents that exhibit a satisfactory quality of autonomy includes agents that have a long life, are highly independent, can harmonize their goals and actions with humans and other agents, and are generally socially adept. Agent Autonomy is a collection of papers from leading international researchers that approximate human intuition, dispel false attributions, and point the way to scholarly thinking about autonomy. A wide array of issues about sharing control and initiative between humans and machines, as well as issues about peer level agent interaction, are addressed.

An Agent-Based Approach for Coordinated Multi-Provider Service Provisioning (Whitestein Series in Software Agent Technologies and Autonomic Computing)

This book proposes a novel approach to improve multi-provider interactions based on the coordination of autonomous and self-motivated software entities acting on behalf of distinct operators. In addition, a novel way of addressing resource allocation and pricing in a compact framework is made possible by the use of powerful resource abstraction techniques. The book is addressed to researchers in the area of agent technology, automated negotiation, distributed constraint satisfaction, and networking. Furthermore, it should be a valuable resource for both network and service providers

Agent-Based Computational Demography: Using Simulation to Improve Our Understanding of Demographic Behaviour (Contributions to Economics)

Agent-Based Computational Demography (ABCD) aims at starting a new stream of research among social scientists whose interests lie in understanding demographic behaviour. The book takes a micro-demographic (agent-based) perspective and illustrates the potentialities of computer simulation as an aid in theory building. The chapters of the book, written by leading experts either in demography or in agent-based modelling, address several key questions. Why do we need agent-based computational demography? How can ABCD be applied to the study of migrations, family demography, and historical demography? What are the peculiarities of agent-based models as applied to the demography of human populations? ABCD is of interest to all scientists interested in studying demographic behaviour, as well as to computer scientists and modellers who are looking for a promising field of application.

Agent-Based Manufacturing: Advances in the Holonic Approach (Advanced Information Processing)

Low-volume high-variety products like personalized cars or customized engines will be the key issues for manufacturing in the 21st century. The necessary control technology is based on the concept of holons, which are the units of production and behave as autonomous and cooperative agents, providing flexibility, adaptability, agility, and dynamic reconfigurability. This book presents the latest research results in agent-based manufacturing as carried out by researchers in academia and industry within the international "Holonic Manufacturing Systems" project. As this project was driven by industry, the results presented here are of vital interest not just to researchers in agent technologies or distributed artificial intelligence, but also to engineers and professionals in industry who have to respond to rapid changes and new demands in production.

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering III: Third International Workshop, AOSE 2002, Bologna, Italy, July 15, 2002, Revised Papers and Invited Contributions (Lecture Notes in Computer Science #2585)

Over the past three decades, software engineers have derived a progressively better understanding of the characteristics of complexity in software. It is now widely recognised thatinteraction is probably the most important single char- teristic of complex software. Software architectures that contain many dyna- cally interacting components, each with their own thread of control, and eng- ing in complex coordination protocols, are typically orders of magnitude more complex to correctly and e?ciently engineer than those that simply compute a function of some input through a single thread of control. Unfortunately, it turns out that many (if not most) real-world applications have precisely these characteristics. As a consequence, a major research topic in c- puter science over at least the past two decades has been the development of tools and techniques to model, understand, and implement systems in which interaction is the norm. Indeed, many researchers now believe that in future computation itself will be understood as chie?y a process of interaction.

Agent Supported Cooperative Work (Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies, and Simulated Organizations #8)

Improvements in computer networking have heralded great expectations for computer-mediated distributed work. However, experience has revealed that, as information flow improves, a central problem for distributed workers is the administration, management and control of that information. Research into Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) investigates design methods and technologies for the support of collaboration, communication and coordination of distributed group work, both within and among organizations. In tandem with this focus on the support of distributed communication and collaboration, there have been exciting developments in the fields of Intelligent Agents and Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI), notably in the concepts, theories and deployment of intelligent agents as a means of distributing computer-based problem solving expertise. The paradigm of multi-agent systems forms a proposed basis for the design of CSCW architectures, the support of CSCW operations and for addressing some of the problems of cooperative working. The application of a multi-agent approach to CSCW makes information exchange among the participants easier by delivering support to the participants, assisting workflows and procedures, and providing convenient user interfaces to CSCW systems. Furthermore, the ideas inherent in such an approach are also applicable to other domains, such as support for interactive learning. Organizations that seek to exploit the advantages offered through CSCW will benefit from the integration of agents in the management and use of their corporate knowledge, especially with the advancement of wired or wireless networking, pervasive computing, and other information technologies. Agent Supported Cooperative Work describes the state of the art in this exciting new area, covering both theoretical foundations and practical applications of ASCW. It is the first book explicitly dedicated to ASCW, bringing together contributions from international experts in the field.

Agent Technologies, Infrastructures, Tools, and Applications for E-Services: NODe 2002 Agent-Related Workshop, Erfurt, Germany, October 7-10, 2002, Revised Papers (Lecture Notes in Computer Science #2592)

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the three agent-related workshops held during the NetObjectDays international conference, NODe 2002, held in Erfurt, Germany, in October 2002. The 23 revised full papers presented with a keynote paper and 2 abstracts were carefully selected during 2 rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on agent-oriented requirements engineering and specification, agent-oriented software engineering, reuse, negotiation and communication, large complex systems, e-business, and applications.

Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing: First International Workshop, AP2PC 2002, Bologna, Italy, July, 2002, Revised and Invited Papers (Lecture Notes in Computer Science #2530)

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is currently attracting enormous public attention, spurred by the popularity of file-sharing systems such as Napster, Gnutella, and Morpheus. In P2P systems a very large number of autonomous computing nodes, the peers, rely on each other for services. P2P networks are emerging as a new distributed computing paradigm because of their potential to harness the computing power of the hosts composing the network, and because they make their underutilized resources available to each other. Three especially commissioned invited articles appear in this volume: an introduction, and revised versions of the papers presented at the 1st International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing, AP2PC 2002, held in Bologna, Italy in July 2002. The book is organized into topical sections on peer-to-peer services, discovery and delivery of trustworthy services, and search and cooperation in peer-to-peer agent systems.

AI 2003: 16th Australian Conference on AI, Perth, Australia, December 3-5, 2003, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science #2903)

Consider the problem of a robot (algorithm, learning mechanism) moving along the real line attempting to locate a particular point ? . To assist the me- anism, we assume that it can communicate with an Environment (“Oracle”) which guides it with information regarding the direction in which it should go. If the Environment is deterministic the problem is the “Deterministic Point - cation Problem” which has been studied rather thoroughly [1]. In its pioneering version [1] the problem was presented in the setting that the Environment could charge the robot a cost which was proportional to the distance it was from the point sought for. The question of having multiple communicating robots locate a point on the line has also been studied [1, 2]. In the stochastic version of this problem, we consider the scenario when the learning mechanism attempts to locate a point in an interval with stochastic (i. e. , possibly erroneous) instead of deterministic responses from the environment. Thus when it should really be moving to the “right” it may be advised to move to the “left” and vice versa. Apart from the problem being of importance in its own right, the stoch- tic pointlocationproblemalsohas potentialapplications insolvingoptimization problems. Inmanyoptimizationsolutions–forexampleinimageprocessing,p- tern recognition and neural computing [5, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 19], the algorithm worksits wayfromits currentsolutionto the optimalsolutionbasedoninfor- tion that it currentlyhas. A crucialquestionis oneof determining the parameter whichtheoptimizationalgorithmshoulduse.

AI*IA 2003: 8th Congress of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, Pisa, Italy, September 23-26, 2003, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science #2829)

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Congress of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, AI*IA 2003, held in Pisa, Italy in September 2003. The 44 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 91 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge representation and reasoning, soft computing, machine learning, data mining, intelligent agents, planning, robotics, natural language processing, and applications in various fields.

Algebra, Geometry and Software Systems

A collection of surveys and research papers on mathematical software and algorithms. The common thread is that the field of mathematical applications lies on the border between algebra and geometry. Topics include polyhedral geometry, elimination theory, algebraic surfaces, Gröbner bases, triangulations of point sets and the mutual relationship. This diversity is accompanied by the abundance of available software systems which often handle only special mathematical aspects. This is why the volume also focuses on solutions to the integration of mathematical software systems. This includes low-level and XML based high-level communication channels as well as general frameworks for modular systems.

Algebra und Diskrete Mathematik für Informatiker

Die Themen aus Algebra und Diskreter Mathematik, die Informatiker in erster Linie benötigen, finden sich in dieser leicht verständlichen Einführung. Mathematik wird Studienanfängern als elementares Werkzeug zur Darstellung, Beschreibung, Abstraktion und Symbolisierung vermittelt. Die Bedeutung algebraischer Strukturen in der Kodierungstheorie, in der Automatentheorie und in der Theorie Formaler Sprachen wird in besonderem Maße verdeutlicht. Das Buch enthält zahlreiche Beispiele und Übungsaufgaben mit kompletten Lösungen.

The Algorithmic Beauty of Sea Shells (The Virtual Laboratory)

The fascinating patterns on the shells of tropical sea snails are not only compellingly beautiful but also tell a tale of biological development. The decorative patterns are records of their own genesis, which follows laws such as those of dune formation or the spread of a flu epidemic. Hans Meinhardt has analyzed the dynamical processes that form these patterns and has retraced them in computer simulations. His book is exciting not only for the astonishing scientific knowledge it reveals but also for its fascinating pictures. An accompanying CD-ROM with the corresponding algorithms allows the reader to simulate the natural pattern formation and growth processes.

Algorithmic Learning Theory: 14th International Conference, ALT 2003, Sapporo, Japan, October 17-19, 2003, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science #2842)

Algorithmic Methods in Non-Commutative Algebra: Applications to Quantum Groups (Mathematical Modelling: Theory and Applications #17)

The already broad range of applications of ring theory has been enhanced in the eighties by the increasing interest in algebraic structures of considerable complexity, the so-called class of quantum groups. One of the fundamental properties of quantum groups is that they are modelled by associative coordinate rings possessing a canonical basis, which allows for the use of algorithmic structures based on Groebner bases to study them. This book develops these methods in a self-contained way, concentrating on an in-depth study of the notion of a vast class of non-commutative rings (encompassing most quantum groups), the so-called Poincaré-Birkhoff-Witt rings. We include algorithms which treat essential aspects like ideals and (bi)modules, the calculation of homological dimension and of the Gelfand-Kirillov dimension, the Hilbert-Samuel polynomial, primality tests for prime ideals, etc.

Algorithmic Topology and Classification of 3-Manifolds (Algorithms and Computation in Mathematics #9)

Here is a thorough review of topics in 3-dimensional topology, derived from a decade of courses taught by the author. The author keeps the exposition to an elementary level by presenting the material mainly from the point of view of special polyhedra and special spines of 3-manifolds. The book culminates with the recognition procedure for Haken manifolds, and includes up-to-date results in computer enumeration of 3-mainfolds. The second edition adds new results, new proofs, and commentaries. Algorithmic Topology and Classification of 3-Manifolds serves as a standard reference for algorithmic 3-dimensional topology for both graduate students and researchers.