Heterogeneous Computing: Hardware and Software Perspectives (ACM Books)

If you look around you will find that all computer systems, from your portable devices to the strongest supercomputers, are heterogeneous in nature. The most obvious heterogeneity is the existence of computing nodes of different capabilities (e.g. multicore, GPUs, FPGAs, ...). But there are also other heterogeneity factors that exist in computing systems, like the memory system components, interconnection, etc. The main reason for these different types of heterogeneity is to have good performance with power efficiency. Heterogeneous computing results in both challenges and opportunities. This book discusses both. It shows that we need to deal with these challenges at all levels of the computing stack: from algorithms all the way to process technology. We discuss the topic of heterogeneous computing from different angles: hardware challenges, current hardware state-of-the-art, software issues, how to make the best use of the current heterogeneous systems, and what lies ahead. The aim of this book is to introduce the big picture of heterogeneous computing. Whether you are a hardware designer or a software developer, you need to know how the pieces of the puzzle fit together. The main goal is to bring researchers and engineers to the forefront of the research frontier in the new era that started a few years ago and is expected to continue for decades. We believe that academics, researchers, practitioners, and students will benefit from this book and will be prepared to tackle the big wave of heterogeneous computing that is here to stay.

Computers & Technology

Zahran, Mohamed

Programming

ACM Books

Conversational UX Design: A Practitioner's Guide to the Natural Conversation Framework (ACM Books)

With recent advances in natural language understanding techniques and far-field microphone arrays, natural language interfaces, such as voice assistants and chatbots, are emerging as a popular new way to interact with computers.
They have made their way out of the industry research labs and into the pockets, desktops, cars and living rooms of the general public. But although such interfaces recognize bits of natural language, and even voice input, they generally lack conversational competence, or the ability to engage in natural conversation. Today’s platforms provide sophisticated tools for analyzing language and retrieving knowledge, but they fail to provide adequate support for modeling interaction. The user experience (UX) designer or software developer must figure out how a human conversation is organized, usually relying on commonsense rather than on formal knowledge. Fortunately, practitioners can rely on conversation science.
This book adapts formal knowledge from the field of Conversation Analysis (CA) to the design of natural language interfaces. It outlines the Natural Conversation Framework (NCF), developed at IBM Research, a systematic framework for designing interfaces that work like natural conversation. The NCF consists of four main components: 1) an interaction model of “expandable sequences,” 2) a corresponding content format, 3) a pattern language with 100 generic UX patterns and 4) a navigation method of six basic user actions. The authors introduce UX designers to a new way of thinking about user experience design in the context of conversational interfaces, including a new vocabulary, new principles and new interaction patterns. User experience designers and graduate students in the HCI field as well as developers and conversation analysis students should find this book of interest.

MOORE, Robert J.

Arar, Raphael

Computer Science

Data Cleaning

Data quality is one of the most important problems in data management, since dirty data often leads to inaccurate data analytics results and incorrect business decisions. Poor data across businesses and the U.S. government are reported to cost trillions of dollars a year. Multiple surveys show that dirty data is the most common barrier faced by data scientists. Not surprisingly, developing effective and efficient data cleaning solutions is challenging and is rife with deep theoretical and engineering problems. This book is about data cleaning, which is used to refer to all kinds of tasks and activities to detect and repair errors in the data. Rather than focus on a particular data cleaning task, we give an overview of the end-to-end data cleaning process, describing various error detection and repair methods, and attempt to anchor these proposals with multiple taxonomies and views. Specifically, we cover four of the most common and important data cleaning tasks, namely, outlier detection, data transformation, error repair (including imputing missing values), and data deduplication. Furthermore, due to the increasing popularity and applicability of machine learning techniques, we include a chapter that specifically explores how machine learning techniques are used for data cleaning, and how data cleaning is used to improve machine learning models. This book is intended to serve as a useful reference for researchers and practitioners who are interested in the area of data quality and data cleaning. It can also be used as a textbook for a graduate course. Although we aim at covering state-of-the-art algorithms and techniques, we recognize that data cleaning is still an active field of research and therefore provide future directions of research whenever appropriate.

Ilyas, Ihab F.

Chu, Xu

Networking & Cloud Computing

Providing Sound Foundations for Cryptography: On the work of Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali (ACM Books)

Concurrency: The Works of Leslie Lamport (ACM Books)

This book is a celebration of Leslie Lamport's work on concurrency, interwoven in four-and-a-half decades of an evolving industry: from the introduction of the first personal computer to an era when parallel and distributed multiprocessors are abundant.
His works lay formal foundations for concurrent computations executed by interconnected computers. Some of the algorithms have become standard engineering practice for fault tolerant distributed computing – distributed systems that continue to function correctly despite failures of individual components. He also developed a substantial body of work on the formal specification and verification of concurrent systems, and has contributed to the development of automated tools applying these methods.
Part I consists of technical chapters of the book and a biography. The technical chapters of this book present a retrospective on Lamport's original ideas from experts in the field. Through this lens, it portrays their long-lasting impact. The chapters cover timeless notions Lamport introduced: the Bakery algorithm, atomic shared registers and sequential consistency; causality and logical time; Byzantine Agreement; state machine replication and Paxos; temporal logic of actions (TLA). The professional biography tells of Lamport's career, providing the context in which his work arose and broke new grounds, and discusses LaTeX – perhaps Lamport’s most influential contribution outside the field of concurrency. This chapter gives a voice to the people behind the achievements, notably Lamport himself, and additionally the colleagues around him, who inspired, collaborated, and helped him drive worldwide impact. Part II consists of a selection of Leslie Lamport's most influential papers.
This book touches on a lifetime of contributions by Leslie Lamport to the field of concurrency and on the extensive influence he had on people working in the field. It will be of value to historians of science, and to researchers and students who work in the area of concurrency and who are interested to read about the work of one of the most influential researchers in this field.

Computing and the National Science Foundation, 1950-2016: Building a Foundation for Modern Computing (ACM Books)

This organizational history relates the role of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the development of modern computing.
Drawing upon new and existing oral histories, extensive use of NSF documents, and the experience of two of the authors as senior managers, this book describes how NSF’s programmatic activities originated and evolved to become the primary source of funding for fundamental research in computing and information technologies.
The book traces how NSF's support has provided facilities and education for computing usage by all scientific disciplines, aided in institution and professional community building, supported fundamental research in computer science and allied disciplines, and led the efforts to broaden participation in computing by all segments of society.
Today, the research and infrastructure facilitated by NSF computing programs are significant economic drivers of American society and industry. For example, NSF supported work that led to the first widely-used web browser, Netscape; sponsored the creation of algorithms at the core of the Google search engine; facilitated the growth of the public Internet; and funded research on the scientific basis for countless other applications and technologies. NSF has advanced the development of human capital and ideas for future advances in computing and its applications.
This account is the first comprehensive coverage of NSF's role in the extraordinary growth and expansion of modern computing and its use. It will appeal to historians of computing, policy makers and leaders in government and academia, and individuals interested in the history and development of computing and the NSF.

Aspray, William

Freeman, Peter A.

Adrion, W. Richards

Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modeling for Linked Data, RDFS, and OWL (ACM Books)

Enterprises have made amazing advances by taking advantage of data about their business to provide predictions and understanding of their customers, markets, and products. But as the world of business becomes more interconnected and global, enterprise data is no long a monolith; it is just a part of a vast web of data. Managing data on a world-wide scale is a key capability for any business today. The Semantic Web treats data as a distributed resource on the scale of the World Wide Web, and incorporates features to address the challenges of massive data distribution as part of its basic design. The aim of the first two editions was to motivate the Semantic Web technology stack from end-to-end; to describe not only what the Semantic Web standards are and how they work, but also what their goals are and why they were designed as they are. It tells a coherent story from beginning to end of how the standards work to manage a world-wide distributed web of knowledge in a meaningful way. The third edition builds on this foundation to bring Semantic Web practice to enterprise. Fabien Gandon joins Dean Allemang and Jim Hendler, bringing with him years of experience in global linked data, to open up the story to a modern view of global linked data. While the overall story is the same, the examples have been brought up to date and applied in a modern setting, where enterprise and global data come together as a living, linked network of data. Also included with the third edition, all of the data sets and queries are available online for study and experimentation at data.world/swwo.

Gandon, Fabien

Allemang, Dean

Hendler, Jim

Code Nation: Personal Computing and the Learn to Program Movement in America (ACM Books)

Code Nation explores the rise of software development as a social, cultural, and technical phenomenon in American history. The movement germinated in government and university labs during the 1950s, gained momentum through corporate and counterculture experiments in the 1960s and 1970s, and became a broad-based computer literacy movement in the 1980s. As personal computing came to the fore, learning to program was transformed by a groundswell of popular enthusiasm, exciting new platforms, and an array of commercial practices that have been further amplified by distributed computing and the Internet. The resulting society can be depicted as a "Code Nation"--a globally-connected world that is saturated with computer technology and enchanted by software and its creation. Code Nation is a new history of personal computing that emphasizes the technical and business challenges that software developers faced when building applications for CP/M, MS-DOS, UNIX, Microsoft Windows, the Apple Macintosh, and other emerging platforms. It is a popular history of computing that explores the experiences of novice computer users, tinkerers, hackers, and power users, as well as the ideals and aspirations of leading computer scientists, engineers, educators, and entrepreneurs. Computer book and magazine publishers also played important, if overlooked, roles in the diffusion of new technical skills, and this book highlights their creative work and influence. Code Nation offers a "behind-the-scenes" look at application and operating-system programming practices, the diversity of historic computer languages, the rise of user communities, early attempts to market PC software, and the origins of "enterprise" computing systems. Code samples and over 80 historic photographs support the text. The book concludes with an assessment of contemporary efforts to teach computational thinking to young people.

Halvorson, Michael J.

Event Mining for Explanatory Modeling (ACM Books)

This book introduces the concept of Event Mining for building explanatory models from analyses of correlated data. Such a model may be used as the basis for predictions and corrective actions. The idea is to create, via an iterative process, a model that explains causal relationships in the form of structural and temporal patterns in the data. The first phase is the data-driven process of hypothesis formation, requiring the analysis of large amounts of data to find strong candidate hypotheses. The second phase is hypothesis testing, wherein a domain expert's knowledge and judgment is used to test and modify the candidate hypotheses. The book is intended as a primer on Event Mining for data-enthusiasts and information professionals interested in employing these event-based data analysis techniques in diverse applications. The reader is introduced to frameworks for temporal knowledge representation and reasoning, as well as temporal data mining and pattern discovery. Also discussed are the design principles of event mining systems. The approach is reified by the presentation of an event mining system called EventMiner, a computational framework for building explanatory models. The book contains case studies of using EventMiner in asthma risk management and an architecture for the objective self. The text can be used by researchers interested in harnessing the value of heterogeneous big data for designing explanatory event-based models in diverse application areas such as healthcare, biological data analytics, predictive maintenance of systems, computer networks, and business intelligence.

Jain, Ramesh

Jalali, Laleh

About the Author Birgit Lugrin (maiden name Birgit Endrass) is a professor for media informatics at the University of Würzburg, Germany. Since her first contact with a socially interactive agent (the Greta agent) in 2003,Catherine Pelachaud is Director of research at CNRS in the ISIR Laboratory, Sorbonne University. SheDavid Traum is the Director for Natural Language Research at the Institute for Creative Technologies Product Description The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents provides a comprehensive overview of the research fields of Embodied Conversational Agents, Intelligent Virtual Agents, and Social Robotics. Socially Interactive Agents (SIAs), whether virtually or physically embodied, are autonomous agents that are able to perceive an environment including people or other agents, reason, decide how to interact, and express attitudes such as emotions, engagement, or empathy. They are capable of interacting with people and one another in a socially intelligent manner using multimodal communicative behaviors, with the goal to support humans in various domains.Written by international experts in their respective fields, the book summarizes research in the many important research communities pertinent for SIAs, while discussing current challenges and future directions. The handbook provides easy access to modeling and studying SIAs for researchers and students, and aims at further bridging the gap between the research communities involved.In two volumes, the book clearly structures the vast body of research. The first volume starts by introducing what is involved in SIAs research, in particular research methodologies and ethical implications of developing SIAs. It further examines research on appearance and behavior, focusing on multimodality. Finally, social cognition for SIAs is investigated using different theoretical models and phenomena such as theory of mind or pro-sociality. The second volume starts with perspectives on interaction, examined from different angles such as interaction in social space, group interaction, or long-term interaction. It also includes an extensive overview summarizing research and systems of human–agent platforms and of some of the major application areas of SIAs such as education, aging support, autism, and games.

The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents: 20 Years of Research on Embodied Conversational Agents, Intelligent Virtual Agents, and Social Robotics Volume 1: Methods, Behavior, Cognition (Acm Books)

Lugrin, Birgit

Pelachaud, Catherine

Traum, David

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