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Fehler als integraler Bestandteil von Nature of Science (NOS) gehören zum naturwissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisgewinnungsprozess. Diese Interventionsstudie liefert empirische Ergebnisse zum Zusammenhang zwischen dem Verständnis von NOS und dem Umgang mit Fehlern. Mittels eines Mixed-Methods Design wurden N=269 Schüler*innen der Sekundarstufe I (7.--9. Klasse) aus der Ostschweiz längsschnittlich befragt. Das Verständnis von NOS-Aspekten beeinflusst die Fehlerlernorientierung, welche eine Mediatorrolle zwischen dem Verständnis von NOS-Aspekten und den affektiv-motivationalen Reaktionen auf Fehler übernimmt. Zwei Monate nach der Intervention unterschieden sich die Interventions- und Kontrollgruppen in affektiv-motivationalen Reaktionen auf Fehler und im Verständnis von NOS-Aspekten. Über die Zeit zeigte sich die Fehlerlernorientierung weniger rangstabil als das Verständnis von NOS-Aspekten. Kreuzverzögerte Effekte konnten zwischen der Fehlerlernorientierung zu einem früheren Zeitpunkt und dem Verständnis von NOS-Aspekten zu einem späteren Zeitpunkt festgestellt werden. Die Ergebnisse der Studie verdeutlichen die zentrale Rolle des Umgangs mit Fehlern im naturwissenschaftlich-technischen Unterricht.

Informing Possible Future Worlds is the Festschrift in honour of Ulrich Frank on the occasion of his 65th birthday. The Festschrift includes twenty-three essays written by friends, colleagues, and fellow researchers in recognition of Ulrich Frank’s contributions to Wirtschaftsinformatik research and the scientific community. Each essay is a personal and unique birthday present to Ulrich Frank written exclusively for the Festschrift. From original research contributions to more personal reflections, the essays cover a wide range of topics, themes, and fields.The Festschrift is edited by Stefan Strecker, FernUniversität in Hagen and Jürgen Jung, Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences.

This book takes a holistic view of the roles of ICTs during the pandemic through the lens of social informatics, as it is critical to our understanding of the relations between society and technology. Specific attention is given to various stakeholders and social contexts, with analysis at the individual, group, community, and society levels. Pushing the boundaries of information science research with timely and critical research questions, this edited volume showcases information science research in the context of COVID-19, by specifically accentuating sociotechnical practices, activities, and ICT interventions during the pandemic. Its social informatics focus appeals to a broad audience, and its global and international orientation provides a timely, innovative, and much-needed perspective to information science. This book is unique in its interdisciplinary nature as it consists of research studies on the intersections between ICTs and health, culture, social interaction, civic engagement, information dissemination, work, and education. Chapters apply a range of research methods, including questionnaire surveys, content analyses, and case studies from countries in Asia, Europe, and America, as well as global and international comparisons. The book’s primary target audience includes scholars and students in information and library science, particularly those interested in the social aspect of the information society. It may be of interest to information professionals, library practitioners, educators, and information policymakers, as well as scholars and students in science and technology studies, cultural studies, political science, public administration, sociology, and communication studies.

In August 2022, researchers and developers from Armenia, Chile, Germany, and Japan met at the American University of Armenia for the third edition of the CODASSCA Workshop on Collaborative Technologies and Data Science in Smart City Applications, co-organized with a Summer School on Artificial Neural Networks and Deep Learning. This book presents their contributions on intelligent technologies in data science and human-centered computing.

Digitalisation, digital networks, and artificial intelligence are fundamentally changing our lives! We must understand the various developments and assess how they interact and how they affect our regular, analogue lives. What are the consequences of such changes for me personally and for our society? Digital networks and artificial intelligence are seminal innovations that are going to permeate all areas of society and trigger a comprehensive, disruptive structural change that will evoke numerous new advances in research and development in the coming years. Even though there are numerous books on this subject matter, most of them cover only specific aspects of the profound and multifaceted effects of the digital transformation. An overarching assessment is missing. In 2016, the Federation of German Scientists (VDW) has founded a study group to assess the technological impacts of digitalisation holistically. Now we present this compendium to you. We address the interrelations and feedbacks of digital innovation on policy, law, economics, science, and society from various scientific perspectives. Please consider this book as an invitation to contemplate with other people and with us, what kind of world we want to live in!

People are starting to see the cryptocurrency market as a viable source of income and investment, similar to the stock market, as the concept of cryptocurrencies continues to gain popularity. Predicting Bitcoin returns is related to financial machine learning, which uses time series to forecast price variance. This study starts with the daily close price of Bitcoin for its initial dataset. The price is transformed into percentages and binary classes, which categorize into “Up” and “Down”, after which a time series is applied to produce two datasets: a categorical dataset for classification and a numerical dataset for regression. For classification that represents a Binary classification in asset-price forecasting, k-fold cross-validation is applied to ensure that the best classifiers are selected for testing and analysis. Most of the regression analysis was based on visualization, which displayed the predicted prices by each regressor in front of the original values and helped analyze the models’ results more accurately. The outcomes of this study were achieved by anticipating bitcoin returns using classification and regression machine learning models, despite the approaches’ low accuracy and significant precision rate to the “Up” class. At this stage, with a significant limitation regarding the dataset and a lack of other indicators, a model capable of predicting future variations is considered a beneficial addition for many trading tools or even for crypto market analysts.

Digitalisierung, Vernetzung und Künstliche Intelligenz verändern unser Leben in grundlegender Weise! Wir müssen die verschiedenen Entwicklungen verstehen und analysieren, wie sie sich gegenseitig verstärken und auf unser "normales", analoges Leben wirken. Welche Konsequenzen haben die Veränderungen für mich und für die Gesellschaft, in der ich lebe? Digitale Vernetzung und Künstliche Intelligenz sind epochale Basisinnovationen, die schubartig alle Bereiche der Gesellschaft durchdringen und Motor eines umfassenden, disruptiv verlaufenden Strukturwandels sind, der in den nächsten Jahren zahlreiche neue Innovationen hervorbringen wird. Trotz zahlreicher Bücher zum Thema werden die tiefgehenden und vielseitigen Wirkungen der Digitalisierung meistens nur ausschnittsweise, also für einzelne Bereiche betrachtet. Was fehlt, ist ein Gesamtbild. Die Vereinigung Deutscher Wissenschaftler (VDW) beschäftigt sich deshalb seit 2016 eingehend mit Technikfolgen der Digitalisierung und hat hierzu eine Studiengruppe eingesetzt, die das vorliegende Kompendium vorlegt. Darin betrachten wir aus verschiedenen Wissenschaftsperspektiven Zusammenhänge und Rückwirkungen digitaler Innovation in unterschiedlichen gesellschaftlichen Bereichen. Sehen Sie das Buch als eine Einladung, mit anderen Menschen und mit uns darüber nachzudenken, wie wir leben wollen!

The volume of scientific literature is increasing and researchers have difficulties in estimating their quality and relevance. Library portals, therefore, are getting more relevant by using quality indicators to help researchers during their research process. With the growing presence of social media, altmetrics have been proposed as complementary indicators to traditional measures. Altmetrics can help to identify online attention and can appear much faster than citations. This study explores altmetrics for filtering relevant articles (in library portals) within the discipline of Economic and Business Studies literature. Firstly, it highlights the altmetrics presence from Mendeley and Altmetric.com for the journals in the above-mentioned disciplines. It presents correlations between citation and altmetrics on article and journal level, suggesting Mendeley counts as an alternative indicator to citations. Afterward, it investigates the use of altmetrics data for potential users with interests in new trends, social media platforms, and journal rankings. Lastly, it explores the behavior of economic researchers using a survey by discovering the usefulness of different altmetrics. With the findings of this study, several forms of altmetrics in library portals are discussed, using EconBiz as the proof-of-concept, to assist both researchers and libraries to identify relevant journals or articles and to cope with the information overload.

Developing Graphics Frameworks with Python and OpenGL shows you how to create software for rendering complete three-dimensional scenes. The authors explain the foundational theoretical concepts as well as the practical programming techniques that will enable you to create your own animated and interactive computer-generated worlds.You will learn how to combine the power of OpenGL, the most widely adopted cross-platform API for GPU programming, with the accessibility and versatility of the Python programming language. Topics you will explore include generating geometric shapes, transforming objects with matrices, applying image-based textures to surfaces, and lighting your scene. Advanced sections explain how to implement procedurally generated textures, postprocessing effects, and shadow mapping. In addition to the sophisticated graphics framework you will develop throughout this book, with the foundational knowledge you will gain, you will be able to adapt and extend the framework to achieve even more spectacular graphical results.

The Simplex algorithm is one of the most important algorithms in discrete optimization, and is the most used algorithm for solving linear programs in practice. In the last 50 years, several pivot rules for this algorithm have been proposed and studied. For most deterministic pivot rules, exponential lower bounds were found, while a probabilistic pivot rule exists that guarantees termination in expected subexponential time. One deterministic pivot rule that is of special interest is Zadeh's pivot rule since it was the most promising candidate for a polynomial pivot rule for a long time. In 2011, Friedmann proved that this is not true by providing an example forcing the Simplex algorithm to perform at least a subexponential number of iterations in the worst case when using Zadeh's pivot rule. Still, it was not known whether Zadeh's pivot rule might achieve subexponential worst case running time. Next to analyzing Friedmann's construction in detail, we develop the first exponential lower bound for Zadeh's pivot rule. This closes a long-standing open problem by ruling out this pivot rule as a candidate for a deterministic, subexponential pivot rule in several areas of linear optimization and game theory.

In September 2020, researchers from Armenia, Chile, Germany and Japan met at the American University of Armenia for a virtual conference to discuss technologies with applications in smart cities, data science and information theory approaches for intelligent systems, technical challenges for intelligent environments, smart human centered computing, artificial neural networks, and deep learning. This book presents their contributions to the 2nd CODASSCA workshop on collaborative technologies and data science in artificial intelligence applications, a highly topical issue in today's computer science.

It is well-known that the existing theoretical models for outlier detection make assumptions that may not reflect the true nature of outliers in every real application. This dissertation describes an empirical study performed on unsupervised outlier detection using 8 algorithms from the state-of-the-art and 8 datasets that refer to a variety of real-world tasks of practical relevance, such as spotting cyberattacks, clinical pathologies and abnormalities occurring in nature. We present our lowdown on the results obtained, pointing out to the strengths and weaknesses of each technique from the application specialists point of view, which is a shift from the designer-based point of view that is commonly adopted. Many of the techniques had unfeasibly high runtime requirements or failed to spot what the specialists consider as outliers in their own data. To tackle this issue, we propose MetricABOD: a novel ABOD-based algorithm that makes the analysis up to thousands of times faster, still being in average 26% more accurate than the most accurate related work. This improvement is tantamount to practical outlier detection in many real-world applications for which the existing methods present unstable accuracy or unfeasible runtime requirements. Finally, we studied two collections of text data to show that our MetricABOD works also for adimensional, purely metric data.

"La spécificité de l'archivage du Web et de ces archives, l’importance qu’elles devraient prendre à l’avenir pour la recherche, mais aussi les particularités et la diversité de leurs conditions de collecte, préservation, accessibilité et consultation invitent à proposer un ouvrage sur cet enjeu à l’interface des préoccupations du monde des bibliothèques, des archives, des entreprises et des chercheurs. "

"Somewhere, there is always wind blowing or the sun shining." This maxim could lead the global shift from fossil to renewable energy sources, suggesting that there is enough energy available to be turned into electricity. But the already impressive numbers that are available today, along with the European Union's 20-20-20 goal – to power 20% of the EU energy consumption from renewables until 2020 –, might mislead us over the problem that the go-to renewables readily available rely on a primary energy source mankind cannot control: the weather. At the same time, the notion of the smart grid introduces a vast array of new data coming from sensors in the power grid, at wind farms, power plants, transformers, and consumers. The new wealth of information might seem overwhelming, but can help to manage the different actors in the power grid. This book proposes to view the problem of power generation and distribution in the face of increased volatility as a problem of information distribution and processing. It enhances the power grid by turning its nodes into agents that forecast their local power balance from historical data, using artificial neural networks and the multi-part evolutionary training algorithm described in this book. They pro-actively communicate power demand and supply, adhering to a set of behavioral rules this book defines, and finally solve the 0-1 knapsack problem of choosing offers in such a way that not only solves the disequilibrium, but also minimizes line loss, by elegant modeling in the Boolean domain. The book shows that the Divide-et-Impera approach of a distributed grid control can lead to an efficient, reliable integration of volatile renewable energy sources into the power grid.

The context for the thesis is the continued high failure rate of investments in healthcare technology with a considerable amount of time, money and effort wasted upon investments that ultimately fail to deliver benefits. The thesis is focused on the key themes of the research questions which examine the role of the clinical community in supporting the successful realisation of clinical benefits from the deployment and use of electronic health record systems (EHR’s). The thesis considers that factors that influence the rate of adoption of use of electronic health record systems by the clinical community are integral in realising both the clinical benefits and dis-benefits of the systems. This study considers the drivers for the use of technology to support improvements in healthcare delivery and outlines the methodologies and approaches which have been used historically and currently to support the benefits realisation management of healthcare technology. The study discovered that several benefits can be realised by EHR’s including a range of benefits aligned to the benefit types of strategic, management and operational; in doing so the study discovered that consideration is not wholly given to benefits aligned to the values of patients and clinicians, the clinical benefits. Uniquely, this study considers the role of dis benefits and how the identification and management of dis-benefits, as the negative outcome of EHR deployment and use, can support aligned endeavours to improve the clinician’s perception and adoption of the EHR to return a benefit over time. Finally, and in conclusion, the study recognises deficiencies in the approach to the investment decision in healthcare technology to focus on non-human organisational motivations such as the financial return on investment leading this study to insist on the necessity to understand the human motivations for the use of EHR’s given the criticality to align clinical users perception of the clinical values of the use of EHR’s.

Introduction This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This volume discusses the prospects and evolution of informatics (or computer science), which has become the operating system of our world, and is today seen as the science of the information society. Its artifacts change the world and its methods have an impact on how we think about and perceive the world. Classical computer science is built on the notion of an “abstract” machine, which can be instantiated by software to any concrete problem-solving machine, changing its behavior in response to external and internal states, allowing for self-reflective and “intelligent” behavior. However, current phenomena such as the Web, cyber physical systems or the Internet of Things show us that we might already have gone beyond this idea, exemplifying a metamorphosis from a stand-alone calculator to the global operating system of our society. Thus computer scientists will need to reconsider the foundations of their discipline to realize the full potential of our field. Taking often contradictory developments into consideration, researchers will not be able to tackle specific technological or methodological problems in the future without also a broader reflection on their field. The papers in this book take a first step forward and reflect on these issues from different perspectives. The broad spectrum of topics includes Informatics: a discipline with a (short) history and a high impact Interdisciplinarity: how to do research Ethics: what is our responsibility Diversity: why are there so few women in informatics Combining informatics, history and art: a special contribution. This book is intended for all informatics researchers, in academia as well as in industry. It is our responsibility – not only as scientists but also as citizens – to make the public aware of the dichotomies and dialectic relationships of computer science.

"This book introduces a new mechanism for representing social networks in which pairwise relationships can be drawn from a range of realistic possibilities, including different types of relationships, different strengths in the directions of a pair, positive and negative relationships, and relationships whose intensities change with time. For each possibility, the book shows how to model the social network using spectral embedding. It also shows how to compose the techniques so that multiple edge semantics can be modeled together. The modeling techniques are then applied to a range of datasets to show how they can produce results that are useful in understanding real-world social networks."

The exchange of orbit information is becoming more important in view of the increasing population of objects in space as well as the increase in parties involved in space operations. The aim of this thesis was to investigate how orbit information maintained by a space surveillance system can be provided to its users. Services like collision avoidance require very accurate information, while other services might be less stringent. An approach was studied, which allows to derive orbit and covariance information of predetermined accuracy from a reference orbit. Using Chebyshev polynomials, continuous state vector and covariance matrix information can be provided. The major advantage is that no inter- or extrapolation on the user's side is required. A method to reduce the data amount by interpolating the variance envelope functions was also studied. The proposed method in this thesis gives access to highly accurate information from the catalogue, where this information is required. On the other hand it can also provide less accurate information, where requirements are less restrictive, thereby allowing for a significantly reduced amount of data to be transferred and stored.

An introduction to the engineering principles of embedded systems, with a focus on modeling, design, and analysis of cyber-physical systems. The most visible use of computers and software is processing information for human consumption. The vast majority of computers in use, however, are much less visible. They run the engine, brakes, seatbelts, airbag, and audio system in your car. They digitally encode your voice and construct a radio signal to send it from your cell phone to a base station. They command robots on a factory floor, power generation in a power plant, processes in a chemical plant, and traffic lights in a city. These less visible computers are called embedded systems, and the software they run is called embedded software. The principal challenges in designing and analyzing embedded systems stem from their interaction with physical processes. This book takes a cyber-physical approach to embedded systems, introducing the engineering concepts underlying embedded systems as a technology and as a subject of study. The focus is on modeling, design, and analysis of cyber-physical systems, which integrate computation, networking, and physical processes. The second edition offers two new chapters, several new exercises, and other improvements. The book can be used as a textbook at the advanced undergraduate or introductory graduate level and as a professional reference for practicing engineers and computer scientists. Readers should have some familiarity with machine structures, computer programming, basic discrete mathematics and algorithms, and signals and systems.

This thesis surveys the research in patch-based synthesis and algorithms for finding correspondences between small local regions of images. We additionally explore a large kind of applications of this new fast randomized matching technique. One of the algorithms we have studied in particular is PatchMatch, can find similar regions or "patches" of an image one to two orders of magnitude faster than previous techniques. The algorithmic program is driven by applying mathematical properties of nearest neighbors in natural images. It is observed that neighboring correspondences tend to be similar or "coherent" and use this observation in algorithm in order to quickly converge to an approximate solution. The algorithm in the most general form can find k-nearest neighbor matching, using patches that translate, rotate, or scale, using arbitrary descriptors, and between two or more images. Speed-ups are obtained over various techniques in an exceedingly range of those areas. We have explored many applications of PatchMatch matching algorithm. In computer graphics, we have explored removing unwanted objects from images, seamlessly moving objects in images, changing image aspect ratios, and video summarization. In computer vision we have explored denoising images, object detection, detecting image forgeries, and detecting symmetries. We conclude by discussing the restrictions of our algorithmic program, GPU implementation and areas for future analysis.

This book introduces concepts in mobile, autonomous robotics to third-fourth year students in Computer Science or a related discipline. The book covers principles of robot motion, forward and inverse kinematics of robotic arms and simple wheeled platforms, perception, error propagation, localization and simultaneous localization and mapping. The cover picture shows a wind-up toy that is smart enough to not fall off a table just using intelligent mechanism design and illustrate the importance of the mechanism in designing intelligent, autonomous systems. This book is open source, open to contributions and released under a creative common license.

Think Java is an introduction to computer science and programming intended for readers with little or no experience. We start with the most basic concepts and are careful to define all terms when they are first used. The book presents each new idea in a logical progression. Larger topics, like recursion and object-oriented programming, are divided into smaller examples and introduced over the course of several chapters. This book is intentionally concise. Each chapter is 12–14 pages and covers the material for one week of a college course. It is not meant to be a comprehensive presentation of Java, but rather, an initial exposure to programming constructs and techniques. We begin with small problems and basic algorithms and work up to object-oriented design. In the vocabulary of computer science pedagogy, this book uses the “objects late” approach.

The Little Book of Semaphores is a free (in both senses of the word) textbook that introduces the principles of synchronization for concurrent programming. In most computer science curricula, synchronization is a module in an Operating Systems class. OS textbooks present a standard set of problems with a standard set of solutions, but most students don't get a good understanding of the material or the ability to solve similar problems. The approach of this book is to identify patterns that are useful for a variety of synchronization problems and then show how they can be assembled into solutions. After each problem, the book offers a hint before showing a solution, giving students a better chance of discovering solutions on their own. The book covers the classical problems, including "Readers-writers," "Producer-consumer" and "Dining Philosophers." In addition, it collects a number of not-so-classical problems, some written by the author and some by other teachers and textbook writers. Readers are invited to create and submit new problems.

Orbital debris is becoming an increasing problem for space flight missions. New satellite launches, explosions, collisions and other events cause a steady rise in the number of objects orbiting the Earth. It is therefore important to determine the future development of the object population, as well as the effectiveness of debris mitigation measures, in long-term simulations. Orbital propagation, the calculation of an object's movement in its orbit, poses a challenge for this research due to the high computation times of the complex perturbation models involved. With populations consisting of hundreds of thousands of objects as well as simulation time frames of up to 200 years, these calculations can take up hours of computation time. To speed up this process, the analytical propagator Ikebana is introduced in this work of applied computer science in engineering. The program runs on graphics processing units, hardware designed for massively parallel execution of up to thousands of concurrent threads. This reduces the overall run time for large object populations from hours to minutes. Porting software from a conventional CPU is not a trivial task and involves a number of potential pitfalls and optimization opportunities which are detailed in this work. The propagator is integrated into other applications via a generic, multi-platform interface specifically designed for this task. It allows to develop the propagator separately and integrate it into other tools as a plugin at run time. The interface's architecture serves as a design template for analytical propagation software.

Due to the ever-increasing pressure from regulatory authorities, the demand for organisations to stay-compliant has increased over the past few years. In response to these demands—and to support the organisational compliance reporting activities, a plethora of compliance management frameworks (CMFs) have been developed. These CMFs offer functionalities that address the compliance problem in a variety of ways to meet organisations’ specific compliance reporting requirements. Regardless of how good and flexible these CMFs can be, their effectiveness largely depends on the ability of their underlying conceptual and formal models to provide faithful representations of normative requirements. A CMF based on weak conceptual and formal models might not be suitable for providing any certification of compliance that is acceptable to the certifying bodies. Given the breadth of the business process compliance domain and the existence of large number of CMFs, determining the suitability of a CMF is a difficult task. Despite that there are no methodologies that can be used to evaluate the abilities of a CMF. This thesis proposes a formal framework to evaluate whether a CMF correctly represents the normative requirements that a system has to comply with. The proposed framework provides the following contributions: (i) a classification model and formal semantics for normative requirements giving a rich and improved ontology of various types of norms, (ii) systematic conceptual and formal evaluations of underlying conceptual and formal models of existing CMF that determine their abilities and shortcomings, and (iii) a deontic extension to Event-Calculus (EC), a value added contribution. The framework has been formally defined and validated through the evaluations of existing CMFs. An example of these evaluations is presented at the end of the thesis. The developed framework is independent of any specific formalism, and can fit into any other formal language.

Offered as an introduction to the field of data structures and algorithms, Open Data Structures covers the implementation and analysis of data structures for sequences (lists), queues, priority queues, unordered dictionaries, ordered dictionaries and graphs. Focusing on a mathematically rigorous approach that is fast, practical and efficient, Morin clearly and briskly presents instruction along with source code. Analyzed and implemented in Java, the data structures presented in the book include stacks, queues, deques and lists implemented as arrays and linked-lists; space-efficient implementations of lists; skip lists; hash tables and hash codes; binary search trees including treaps, scapegoat trees and red-black trees; integer searching structures including binary tries, x-fast tries and y-fast tries; heaps, including implicit binary heaps and randomized meldable heaps; graphs, including adjacency matrix and adjacency list representations and B-trees. A modern treatment of an essential computer science topic, Open Data Structures is a measured balance between classical topics and state-of-the art structures that will serve the needs of all undergraduate students or self-directed learners.

Information Systems: A Manager’s Guide to Harnessing Technology is intended for use in undergraduate and/or graduate courses in Management Information Systems and Information Technology. The teaching approach in Information Systems: A Manager’s Guide to Harnessing Technology V 1.3 can change this. The text offers a proven approach that has garnered student praise, increased is enrollment and engaged students to think deeper and more practically about the space where business and technology meet. Every topic is related to specific business examples, so students gain an immediate appreciation of its importance. Rather than lead with technical topics, the book starts with strategic thinking, focusing on big-picture issues that have confounded experts but will engage students. And while chapters introduce concepts, cases on approachable, exciting firms across industries further challenge students to apply what they've learned, asking questions like:Why was NetFlix able to repel Blockbuster and WalMart? How did Harrah's Casino's become twice as profitable as comparably-sized Caesar's, enabling the former to acquire the latter? How does Spain's fashion giant Zara, a firm that shuns the sort of offshore manufacturing used by every other popular clothing chain, offer cheap fashions that fly off the shelves, all while achieving growth rates and profit margins that put Gap to shame? Why do technology markets often evolve into winner-take-all or winner take-most scenarios? And how can managers compete when these dynamics are present? Why is Google more profitable than Disney? How much is Facebook really worth. The teaching approach in this text encourages students to think deeper and more practically about the space where business and technology meet. Every topic is related to specific business examples, so students gain an immediate appreciation of its importance. Rather than starting with technical topics, the book starts with strategic thinking, focusing on big-picture issues that interest students. The author John Gallaugher is one of BusinessWeek's "Professors of the Year." Learn more by visiting his blog, The Week in Geek, where he covers the intersection of courseware, technology and strategy.

Introduction to the Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems introduces students to mathematical/computational modeling and analysis developed in the emerging interdisciplinary field of Complex Systems Science. Complex systems are systems made of a large number of microscopic components interacting with each other in nontrivial ways. Many real-world systems can be understood as complex systems, where critically important information resides in the relationships between the parts and not necessarily within the parts themselves. This textbook offers an accessible yet technically-oriented introduction to the modeling and analysis of complex systems. The topics covered include: fundamentals of modeling, basics of dynamical systems, discrete-time models, continuous-time models, bifurcations, chaos, cellular automata, continuous field models, static networks, dynamic networks and agent-based models. Most of these topics are discussed in two chapters, one focusing on computational modeling and the other on mathematical analysis. This unique approach provides a comprehensive view of related concepts and techniques, and allows readers and instructors to flexibly choose relevant materials based on their objectives and needs. Python sample codes are provided for each modeling example.

Welcome to Information Systems for Business and Beyond. In this book, you will be introduced to the concept of information systems, their use in business, and the larger impact they are having on our world. This book is written as an introductory text, meant for those with little or no experience with computers or information systems. While sometimes the descriptions can get a little bit technical, every effort has been made to convey the information essential to understanding a topic while not getting bogged down in detailed terminology or esoteric discussions. Learning objectives can be found at the beginning of each chapter. Of course, all chapters are recommended for use in an introductory information systems course. However, for courses on a shorter calendar or courses using additional textbooks, a review of the learning objectives will help determine which chapters can be omitted. At the end of each chapter, there is a set of study questions and exercises (except for chapter one, which only offers study questions). The study questions can be assigned to help focus students’ reading on the learning objectives. The exercises are meant to be a more in-depth, experiential way for students to learn chapter topics. It is recommended that you review any exercise before assigning it, adding any detail needed (such as length, due date) to complete the assignment.

Think Stats is an introduction to Probability and Statistics for Python programmers. Think Stats emphasizes simple techniques you can use to explore real data sets and answer interesting questions. The book presents a case study using data from the National Institutes of Health. Readers are encouraged to work on a project with real datasets. If you have basic skills in Python, you can use them to learn concepts in probability and statistics. Think Stats is based on a Python library for probability distributions (P.M.F.s and C.D.F.s). Many of the exercises use short programs to run experiments and help readers develop understanding.

Web development is an evolving amalgamation of languages that work in concert to receive, modify and deliver information between parties using the Internet as a mechanism of delivery. While it is easy to describe conceptually, implementation is accompanied by an overwhelming variety of languages, platforms, templates, frameworks, guidelines and standards. Navigating a project from concept to completion often requires more than mastery of one or two complementing languages, meaning today’s developers need both breadth, and depth, of knowledge to be effective. This text provides the developer with an understanding of the various elements of web development by focusing on the concepts and fundamentals through the examples within, providing a foundation that allows easier transition to other languages and a better understanding of how to approach their work. The reader will be introduced to topics in a manner that follows most project development methods, from initial conceptualization and design through front end development, back end development and introducing additional concepts like accessibility and security, while focusing on responsive design techniques. Each section of the text includes opportunities to practice the material and assess increased knowledge after examining the topics.

Think D.S.P. is an introduction to Digital Signal Processing in Python. The premise of this book (and the other books in the Think X series) is that if you know how to program, you can use that skill to learn other things. The author is writing this book because he thinks the conventional approach to digital signal processing is backward: most books (and the classes that use them) present the material bottom-up, starting with mathematical abstractions like phasors.

Most books that use MATLAB are aimed at readers who know how to program. This book is for people who have never programmed before. As a result, the order of presentation is unusual. The book starts with scalar values and works up to vectors and matrices very gradually. This approach is good for beginning programmers, because it is hard to understand composite objects until you understand basic programming semantics. But there are problems: The MATLAB documentation is written in terms of matrices, and so are the error messages. To mitigate this problem, the book explains the necessary vocabulary early and deciphers some of the messages that beginners find confusing. Many of the examples in the first half of the book are non-standard MATLAB. I address this problem in the second half by translating the examples into a more idiomatic style. The book puts a lot of emphasis on functions, in part because they are an important tool for controlling program complexity, and also because they are useful for working with MATLAB tools like fzero and ode45. I assume that readers know calculus, differential equations and physics, but not linear algebra. I explain the math as I go along, but the descriptions might not be enough for someone who hasn't seen the material before. There are small exercises within each chapter, and a few larger exercises at the end of some chapters.

Introduction Ability to use information and communication technologies (ICT) is an imperative for effective participation in today’s digital age. Schools worldwide are responding to the need to provide young people with that ability. But how effective are they in this regard? The IEA International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) responded to this question by studying the extent to which young people have developed computer and information literacy (CIL), which is defined as the ability to use computers to investigate, create, and communicate with others at home, school, the workplace and in society. The study was conducted under the auspices of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and builds on a series of earlier IEA studies focusing on ICT in education. Data were gathered from almost 60,000 Grade 8 students in more than 3,300 schools from 21 education systems. This information was augmented by data from almost 35,000 teachers in those schools and by contextual data collected from school ICT-coordinators, school principals, and the ICILS national research centers. The IEA ICILS team systematically investigated differences among the participating countries in students’ CIL outcomes, how participating countries were providing CIL-related education, and how confident teachers were in using ICT in their pedagogical practice. The team also explored differences within and across countries with respect to relationships between CIL education outcomes and student characteristics and school contexts. In general, the study findings presented in this international report challenge the notion of young people as “digital natives” with a self-developed capacity to use digital technology. The large variations in CIL proficiency within and across the ICILS countries suggest it is naive to expect young people to develop CIL in the absence of coherent learning programs. Findings also indicate that system- and school-level planning needs to focus on increasing teacher expertise in using ICT for pedagogical purposes if such programs are to have the desired effect. The report furthermore presents an empirically derived scale and description of CIL learning that educational stakeholders can reference when deliberating about CIL education and use to monitor change in CIL over time.

Linked Open Data (LOD) is a pragmatic approach for realizing the Semantic Web vision of making the Web a global, distributed, semantics-based information system. This book presents an overview on the results of the research project “LOD2 -- Creating Knowledge out of Interlinked Data”. LOD2 is a large-scale integrating project co-funded by the European Commission within the FP7 Information and Communication Technologies Work Program. Commencing in September 2010, this 4-year project comprised leading Linked Open Data research groups, companies, and service providers from across 11 European countries and South Korea. The aim of this project was to advance the state-of-the-art in research and development in four key areas relevant for Linked Data, namely 1. RDF data management; 2. the extraction, creation, and enrichment of structured RDF data; 3. the interlinking and fusion of Linked Data from different sources and 4. the authoring, exploration and visualization of Linked Data.

This book quantifies the key factors of WLAN performance and describes methods for improvement. It provides theoretical background and empirical results for the optimum planning and deployment of indoor WLAN systems, explaining the fundamentals while supplying guidelines for design, modeling, and performance evaluation. It discusses environmental effects on WLAN systems, protocol redesign for routing and MAC, and traffic distribution; examines emerging and future network technologies; and includes radio propagation and site measurements, simulations for various network design scenarios, numerous illustrations, practical examples, and learning aids.

Programming Fundamentals — A Modular Structured Approach using C++ is written by Kenneth Leroy Busbee, a faculty member at Houston Community College in Houston, Texas. The materials used in this textbook/collection were developed by the author and others as independent modules for publication within the Connexions environment. Programming fundamentals are often divided into three college courses: Modular/Structured, Object Oriented and Data Structures. This textbook/collection covers the first of those three courses.The learning modules of this textbook/collection were written as standalone modules. Students using a collection of modules as a textbook will usually view it contents by reading the modules sequentially as presented by the author of the collection.The learning modules of this textbook/collection were, for the most part, written without consideration of a specific programming language. In many cases the C++ language is discussed as part of the explanation of the concept. Often the examples used for C++ are exactly the same for the Java programming language. However, some modules were written specifically for the C++ programming language. This could not be avoided as the C++ language is used in conjunction with this textbook/collection by the author in teaching college courses.

Pharo is a clean, innovative, open-source, live-programming environment. Deep into Pharo is the second volume of a series of books covering Pharo. Whereas the first volume is intended for newcomers, this second volume covers deeper topics. You will learn about Pharo frameworks and libraries such as Glamour, PetitParser, Roassal, FileSystem, Regex and Socket. You will explore the language with chapters on exceptions, blocks, small integers and floats. You will discover tools such as profilers, Metacello and Gofer.

This book is the first to combine coverage of fuzzy logic and Semantic Web languages. It provides in-depth insight into fuzzy Semantic Web languages for non-fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic experts. It also helps researchers of non-Semantic Web languages get a better understanding of the theoretical fundamentals of Semantic Web languages. The first part of the book covers all the theoretical and logical aspects of classical (two-valued) Semantic Web languages. The second part explains how to generalize these languages to cope with fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic.

We have designed this third edition of Java, Java, Java to be suitable for a typical Introduction to Computer Science (CS1) course or for a slightly more advanced Java as a Second Language course. This edition retains the “objects first” approach to programming and problem solving that was characteristic of the first two editions. Throughout the text we emphasize careful coverage of Java language features, introductory programming concepts and object-oriented design principles. The third edition retains many of the features of the first two editions, including: •Early Introduction of Objects *Emphasis on Object Oriented Design (O.O.D.) *Unified Modeling Language (U.M.L.) *Diagrams *Self-study Exercises with Answers *Programming, Debugging and Design Tips from the Java Library Sections *Object-Oriented Design Sections *End-of-Chapter Exercises *Companion Web Site, with Power Points and other Resources The In the Laboratory sections from the first two editions have been moved onto the book’s Companion Web Site. Table One shows the Table of Contents for the third edition.

Think Python is a concise introduction to software design using the Python programming language. Intended for people with no programming experience, this book starts with the most basic concepts and gradually adds new material. Some of the ideas students find most challenging, like recursion and object-oriented programming, are divided into a sequence of smaller steps and introduced over the course of several chapters. This textbook has been used in classes at Bard College, Olin College of Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, University of Maine and University of Northern Colorado.

Think Bayes is an introduction to Bayesian statistics using computational methods.The premise of this book, and the other books in the Think X series, is that if you know how to program, you can use that skill to learn other topics.Most books on Bayesian statistics use mathematical notation and present ideas in terms of mathematical concepts like calculus. This book uses Python code instead of math, and discrete approximations instead of continuous mathematics. As a result, what would be an integral in a math book becomes a summation, and most operations on probability distributions are simple loops.I think this presentation is easier to understand, at least for people with programming skills. It is also more general, because when we make modeling decisions, we can choose the most appropriate model without worrying too much about whether the model lends itself to conventional analysis. Also, it provides a smooth development path from simple examples to real-world problems.

This book is about complexity science, data structures and algorithms, intermediate programming in Python and the philosophy of science: Data structures and algorithms: A data structure is a collection that contains data elements organized in a way that supports particular operations. For example, a dictionary organizes key-value pairs in a way that provides fast mapping from keys to values, but mapping from values to keys is generally slower. An algorithm is a mechanical process for performing a computation. Designing efficient programs often involves the co-evolution of data structures and the algorithms that use them. For example, the first few chapters are about graphs, a data structure that is a good implementation of a graph — nested dictionaries — and several graph algorithms that use this data structure. Python programming: This book picks up where Think Python leaves off. I assume that you have read that book or have equivalent knowledge of Python. As always, I will try to emphasize fundamental ideas that apply to programming in many languages, but along the way you will learn some useful features that are specific to Python. Computational modeling: A model is a simplified description of a system that is useful for simulation or analysis. Computational models are designed to take advantage of cheap, fast computation. Philosophy of science: The models and results in this book raise a number of questions relevant to the philosophy of science, including the nature of scientific laws, theory choice, realism and instrumentalism, holism and reductionism and Bayesian epistemology. This book focuses on discrete models, which include graphs, cellular automata and agent-based models. They are often characterized by structure, rules and transitions rather than by equations. They tend to be more abstract than continuous models; in some cases there is no direct correspondence between the model and a physical system. Complexity science is an interdisciplinary field — at the intersection of mathematics, computer science and physics — that focuses on these kinds of models. That's what this book is about.

This timely introduction to spectral feature selection illustrates the potential of this powerful dimensionality reduction technique in high-dimensional data processing. It presents the theoretical foundations of spectral feature selection, its connections to other algorithms, and its use in handling both large-scale data sets and small sample problems. Readers learn how to use spectral feature selection to solve challenging problems in real-life applications and discover how general feature selection and extraction are connected to spectral feature selection. Source code for the algorithms is available online.

We set out to design an introductory course governed by four themes: Give students a good idea of what a career in M.I.S. looks like by doing M.I.S. Enhance the professionalism of deliverables by teaching design and usability concepts. Promote creativity by assigning projects that demand it. Teach students about cloud computing by having them do cloud computing. Students in an introductory Management Information Systems (M.I.S.) course often ask what a career in M.I.S. looks like. Lacking a clear vision, they make their own assumptions. Often they assume the career involves programming with little human interaction. That M.I.S. is a technical field could not be further from the truth. M.I.S. job descriptions typically require candidates to be able to collaborate, communicate, analyze needs and gather requirements. They also list the need for excellent written and communication skills. In other words, M.I.S. workers are constantly interacting with other people both inside and outside the organization. They are coming up with creative solutions to business problems.This course is designed to help students get a feel for what a career in M.I.S. would be like. Our students report that they learn more about information systems from their internships than from their is courses. Consequently, we designed a course that looks very much like an internship—an introduction to the field followed by a substantial project. Chapter One begins by introducing the information systems landscape. Here we discuss all the usual suspects: the information systems triangle, the systems development life cycle, transaction systems (E.R.P., S.C.M., C.R.M.), collaboration systems and business intelligence systems. Other aspects of the landscape such as usability, outsourcing, database concepts and so forth are introduced throughout chapter in Chapter Two where they fit in naturally with the flow of the project. Chapter Two is the substantial project which runs over a number of chapters. Over the course of the semester, students plan, build, and develop a proposal for an iPhone application. They develop a very realistic mockup. They also build a website to help market and support the app. Students are engaged because the project is fun and feels real. However, they are simultaneously learning business concepts and M.I.S. skills. Prior to the existence of this course, we were only able to give such an interesting project at the senior level. Now, even as freshmen, students have a real experience of M.I.S. in operation. A by product of creating an engaging course is increased enrollment in the M.I.S. major. Even students who have never heard of M.I.S. become excited about the major and either switch majors or add it as a double major or minor. Many other books have students study tools and then do a case. By contrast, most of this book is a case. Much like the real world, we introduce tools when needed, and only to the extent needed, to get at each part of the case.

Foundations of Computation is a free textbook for a one-semester course in theoretical computer science. It has been used for several years in a course at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. The course has no prerequisites other than introductory computer programming. The first half of the course covers material on logic, sets, and functions that would often be taught in a course in discrete mathematics. The second part covers material on automata, formal languages and grammar that would ordinarily be encountered in an upper level course in theoretical computer science.

This open textbook aims to fill the gap between the open-source implementations and the open-source network specifications by providing a detailed but pedagogical description of the key principles that guide the operation of the Internet. The book is released under a creative commons license. Such an open-source license is motivated by two reasons. The first is that we hope that this will allow many students to use the book to learn computer networks. The second is that I hope that other teachers will reuse, adapt and improve it. Time will tell if it is possible to build a community of contributors to improve and develop the book further. As a starting point, the first release contains all the material for a one-semester first upper undergraduate or a graduate networking course.

An Air Force evaluation of Multics, and Ken Thompson’s Turing award lecture (“Reflections on Trusting Trust”), showed that compilers can be subverted to insert malicious Trojan horses into critical software, including themselves. If this “trusting trust” attack goes undetected, even complete analysis of a system’s source code will not find the malicious code that is running. Previously-known countermeasures have been grossly inadequate. If this attack cannot be countered, attackers can quietly subvert entire classes of computer systems, gaining complete control over financial, infrastructure, military, and/or business systems worldwide. This dissertation’s thesis is that the trusting trust attack can be detected and effectively countered using the “Diverse Double-Compiling” (DDC) technique, as demonstrated by (1) a formal proof that DDC can determine if source code and generated executable code correspond, (2) a demonstration of DDC with four compilers (a small C compiler, a small Lisp compiler, a small maliciously corrupted Lisp compiler, and a large industrial-strength C compiler, GCC), and (3) a description of approaches for applying DDC in various real-world scenarios. In the DDC technique, source code is compiled twice: the source code of the compiler’s parent is compiled using a trusted compiler, and then the putative compiler source code is compiled using the result of the first compilation. If the DDC result is bit-for-bit identical with the original compiler-under-test’s executable, and certain other assumptions hold, then the compiler-under-test’s executable corresponds with its putative source code.

Squeak is a modern open-source development environment for the classic Smalltalk-80 programming language. Despite being the first purely object-oriented language and environment, Smalltalk is in many ways still far ahead of its successors in promoting a vision of an environment where everything is an object, and anything can change at run-time. Squeak by Example, intended for both students and developers, will guide you gently through the Squeak language and environment by means of a series of examples and exercises. The book helps you get started with A Quick Tour of Squeak and guides you through A First Application. The Smalltalk language is introduced in three chapters on Syntax in a Nutshell, Understanding Message Syntax and The Smalltalk Object Model. Development with Squeak is covered in The Squeak Programming Environment and SUnit. Several of the key classes are presented in chapters on Basic Classes, Collections, Streams and Morphic. The first edition of the book concludes with chapters on Classes and Metaclasses and Frequently Asked Questions.

Pharo is a modern open-source development environment for the classic Smalltalk-80 programming language. Despite being the first purely object-oriented language and environment, Smalltalk is in many ways still far ahead of its successors in promoting a vision of an environment where everything is an object, and anything can change at run-time. Pharo by Example, intended for both students and developers, will guide you gently through the Pharo language and environment by means of a series of examples and exercises. The book helps you get started with A Quick Tour of Pharo and guides you through A First Application. The Smalltalk language is introduced in the chapters Syntax in a Nutshell and Understanding Message Syntax.Development with Pharo is introduced in The Smalltalk Object Model, The Pharo Programming Environment and SUnit. Several of the key classes are presented in chapters on Basic Classes, Collections, Streams and Morphic. A chapter dedicated to Seaside by Example introduces web application development with the popular Seaside framework. The first edition of the book concludes with chapters on Classes and Metaclasses, Reflection and Frequently Asked Questions.