It is always confusing, and perhaps inconvenient at times, using generic terms that will mean something to everyone but different things to different people. "High Performance" is one of those terms. High Performance can be viewed as synonymous to High Speed or Low Latency or a number of other characteristics. The interesting thing is that such ambiguity can sometimes be useful in a world where focus shifts quite easily from one issue to another as times and needs evolve. Many things have changed since the first HPN conference held in Aachen, Germany in 1987. The focus then was mainly on Media Access Control (MAC) protocols that allow users to share the high bandwidth of optical fiber. FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface) was making its debut with its amazing 100 Mbps speed. ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) and SONET (the Synchronous Optical Network) were beginning to capture our imagination. What could users possibly do with such "high performance"? Share it! After realizing that the real problems had gradually shifted away from the network media to the periphery of the network, focus also began to shift. Adapter design, protocol implementation, and communication systems architecture began to attract our interest. Networking -not Networks-became the hot issue.

Since its original inception back in 1989 the Web has changed into an environment where Web applications range from small-scale information dissemination applications, often developed by non-IT professionals, to large-scale, commercial, enterprise-planning and scheduling applications, developed by multidisciplinary teams of people with diverse skills and backgrounds and using cutting-edge, diverse technologies. As an engineering discipline, Web engineering must provide principles, methodologies and frameworks to help Web professionals and researchers develop applications and manage projects effectively. Mendes and Mosley have selected experts from numerous areas in Web engineering, who contribute chapters where important concepts are presented and then detailed using real industrial case studies. After an introduction into the discipline itself and its intricacies, the contributions range from Web effort estimation, productivity benchmarking and conceptual and model-based application development methodologies, to other important principles such as usability, reliability, testing, process improvement and quality measurement. This is the first book that looks at Web engineering from a measurement perspective. The result is a self-containing, comprehensive overview detailing the role of measurement and metrics within the context of Web engineering. This book is ideal for professionals and researchers who want to know how to use sound principles for the effective management of Web projects, as well as for courses at an advanced undergraduate or graduate level.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Autonomous Intelligent Systems: Agents and Data Mining, AIS-ADM 2007, held in St. Petersburg, Russia in June 2007. The 17 revised full papers and six revised short papers presented together with four invited lectures cover agent and data mining, agent competition and data mining, as well as text mining, semantic Web, and agents.

This book covers the underlying science and application issues related to aggregation operators, focusing on tools used in practical applications that involve numerical information. It will thus be required reading for engineers, statisticians and computer scientists of all kinds. Starting with detailed introductions to information fusion and integration, measurement and probability theory, fuzzy sets, and functional equations, the authors then cover numerous topics in detail, including the synthesis of judgements, fuzzy measures, weighted means and fuzzy integrals.