Growing up in the shadow of one of Terra’s champions was a comfortable place to be. Padana was the third child of the Empress Amanda Tyrell of the Haldis Imperium, and she was a very requested bride. Being a class zero like her mother, Padana has nothing to offer the next generation. Any child she bears will breed true to the father. This attracts a certain type of suitor who has every interest in her position as princess and none as her descendant of a champion. Padana finds this annoying. Yomin is the heir to an empire, a guardian, and a descendant of a class zero himself. It is a requirement for his line that the aspects of Hredu breed true. Getting a portrait from the artist Rhoda had given him a woman to find, and locating her in the Haldis Imperium had meant some high-level negotiation. Fortunately, he had just met an excellent negotiator.

Point-to-Point Communication. User-Defined Datatypes and Packing. Collective Communications. Communicators. Process Topologies. Environmental Management. The MPI Profiling Interface.

Object-oriented database management systems (OODBMSs) have generated significant excitement in the database community in the last decade. This interest stems from a real need for data management support for what are called "advanced application areas" that are not well-served by relational technology. The case for object-oriented technology has been made on three fronts. First is the data modeling requirements of the new applications. Some of the more important shortcomings of the relational systems in meeting the requirements of these applications include: 1. Relational systems deal with a single object type: a relation. A relation is used to model different real-world objects, but the semantics of this association is not part of the database. Furthermore, the attributes of a relation may come only from simple and fixed data type domains (numeric, character, and, sometimes, date types). Advanced applications require explicit storage and manipulation of more abstract types (e.g., images, design documents) and the ability for the users to define their own application-specific types. Therefore, a rich type system supporting user defined abstract types is required. 2. The relational model structures data in a relatively simple and flat manner. Non traditional applications require more complex object structures with nested objects (e.g., a vehicle object containing an engine object).

Based on lectures held at the 8th edition of the series of summer schools in Villa de Leyva since 1999, this book presents an introduction to topics of current interest at the interface of geometry, algebra, analysis, topology and theoretical physics. It is aimed at graduate students and researchers in physics or mathematics, and offers an introduction to the topics discussed in the two weeks of the summer school: operator algebras, conformal field theory, black holes, relativistic fluids, Lie groupoids and Lie algebroids, renormalization methods, spectral geometry and index theory for pseudo-differential operators.

This book can be viewed as a first attempt to systematically develop an algebraic theory of nonlinear differential equations, both ordinary and partial. The main goal of the author was to construct a theory of elimination, which ``will reduce the existence problem for a finite or infinite system of algebraic differential equations to the application of the implicit function theorem taken with Cauchy's theorem in the ordinary case and Riquier's in the partial.'' In his 1934 review of the book, J. M. Thomas called it ``concise, readable, original, precise, and stimulating'', and his words still remain true. A more fundamental and complete account of further developments of the algebraic approach to differential equations is given in Ritt's treatise Differential Algebra, written almost 20 years after the present work (Colloquium Publications, Vol. 33, American Mathematical Society, 1950).

Rule-basedevolutionaryonlinelearningsystems,oftenreferredtoasMichig- style learning classi?er systems (LCSs), were proposed nearly thirty years ago (Holland, 1976; Holland, 1977) originally calling them cognitive systems. LCSs combine the strength of reinforcement learning with the generali- tion capabilities of genetic algorithms promising a ?exible, online general- ing, solely reinforcement dependent learning system. However, despite several initial successful applications of LCSs and their interesting relations with a- mal learning and cognition, understanding of the systems remained somewhat obscured. Questions concerning learning complexity or convergence remained unanswered. Performance in di?erent problem types, problem structures, c- ceptspaces,andhypothesisspacesstayednearlyunpredictable. Thisbookhas the following three major objectives: (1) to establish a facetwise theory - proachforLCSsthatpromotessystemanalysis,understanding,anddesign;(2) to analyze, evaluate, and enhance the XCS classi?er system (Wilson, 1995) by the means of the facetwise approach establishing a fundamental XCS learning theory; (3) to identify both the major advantages of an LCS-based learning approach as well as the most promising potential application areas. Achieving these three objectives leads to a rigorous understanding of LCS functioning that enables the successful application of LCSs to diverse problem types and problem domains. The quantitative analysis of XCS shows that the inter- tive, evolutionary-based online learning mechanism works machine learning competitively yielding a low-order polynomial learning complexity. Moreover, the facetwise analysis approach facilitates the successful design of more - vanced LCSs including Holland’s originally envisioned cognitive systems. Martin V.

The UML (Unified Modelling Language) has become the industry standard for modelling software-intensive systems. This fully revised edition, which looks at several applications using the UML as part of a generic approach to aid many kinds of problem-solving and information modelling, coincides with the release of UML Version 2 by the Object Management Group and covers the significant changes that have occured since its release. The author also discusses life-cycle management, examining the way the UML can be used to control and manage projects and the UML systems engineering profile.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences, ISCIS 2004, held in Kemer-Antalya, Turkey in October 2004. The 99 revised full papers presented together with an invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 335 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on artificial intelligence and machine learning, computer graphics and user interfaces, computer networks and security, computer vision and image processing, database systems, modeling and performance evaluation, natural language processing, parallel and distributed computing, real-time control applications, software engineering and programming, and theory of computing.