Heterogeneous Computing: Hardware and Software Perspectives (ACM Books)

If you look around you will find that all computer systems, from your portable devices to the strongest supercomputers, are heterogeneous in nature. The most obvious heterogeneity is the existence of computing nodes of different capabilities (e.g. multicore, GPUs, FPGAs, ...). But there are also other heterogeneity factors that exist in computing systems, like the memory system components, interconnection, etc. The main reason for these different types of heterogeneity is to have good performance with power efficiency. Heterogeneous computing results in both challenges and opportunities. This book discusses both. It shows that we need to deal with these challenges at all levels of the computing stack: from algorithms all the way to process technology. We discuss the topic of heterogeneous computing from different angles: hardware challenges, current hardware state-of-the-art, software issues, how to make the best use of the current heterogeneous systems, and what lies ahead. The aim of this book is to introduce the big picture of heterogeneous computing. Whether you are a hardware designer or a software developer, you need to know how the pieces of the puzzle fit together. The main goal is to bring researchers and engineers to the forefront of the research frontier in the new era that started a few years ago and is expected to continue for decades. We believe that academics, researchers, practitioners, and students will benefit from this book and will be prepared to tackle the big wave of heterogeneous computing that is here to stay.

Computers & Technology

Zahran, Mohamed

Programming

ACM Books

Conversational UX Design: A Practitioner's Guide to the Natural Conversation Framework (ACM Books)

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, or the ability to engage in natural conversation. Today's platforms provide sophisticated tools for analyzing language and retrieving knowledge, but they fail to provide adequate support for modeling interaction. The user experience (UX) designer or software developer must figure out how a human conversation is organized, usually relying on commonsense rather than on formal knowledge. Fortunately, practitioners can rely on conversation science. This book adapts formal knowledge from the field of Conversation Analysis (CA) to the design of natural language interfaces. It outlines the Natural Conversation Framework (NCF), developed at IBM Research, a systematic framework for designing interfaces that work like natural conversation. The NCF consists of four main components: 1) an interaction model of "expandable sequences," 2) a corresponding content format, 3) a pattern language with 100 generic UX patterns and 4) a navigation method of six basic user actions. The authors introduce UX designers to a new way of thinking about user experience design in the context of conversational interfaces, including a new vocabulary, new principles and new interaction patterns. User experience designers and graduate students in the HCI field as well as developers and conversation analysis students should find this book of interest.

MOORE, Robert J.

Arar, Raphael

Computer Science

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, or the ability to engage in natural conversation. Today’s platforms provide sophisticated tools for analyzing language and retrieving knowledge, but they fail to provide adequate support for modeling interaction. The user experience (UX) designer or software developer must figure out how a human conversation is organized, usually relying on commonsense rather than on formal knowledge. Fortunately, practitioners can rely on conversation science.
This book adapts formal knowledge from the field of Conversation Analysis (CA) to the design of natural language interfaces. It outlines the Natural Conversation Framework (NCF), developed at IBM Research, a systematic framework for designing interfaces that work like natural conversation. The NCF consists of four main components: 1) an interaction model of “expandable sequences,” 2) a corresponding content format, 3) a pattern language with 100 generic UX patterns and 4) a navigation method of six basic user actions. The authors introduce UX designers to a new way of thinking about user experience design in the context of conversational interfaces, including a new vocabulary, new principles and new interaction patterns. User experience designers and graduate students in the HCI field as well as developers and conversation analysis students should find this book of interest.

Data Cleaning

Data quality is one of the most important problems in data management, since dirty data often leads to inaccurate data analytics results and incorrect business decisions. Poor data across businesses and the U.S. government are reported to cost trillions of dollars a year. Multiple surveys show that dirty data is the most common barrier faced by data scientists. Not surprisingly, developing effective and efficient data cleaning solutions is challenging and is rife with deep theoretical and engineering problems. This book is about data cleaning, which is used to refer to all kinds of tasks and activities to detect and repair errors in the data. Rather than focus on a particular data cleaning task, we give an overview of the end-to-end data cleaning process, describing various error detection and repair methods, and attempt to anchor these proposals with multiple taxonomies and views. Specifically, we cover four of the most common and important data cleaning tasks, namely, outlier detection, data transformation, error repair (including imputing missing values), and data deduplication. Furthermore, due to the increasing popularity and applicability of machine learning techniques, we include a chapter that specifically explores how machine learning techniques are used for data cleaning, and how data cleaning is used to improve machine learning models. This book is intended to serve as a useful reference for researchers and practitioners who are interested in the area of data quality and data cleaning. It can also be used as a textbook for a graduate course. Although we aim at covering state-of-the-art algorithms and techniques, we recognize that data cleaning is still an active field of research and therefore provide future directions of research whenever appropriate.

Ilyas, Ihab F.

Chu, Xu

Networking & Cloud Computing

Providing Sound Foundations for Cryptography: On the Work of Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali (ACM Books)

Cryptography is concerned with the construction of schemes that withstand any abuse.
A cryptographic scheme is constructed so as to maintain a desired functionality, even under malicious attempts aimed at making it deviate from its prescribed behavior. The design of cryptographic systems must be based on firm foundations, whereas ad hoc approaches and heuristics are a very dangerous way to go. These foundations were developed mostly in the 1980s, in works that are all co-authored by Shafi Goldwasser and/or Silvio Micali. These works have transformed cryptography from an engineering discipline, lacking sound theoretical foundations, into a scientific field possessing a well-founded theory, which influences practice as well as contributes to other areas of theoretical computer science.
This book celebrates these works, which were the basis for bestowing the 2012 A.M. Turing Award upon Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali. A significant portion of this book reproduces some of these works, and another portion consists of scientific perspectives by some of their former students. The highlight of the book is provided by a few chapters that allow the readers to meet Shafi and Silvio in person. These include interviews with them, their biographies and their Turing Award lectures.

Concurrency: The Works of Leslie Lamport (ACM Books)

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 continue to function correctly despite failures of individual components. He also developed a substantial body of work on the formal specification and verification of concurrent systems, and has contributed to the development of automated tools applying these methods.
Part I consists of technical chapters of the book and a biography. The technical chapters of this book present a retrospective on Lamport's original ideas from experts in the field. Through this lens, it portrays their long-lasting impact. The chapters cover timeless notions Lamport introduced: the Bakery algorithm, atomic shared registers and sequential consistency; causality and logical time; Byzantine Agreement; state machine replication and Paxos; temporal logic of actions (TLA). The professional biography tells of Lamport's career, providing the context in which his work arose and broke new grounds, and discusses LaTeX – perhaps Lamport’s most influential contribution outside the field of concurrency. This chapter gives a voice to the people behind the achievements, notably Lamport himself, and additionally the colleagues around him, who inspired, collaborated, and helped him drive worldwide impact. Part II consists of a selection of Leslie Lamport's most influential papers.
This book touches on a lifetime of contributions by Leslie Lamport to the field of concurrency and on the extensive influence he had on people working in the field. It will be of value to historians of science, and to researchers and students who work in the area of concurrency and who are interested to read about the work of one of the most influential researchers in this field.

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Books by ACM Books

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the ACM Books publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Heterogeneous Computing: Hardware and Software Perspectives (ACM Books)

Heterogeneous Computing: Hardware and Software Perspectives (ACM Books)

Conversational UX Design: A Practitioner's Guide to the Natural Conversation Framework (ACM Books)

Conversational UX Design: A Practitioner's Guide to the Natural Conversation Framework (ACM Books)

Data Cleaning

Data Cleaning

Providing Sound Foundations for Cryptography: On the Work of Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali (ACM Books)

Providing Sound Foundations for Cryptography: On the Work of Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali (ACM Books)

Concurrency: The Works of Leslie Lamport (ACM Books)

Concurrency: The Works of Leslie Lamport (ACM Books)