Computers In Building

Building Product Models thoroughly presents the concepts, technology, and methods now used to work out what will become the building product model - a new, digital representation for architecture, civil engineering, and building construction. Organized into three sections (history, current tools and concepts, and existing efforts and research issues), this resource provides the field of building product modeling with a standard reference as well as a single, comprehensive text for university courses. Until now, all the efforts in building modeling have been reported in research journals and conference proceedings or been made available as draft standards on the Internet. Building Product Models is the only book available on this vital field, bringing together essential aspects of major efforts from the early 1970s to the present.

PC expert Rosenthal explains everything readers need to know--including basic vocabulary and where to find and purchase parts--in clear, easy-to-understand language. Users learn how to assemble both tower and desktop PCs, how to install an operating system and software, and also learn about technology upgrades and add-ons.

This title gives students an integrated and rigorous picture of applied computer science, as it comes to play in the construction of a simple yet powerful computer system.

Since the establishment of the CAAD Futures Foundation in 1985, CAAD experts from all over the world meet every two years to present and document the state of the art of research in Computer Aided Architectural Design. Together, the series provides a good record of the evolving state of research in this area over the last fourteen years. The Proceedings this year is the eighth in the series. The conference held at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, includes twenty-five papers presenting new and exciting results and capabilities in areas such as computer graphics, building modeling, digital sketching and drawing systems, Web-based collaboration and information exchange. An overall reading shows that computers in architecture is still a young field, with many exciting results emerging out of both greater understanding of the human processes and information processing needed to support design and also the continuously expanding capabilities of digital technology.

Building Product Models thoroughly presents the concepts, technology, and methods now used to work out what will become the building product model - a new, digital representation for architecture, civil engineering, and building construction. Organized into three sections (history, current tools and concepts, and existing efforts and research issues), this resource provides the field of building product modeling with a standard reference as well as a single, comprehensive text for university courses. Until now, all the efforts in building modeling have been reported in research journals and conference proceedings or been made available as draft standards on the Internet. Building Product Models is the only book available on this vital field, bringing together essential aspects of major efforts from the early 1970s to the present.

An examination of more than sixty years of successes and failures in developing technologies that allow computers to understand human spoken language. Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey famously featured HAL, a computer with the ability to hold lengthy conversations with his fellow space travelers. More than forty years later, we have advanced computer technology that Kubrick never imagined, but we do not have computers that talk and understand speech as HAL did. Is it a failure of our technology that we have not gotten much further than an automated voice that tells us to "say or press 1"? Or is there something fundamental in human language and speech that we do not yet understand deeply enough to be able to replicate in a computer? In The Voice in the Machine, Roberto Pieraccini examines six decades of work in science and technology to develop computers that can interact with humans using speech and the industry that has arisen around the quest for these technologies. He shows that although the computers today that understand speech may not have HAL's capacity for conversation, they have capabilities that make them usable in many applications today and are on a fast track of improvement and innovation. Pieraccini describes the evolution of speech recognition and speech understanding processes from waveform methods to artificial intelligence approaches to statistical learning and modeling of human speech based on a rigorous mathematical model--specifically, Hidden Markov Models (HMM). He details the development of dialog systems, the ability to produce speech, and the process of bringing talking machines to the market. Finally, he asks a question that only the future can answer: will we end up with HAL-like computers or something completely unexpected?