This book results from many years of teaching an upper division course on communication networks in the EECS department at the University of California, Berkeley. It is motivated by the perceived need for an easily accessible textbook that puts emphasis on the core concepts behind current and next generation networks. After an overview of how today's Internet works and a discussion of the main principles behind its architecture, we discuss the key ideas behind Ethernet, WiFi networks,...
Meaning is a fundamental concept in Natural Language Processing (NLP), in the tasks of both Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG). This is because the aims of these fields are to build systems that understand what people mean when they speak or write, and that can produce linguistic strings that successfully express to people the intended content. In order for NLP to scale beyond partial, task-specific solutions, researchers in these fields must be informed...
The cost of fixing software design flaws after the completion of a software product is so high that it is vital to come up with ways to detect software design flaws in the early stages of software development, for instance, during the software requirements, the analysis activity, or during software design, before coding starts. It is not uncommon that software requirements are ambiguous or contradict each other. Ambiguity is exacerbated by the fact that software requirements are typically...
The Handbook of Multimodal-Multisensor Interfaces provides the first authoritative resource on what has become the dominant paradigm for new computer interfaces-user input involving new media (speech, multi-touch, hand and body gestures, facial expressions, writing) embedded in multimodal-multisensor interfaces. This three-volume handbook is written by international experts and pioneers in the field. It provides a textbook, reference, and technology roadmap for professionals working in this...
The first course in software engineering is the most critical. Education must start from an understanding of the heart of software development, from familiar ground that is common to all software development endeavors. This book is an in-depth introduction to software engineering that uses a systematic, universal kernel to teach the essential elements of all software engineering methods. This kernel, Essence, is a vocabulary for defining methods and practices. Essence was envisioned and...
Nash equilibrium is the central solution concept in Game Theory. Since Nash’s original paper in 1951, it has found countless applications in modeling strategic behavior of traders in markets, (human) drivers and (electronic) routers in congested networks, nations in nuclear disarmament negotiations, and more. A decade ago, the relevance of this solution concept was called into question by computer scientists, who proved (under appropriate complexity assumptions) that computing a Nash...
This book is a celebration of Leslie Lamport's work on concurrency, interwoven in four-and-a-half decades of an evolving industry: from the introduction of the first personal computer to an era when parallel and distributed multiprocessors are abundant. His works lay formal foundations for concurrent computations executed by interconnected computers. Some of the algorithms have become standard engineering practice for fault tolerant distributed computing – distributed systems that...
With recent advances in natural language understanding techniques and far-field microphone arrays, natural language interfaces, such as voice assistants and chatbots, are emerging as a popular new way to interact with computers. They have made their way out of the industry research labs and into the pockets, desktops, cars and living rooms of the general public. But although such interfaces recognize bits of natural language, and even voice input, they generally lack conversational competence,...