Castel Ivano, originally built in 1375, is one of many beautiful and impressive castles strategically placed atop hills in Trentino's Valsugana in Northern Italy. It was in this castle on a series of brilliant sunny crisp November days in 1990 that an international group of computer scientists and cognitive scientists met at a workshop to discuss theoretical and applied issues concerning communi cation from an Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science perspective. About forty people, representing nine countries, participated in the workshop, either as speakers, discussants, or observers....

Soft computing is a consortium of computing methodologies that provide a foundation for the conception, design, and deployment of intelligent systems and aims to formalize the human ability to make rational decisions in an environment of uncertainty and imprecision. This book is based on a NATO Advanced Study Institute held in 1996 on soft computing and its applications. The distinguished contributors consider the principal constituents of soft computing, namely fuzzy logic, neurocomputing, genetic computing, and probabilistic reasoning, the relations between them, and their fusion in...

Batch chemical processing has in the past decade enjoyed a return to respectability as a valuable, effective, and often preferred mode of process operation. This book provides the first comprehensive and authoritative coverage that reviews the state of the art development in the field of batch chemical systems engineering, applications in various chemical industries, current practice in different parts of the world, and future technical challenges. Developments in enabling computing technologies such as simulation, mathematical programming, knowledge based systems, and prognosis of how these...

Supercomputing is an important science and technology that enables the scientist or the engineer to simulate numerically very complex physical phenomena related to large-scale scientific, industrial and military applications. It has made considerable progress since the first NATO Workshop on High-Speed Computation in 1983 (Vol. 7 of the same series). This book is a collection of papers presented at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop held in Trondheim, Norway, in June 1989. It presents key research issues related to: - hardware systems, architecture and performance; - compilers and...

These proceedings contain lectures presented at the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Concurrent Engineering Tools and Technologies for Mechanical System Design held in Iowa City, Iowa, 25 May -5 June, 1992. Lectures were presented by leaders from Europe and North America in disciplines contributing to the emerging international focus on Concurrent Engineering of mechanical systems. Participants in the Institute were specialists from throughout NATO in disciplines constituting Concurrent Engineering, many of whom presented contributed papers during the Institute and all of whom participated...

Combinatorial Algorithms on Words refers to the collection of manipulations of strings of symbols (words) - not necessarily from a finite alphabet - that exploit the combinatorial properties of the logical/physical input arrangement to achieve efficient computational performances. The model of computation may be any of the established serial paradigms (e.g. RAM's, Turing Machines), or one of the emerging parallel models (e.g. PRAM, WRAM, Systolic Arrays, CCC). This book focuses on some of the accomplishments of recent years in such disparate areas as pattern matching, data compression, free...

This book contains the edited version of lectures and selected papers presented at the NATO ADVANCED STUDY INSTITUTE ON COMPUTER AIDED OPTIMAL DESIGN: Structural and Mechanical Systems, held in Tr6ia, Portugal, 29th June to 11th July 1986, and organized by CEMUL -Center of Mechanics and Materials of the Technical University of Lisbon. The Institute was attended by 120 participants from 21 countries, including leading scientists and engineers from universities, research institutions and industry, and Ph.D. students. Some participants presented invited and contributed papers during the...

Thirty years ago pattern recognition was dominated by the learning machine concept: that one could automate the process of going from the raw data to a classifier. The derivation of numerical features from the input image was not considered an important step. One could present all possible features to a program which in turn could find which ones would be useful for pattern recognition. In spite of significant improvements in statistical inference techniques, progress was slow. It became clear that feature derivation was a very complex process that could not be automated and that features...

Computational concepts and techniques have always played a major role in control engineering since the first computer-based control systems were put into operation over twenty years ago. This role has in fact been accelerating over the intervening years as the sophistication of the computing methods and tools available, as well as the complexity of the control problems they have been used to solve, have also increased. In particular, the introduction of the microprocessor and its use as a low-cost computing element in a distributed computer control system has had a profound effect on the way...

The NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) "Algorithms and Model Formulations in Mathematical Programming" was held at Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway, from June 15 to June 19, 1987. The ARW was organized on behalf of the Committee on Algorithms (COAL) of the Mathematical Programming Society (MPS). Co-directors were Jan Telgen (Van Dien+Co Organisatie, Utrecht, The Netherlands) and Roger J-B Wets (The University of California at Davis, USA). 43 participants from 11 countries attended the ARW. The workshop was organized such that each day started with a - minute keynote presentation,...