Gianni Jacucci - Böcker

Cooperative working environments and their development are becoming increasingly important and ever more frequent in different industrial sectors and this book provides a scientific approach for managing team engineering. Meta-cognitive knowledge and networks are identified as key resources enabling engineering teams to work effectively and to reduce engineering time. This book illustrates how computer support can aid cooperative work within the context of practical methodologies and examples. The fields covered in the book include: state-of-the-art research in cooperative learning tools; practical examples and methodologies illustrating the implementation of cooperative networks; and an interdisciplinary approach to team engineering. This book is sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and is aimed at researchers, engineers, and technical managers involved in the development of advanced applications for engineering and manufacturing, and software design and engineering.

Cooperative working environments and their development are becoming increasingly important and ever more frequent in different industrial sectors and this book provides a scientific approach for managing Team Engineering.

The International PROLAMAT Conference is an internationally well known event for demonstrating and evaluating activities and progress in the field of discrete manufacturing.

Six years passed by since the NATO ASI on "Liquid and Amorphous Metals" was held in Zwiesel, Germany, in September 1979. The present one is the second NATO School devoted to research on disordered condensed matter, mainly liquid and amorphous metals. This time the title contains the word "materials" to explicitely include those aspects of the glassy state of insulators either shared with metallic glasses - e.g. the glass tran­ sition - or on the border line with metallic systems - e.g. the metal­ non-metal transition. The long period which purposely elapsed between the two Institutes indi­ cates the intention not to have "just another conference", but to review the state of affairs in the field with a somewhat more durable scope. This is especially important to help basic research to bridge towards applica­ tions and to introduce young researchers in this field. In fact, while the understanding of these materials and their properties is a tremendous challenge for experimental and theoretical physicists, glassy substances offer an enormous potential in-the development of new materials for tech­ nical applications. To this end, the Institute has brought together insiders and peers from allover the world to discuss basic principles and latest results and to help correlate future research effort. Another important aim was to intro­ duce newcomers to the field.