field studies. A set of principles for the conduct and evaluation of interpretive field research in information systems is proposed, along with their philosophical rationale. The usefulness of the principles is illustrated by evaluating three published interpretive field studies drawn from

. The latter relates to how data is observed and is problem domain dependent. The former depends on how various prior constraints are expressed. Markov Random Field Models (MRF) theory is a tool to encode contextual constraints into the prior probability. This paper presents a unified approach for MRF modeling

This paper provides an overview of research and development activities in the field of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. It aims to identify key concepts and applications, and to indicate how they relate to one-another. Some historical context to the field of agent-based computing

number of general assumptions used in this research field are identified and the character of these assumptions indicates that the research field is still in an early stage of development. To evaluate the state of the art, the major application areas are identified and performances are analyzed in light

Research on ontology is becoming increasingly widespread in the computer science community, and its importance is being recognized in a multiplicity of research fields and application areas, including knowledge engineering, database design and integration, information retrieval and extraction. We

limitation—no spatial information is taken into account. This causes the FM model to work only on well-defined images with low levels of noise; unfortunately, this is often not the the case due to artifacts such as partial volume effect and bias field distortion. Under these conditions, FM model

visual servo system must be capable of tracking image features in a sequence of images, we include an overview of feature-based and correlation-based methods for tracking. We conclude the tutorial with a number of observations on the current directions of the research field of visual servo control.

, scalability, and customizability. To address these issues, researchers are investigating a variety of innovative approaches. The most promising and intriguing ones are those based on the ability of moving code across the nodes of a network, exploiting the notion of mobile code. As an emerging research field

Computing devices and applications are now used beyond the desktop, in diverse environments, and this trend toward ubiquitous computing is accelerating. One challenge that remains in this emerging research field is the ability to enhance the behavior of any application by informing

This paper discusses the challenges in computer systems research posed by the emerging field of pervasive computing. It first examines the relationship of this new field to its predecessors: distributed systems and mobile computing. It then identifies four new research thrusts: effective use