This document has been prepared using the L a T E X system. We thank Donald Knuth for T E X, Leslie Lamport for L a T E X, and Jan van der Steen at CWI for online help. Some figures were prepared by John Tromp using the xpic program. The London Mathematical Society kindly gave permission to reproduce a long extract by A.M. Turing. The Indian Statistical Institute, through the editor of Sankhy¯a, kindly gave permission to quote A.N. Kolmogorov. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support by NSF Grant DCR8606366, ONR Grant N00014-85-k-0445, ARO Grant DAAL03-86-K0171, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada through operating grants OGP-0036747, OGP-046506, and International Scientific Exchange Awards ISE0046203, ISE0125663, and NWO Grant NF 62-376. The book was conceived in late Spring 1986 in the Valley of the Moon in Sonoma County, California. The actual writing lasted on and off from autumn 1987 until summer 1993. One of us [PV] gives very special thanks to his lovely wife Pauline for insisting from the outset on the significance of this enterprise. The Aiken Computation Laboratory of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA; the Computer Science Department of York University, Ontario, Canada; the Computer Science Department of the University xii of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada; and CWI, Amsterdam, the Netherlands provided the working environments in which this book could be written. Preface to the Second Edition

motivating their need, we clarify just what ontologies are and what purposes they serve. We outline a methodology for developing and evaluating ontologies, first discussing informal techniques, concerning such issues as scoping, handling ambiguity, reaching agreement and producing de nitions. We

evolution proceeds in a tree-like manner, analysis of the data may not be best served by using methods that enforce a tree structure, but rather by a richer visualization of the data to evaluate its properties, at least as an essential first step. Thus, phylogenetic networks should be employed when

We present a new and more symmetric version of the circumscription method of nonmonotonic reasoning first described in (McCarthy 1980) and some applications to formalizing common sense knowledge. The applications in this paper are mostly based on minimizing the abnormality of different aspects

Although initially introduced and studied in the late 1960s and early 1970s, statistical methods of Markov source or hidden Markov modeling have become increasingly popular in the last several years. There are two strong reasons why this has occurred. First the models are very rich in mathematical

We study the semidefinite programming problem (SDP), i.e the problem of optimization of a linear function of a symmetric matrix subject to linear equality constraints and the additional condition that the matrix be positive semidefinite. First we review the classical cone duality as specialized

-aware applications. In this paper, we address these three problems in turn. We first define context, identify categories of contextual information, and characterize context-aware application behavior. Though the full impact of context-aware computing requires understanding very subtle and high-level notions

In this paper we study a first-order primal-dual algorithm for convex optimization problems with known saddle-point structure. We prove convergence to a saddle-point with rate O(1/N) in finite dimensions, which is optimal for the complete class of non-smooth problems we are considering

In this paper, we develop simple models to study the performance of BitTorrent, a second generation peerto-peer (P2P) application. We first present a simple fluid model and study the scalability, performance and efficiency of such a file-sharing mechanism. We then consider the built-in incentive

. The surface gnerates location dependent electric fields, which are capacitively coupled through the users to receivers installed in the work environment. We describe the design of these sytems and their applications. Finally, we conclude with a description of the results we have obtained with a first