Now, for the first time, publication of the landmark work inbackpropagation! Scientists, engineers, statisticians, operationsresearchers, and other investigators involved in neural networkshave long sought direct access to Paul Werbos's groundbreaking,much-cited 1974 Harvard doctoral thesis, The Roots ofBackpropagation, which laid the foundation of backpropagation. Now,with the publication of its full text, these practitioners can gostraight to the original material and gain a deeper, practicalunderstanding of this unique mathematical approach to socialstudies and related fields. In addition, Werbos has provided threemore recent research papers, which were inspired by his originalwork, and a new guide to the field. Originally written for readerswho lacked any knowledge of neural nets, The Roots ofBackpropagation firmly established both its historical andcontinuing significance as it: * Demonstrates the ongoing value and new potential ofbackpropagation * Creates a wealth of sound mathematical tools useful acrossdisciplines * Sets the stage for the emerging area of fast automaticdifferentiation * Describes new designs for forecasting and control which exploitbackpropagation * Unifies concepts from Freud, Jung, biologists, and others into anew mathematical picture of the human mind and how it works * Certifies the viability of Deutsch's model of nationalism as apredictive tool--as well as the utility of extensions of thiscentral paradigm "What a delight it was to see Paul Werbos rediscover Freud'sversion of 'back-propagation.' Freud was adamant (in The Projectfor a Scientific Psychology) that selective learning could onlytake place if the presynaptic neuron was as influenced as is thepostsynaptic neuron during excitation. Such activation of bothsides of the contact barrier (Freud's name for the synapse) wasaccomplished by reducing synaptic resistance by the absorption of'energy' at the synaptic membranes. Not bad for 1895! But Werbos1993 is even better." --Karl H. Pribram Professor Emeritus,Stanford University

"This is the first book that renders a thorough discussion of systems science. It draws on material from an extensive collection of external sources, including several other books and a special library collection complete with videotape empirical evidence of applicability of the theory to a wide variety of circumstances. This is essential because systems science must be responsive to diverse human situations of the widest difficulty, and it must fill the void that the specific sciences cannot fill, because these sciences are insensitive to the necessities of reconciling disparate views of multiple observers, and incorporating local conditions in hypotheses that precede inductive explorations."--BOOK JACKET.

A world list of books in the English language.

This volume investigates our ability to capture, and then apply, expertise. In recent years, expertise has come to be regarded as an increasingly valuable and surprisingly elusive resource. Experts, who were the sole active dispensers of certain kinds of knowledge in the days before AI, have themselves become the objects of empirical inquiry, in which their knowledge is elicited and studied -- by knowledge engineers, experimental psychologists, applied psychologists, or other experts -- involved in the development of expert systems. This book achieves a marriage between experimentalists, applied scientists, and theoreticians who deal with expertise. It envisions the benefits to society of an advanced technology for capturing and disseminating the knowledge and skills of the best corporate managers, the most seasoned pilots, and the most renowned medical diagnosticians. This book should be of interest to psychologists as well as to knowledge engineers who are "out in the trenches" developing expert systems, and anyone pondering the nature of expertise and the question of how it can be elicited and studied scientifically. The book's scope and the pivotal concepts that it elucidates and appraises, as well as the extensive categorized bibliographies it includes, make this volume a landmark in the field of expert systems and AI as well as the field of applied experimental psychology.

In the last few years we have observed an explosive growth of multimedia computing, communication and applications. This revolution is transforming the way people live, work, and interact with each other, and is impacting the way business, government services, education, entertainment and healthcare are operating. Yet, several issues related to modeling, specification, analysis and design of distributed multimedia database systems and multimedia information retrieval are still challenging to both researchers and praclitioners. Distributed Multimedia Databases: Techniques and Applications points out these challenges and provides valuable suggestions toward the necessary solutions, by focusing on multimedia database techniques.