The textbook aims to present general relativity and modern cosmology in a friendly form suitable for advanced undergraduates. The text begins with a self-contained introduction to the theory of manifolds and then develops the tools needed to understand curved spaces and curved spacetimes. Special relativity can then be understood in a geometrical context, bypassing some of the difficulties students have when encountering relativistic effects (e.g. time dilation and length contraction) for the first time. The theory of curvature and its effects leads to the Einstein field equations and its classic tests in the precession of Mercury and the deflection of starlight.The second part of the book covers modern cosmology, starting with the evolution equations for the expansion of the universe. The microwave background, evidence for dark matter, and the clustering of galaxies are examined in detail.

The proceedings of this workshop include invited lectures by Professors Stan Gielen and Lotfi Zadeh. The workshop was the last to be organised by the late Professor Eduardo R. Cainello, known worldwide for his fundamental contributions to cybernetics and theoretical physics, and to whom this volume is dedicated.

This volume contains the proceedings of the seventh Italian Workshop on Neural Nets WIRN VIETRI '95, organized by the International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies 'E R Caianiello' (IIASS) and Società Italiana Reti Neuroniche (SIREN).The spectrum of contributors and participants covers the activity of Italian research in the field. The papers of the two invited speakers, M J Jordan ('Sigmoid Belief Networks') and E Oja ('Principal and Independent Component Analysis'), and the two reviews ('Fast Learning Algorithms for Feedforward NN' and 'ANN Ensembles: a Bayesian Standpoint') complete the highly qualified contents of the volume.

Due to increasing globalization and the explosion of media available on the Internet, computer techniques to organize, classify, and find desired media are becoming more and more relevant. One such technique to extract semantic information from multimedia data sources is Multimedia Information Retrieval (MMIR or MIR). MIR is a broad area covering both structural issues and intelligent content analysis and retrieval. These aspects must be integrated into a seamless whole, which involves expertise from a wide variety of fields. This book presents recent applications of MIR for content-based image retrieval, bioinformation analysis and processing, forensic multimedia retrieval techniques, and audio and music classification.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the 14th Italian Workshop on Neural Networks, WIRN VIETRI 2003, held in Vietri sul Mare, Italy in June 2003. The 41 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and improved during two rounds of selection and refereeing. The papers are organized in topical sections on models for neural computation; architectures and algorithms; image and signal processing; applications; bioinformatics and statistics; and formats of knowledge: words, images, and narratives.