Search

The Routledge Companion to Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities covers a wide range of issues encountered in the world's libraries and archives as they continue to expand their support of, and direct engagement in, Digital Humanities (DH) research and teaching. In addition to topics related to the practice of librarianship, and to libraries and archives as DH-friendly institutions, we address issues of importance to library and archives workers themselves: labour, sustainability, organisation and infrastructure, and focused professional practices that reflect the increasingly important role of librarians and archivists as active research partners. One of the central motifs of this book is that the “two” fields—DH, on the one hand, and the library, archival, and information sciences on the other—are in fact deeply intertwined, productively interdependent, and mutually reinforcing. We place these on an equal footing, considering how they coexist and collaborate in equal partnership.This Companion will be of interest to DH practitioners and theorists, especially those who work in libraries and archives, and those who work with them. Likewise, “non-DH” (or “not-yet-DH”) library and archival administrators, reference and public service librarians, cataloguers, and even those who work primarily with the tangible collections will find here echoes and implications of the most venerable traditions and practices of our shared profession.Chapter 14 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.Chapter 17 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Building on the historical study of cultural translation, this volume brings together a range of case studies and fresh approaches to early modern intellectual history by scholars from across Europe reflecting on ideological and political change from c. 1600 to 1840.Translations played a crucial role in the transmission of political ideas across linguistic and cultural borders in early modern Europe. Yet intellectual historians have been slow to adopt the study of translations as an analytical tool for the understanding of such cultural transfers. Recently, a number of different approaches to transnational intellectual history have emerged, allowing historians of early modern Europe to draw on work not just in translation studies, literary studies, conceptual history, the history of political thought and the history of scholarship, but also in the history of print and its significance for cultural transfer. Thorough qualitative and quantitative analysis of texts in translation can place them more accurately in time and space. This book provides a better understanding of the extent to which ideas crossed linguistic and cultural divides, and how they were re-shaped in the process.Written in an accessible style, this volume is aimed at scholars in cognate disciplines as well as at postgraduate students.

De bijdragen in dit Engelstalige werk verkennen de relatie tussen recht en moraliteit vanuit verschillende perspectieven. De auteurs analyseren specifieke kwesties op het gebied van vrijheid van meningsuiting, vrijheid van godsdienst, constitutionalisme, de universaliteit van mensenrechten, dierenrechten, democratie en terrorisme. De rode draad is hun zoektocht naar een antwoord op de vraag wat waarden zoals rechtvaardigheid, eerlijkheid en respect voor mensenrechten kunnen betekenen. De focus op deze domeinen zorgt voor de maatschappelijke relevantie van de discussies. Tegelijkertijd zijn ze zo geschreven dat ze toegankelijk zijn voor niet-specialisten, terwijl ze de nodige diepgang bieden om recht te doen aan de complexiteit van de thema's. De onderzoeken zijn gericht op het bieden van inzicht in actuele debatten, waarvan de relevantie ook buiten de grenzen van die debatten reikt.

Paris, 1599. At the end of the French Wars of Religion, the widow Renée Chevalier instigated the prosecution of the military captain Mathurin Delacanche, who had committed multiple acts of rape, homicide, and theft against the villagers who lived around her château near the cathedral city of Sens. But how could Chevalier win her case when King Henri IV's Edict of Nantes ordered that the recent troubles should be forgotten as'things that had never been'? A Widow's Vengeance after the Wars of Religion is a dramatic account of the impact of the troubles on daily life. Based on neglected archival sources and an exceptional criminal trial, it recovers the experiences of women, peasants, and foot soldiers, who are marginalized in most historical studies. Tom Hamilton shows how this trial contributed to a wider struggle for justice and an end to violence in postwar France. People throughout the society of the Old Regime did not consider rape and pillage as inevitable consequences of war, and denounced soldiers'illicit violence when they were given the chance. As a result, the early modern laws of war need to be understood not only as the idealistic invention of great legal thinkers, but also as a practical framework that enabled magistrates to do justice for plaintiffs and witnesses, like Chevalier and the villagers who lived under her protection.

This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 19th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications, VISIGRAPP 2023, held in Lisbon, Portugal, during February 19–21, 2023. The 17 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from 395 submissions. VISIGRAPP aims to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in theoretical advances and applications of computer vision, information visualization, computer graphics and interaction.

New Diplomatic History has turned into one of the most dynamic and innovative areas of research – especially with regard to early modern history. It has shown that diplomacy was not as homogenous as previously thought. On the contrary, it was shaped by a multitude of actors, practices and places. The handbook aims to characterise these different manifestations of diplomacy and to contextualise them within ongoing scientific debates. It brings together scholars from different disciplines and historiographical traditions.The handbook deliberately focuses on European diplomacy – although non-European areas are taken into account for future research – in order to limit the framework and ensure precise definitions of diplomacy and its manifestations. This must be the prerequisite for potential future global historical perspectives including both the non-European and the European world.

Chemometrics and Numerical Methods in LIBS A practical guide to the application of chemometric methods to solve qualitative and quantitative problems in LIBS analyses Chemometrics and Numerical Methods in LIBS, delivers an authoritative and practical exploration of the use of advanced chemometric methods to laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) cases. The book discusses the fundamentals of chemometrics before moving on to solutions that can be applied to data analysis methods. It is a concise guide designed to help readers at all levels of knowledge solve commonly encountered problems in the field. The book includes three sections: LIBS information simplification, LIBS classification, and quantitative analysis by LIBS. Each section of the book is divided into a description of relevant techniques and practical examples of its applications. Contributors to this edited volume are the most recognized international experts on the chemometric techniques relevant to LIBS analysis. Chemometrics and Numerical Methods in LIBS also includes: A thorough introduction to the simplification of LIBS information, including principal component analysis, independent component analysis, and parallel factor analysis Comprehensive explorations of classification by LIBS, including spectral angle mapping, linear discriminant analysis, graph clustering, self-organizing maps, and artifical neural networks Practical discussions of linear methods for quantitative analysis by LIBS, including calibration curves, partial least squares regression, and limit of detection In-depth examinations of multivariate analysis and non-linear methods, including calibration-free LIBS, the non-linear Kalman filter, artificial and convolutional neural networks for quantification Relevant for researchers and PhD students seeking practical information on the application of advanced statistical methods to the analysis of LIBS spectra, Chemometrics and Numerical Methods in LIBS will also earn a place in the libraries of students taking courses involving LIBS spectro-analytical techniques

This book constitutes refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence, ICCCI 2021, held in Kallithea, Rhodes, Greece, in October - November 2021. Due to the the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held online. The 44 full papers and 14 short papers were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 231 submissions. The papers are organized according to the following topical sections: ​​social networks and recommender systems; collective decision-making; computer vision techniques; innovations in intelligent systems; cybersecurity intelligent methods; data mining and machine learning; machine learning in real-world data; Internet of Things and computational technologies for collective intelligence; smart industry and management systems; low resource languages processing; computational intelligence for multimedia understanding.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence, ICCCI 2021, held in September/October 2021. The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 58 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 230 submissions. The papers are grouped in topical issues on knowledge engineering and semantic web; social networks and recommender systems; collective decision-making; cooperative strategies for decision making and optimization; data mining and machine learning; computer vision techniques; natural language processing; Internet of Things: technologies and applications; Internet of Things and computational technologies for collective intelligence; computational intelligence for multimedia understanding.

Although there is a rich historiography on Enlightenment Tuscany in Italian as well as French and German, the principle Anglophone works are Eric Cochrane's Tradition and Enlightenment in the Tuscan Academies (1961) and his Enlightenment Florence in the Forgotten Centuries (1973). It is high time to revisit the Tuscan Enlightenment. This volume brings together an international group of scholars with the goal of putting to rest the idea that Florence ceased to be interesting after the Renaissance. Indeed, it is partly the explicit dialogue between Renaissance and Enlightenment that makes eighteenth-century Tuscany so interesting. This enlightened age looked to the past. It began the Herculean project of collecting, editing, and publishing many of the manuscripts that today form the bedrock of any serious study of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Vasari, Galileo, and other Tuscan writers. This was an age of public libraries, projects of cultural restoration, and the emergence of the Uffizi as a public art gallery, complemented by a science museum in Peter Leopold's reign whose relics can still be visited in the Museo Galileo and La Specola.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence, ICCCI 2020, held in Da Nang, Vietnam, in November 2020.•The 70 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 314 submissions. The papers are grouped in topical sections on: knowledge engineering and semantic web; social networks and recommender systems; collective decision-making; applications of collective intelligence; data mining methods and applications; machine learning methods; deep learning and applications for industry 4.0; computer vision techniques; biosensors and biometric techniques; innovations in intelligent systems; natural language processing; low resource languages processing; computational collective intelligence and natural language processing; computational intelligence for multimedia understanding; and intelligent processing of multimedia in web systems. •The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This book constitutes refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence, ICCCI 2020, held in Da Nang, Vietnam, in November – December 2020. Due to the the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held online. The 68 papers were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 314 submissions. The papers are organized according to the following topical sections: ​data mining and machine learning; deep learning and applications for industry 4.0; recommender systems; computer vision techniques; decision support and control systems; intelligent management information systems; innovations in intelligent systems; intelligent modeling and simulation approaches for games and real world systems; experience enhanced intelligence to IoT; data driven IoT for smart society; applications of collective intelligence; natural language processing; low resource languages processing; computational collective intelligence and natural language processing.

These proceedings collect papers presented at the 11th International Conference on Multimedia & Network Information Systems (MISSI 2018), held from 12 to 14 September 2018 in Wrocław, Poland. The keynote lectures, given by four outstanding scientists, are also included here. The Conference attracted a great number of scientists from across Europe and beyond, and hosted the 6th International Workshop on Computational Intelligence for Multimedia Understanding as well as four special sessions. The majority of the papers describe various artificial intelligence (AI) methods applied to multimedia and natural language (NL) processing; they address hot topics such as virtual and augmented reality, identity recognition, video summarization, intelligent audio processing, accessing multilingual information and opinions, video games, and innovations in Web technologies. Accordingly, the proceedings provide a cutting-edge update on work being pursued in the rapidlyevolving field of Multimedia and Internet Information Systems.

The problem of dealing with missing or incomplete data in machine learning and computer vision arises in many applications. Recent strategies make use of generative models to impute missing or corrupted data. Advances in computer vision using deep generative models have found applications in image/video processing, such as denoising, restoration, super-resolution, or inpainting. Inpainting and Denoising Challenges comprises recent efforts dealing with image and video inpainting tasks. This includes winning solutions to the ChaLearn Looking at People inpainting and denoising challenges: human pose recovery, video de-captioning and fingerprint restoration. This volume starts with a wide review on image denoising, retracing and comparing various methods from the pioneer signal processing methods, to machine learning approaches with sparse and low-rank models, and recent deep learning architectures with autoencoders and variants. The following chapterspresent results from the Challenge, including three competition tasks at WCCI and ECML 2018. The top best approaches submitted by participants are described, showing interesting contributions and innovating methods. The last two chapters propose novel contributions and highlight new applications that benefit from image/video inpainting.

This edited collection offers a reassessment of the complicated legacy of Emer de Vattel's Droit des gens, first published in 1758. One of the most influential books in the history of international law and a major reference point in the fields of international relations theory and political thought, this book played a role in the transformation of diplomatic practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. But how did Vattel's legacy take shape? The volume argues that the enduring relevance of Vattel's Droit des gens cannot be explained in terms of doctrines and academic disciplines that formed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead, the chapters show how the complex reception of this book took shape historically and why it had such a wide geographical and disciplinary appeal until well into the twentieth century. The volume charts its reception through translations, intellectual, ideological and political appropriations as well as new practical usages, and explores Vattel's discursive and conceptual innovations. Drawing on a wide range of sources, such as archive memoranda and diplomatic correspondences, this volume offers new perspectives on the book's historical contexts and cultures of reception, moving past the usual approach of focusing primarily on the text. In doing so, this edited collection forms a major contribution to this new direction of study in intellectual history in general and Vattel's Droit des gens in particular.

Written specifically for researchers of all disciplines whose first language is not English, this guide presents easy-to-follow rules and tips, along with authentic examples taken from real emails, referees'reports and cover letters, will show you how to:write effective emails (subject lines, structure, requests, level of formality)review other people's manuscripts reply effectively and constructively to referees'reports correspond with editorswrite letters regarding summer schools, internships, and PhD and postdoc programswrite reference lettersThis new edition contains over 40% new material, including stimulating factoids and discussion points both for self-study and in-class use, as well as suggestions for drafting proposals for research projects and writing research statements.EAP teachers will find this book to be a great source of tips for training students, and for providing both instructive and entertaining lessons.Other books in the series cover: writing research papers; presentations at international conferences; English grammar, usage and style; and interacting on campus; plus exercise books and a teacher's guide to the whole series.Please visit http://www.springer.com/series/13913 for a full list of titles in the series.Adrian Wallwork is the author of more than 30 ELT and EAP textbooks. He has trained several thousand PhD students and academics from 35 countries to write research papers, prepare presentations, and communicate with editors, referees and fellow researchers.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Multimedia Communications, Services and Security, MCSS 2015, held in Krakow, Poland, in November 2015.The 16 full papers included in the volume were selected from 39 submissions. The papers cover ongoing research activities in the following topics: multimedia services; intelligent monitoring; audio-visual systems; biometric applications; experiments and deployments.

This book presents an exciting collection of contributions based on the workshop “Bringing Maths to Life” held October 27-29, 2014 in Naples, Italy. The state-of-the art research in biology and the statistical and analytical challenges facing huge masses of data collection are treated in this Work. Specific topics explored in depth surround the sessions and special invited sessions of the workshop and include genetic variability via differential expression, molecular dynamics and modeling, complex biological systems viewed from quantitative models, and microscopy images processing, to name several. In depth discussions of the mathematical analysis required to extract insights from complex bodies of biological datasets, to aid development in the field novel algorithms, methods and software tools for genetic variability, molecular dynamics, and complex biological systems are presented in this book. Researchers and graduate students in biology, life science, and mathematics/statistics will find the content useful as it addresses existing challenges in identifying the gaps between mathematical modeling and biological research. The shared solutions will aid and promote further collaboration between life sciences and mathematics.

In questo numero la sezione “Studi” è dedicata all'Università di Perugia. STUDI: ATTILIO BARTOLI LANGELI, All'origine dello Studio: politica e cultura della città. PAOLO NARDI, Le origini delle Università di Perugia e Siena: spunti per una comparazione. FERDINANDO TREGGIARI, «Doctoratus est dignitas»: la lezione di Bartolo. SIRIO MARIA POMANTE, Il sepolcro del giureconsulto Angelo Perigli: nuovi apporti per la storia della scultura del Quattrocento a Perugia. GIULIA RUINA, Il primo secolo dell'insegnamento medico a Perugia: maestro Antonio di Uguccio da Scarperia. CÉCILE CABY, Les discours de laudibus theologie de l'Augustin Ambrogio Massari pour le Studium de Pérouse. ALBERTO GROHMANN, L'impatto dell'università nella struttura urbana di Perugia. SIMONE BARTOLONI, I registri delle lauree. DANIELE SINI-STEFANIA ZUCCHINI, Il finanziamento pubblico dello Studio perugino nella documentazione della Camera apostolica (secoli XV-XVI). ANNA ALBERTI, Fonti inedite di archivio per la storia dello Studium Perusinum (secc. XV-XVI). LAURA TEZA, Glorie dinastiche e perugine nel Iustitiae Sacellum di Guglielmo Pontano. LAURA MARCONI, Gli studenti marchigiani nell'archivio del Collegio studentesco della Sapienza Nuova di Perugia. REGINA LUPI, L'Università di Perugia in età moderna: una dialettica tra Stato e corporazioni urbane. MARIA ALESSANDRA PANZANELLI FRATONI, La Biblioteca antica dell'Università di Perugia, Sala del Dottorato e altre collezioni speciali. Appendice a cura di MONICA FIORE, Il Fondo Vanni. VITTOR IVO COMPARATO, Il diritto di natura a Perugia tra la Repubblica romana e l'Unità. LETIZIA GIOVAGNONI, Le scienze naturali: gli agronomi e l'università tra rivoluzione e Restaurazione. MANUEL VAQUERO PIÑEIRO, Da ‘Libera'a ‘Regia': aspetti patrimoniali dell'Università di Perugia (1862-1925). FRANCO BOZZI, Scuola, università, circoli culturali nella costruzione dell'identità nazionale: il caso di Perugia. ENRICO MENESTÒ, Appunti di storia della storiografia dell'Università di Perugia. MARCO MENZENGHI, Onomasticon: una banca dati prosopografica per la storia dell'Università di Perugia. FONTI: MARIA ROSA DI SIMONE, L'Unità d'Italia e l'insegnamento del diritto pubblico all'Università di Roma. ILARIA MAGGIULLI, «Li scolari per il più vivono, et vestono à guisa di soldati, con grande licenza»: 1564, un episodio di violenza studentesca a Bologna. MARIA TERESA GUERRINI, L'Accademia degli Impazienti: un esperimento nella Bologna di fine Seicento. ANDREA UBRIZSY SAVOIA, 500 anni fa iniziava l'insegnamento della Botanica s.l. all'Università ‘La Sapienza'di Roma. ARCHIVI, BIBLIOTECHE, MUSEI: MATTIA FLAMIGNI, La serie Professori universitari epurati (1944-46) presso l'Archivio Centrale dello Stato. Uno studio.

ATTILIO BARTOLI LANGELI, All'origine dello Studio: politica e cultura della città. PAOLO NARDI, Le origini delle Università di Perugia e Siena: spunti per una comparazione. FERDINANDO TREGGIARI, «Doctoratus est dignitas»: la lezione di Bartolo. SIRIO MARIA POMANTE, Il sepolcro del giureconsulto Angelo Perigli: nuovi apporti per la storia della scultura del Quattrocento a Perugia. GIULIA RUINA, Il primo secolo dell'insegnamento medico a Perugia: maestro Antonio di Uguccio da Scarperia. CÉCILE CABY, Les discours de laudibus theologie de l'Augustin Ambrogio Massari pour le Studium de Pérouse. ALBERTO GROHMANN, L'impatto dell'università nella struttura urbana di Perugia. SIMONE BARTOLONI, I registri delle lauree. DANIELE SINI-STEFANIA ZUCCHINI, Il finanziamento pubblico dello Studio perugino nella documentazione della Camera apostolica (secoli XV-XVI). ANNA ALBERTI, Fonti inedite di archivio per la storia dello Studium Perusinum (secc. XV-XVI). LAURA TEZA, Glorie dinastiche e perugine nel Iustitiae Sacellum di Guglielmo Pontano. LAURA MARCONI, Gli studenti marchigiani nell'archivio del Collegio studentesco della Sapienza Nuova di Perugia. REGINA LUPI, L'Università di Perugia in età moderna: una dialettica tra Stato e corporazioni urbane. MARIA ALESSANDRA PANZANELLI FRATONI, La Biblioteca antica dell'Università di Perugia, Sala del Dottorato e altre collezioni speciali. Appendice a cura di MONICA FIORE, Il Fondo Vanni. VITTOR IVO COMPARATO, Il diritto di natura a Perugia tra la Repubblica romana e l'Unità. LETIZIA GIOVAGNONI, Le scienze naturali: gli agronomi e l'università tra rivoluzione e Restaurazione. MANUEL VAQUERO PIÑEIRO, Da ‘Libera'a ‘Regia': aspetti patrimoniali dell'Università di Perugia (1862-1925). FRANCO BOZZI, Scuola, università, circoli culturali nella costruzione dell'identità nazionale: il caso di Perugia. ENRICO MENESTÒ, Appunti di storia della storiografia dell'Università di Perugia. MARCO MENZENGHI, Onomasticon: una banca dati prosopografica per la storia dell'Università di Perugia.

Selected, peer reviewed papers from the 2012 3rd International Conference on Applied Mechanics and Mechanical Engineering (ICAMME 2012), November 14-15, 2012, Macau

Von der Antike bis in unsere Tage haben sich Wissenschaftler und Philosophen darüber gewundert, dass eine so abstrakte Disziplin wie die Mathematik die Natur derart perfekt erklären kann. Sogar mehr als das: Mathematiker haben oft Voraussagen gemacht, etwa über die Existenz bestimmter Teilchen, die sich später als richtig erwiesen haben. Was ist es, das der Mathematik solch unglaubliche Macht verleiht? Oder, wie Einstein sich einst fragte: „Wie ist es möglich, dass die Mathematik, die doch ein von aller Erfahrung unabhängiges Produkt des menschlichen Denkens ist, auf die Gegenstände der Welt so vortrefflich passt?“ Werden mathematische Erkenntnisse also nicht erfunden, sondern entdeckt? Diese Fragestellung bildet den roten Faden, an dem der Astrophysiker Mario Livio mit großer Lebendigkeit durch die Geistesgeschichte des mathematischen und naturwissenschaftlichen Denkens führt. Zugleich wirft sein Buch einen frischen und unterhaltsamen Blick auf die Lebensgeschichte und die Erkenntnisse großer Denker wie Pythagoras, Platon, Newton und Einstein. „Eine lebendige und faszinierende Lektüre für ein breites Publikum“ – Nature

The book gathers articles that were exposed during the seventh edition of the Workshop “Data Analysis in Astronomy”. It illustrates a current trend to search for common expressions or models transcending usual disciplines, possibly associated with some lack in the Mathematics required to model complex systems. In that, data analysis would be at the epicentre and a key facilitator of some current integrative phase of Science.It is all devoted to the question of “representation in Science”, whence its name, IMAGe IN AcTION, and main thrustsSuch a classification makes concepts as “complexity” or “dynamics” appear like transverse notions: a measure among others or a dimensional feature among others.Part A broadly discusses a dialogue between experiments and information, be information extracted-from or brought-to experiments. The concept is fundamental in statistics and tailors to the emergence of collective behaviours. Communication then asks for uncertainty considerations — noise, indeterminacy or approximation — and its wider impact on the couple perception-action. Clustering being all about uncertainty handling, data set representation appears not to be the only solution: Introducing hierarchies with adapted metrics, a priori pre-improving the data resolution are other methods in need of evaluation. The technology together with increasing semantics enables to involve synthetic data as simulation results for the multiplication of sources.Part B plays with another couple important for complex systems: state vs. transition. State-first descriptions would characterize physics, while transition-first would fit biology. That could stem from life producing dynamical systems in essence. Uncertainty joining causality here, geometry can bring answers: stable patterns in the state space involve constraints from some dynamics consistency. Stable patterns of activity characterize biological systems too. In the living world, the complexity — i.e. a global measure on both states and transitions — increases with consciousness: this might be a principle of evolution. Beside geometry or measures, operators and topology have supporters for reporting on dynamical systems. Eventually targeting universality, the category theory of topological thermodynamics is proposed as a foundation of dynamical system understanding.Part C details examples of actual data-system relations in regards to explicit applications and experiments. It shows how pure computer display and animation techniques link models and representations to “reality” in some “concrete” virtual, manner. Such techniques are inspired from artificial life, with no connection to physical, biological or physiological phenomena! The Virtual Observatory is the second illustration of the evidence that simulation helps Science not only in giving access to more flexible parameter variability, but also due to the associated data and method storing-capabilities. It fosters interoperability, statistics on bulky corpuses, efficient data mining possibly through the web etc. in short a reuse of resources in general, including novel ideas and competencies. Other examples deal more classically with inverse modelling and reconstruction, involving Bayesian techniques or chaos but also fractal and symmetry.

Bestselling author and astrophysicist Mario Livio examines the lives and theories of history's greatest mathematicians to ask how—if mathematics is an abstract construction of the human mind—it can so perfectly explain the physical world.Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner once wondered about “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in the formulation of the laws of nature. Is God a Mathematician? investigates why mathematics is as powerful as it is. From ancient times to the present, scientists and philosophers have marveled at how such a seemingly abstract discipline could so perfectly explain the natural world. More than that—mathematics has often made predictions, for example, about subatomic particles or cosmic phenomena that were unknown at the time, but later were proven to be true. Is mathematics ultimately invented or discovered? If, as Einstein insisted, mathematics is “a product of human thought that is independent of experience,” how can it so accurately describe and even predict the world around us? Physicist and author Mario Livio brilliantly explores mathematical ideas from Pythagoras to the present day as he shows us how intriguing questions and ingenious answers have led to ever deeper insights into our world. This fascinating book will interest anyone curious about the human mind, the scientific world, and the relationship between them.

Witnesses to the disappearance of a text, palimpsest manuscripts bear the marks of their own genesis, with their original inscription rubbed out and written over on the same parchment. This collection explores analogies of erasure and rewriting observed in editorial and literary practices underlying the production of texts from medieval England.

English for Academic Correspondence and Socializing is the first ever book of its kind specifically written for researchers of all disciplines whose first language is not English. With easy-to-follow rules and tips, and with authentic examples taken from real emails, referee's reports and cover letters, you will learn how to:• use strategies for understanding native speakers of English• significantly improve your listening skills• organize one-to-one meetings• feel confident at social events• manage and participate in a successful conversation • write effective emails• review other people's manuscripts - formally and informally • reply effectively and constructively to referees'reports • write cover letters to editors • use the telephone and Skype • participate in (video) conference calls • exploit standard English phrasesOther books in the series:English for Presentations at International ConferencesEnglish for Writing Research PapersEnglish for Research: Usage, Style, and GrammarEnglish for Academic Research: Grammar ExercisesEnglish for Academic Research: Vocabulary ExercisesEnglish for Academic Research: Writing Exercises

The rapidly growing volume of available digital documents of various formats and the possibility to access these through Internet-based technologies, have led to the necessity to develop solid methods to properly organize and structure documents in large digital libraries and repositories. Due to the extremely large volumes of documents and to their unstructured form, most of the research efforts in this direction are dedicated to automatically infer structure and schemas that can help to better organize huge collections of documents and data. This book covers the latest advances in structure inference in heterogeneous collections of documents and data. The book brings a comprehensive view of the state-of-the-art in the area, presents some lessons learned and identifies new research issues, challenges and opportunities for further research agenda and developments. The selected chapters cover a broad range of research issues, from theoretical approaches to case studies and best practices in the field. Researcher, software developers, practitioners and students interested in the field of learning structure and schemas from documents will find the comprehensive coverage of this book useful for their research, academic, development and practice activity.

This book is part of a three-volume set that constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES 2007. Coverage in this first volume includes artificial neural networks and connectionists systems, fuzzy and neuro-fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation, machine learning and classical AI, agent systems, and information engineering and applications in ubiquitous computing environments.

During the past decade digital imaging has significantly progressed in all imaging areas ranging from medicine, pharmacy, chemistry, biology to astrophysics, meteorology and geophysics. The avalanche of digitized images produced a need for special techniques of processing and knowledge extraction from many digital images with minimal or even without human interaction. This has resulted in a new area in the digital processing called pattern recognition that becomes increasingly necessary owing to a growing number of images to be processed. The first applications of pattern recognition techniques were for the analysis of medical X rays and MMR images that enabled the extraction of quantified information in terms of texture, intensity and shape and allowed to significantly improve a di agnosis of human organs. These techniques were significantly developed over the la st few years and combined feature detection and classification by using re gion based and artificial intelligence methods. By using growing databases of medical images processed with pattern recognition and classification t echniques, one can produce fast and consistent diagnosis of diseases based on the accumulated knowledge obtained from many other similar cases from the stored databases. The use of CCD cameras for astroph ysical instruments on the ground and space produce digitized images in va rious fields of astrophysics. In the past decade, many space and ground based instruments provide large numbers of digitized images of the ni ght skies and of the Sun, our closest star.

At a Christie's auction in October 1998, a battered medieval manuscript sold for two million dollars to an anonymous bidder, who then turned it over to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore for further study. The manuscript was a palimpsest-a book made from an earlier codex whose script had been scraped off and the pages used again. Behind the script of the thirteenth-century monk's prayer book, the palimpsest revealed the faint writing of a much older, tenth-century manuscript. Part archaeological detective story, part science, and part history, The Archimedes Codex tells the extraordinary story of this lost manuscript, from its tenth-century creation in Constantinople to the auction block at Christie's, and how a team of scholars used the latest imaging technology to reveal and decipher the original text. What they found was the earliest surviving manuscript by Archimedes (287 b.c.-212 b.c.), the greatest mathematician of antiquity-a manuscript that revealed, for the first time, the full range of his mathematical genius, which was two thousand years ahead of modern science.

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.

ICIAR 2004, the International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition, was the?rst ICIAR conference, and was held in Porto, Portugal. ICIAR will be organized annually, and will alternate between Europe and North America. ICIAR 2005 will take place in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The idea of o?ering these conferences came as a result of discussion between researchers in Portugal and Canada to encourage collaboration and exchange, mainly between these two countries, but also with the open participation of other countries, addressing recent advances in theory, methodology and applications. The response to the call for papers for ICIAR 2004 was very positive. From 316 full papers submitted, 210 were accepted (97 oral presentations, and 113 - sters). The review process was carried out by the Program Committee members and other reviewers; all are experts in various image analysis and recognition areas. Each paper was reviewed by at least two reviewing parties. The high q- lity of the papers in these proceedings is attributed?rst to the authors, and second to the quality of the reviews provided by the experts. We would like to thank the authors for responding to our call, and we wholeheartedly thank the reviewers for their excellent work in such a short amount of time. We are espe- ally indebted to the Program Committee for their e?orts that allowed us to set up this publication. We were very pleased to be able to include in the conference, Prof. Murat KuntfromtheSwissFederalInstituteofTechnology,andProf. Mario ´ Figueiredo, oftheInstitutoSuperiorT´ ecnico,inPortugal.

This was the sixth in the sequence of the international conferences promoted and organized by the European Association for Signal Processing. The conference has established itself as one of the world's largest and most important meetings on the subject.The 444 papers (in three volumes) are organized under 7 themes, containing the following topics:1. Theory of Signals and Systems:a) Detection, b) Estimation, c) Filtering, d)Spectral estimation, e) Adaptive systems, f) Modeling, g) Digital transforms, h) Digital filtering.2. Image Processing and Multidimensional Signal Processing:a) Coding, b) Enhancement, c) Restoration, d) Medical image processing.3. Speech Processing:a) Coding, b) Synthesis, c) Recognition and understanding, d) Enhancement.4. Implementations:a) Hardware, b) Software, c) VLSI, d) Novel Architectures, e) Array processing.5. Knowledge Engineering and Signal Processing:a) Expert systems, b) Pattern recognition, c) Signal interpretation, d) Image understanding.6. Neural Networks for Signal Processing:a) Theory, b) Speech, c) Vision, d) Implementations. 7. Applications:a) Radar, b) Sonar, c) Communications, d) Geophysics, e) Digital audio, f) Biomedics, g) Sensing, h) Robotics, i) Astrophysics, j) Mechanics, k) other.The diversity of topics in this 3-volume set, as well as the extraordinary tempo at which Signal Processing has progressed, attest to the permanent vitality of this area of research and development. Workers in signal processing will find in these papers the latest advances and results, as well as indications on future research and analysis in this rapidly developing field.