This is the first book to offer a concentrated look at the work of the Düsseldorf photographer. His photographs develop into a conglomerate of self-organising biological material and a topography constructed out of itself.

Edited by Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schepf. Essays by Peter J. Bentley, Erkki Huhtamo, Friedrich Kittler and Pierre Levy.

This book describes how a confused decision maker, who wishes to make a reasonable and responsible choice among alternatives, can systematically probe their thoughts and feelings in order to make the critically important trade-offs between incommensurable objectives.

Data can be extremely valuable if we are able to extract information from them. This is why multivariate data analysis is essential for business and science. This book offers an easy-to-understand introduction to the most relevant methods of multivariate data analysis. It is strictly application-oriented, requires little knowledge of mathematics and statistics, demonstrates the procedures with numerical examples and illustrates each method via a case study solved with IBM’s statistical software package SPSS. Extensions of the methods and links to other procedures are discussed and recommendations for application are given. An introductory chapter presents the basic ideas of the multivariate methods covered in the book and refreshes statistical basics which are relevant to all methods. Contents Introduction to empirical data analysis Regression analysis Analysis of variance Discriminant analysis Logistic regression Contingency analysis Factor analysis Cluster analysis Conjoint analysis The original German version is now available in its 16th edition. In 2015, this book was honored by the Federal Association of German Market and Social Researchers as “the textbook that has shaped market research and practice in German-speaking countries”. A Chinese version is available in its 3rd edition. On the website www.multivariate-methods.info, the authors further analyze the data with Excel and R and provide additional material to facilitate the understanding of the different multivariate methods. In addition, interactive flashcards are available to the reader for reviewing selected focal points. Download the Springer Nature Flashcards App and use exclusive content to test your knowledge.

Model-Driven Software Development (MDSD) is currently a highly regarded development paradigm among developers and researchers. With the advent of OMG's MDA and Microsoft's Software Factories, the MDSD approach has moved to the centre of the programmer's attention, becoming the focus of conferences such as OOPSLA, JAOO and OOP. MDSD is about using domain-specific languages to create models that express application structure or behaviour in an efficient and domain-specific way. These models are subsequently transformed into executable code by a sequence of model transformations. This practical guide for software architects and developers is peppered with practical examples and extensive case studies. International experts deliver: * A comprehensive overview of MDSD and how it relates to industry standards such as MDA and Software Factories. * Technical details on meta modeling, DSL construction, model-to-model and model-to-code transformations, and software architecture. * Invaluable insight into the software development process, plus engineering issues such as versioning, testing and product line engineering. * Essential management knowledge covering economic and organizational topics, from a global perspective. Get started and benefit from some practical support along the way!

Pattern-Directed Inference Systems provides a description of the design and implementation of pattern-directed inference systems (PDIS) for various applications. The book also addresses the theoretical significance of PDIS for artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. The book is divided into eight sections. The introduction provides a brief overview of pattern-directed inference systems, including a historical perspective, a review of basic concepts, and a survey of work in this area. Subsequent chapters address topics on architecture and design, methods for accessing and controlling rule based systems, methods for obtaining adaptive behavior via rule-based systems and cognitive modeling. Constructing models of human information processing, natural language understanding and multilevel systems and complexity are described as well. The last section discusses the earlier chapters in the book and provides a unifying set of principles for the PDIS formalism. Computer scientists, psychologists, engineers, and researchers in artificial intelligence will find the book very informative.

The purpose of computer vision is to make computers capable of understanding environments from visual information. Computer vision has been an interesting theme in the field of artificial intelligence. It involves a variety of intelligent information processing: both pattern processing for extraction of meaningful symbols from visual information and symbol processing for determining what the symbols represent. The term "3D computer vision" is used if visual information has to be interpreted as three-dimensional scenes. 3D computer vision is more challenging because objects are seen from limited directions and some objects are occluded by others. In 1980, the author wrote a book "Computer Vision" in Japanese to introduce an interesting new approach to visual information processing developed so far. Since then computer vision has made remarkable progress: various rangefinders have become available, new methods have been developed to obtain 3D informa tion, knowledge representation frameworks have been proposed, geometric models which were developed in CAD/CAM have been used for computer vision, and so on. The progress in computer vision technology has made it possible to understand more complex 3 D scenes. There is an increasing demand for 3D computer vision. In factories, for example, automatic assembly and inspection can be realized with fewer con straints than conventional ones which employ two-dimensional computer vision.