Unlike other books that focus only on selected specific subjects this book provides both a broad and rich cross-section of contemporary approaches to stochastic modeling in finance and economics; it is decision making oriented. The material ranges from common tools to solutions of sophisticated system problems and applications.
In Part I, the fundamentals of financial thinking and elementary mathematical methods of finance are presented. The method of presentation is simple enough to bridge the elements of financial arithmetic and complex models of financial math developed in the later...

The amount of audiovisual information available in digital format has grown exponentially in recent years. Gigabytes of new images, audio and video clips are generated and stored everyday. Most audiovisual content can be accessed through the Internet, which is a very large, unstructured, distributed information database. Searching and retrieving multimedia information from the Web has been limited to the use of keywords.

Over the past decade, many researchers, mostly from the Image Processing and Computer Vision community, have started to investigate possible ways of retrieving...