Informatyka

The International Conference on Logic Programming, sponsored by the Association for Logic Programming, includes tutorials, lectures, and refereed papers on all aspects of logic programming, including theoretical foundations, constraints, concurrency and parallelism, deductive databases, language design and implementation, nonmonotonic reasoning, and logic programming and the Internet.

The payment card business has evolved from its inception in the 1950s as a way to handle payment for expense-account lunches (the Diners Club card) into today's complex, sprawling industry that drives trillions of dollars in transaction volume each year. Paying with Plastic is the definitive source on an industry that has revolutionized the way we borrow and spend. More than a history book, Paying with Plastic delivers an entertaining discussion of the impact of an industry that epitomizes the notion of two-sided markets: those in which two or more customer groups receive...

As computers and the tasks they perform become increasingly complex, researchers are looking to nature -- as model and as metaphor -- for inspiration. The organization and behavior of biological organisms present scientists with an invitation to reinvent computing for the complex tasks of the future. In Imitation of Life, Nancy Forbes surveys the emerging field of biologically inspired computing, looking at some of the most impressive and influential examples of this fertile synergy.

Forbes points out that the influence of biology on computing goes back to the early days of...

AI in the 1980s and Beyond provides an inside report on current applications, trends, and future opportunities in one of the world's major centers of artificial intelligence research. The topics covered include a general perspective on AI, knowledge-based systems, expert systems tools and techniques, system building in medical diagnosis, AI and software engineering, intelligent natural language processing, automatic speech recognition, intelligent vision, seeing robots, robot programming, robot tactile sensing, and autonomous mobile robots. W. Eric L. Grimson and Ramesh S. Patil are both...

Stephen Grossberg and his colleagues at Boston University's Center for Adaptive Systems are producing some of the most exciting research in the neural network approach to making computers "think." Packed with real-time computer simulations and rigorous demonstrations of these phenomena, this book includes results on vision, speech, cognitive information processing; adaptive pattern recognition, adaptive robotics, conditioning and attention, cognitive-emotional interactions, and decision making under risk.

Is the Internet a vast arena of unrestricted communication and freely exchanged information or a regulated, highly structured virtual bureaucracy? In Protocol, Alexander Galloway argues that the founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom, and that the controlling power lies in the technical protocols that make network connections (and disconnections) possible. He does this by treating the computer as a textual medium that is based on a technological language, code. Code, he argues, can be subject to the same kind of cultural and literary analysis as any natural language;...

This series is for people--adults and teenagers--who are interested in computer programming because it's fun. The three volumes use the Logo programming language as the vehicle for an exploration of computer science from the perspective of symbolic computation and artificial intelligence. Logo is a dialect of Lisp, a language used in the most advanced research projects in computer science, especially in artificial intelligence. Throughout the series, functional programming techniques (including higher order functions and recursion) are emphasized, but traditional sequential programming is...

The growth of the Internet has been propelled in significant part by user investment in infrastructure: computers, internal wiring, and the connection to the Internet provider. This "bottom-up" investment minimizes the investment burden facing providers. New technologies such as wireless and data transmission over power lines, as well as deregulation of telecommunications and electric utilities, will provide new opportunities for user investment in intelligent infrastructure as leverage points for Internet and broadband access.Recasting the "problem of the last 100 feet" as "the...

The CLOS metaobject protocol is an elegant, high-performance extension to the CommonLisp Object System. The authors, who developed the metaobject protocol and who were among the group that developed CLOS, introduce this new approach to programming language design, describe its evolution and design principles, and present a formal specification of a metaobject protocol for CLOS.

Kiczales, des Rivieres, and Bobrow show that the "art of metaobject protocol design" lies in creating a synthetic combination of object-oriented and reflective techniques that can be applied under existing...

Computation and Intelligence brings together 29 readings in Artificial Intelligence that are particularly relevant to today's student/practitioner. With its helpful critique of the selections, extensive bibliography, and clear presentation of the material, Computation and Intelligence will be a useful adjunct to any course in AI as well as a handy reference for professionals in the field.The book is divided into five parts, each reflecting the stages of development of AI. The first part, Foundations, contains readings that present or discuss foundational ideas linking computation and...

The authors of Thoughtful Interaction Design go beyond the usual technical concerns of usability and usefulness to consider interaction design from a design perspective. The shaping of digital artifacts is a design process that influences the form and functions of workplaces, schools, communication, and culture; the successful interaction designer must use both ethical and aesthetic judgment to create designs that are appropriate to a given environment. This book is not a how-to manual, but a collection of tools for thought about interaction design.

Working with information...

The annual International Logic Programming Symposium, traditionally held in North America, is one of the main international conferences sponsored by the Association of Logic Programming. The themes of the 1997 conference are new theoretical and practical accomplishments in logic programming, new research directions where ideas originating from logic programming can play a fundamental role, and relations between logic programming and other fields of computer science. Topics include theoretical foundations, constraints, concurrency and parallelism, deductive databases, language design and...

Most aspects of our private and social lives -- our safety, the integrity of the financial system, the functioning of utilities and other services, and national security -- now depend on computing. But how can we know that this computing is trustworthy? In Mechanizing Proof, Donald MacKenzie addresses this key issue by investigating the interrelations of computing, risk, and mathematical proof over the last half century from the perspectives of history and sociology. His discussion draws on the technical literature of computer science and artificial intelligence and on extensive...

Just as education has promoted democracy and economic growth, the Internet has the potential to benefit society as a whole. Digital citizenship, or the ability to participate in society online, promotes social inclusion. But statistics show that significant segments of the population are still excluded from digital citizenship. The authors of this book define digital citizens as those who are online daily. By focusing on frequent use, they reconceptualize debates about the digital divide to include both the means and the skills to participate online. They offer new evidence (drawn from...

Interfaces that talk and listen are populating computers, cars, call centers, and even home appliances and toys, but voice interfaces invariably frustrate rather than help. In Wired for Speech, Clifford Nass and Scott Brave reveal how interactive voice technologies can readily and effectively tap into the automatic responses all speech -- whether from human or machine -- evokes. Wired for Speech demonstrates that people are "voice-activated": we respond to voice technologies as we respond to actual people and behave as we would in any social situation. By leveraging this...

The latest scientific findings indicate that emotions play an essential role in decision making, perception, learning, and more -- that is, they influence the very mechanisms of rational thinking. Not only too much, but too little emotion can impair decision making. According to Rosalind Picard, if we want computers to be genuinely intelligent and to interact naturally with us, we must give computers the ability to recognize, understand, even to have and express emotions.

Part 1 of this book provides the intellectual framework for affective computing. It includes background on human...

Howard Rheingold has been called the First Citizen of the Internet. In this book he tours the "virtual community" of online networking. He describes a community that is as real and as much a mixed bag as any physical community -- one where people talk, argue, seek information, organize politically, fall in love, and dupe others. At the same time that he tells moving stories about people who have received online emotional support during devastating illnesses, he acknowledges a darker side to people's behavior in cyberspace. Indeed, contends Rheingold, people relate to each other online much...

As we enter the "decade of data," the disparity between the vast amount of data storage capacity (measurable in terabytes and petabytes) and the bandwidth available for accessing it has created an input/output bottleneck that is proving to be a major constraint on the effective use of scientific data for research. Scalable Input/Output is a summary of the major research results of the Scalable I/O Initiative, launched by Paul Messina, then Director of the Center for Advanced Computing Research at the California Institute of Technology, to explore software and algorithmic solutions...

Beowulf clusters, which exploit mass-market PC hardware and software in conjunction with cost-effective commercial network technology, are becoming the platform for many scientific, engineering, and commercial applications. With growing popularity has come growing complexity. Addressing that complexity, Beowulf Cluster Computing with Linux and Beowulf Cluster Computing with Windows provide system users and administrators with the tools they need to run the most advanced Beowulf clusters. The book is appearing in both Linux and Windows versions in order to reach the entire PC cluster...