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Book Description

With this digital Early Release edition of Practical Computer Vision with SimpleCV, you get the entire book bundle in its earliest form – the author’s raw and unedited content – so you can take advantage of this content long before the book’s official release. You’ll also receive updates when significant changes are made, as well as the final ebook version.

SimpleCV is a cross platform (Windows, Macintosh, Linux) framework in Python that makes writing computer vision applications quick and easy. This book takes you through real world examples and applications using SimpleCV so that anyone, even with zero knowledge of computer vision, can use to create their own vision application in a few minutes with a webcam and PC. SimpleCV has its own integrated shell (command line) and code editor so you can rapidly test new techniques, load and run examples, view documentation, etc. The library also works with webcams, cell phones, the Xbox Kinect, and TI’s Beagle Board and Panda Board. There are 1-click installers for every platform, so you can be up and running any of the examples included in this book in a few minutes.

Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Getting to Know the SimpleCV framework
Chapter 3. Image Sources
Chapter 4. Pixels and Images Download Now »

Book Description

Use Windows debuggers throughout the development cycle—and build better software

Rethink your use of Windows debugging and tracing tools—and learn how to make them a key part of test-driven software development. Led by a member of the Windows Fundamentals Team at Microsoft, you’ll apply expert debugging and tracing techniques—and sharpen your C++ and C# code analysis skills—through practical examples and common scenarios. Learn why experienced developers use debuggers in every step of the development process, and not just when bugs appear.

Discover how to:

• Go behind the scenes to examine how powerful Windows debuggers work
• Catch bugs early in the development cycle with static and runtime analysis tools
• Gain practical strategies to tackle the most common code defects
• Apply expert tricks to handle user-mode and kernel-mode debugging tasks
• Implement postmortem techniques such as JIT and dump debugging
• Debug the concurrency and security aspects of your software
• Use debuggers to analyze interactions between your code and the operating system
• Analyze software behavior with Xperf and the Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) framework

Download Now »

Book Description

If you’ve done some Arduino tinkering and wondered how you could incorporate the Kinect—or the other way around—then this book is for you. The authors of Arduino and Kinect Projects will show you how to create 10 amazing, creative projects, from simple to complex. You’ll also find out how to incorporate Processing in your project design—a language very similar to the Arduino language.

The ten projects are carefully designed to build on your skills at every step. Starting with the Arduino and Kinect equivalent of “Hello, World,” the authors will take you through a diverse range of projects that showcase the huge range of possibilities that open up when Kinect and Arduino are combined.

• Gesture-based Remote Control. Control devices and home appliances with hand gestures.
• Kinect-networked Puppet. Play with a physical puppet remotely using your whole body.
• Mood Lamps. Build your own set of responsive, gesture controllable LED lamps.
• Drawing Robot. Control a drawing robot using a Kinect-based tangible table.
• Remote-controlled Vehicle. Use your body gestures to control a smart vehicle.
• Biometric Station. Use the Kinect for biometric recognition and checking Body Mass Indexes.
• 3D Modeling Interface. Learn how to use the Arduino LilyPad to build a wearable 3D modelling interface.
• 360º Scanner. Build a turntable scanner and scan any object 360º using only one Kinect.
• Delta Robot. Build and control your own fast and accurate parallel robot. Download Now »

Book Description

Implement Configuration Management Databases that Deliver Rapid ROI and Sustained Business Value

Implementing an enterprise-wide Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is one of the most influential actions an IT organization can take to improve service delivery and bridge the gap between technology and the business. With a well-designed CMDB in place, companies are better positioned to manage and optimize IT infrastructure, applications, and services; automate more IT management tasks; and restrain burgeoning costs. Now, there’s an objective, vendor-independent guide to making a CMDB work in your organization. The CMDB Imperative presents a start-to-finish implementation methodology that works and describes how the CMDB is shifting to the superior Configuration Management System (CMS).

Expert CMDB industry analyst Glenn O’Donnell and leading-edge architect and practitioner Carlos Casanova first review the drivers behind a CMDB and the technical, economic, cultural, and political obstacles to success. Drawing on the experiences of hundreds of organizations, they present indispensable guidance on architecting and customizing CMDB solutions to your specific environment. They’ll guide you through planning, implementation, transitioning into production, day-to-day operation and maintenance, and much more. Coverage includes

• Defining the tasks and activities associated with configuration management
• Understanding the CMDB’s role in ITIL Download Now »

Book Description

Want to tap the power behind search rankings, product recommendations, social bookmarking, and online matchmaking? This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build Web 2.0 applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by people on the Internet. With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze and understand the data once you’ve found it.

Programming Collective Intelligence takes you into the world of machine learning and statistics, and explains how to draw conclusions about user experience, marketing, personal tastes, and human behavior in general — all from information that you and others collect every day. Each algorithm is described clearly and concisely with code that can immediately be used on your web site, blog, Wiki, or specialized application. This book explains:

• Collaborative filtering techniques that enable online retailers to recommend products or media
• Methods of clustering to detect groups of similar items in a large dataset
• Search engine features — crawlers, indexers, query engines, and the PageRank algorithm
• Optimization algorithms that search millions of possible solutions to a problem and choose the best one
• Bayesian filtering, used in spam filters for classifying documents based on word types and other features
• Using decision trees not only to make predictions, but to model the way decisions are made
• Predicting numerical values rather than classifications to build price models Download Now »

Book Description

With this digital Early Release edition of Natural Language Annotation for Machine Learning, you get the entire book bundle in its earliest form – the author’s raw and unedited content – so you can take advantage of this content long before the book’s official release. You’ll also receive updates when significant changes are made, as well as the final ebook version.

Create your own natural language training corpus for machine learning. This example-driven book walks you through the annotation cycle, from selecting an annotation task and creating the annotation specification to designing the guidelines, creating a “gold standard” corpus, and then beginning the actual data creation with the annotation process.

Systems exist for analyzing existing corpora, but making a new corpus can be extremely complex. To help you build a foundation for your own machine learning goals, this easy-to-use guide includes case studies that demonstrate four different annotation tasks in detail. You’ll also learn how to use a lightweight software package for annotating texts and adjudicating the annotations.

This book is a perfect companion to O’Reilly’s Natural Language Processing with Python, which describes how to use existing corpora with the Natural Language Toolkit.

Table of Contents
Chapter 1. The Basics
Chapter 2. Defining Your Goal and Dataset Download Now »