Series On Software Engineering And Knowledge Engineering – serie

Machine learning deals with the issue of how to build computer programs that improve their performance at some tasks through experience. Machine learning algorithms have proven to be of great practical value in a variety of application domains. Not surprisingly, the field of software engineering turns out to be a fertile ground where many software development and maintenance tasks could be formulated as learning problems and approached in terms of learning algorithms. This book deals with the subject of machine learning applications in software engineering. It provides an overview of machine learning, summarizes the state-of-the-practice in this niche area, gives a classification of the existing work, and offers some application guidelines. Also included in the book is a collection of previously published papers in this research area.

In architecting dependable systems, what is required to improve the overall system robustness is fault tolerance. Many methods have been proposed to this end, the solutions are usually considered late during the design and implementation phases of the software life-cycle (e.g., Java and Windows NT exception handling), thus reducing the effectiveness error and fault handling. Since the system design typically models only normal behaviour of the system while ignoring exceptional ones, the implementation of the system is unable to handle abnormal events. Consequently, the system may fail in unexpected ways due to faults.It has been argued that fault tolerance management during the entire life-cycle improves the overall system robustness and that different classes of threats need to be identified for and dealt with at each distinct phase of software development, depending on the abstraction level of the software system being modelled.This book builds on this trend and investigates how fault tolerance mechanisms can be applied when engineering a software system. In particular, it identifies the new problems arising in this area, introduces the new models to be applied at different abstraction levels, defines methodologies for model-driven engineering of such systems and outlines the new technologies and validation and verification environments supporting this.

This book focuses on the topic of improving software quality using adaptive control approaches. As software systems grow in complexity, some of the central challenges include their ability to self-manage and adapt at run time, responding to changing user needs and environments, faults, and vulnerabilities. Control theory approaches presented in the book provide some of the answers to these challenges.The book weaves together diverse research topics (such as requirements engineering, software development processes, pervasive and autonomic computing, service-oriented architectures, on-line adaptation of software behavior, testing and QoS control) into a coherent whole.Written by world-renowned experts, this book is truly a noteworthy and authoritative reference for students, researchers and practitioners to better understand how the adaptive control approach can be applied to improve the quality of software systems. Book chapters also outline future theoretical and experimental challenges for researchers in this area.

This review volume consists of articles concerning CASE technology and research as discussed from two perspectives.For the most part, the available CASE technology is intended to automate certain phases of the software development life cycle. The book contains articles which focus on how the current technology alters the nature of software engineering efforts. Papers which delve into the knowledge a software engineer needs to possess and how the software engineer's work content has or may change are included. Cultural as well as technical considerations are discussed.The current CASE technology exists to automate phases of the software development life cycle, thus affecting software development in the short term, but we cannot ignore the CASE research efforts toward a higher generation language. Such a language should affect software development in the long term. Papers suggesting how these languages may alter the nature of software engineering in the future are presented.

The interplay of artificial intelligence and software engineering has been an interesting and an active area in research institution and industry. This book covers the state of the art in the use of knowledge-based approaches for software specification, design, implementation, testing and debugging. Starting with an introduction to various software engineering paradigms and knowledge-based software systems, the book continues with the discussion of using hybrid knowledge representation as a basis to specify software requirements, to facilitate specification analysis and transformation of real-time distributed software systems. A formal requirements specification language using non-monotonic logic, temporal logic, frames and production systems for new software engineering paradigms (such as rapid prototyping, operational specification and transformational implementation) is also discussed in detail. Examples from switching and other applications are used to illustrate the requirements language. Finally, the development, specification and verification of knowledge-based systems are investigated.

The papers collected in the book were invited by the editors as tutorial courses or keynote speeches for the Fourth International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering. It was the editors' intention that this book should offer a wide coverage of the main topics involved with the specifications, prototyping, development and maintenance of software systems and knowledge-based systems. The main issues in the area of software engineering and knowledge engineering are addressed and for each analyzed topic the corresponding of state research is reported.

This volume focuses on current and future trends in the interplay between software engineering and artificial intelligence.This interplay is now critical to the success of both disciplines, and it also affects a wide range of subject areas. The articles in this volume survey the significant work that has been accomplished, describe the state of the art, analyze the current trends, and predict which future directions have the most potential for success. Areas covered include requirements engineering, real-time systems, reuse technology, development environments and meta-environments, process representations, safety-critical systems, and metrics and measures for processes and products.

This book covers the principles and recent research results in intelligent image database systems design. Special emphasis is placed on spatial reasoning and the techniques for image indexing and retrieval, mainly based on the Theory of Symbolic Projection. In addition, applications of the theory and techniques to intelligent image database systems design are also discussed.

This is a textbook for a course in object-oriented software engineering at advanced undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as for software engineers. It contains more than 120 exercises of diverse complexity.The book discusses fundamental concepts and terminology on object-oriented software development, assuming little background on software engineering, and emphasizes design and maintenance rather than programming.It also presents up-to-date and easily understood methodologies and puts forward a software life cycle model which explicitly encourages reusability during software development and maintenance.

The term “software visualisation” refers to the graphical display of characteristics and behaviour of all aspects of software: design and analysis methods, systems, programs and algorithms. The purpose of this book is to collect and compare different experiences of software visualisation both from fundamental and applied viewpoints.The book is divided into four parts, covering important aspects of software visualisation. Part 1 covers a survey on existing software visualisation tools and environments, the strategies for making a software visualisation system language independent, and program animation for C language. Part 2 presents topics and techniques on graph drawing, which supports efficient and aesthetically pleasing visualisation. Some recently developed graph drawing systems and techniques used are described. Part 3 discusses visual programming concepts and techniques for supporting parallel and heterogeneous distributed programming. Part 4 includes several case studies of software visualisation, concentrating on the broader field of software engineering ranging from software metrics to reverse engineering.

This is the first book that attempts to provide a framework in which to embed an automatic programming system based on evolutionary learning (genetic programming) into a traditional software engineering environment. As such, it looks at how traditional software engineering knowledge can be integrated with an evolutionary programming process in a symbiotic way.

The World Wide Web and the Internet are signs that things will be very different in the future. And what is so striking about this computer-age future is that it comes incredibly fast and is incredibly overwhelming. Anyone who has surfed the Web has exclaimed at one point or another that there is so much information available, so much to search and so much to keep up with.Where Lycos and AltaVista are already accepted tools for textual information, image and multimedia search engines are the natural answers in the quest for pictorial information. This book provides a state-of-the-art description of that field. It contains the proceedings of a valuable workshop in Amsterdam, where people gathered to discuss the progress in the field. The topics cover computational methods of searching for pictures, the powerful pictorial clues in the recognition of objects, storage and indexing of objects in a database, and, ways to access the requested pictorial information.

The last few years have seen an explosive growth in multimedia computing, communications and applications. This revolution is transforming the way people live, work, and interact with one another, and is impacting the way businesses, government services, education, entertainment, and health care are operating. It is safe to say that the multimedia revolution is underway. Yet, several issues related to modeling, specification, analysis and design of distributed multimedia systems and applications are still challenging both researchers and practitioners.This book addresses fundamental design issues and research topics, related to multimedia systems, and provides a comprehensive study of the issues. The topics covered include: distributed multimedia databases and computing; multiparadigmatic information retrieval; modeling and analysis of distributed multimedia systems; OS support for distributed multimedia systems; multimedia communications and networking; multimedia digital libraries and mail systems; multimedia human-computer interaction; multimedia applications for CSCW, distant education, electronic commerce teleconferencing, telemedicine; visual and multidimensional languages for multimedia applications; multimedia workflows; multimedia stream synchronization. In addition, a number of tutorial and overview articles are included so that the volume strikes a balance between introductory tutorials and advanced topics.

Parallel processing is a very important technique for improving the performance of various software development and maintenance activities. The purpose of this book is to introduce important techniques for parallel executation of high-level specifications of software systems. These techniques are very useful for the construction, analysis, and transformation of reliable large-scale and complex software systems.

This book is useful for readers who want to visualize graphs as representing structural knowledge in a variety of fields. It gives an outline of the whole field, describes in detail the representative methods for drawing graphs, explains extensions such as fisheye and dynamic drawing, presents many practical applications, and discusses ways of evaluation. It makes the intuitive understanding of these easier by using examples and diagrams, and provides a wealth of references for those readers who wish to know more.

Empirical verification of knowledge is one of the foundations for developing any discipline. As far as software construction is concerned, the empirically verified knowledge is not only sparse but also not very widely disseminated among developers and researchers. This book aims to spread the idea of the importance of empirical knowledge in software development from a highly practical viewpoint. It has two goals: (1) Define the body of empirically validated knowledge in software development so as to advise practitioners on what methods or techniques have been empirically analysed and what the results were; (2) as empirical tests have traditionally been carried out by universities or research centres, propose techniques applicable by industry to check on the software development technologies they use.

This is a textbook for a course in object-oriented software engineering at advanced undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as for software engineers. It contains more than 120 exercises of diverse complexity.The book discusses fundamental concepts and terminology on object-oriented software development, assuming little background on software engineering, and emphasizes design and maintenance rather than programming.It also presents up-to-date and easily understood methodologies and puts forward a software life cycle model which explicitly encourages reusability during software development and maintenance.

This is an excellent, up-to-date and easy-to-use text on data structures and algorithms that is intended for undergraduates in computer science and information science. The thirteen chapters, written by an international group of experienced teachers, cover the fundamental concepts of algorithms and most of the important data structures as well as the concept of interface design. The book contains many examples and diagrams. Whenever appropriate, program codes are included to facilitate learning.This book is supported by an international group of authors who are experts on data structures and algorithms, through its website at www.cs.pitt.edu/~jung/GrowingBook/, so that both teachers and students can benefit from their expertise.

This volume emphasizes the primary role played by images in computer science. In the last two decades images have replaced written texts; the enormous possibilities of the image language have overcome written language in an ever-more-restricted ambit.An image is better than one thousand words; so it was straightforward to apply visual language in the field of computer science. Nowadays everything that appears on a computer screen is an image, regardless of whether it is a word or a picture. Is it possible to realize an e-learning program without working in terms of images? The answer is undoubtedly no, even if several problems arise in this context: the qualitative and quantitative content of the image we need to use for a specific task; the psychological effect on the user, including the level of attention and the correct perception of the image significance. Most of these problems form the basis of image-understanding techniques.Widespread use of images requires organization of the information in the databank or database, whose dimensions are sometimes so wide as to be too complex to manage; therefore information retrieval techniques arise from this need. The new instruments used in image and/or remote diagnosis, image transmission, the respect of the law in force and the ever-more-relevant image storage capacity required for this task imply the use of techniques of visual language and information retrieval.The proceedings have been selected for coverage in:• Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings® (ISTP® / ISI Proceedings)• Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings (ISTP CDROM version / ISI Proceedings)

There is a strong need for advances in the fields of image indexing and retrieval and visual query languages for multimedia databases. Image technology is facing both classical and novel problems for the organization and filtering of increasingly large amounts of pictorial data. Novel kinds of problems, such as indexing and high-level content-base, accessing to image databases, human interaction with multimedia systems, approaches to multimedial data, biometrics, data mining, computer graphics and augmented reality, have grown into real-life issues.The papers in this proceedings volume relate to the subject matter of multimedia databases and image communication. They offer different approaches which help to keep the field of research lively and interesting.