Deep into the 21st century, the line between man and machine has been inexorably blurred. In this rapidly converging landscape, cyborg super-agent Major Motoko Kusanagi is charged to track down the most dangerous terrorists and cybercriminals, including "ghost hackers," capable of exploiting the human/machine interface by reprogramming human minds to become puppets to carry out their criminal ends.

The definitive history of the most influential cyberpunk anime of all time! This beautiful, color hardcover guide begins with the seminal feature that inspired The Matrix and many other films, comics, and novels, and ends with the live-action Hollywood adaptation starring Scarlett Johansson. Follow the franchise that made manga master Shirow Masamune, legendary director Mamoru Oshii, and the studio Production I.G the legends they are today. In-depth interviews, stunning concept art, and tales of behind-the-scenes triumphs and near-tragedies from the 22-year history of The Ghost in the Shell. Begin with the original anime, which was released in Japan in 1995 and subsequently took the West by storm, through the award-winning sequel Innocence and the global smash hit TV adaptation Stand Alone Complex, all the way up to 2017, with the release of the new live-action film from Paramount Pictures.

A covert mission in Shanghai reunites Kusanagi with a wartime rival amid shifting loyalties. The infiltration of an anti-cyberization cult calls for Section 9’s most “human” members to do things the old-fashioned way. A deep dive into the mind of a criminal forces Kusanagi to question the nature of imagination – and her own identity. The stories in Global Neural Network bring a 21st-century perspective to its questions of human identity and the border between mind and machine that made The Ghost in the Shell one of the most revered manga of all time, and unleash top Western comics artists on eye-popping action scenes starring Kusanagi, Batou, Togusa, Aramaki, and all the members of Section 9! Original stories by: * Alex de Campi (Twisted Romance) & Giannis Milonogiannis (Prophet) * Brenden Fletcher (Gotham Academy, Motor Crush) & LRNZ (Golem) * Genevieve Valentine (Mechanique, Icon), & Brent Schoonover (The Astonishing Ant-Man) * Max Gladstone (the Craft Sequence) & David López (All-New Wolverine)

Deep into the 21st century, the line between man and machine has been inexorably blurred as humans rely on the enhancement of mechanical implants, and robots are upgraded with human tissue. In this rapidly converging technoscape, the cover-ops agents of Section 9 are charged to track and crack the most dangerous terrorists, cybercriminals, and ghost hackers the digital future has to offer. Whether dealing with remote-controlled corpses, lethally malfunctioning micromachines, or cop-killer cyborgs, Section 9 is determined to serve and protect…and reboot some cybercrook butt! Ghost in the Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor presents for the first time in America the "lost" Ghost in the Shell stories, created by Shirow Masamune after completing work on the original Ghost in the Shell manga and prior to his tour-de-force, Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface, but never collected until now. Focusing on Section 9 agents in their daily battle against technocrime, Human-Error Processor has all the mind-twisting cybermadness you’ve come to expect from Ghost in the Shell but set in a more police-procedural context with action and suspense galore. Features the stories "Fat Cat," "Drive Slave," "Mines of Mind," and "Lost Past."

Many existing information retrieval (IR) systems are surprisingly ineffective at finding documents relevant to particular topics. Traditional systems are extremely brittle, failing to retrieve relevant documents unless the user's exact search string is found. They support only the most primitive trial-and-error interaction with their users and are also static. Even systems with so-called "relevance feedback" are incapable of learning from experience with users. SCALIR (a Symbolic and Connectionist Approach to Legal Information Retrieval) -- a system for assisting research on copyright law -- has been designed to address these problems. By using a hybrid of symbolic and connectionist artificial intelligence techniques, SCALIR develops a conceptual representation of document relationships without explicit knowledge engineering. SCALIR's direct manipulation interface encourages users to browse through the space of documents. It then uses these browsing patterns to improve its performance by modifying its representation, resulting in a communal repository of expertise for all of its users. SCALIR's representational scheme also mirrors the hybrid nature of the Anglo-American legal system. While certain legal concepts are precise and rule-like, others -- which legal scholars call "open-textured" -- are subject to interpretation. The meaning of legal text is established through the parallel and distributed precedence-based judicial appeal system. SCALIR represents documents and terms as nodes in a network, capturing the duality of the legal system by using symbolic (semantic network) and connectionist links. The former correspond to a priori knowledge such as the fact that one case overturned another on appeal. The latter correspond to statistical inferences such as the relevance of a term describing a case. SCALIR's text corpus includes all federal cases on copyright law. The hybrid representation also suggests a way to resolve the apparent incompatibility between the two prominent paradigms in artificial intelligence, the "classical" symbol-manipulation approach and the neurally-inspired connectionist approach. Part of the book focuses on a characterization of the two paradigms and an investigation of when and how -- as in the legal research domain -- they can be effectively combined.