The improvement of crop species has been a basic pursuit since cultivation began thousands of years ago. To feed an ever increasing world population will require a great increase in food production. Wheat, corn, rice, potato and few others are expected to lead as the most important crops in the world. Enormous efforts are made all over the...

We make complex decisions every day, requiring trust in many different entities for different reasons. These decisions are not made by combining many isolated trust evaluations. Many interlocking factors play a role, each dynamically impacting the others.  In this brief, "trust context" is defined as the system level...

Abstraction is a fundamental mechanism underlying both human and artificial perception, representation of knowledge, reasoning and learning. This mechanism plays a crucial role in many disciplines, notably Computer Programming, Natural and Artificial Vision, Complex Systems, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Art, and Cognitive...

This book covers the use and development of software for astronomy. It describes the control systems used to point the telescope and operate its cameras and spectrographs, as well as the web-based tools used to plan those observations. In addition, the book also covers the analysis and archiving of astronomical data once it has been acquired....

“Weird Worlds” is the third book in David Seargent’s “Weird” series. This book assumes a basic level of astronomical understanding and concentrates on the “odd and interesting” aspects of planetary bodies, including asteroids and moons. From our viewpoint here on Earth, this work features the most...

An Introduction to Statistical Learning provides an accessible overview of the field of statistical learning, an essential toolset for making sense of the vast and complex data sets that have emerged in fields ranging from biology to finance to marketing to astrophysics in the past twenty years. This book presents some of the most...

In the treatment of chronic diseases, wireless Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) are commonly used to communicate with an outside programmer (reader). Such communication raises serious security concerns, such as the ability for hackers to gain access to a patient’s medical records. This brief provides an overview of such attacks and...

Finance and energy markets have been an active scientific field for some time, even though the development and applications of sophisticated quantitative methods in these areas are relatively new―and referred to in a broader context as energy finance. Energy finance is often viewed as a branch of mathematical finance, yet this area...

The Analytic Network Process (ANP), developed by Thomas Saaty in his work on multicriteria decision making, applies network structures with dependence and feedback to complex decision making. This new edition of Decision Making with the Analytic Network Process is a selection of the latest applications of ANP to economic, social and...

This book provides a hands-on, application-oriented guide to the language and methodology of both SystemVerilog Assertions and SytemVerilog Functional Coverage.  Readers will benefit from the step-by-step approach to functional hardware verification, which will enable them to uncover hidden and hard to find bugs, point directly to the...

This book systematically presents a comprehensive framework and effective techniques for in-depth analysis, clear design procedure, and efficient implementation of diagnosis and prognosis algorithms for hybrid systems. It offers an overview of the fundamentals of diagnosis\prognosis and hybrid bond graph modeling. This book also describes...