At 44, New York divorcee, Mel, is not ready to give up on God or the possibility of motherhood. Between running an actors' agency in Hammersmith and rehearsing her role in a rock musical, she agrees to take care of her stepdaughter, Jess's challenging four-year-old son, Billy, two afternoons a week. Writing: Playing Billy's Mom on a strip of paper to place in her Gratitude jar, she prays that her good deed will have a pay off: her own fertility.Meanwhile, prepped with hormone table...

Elves with blasters!It's all true! Faeries, Elves and Angels; the gods and monsters of myth and legend are real, and living among us. There has been a war going on for a very long time between the Elder races of the Vansadagaadian Corridor and predatory forces of the Annunaki god Enlil and the Pandemonium. Humanity is caught in the middle.Walter Ryan is an agent of the Melkizedek Order who has been given orders to track down an enemy named Graud. The missio...

Ernest Mandel (1923-1995), was one of the most prominent anti-Stalinist Marxist intellectuals of his time. A political theorist and economist, his worldview was shaped by experiences in the Second World War as an underground political activist in Occupied Belgium and during his subsequent internment in a Nazi prison camp. Mandel's faith in human nature and in the working classes survived Nazi oppression and the murder of much of his family in the concentration camps. He retained his connec...

This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 23nd International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2017, held in Melbourne, Australia from August 28, 2017 until September 1, 2017. The conference is colocated with the 20th International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT 2017) and the 33rd International Conference on Logic Programming.The 46 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and...

Search has been vital to artificial intelligence from the very beginning as a core technique in problem solving. The authors present a thorough overview of heuristic search with a balance of discussion between theoretical analysis and efficient implementation and application to real-world problems. Current developments in search such as pattern databases and search with efficient use of external memory and parallel processing units on main boards and graphics cards are detailed. Heuristic ...

Classical computer science textbooks tell us that some problems are 'hard'. Yet many areas, from machine learning and computer vision to theorem proving and software verification, have defined their own set of tools for effectively solving complex problems. Tractability provides an overview of these different techniques, and of the fundamental concepts and properties used to tame intractability. This book will help you understand what to do when facing a hard computational problem. Can the...

This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2016, held in Toulouse, France, in September 2016.The 63 revised regular papers presented together with 4 short papers and the abstracts of 4 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 157 submissions. The scope of CP 2016 includes all aspects of computing with constraints, including theory, algorithms, environments, la...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Integration of Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems, CPAIOR 2017, held in Padua, Italy, in June 2017.The 32 full papers presented together with 6 abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The conference brings together interested researchers from constraint programming, artificial intell...

This book constitutes the revised selected papers of the 10th International Symposium on Formal Aspects of Component Software, FACS 2013, held in Nanchang, China, in October 2013. The 19 full papers and three invited talks presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 51 submissions. The papers are concerned with how formal methods can be used to make component-based development fit for the new architectures of today and the systems that are now pervading the socio-economic worlds.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Haifa Verification Conference, HVC 2015, held in Haifa, Israel, in November 2015.The 17 revised full papers and 4 invited talks presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on hybrid systems; tools; verification of robotics; symbolic execution; model checking; timed systems; SAT solving; multi domain verification; and synthesis.

The two-volume set LNCS 9779 and LNCS 9780 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, CAV 2016, held in Toronto, ON, USA, in July 2016.The total of 46 full and 12 short papers presented in the proceedings was carefully reviewed and selected from 195 submissions. The papers were organized in topical sections named: probabilistic systems; synthesis; constraint solving; model checking; program analysis; timed and hybrid sy...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on NASA Formal Methods, NFM 2017, held in Moffett Field, CA, USA, in May 2017.The 23 full and 8 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 77 submissions. The papers focus on formal techniques and other approaches for software assurance, their theory, current capabilities and limitations, as well as their potential application to aerospace, robotics, and other NASA-relevant...