EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book On the Efficient Determination of Most Near Neighbors

Download or read book On the Efficient Determination of Most Near Neighbors written by Mark S. Manasse and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The time-worn aphorism "close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades" is clearly inadequate. Close also counts in golf, shuffleboard, archery, darts, curling, and other games of accuracy in which hitting the precise center of the target isn't to be expected every time, or in which we can expect to be driven from the target by skilled opponents. This book is not devoted to sports discussions, but to efficient algorithms for determining pairs of closely related web pages—and a few other situations in which we have found that inexact matching is good enough — where proximity suffices. We will not, however, attempt to be comprehensive in the investigation of probabilistic algorithms, approximation algorithms, or even techniques for organizing the discovery of nearest neighbors. We are more concerned with finding nearby neighbors; if they are not particularly close by, we are not particularly interested. In thinking of when approximation is sufficient, remember the oft-told joke about two campers sitting around after dinner. They hear noises coming towards them. One of them reaches for a pair of running shoes, and starts to don them. The second then notes that even with running shoes, they cannot hope to outrun a bear, to which the first notes that most likely the bear will be satiated after catching the slower of them. We seek problems in which we don't need to be faster than the bear, just faster than the others fleeing the bear.

Book On the Efficient Determination of Most Near Neighbors

Download or read book On the Efficient Determination of Most Near Neighbors written by Mark S. Manasse and published by Morgan & Claypool. This book was released on 2012 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The material in this book grew from a simple question: "We know how to easily determine whether two files are identical, but what do we know about determining whether two files are similar?" The answer was "Not much," but when a theorist gives this answer, good things often happen. Such was the case here. This book will be important to practitioners interested in this and similar questions. It contains two intertwined threads; a mathematical treatment of the problem and an engineering thread that provides extremely efficient code for obtaining the solution at scale. I recommend it highly.---Charles P. (Chuck) Thacker, Microsoft Research From de-duplication to search, billion dollar industries rely on the ability to search for keys that are "close" to a specified key. The book by Mark Manasse provides a beautiful exposition of the field. Manasse is a well-known expert who has written some of the fundamental theoretical papers in the field; better still, he has worked on real products such as AltaVista and Windows file de-duplication. Mark has the rare ability to take theoretical ideas and convert them to sound engineering. The book will appeal to developers working in the web milieu because it illuminates the details that are often missing using code snippets. It will also appeal to researchers and students because of the uniform and insightful exposition of an important area.---George Varghese, Professor, University of California, San Diego Mark Manasse, the father of micropayments, provides insight, techniques, and theory behind search---on getting not too large, not too small, but just right results. This horseshoes mini-treatise comes right from the horse's mouth as an Alta Vistan---he shows how the game was constructed by high dimensionality mapping into tractable space and time to find ringers and good outliers.---Gordon Bell, Microsoft Research

Book On The Efficient Determination of Most Near Neighbors

Download or read book On The Efficient Determination of Most Near Neighbors written by Mark Manasse and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2012-11-16 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The time-worn aphorism "close only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades" is clearly inadequate. Close also counts in golf, shuffleboard, archery, darts, curling, and other games of accuracy in which hitting the precise center of the target isn't to be expected every time, or in which we can expect to be driven from the target by skilled opponents. This lecture is not devoted to sports discussions, but to efficient algorithms for determining pairs of closely related web pages -- and a few other situations in which we have found that inexact matching is good enough; where proximity suffices. We will not, however, attempt to be comprehensive in the investigation of probabilistic algorithms, approximation algorithms, or even techniques for organizing the discovery of nearest neighbors. We are more concerned with finding nearby neighbors; if they are not particularly close by, we are not particularly interested. In thinking of when approximation is sufficient, remember the oft-told joke about two campers sitting around after dinner. They hear noises coming towards them. One of them reaches for a pair of running shoes, and starts to don them. The second then notes that even with running shoes, they cannot hope to outrun a bear, to which the first notes that most likely the bear will be satiated after catching the slower of them. We seek problems in which we don't need to be faster than the bear, just faster than the others fleeing the bear.

Book On the Efficient Determination of Most Near Neighbors  2nd Edition

Download or read book On the Efficient Determination of Most Near Neighbors 2nd Edition written by Mark Manasse and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The time-worn aphorism "close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades" is clearly inadequate. Close also counts in golf, shuffleboard, archery, darts, curling, and other games of accuracy in which hitting the precise center of the target isn't to be expected every time, or in which we can expect to be driven from the target by skilled opponents. This book is not devoted to sports discussions, but to efficient algorithms for determining pairs of closely related web pages-and a few other situations in which we have found that inexact matching is good enough - where proximity suffices. We will not, however, attempt to be comprehensive in the investigation of probabilistic algorithms, approximation algorithms, or even techniques for organizing the discovery of nearest neighbors. We are more concerned with finding nearby neighbors; if they are not particularly close by, we are not particularly interested. In thinking of when approximation is sufficient, remember the oft-told joke about two campers sitting around after dinner. They hear noises coming towards them. One of them reaches for a pair of running shoes, and starts to don them. The second then notes that even with running shoes, they cannot hope to outrun a bear, to which the first notes that most likely the bear will be satiated after catching the slower of them. We seek problems in which we don't need to be faster than the bear, just faster than the others fleeing the bear.

Book Explaining the Success of Nearest Neighbor Methods in Prediction

Download or read book Explaining the Success of Nearest Neighbor Methods in Prediction written by George H. Chen and published by Foundations and Trends (R) in Machine Learning. This book was released on 2018-05-30 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains the success of Nearest Neighbor Methods in Prediction, both in theory and in practice.

Book Social Monitoring for Public Health

Download or read book Social Monitoring for Public Health written by Michael J. Paul and published by Morgan & Claypool Publishers. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public health thrives on high-quality evidence, yet acquiring meaningful data on a population remains a central challenge of public health research and practice. Social monitoring, the analysis of social media and other user-generated web data, has brought advances in the way we leverage population data to understand health. Social media offers advantages over traditional data sources, including real-time data availability, ease of access, and reduced cost. Social media allows us to ask, and answer, questions we never thought possible. This book presents an overview of the progress on uses of social monitoring to study public health over the past decade. We explain available data sources, common methods, and survey research on social monitoring in a wide range of public health areas. Our examples come from topics such as disease surveillance, behavioral medicine, and mental health, among others. We explore the limitations and concerns of these methods. Our survey of this exciting new field of data-driven research lays out future research directions.

Book Task Intelligence for Search and Recommendation

Download or read book Task Intelligence for Search and Recommendation written by Chirag Shah and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-01 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While great strides have been made in the field of search and recommendation, there are still challenges and opportunities to address information access issues that involve solving tasks and accomplishing goals for a wide variety of users. Specifically, we lack intelligent systems that can detect not only the request an individual is making (what), but also understand and utilize the intention (why) and strategies (how) while providing information and enabling task completion. Many scholars in the fields of information retrieval, recommender systems, productivity (especially in task management and time management), and artificial intelligence have recognized the importance of extracting and understanding people's tasks and the intentions behind performing those tasks in order to serve them better. However, we are still struggling to support them in task completion, e.g., in search and assistance, and it has been challenging to move beyond single-query or single-turn interactions. The proliferation of intelligent agents has unlocked new modalities for interacting with information, but these agents will need to be able to work understanding current and future contexts and assist users at task level. This book will focus on task intelligence in the context of search and recommendation. Chapter 1 introduces readers to the issues of detecting, understanding, and using task and task-related information in an information episode (with or without active searching). This is followed by presenting several prominent ideas and frameworks about how tasks are conceptualized and represented in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, the narrative moves to showing how task type relates to user behaviors and search intentions. A task can be explicitly expressed in some cases, such as in a to-do application, but often it is unexpressed. Chapter 4 covers these two scenarios with several related works and case studies. Chapter 5 shows how task knowledge and task models can contribute to addressing emerging retrieval and recommendation problems. Chapter 6 covers evaluation methodologies and metrics for task-based systems, with relevant case studies to demonstrate their uses. Finally, the book concludes in Chapter 7, with ideas for future directions in this important research area.

Book Images in Social Media

    Book Details:
  • Author : Susanne Ørnager
  • Publisher : Springer Nature
  • Release : 2022-06-01
  • ISBN : 3031023145
  • Pages : 101 pages

Download or read book Images in Social Media written by Susanne Ørnager and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-01 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the methodologies, organization, and communication of digital image collection research that utilizes social media content. ("Image" is here understood as a cultural, conventional, and commercial—stock photo—representation.) The lecture offers expert views that provide different interpretations of images and their potential implementations. Linguistic and semiotic methodologies as well as eye-tracking research are employed to both analyze images and comprehend how humans consider them, including which salient features generally attract viewers' attention. This literature review covers image—specifically photographic—research since 2005, when major social media platforms emerged. A citation analysis includes an overview of co-citation maps that demonstrate the nexus of image research literature and the journals in which they appear. Eye tracking tests whether scholarly templates focus on the proper features of an image, such as people, objects, time, etc., and if a prescribed theme affects the eye movements of the observer. The results may point to renewed requirements for building image search engines. As it stands, image management already requires new algorithms and a new understanding that involves text recognition and very large database processing. The aim of this book is to present different image research areas and demonstrate the challenges image research faces. The book's scope is, by necessity, far from comprehensive, since the field of digital image research does not cover fake news, image manipulation, mobile photos, etc.; these issues are very complex and need a publication of their own. This book should primarily be useful for students in library and information science, psychology, and computer science.

Book Automatic Disambiguation of Author Names in Bibliographic Repositories

Download or read book Automatic Disambiguation of Author Names in Bibliographic Repositories written by Anderson A. Ferreira and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-01 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with a hard problem that is inherent to human language: ambiguity. In particular, we focus on author name ambiguity, a type of ambiguity that exists in digital bibliographic repositories, which occurs when an author publishes works under distinct names or distinct authors publish works under similar names. This problem may be caused by a number of reasons, including the lack of standards and common practices, and the decentralized generation of bibliographic content. As a consequence, the quality of the main services of digital bibliographic repositories such as search, browsing, and recommendation may be severely affected by author name ambiguity. The focal point of the book is on automatic methods, since manual solutions do not scale to the size of the current repositories or the speed in which they are updated. Accordingly, we provide an ample view on the problem of automatic disambiguation of author names, summarizing the results of more than a decade of research on this topic conducted by our group, which were reported in more than a dozen publications that received over 900 citations so far, according to Google Scholar. We start by discussing its motivational issues (Chapter 1). Next, we formally define the author name disambiguation task (Chapter 2) and use this formalization to provide a brief, taxonomically organized, overview of the literature on the topic (Chapter 3). We then organize, summarize and integrate the efforts of our own group on developing solutions for the problem that have historically produced state-of-the-art (by the time of their proposals) results in terms of the quality of the disambiguation results. Thus, Chapter 4 covers HHC - Heuristic-based Clustering, an author name disambiguation method that is based on two specific real-world assumptions regarding scientific authorship. Then, Chapter 5 describes SAND - Self-training Author Name Disambiguator and Chapter 6 presents two incremental author name disambiguation methods, namely INDi - Incremental Unsupervised Name Disambiguation and INC- Incremental Nearest Cluster. Finally, Chapter 7 provides an overview of recent author name disambiguation methods that address new specific approaches such as graph-based representations, alternative predefined similarity functions, visualization facilities and approaches based on artificial neural networks. The chapters are followed by three appendices that cover, respectively: (i) a pattern matching function for comparing proper names and used by some of the methods addressed in this book; (ii) a tool for generating synthetic collections of citation records for distinct experimental tasks; and (iii) a number of datasets commonly used to evaluate author name disambiguation methods. In summary, the book organizes a large body of knowledge and work in the area of author name disambiguation in the last decade, hoping to consolidate a solid basis for future developments in the field.

Book Information Retrieval Models

Download or read book Information Retrieval Models written by Thomas Roelleke and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Information Retrieval (IR) models are a core component of IR research and IR systems. The past decade brought a consolidation of the family of IR models, which by 2000 consisted of relatively isolated views on TF-IDF (Term-Frequency times Inverse-Document-Frequency) as the weighting scheme in the vector-space model (VSM), the probabilistic relevance framework (PRF), the binary independence retrieval (BIR) model, BM25 (Best-Match Version 25, the main instantiation of the PRF/BIR), and language modelling (LM). Also, the early 2000s saw the arrival of divergence from randomness (DFR). Regarding intuition and simplicity, though LM is clear from a probabilistic point of view, several people stated: "It is easy to understand TF-IDF and BM25. For LM, however, we understand the math, but we do not fully understand why it works." This book takes a horizontal approach gathering the foundations of TF-IDF, PRF, BIR, Poisson, BM25, LM, probabilistic inference networks (PIN's), and divergence-based models. The aim is to create a consolidated and balanced view on the main models. A particular focus of this book is on the "relationships between models." This includes an overview over the main frameworks (PRF, logical IR, VSM, generalized VSM) and a pairing of TF-IDF with other models. It becomes evident that TF-IDF and LM measure the same, namely the dependence (overlap) between document and query. The Poisson probability helps to establish probabilistic, non-heuristic roots for TF-IDF, and the Poisson parameter, average term frequency, is a binding link between several retrieval models and model parameters. Table of Contents: List of Figures / Preface / Acknowledgments / Introduction / Foundations of IR Models / Relationships Between IR Models / Summary & Research Outlook / Bibliography / Author's Biography / Index

Book Visual Information Retrieval using Java and LIRE

Download or read book Visual Information Retrieval using Java and LIRE written by Mathias Lux and published by Morgan & Claypool Publishers. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visual information retrieval (VIR) is an active and vibrant research area, which attempts at providing means for organizing, indexing, annotating, and retrieving visual information (images and videos) from large, unstructured repositories. The goal of VIR is to retrieve matches ranked by their relevance to a given query, which is often expressed as an example image and/or a series of keywords. During its early years (1995-2000), the research efforts were dominated by content-based approaches contributed primarily by the image and video processing community. During the past decade, it was widely recognized that the challenges imposed by the lack of coincidence between an image's visual contents and its semantic interpretation, also known as semantic gap, required a clever use of textual metadata (in addition to information extracted from the image's pixel contents) to make image and video retrieval solutions efficient and effective. The need to bridge (or at least narrow) the semantic gap has been one of the driving forces behind current VIR research. Additionally, other related research problems and market opportunities have started to emerge, offering a broad range of exciting problems for computer scientists and engineers to work on. In this introductory book, we focus on a subset of VIR problems where the media consists of images, and the indexing and retrieval methods are based on the pixel contents of those images -- an approach known as content-based image retrieval (CBIR). We present an implementation-oriented overview of CBIR concepts, techniques, algorithms, and figures of merit. Most chapters are supported by examples written in Java, using Lucene (an open-source Java-based indexing and search implementation) and LIRE (Lucene Image REtrieval), an open-source Java-based library for CBIR.

Book Digital Libraries for Cultural Heritage

Download or read book Digital Libraries for Cultural Heritage written by Tatjana Aparac-Jelušić and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: European digital libraries have existed in diverse forms and with quite different functions, priorities, and aims. However, there are some common features of European-based initiatives that are relevant to non-European communities. There are now many more challenges and changes than ever before, and the development rate of new digital libraries is ever accelerating. Delivering educational, cultural, and research resources-especially from major scientific and cultural organizations-has become a core mission of these organizations. Using these resources they will be able to investigate, educate, and elucidate, in order to promote and disseminate and to preserve civilization. Extremely important in conceptualizing the digital environment priorities in Europe was its cultural heritage and the feeling that these rich resources should be open to Europe and the global community. In this book we focus on European digitized heritage and digital culture, and its potential in the digital age. We specifically look at the EU and its approaches to digitization and digital culture, problems detected, and achievements reached, all with an emphasis on digital cultural heritage. We seek to report on important documents that were prepared on digitization; copyright and related documents; research and education in the digital libraries field under the auspices of the EU; some other European and national initiatives; and funded projects. The aim of this book is to discuss the development of digital libraries in the European context by presenting, primarily to non-European communities interested in digital libraries, the phenomena, initiatives, and developments that dominated in Europe. We describe the main projects and their outcomes, and shine a light on the number of challenges that have been inspiring new approaches, cooperative efforts, and the use of research methodology at different stages of the digital libraries development. The specific goals are reflected in the structure of the book, which can be conceived as a guide to several main topics and sub-topics. However, the author’s scope is far from being comprehensive, since the field of digital libraries is very complex and digital libraries for cultural heritage is even moreso.

Book Digital Libraries Applications

Download or read book Digital Libraries Applications written by Edward A. Fox and published by Morgan & Claypool Publishers. This book was released on 2014-03-01 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital libraries (DLs) have evolved since their launch in 1991 into an important type of information system, with widespread application. This volume advances that trend further by describing new research and development in the DL field that builds upon the 5S (Societies, Scenarios, Spaces, Structures, Streams) framework, which is discussed in three other DL volumes in this series.While the 5S framework may be used to describe many types of information systems, and is likely to have even broader utility and appeal, we focus here on digital libraries. Drawing upon six (Akbar, Kozievitch, Leidig, Li, Murthy, Park) completed and two (Chen, Fouh) in-process dissertations, as well as the efforts of collaborating researchers, and scores of related publications, presentations, tutorials, and reports, this book demonstrates the applicability of 5S in five digital library application areas, that also have importance in the context of the WWW, Web 2.0, and innovative information systems. By integrating surveys of the state-of-the-art, newresearch, connections with formalization, case studies, and exercises/projects, this book can serve as a textbook for those interested in computing, information, and/or library science. Chapter 1 focuses on images, explaining how they connect with information retrieval, in the context of CBIR systems. Chapter 2 gives two case studies of DLs used in education, which is one of the most common applications of digital libraries. Chapter 3 covers social networks, which are at the heart of work onWeb 2.0, explaining the construction and use of deduced graphs, that can enhance retrieval and recommendation. Chapter 4 demonstrates the value of DLs in eScience, focusing, in particular, on cyber-infrastructure for simulation. Chapter 5 surveys geospatial information in DLs, with a case study on geocoding. Given this rich content, we trust that any interested in digital libraries, or in related systems, will find this volume to be motivating, intellectually satisfying, and useful. We hope it will help move digital libraries forward into a science as well as a practice. We hope it will help build community that will address the needs of the next generation of DLs. Table of Contents: Content-Based Image Retrieval / Education / Social Networks in Digital Libraries / eScience and Simulation Digital Libraries / Geospatial Information / Bibliography

Book Digital Library Technologies

Download or read book Digital Library Technologies written by Edward A. Fox and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-01 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital libraries (DLs) have introduced new technologies, as well as leveraging, enhancing, and integrating related technologies, since the early 1990s. These efforts have been enriched through a formal approach, e.g., the 5S (Societies, Scenarios, Spaces, Structures, Streams) framework, which is discussed in two earlier volumes in this series. This volume should help advance work not only in DLs, but also in the WWW and other information systems. Drawing upon four (Kozievitch, Murthy, Park, Yang) completed and three (Elsherbiny, Farag, Srinivasan) in-process dissertations, as well as the efforts of collaborating researchers and scores of related publications, presentations, tutorials, and reports, this book should advance the DL field with regard to at least six key technologies. By integrating surveys of the state-of-the-art, new research, connections with formalization, case studies, and exercises/projects, this book can serve as a computing or information science textbook. It can support studies in cyber-security, document management, hypertext/hypermedia, IR, knowledge management, LIS, multimedia, and machine learning. Chapter 1, with a case study on fingerprint collections, focuses on complex (composite, compound) objects, connecting DL and related work on buckets, DCC, and OAI-ORE. Chapter 2, discussing annotations, as in hypertext/hypermedia, emphasizes parts of documents, including images as well as text, managing superimposed information. The SuperIDR system, and prototype efforts with Flickr, should motivate further development and standardization related to annotation, which would benefit all DL and WWW users. Chapter 3, on ontologies, explains how they help with browsing, query expansion, focused crawling, and classification. This chapter connects DLs with the Semantic Web, and uses CTRnet as an example. Chapter 4, on (hierarchical) classification, leverages LIS theory, as well as machine learning, and is important for DLs as well as the WWW. Chapter 5, on extraction from text, covers document segmentation, as well as how to construct a database from heterogeneous collections of references (from ETDs); i.e., converting strings to canonical forms. Chapter 6 surveys the security approaches used in information systems, and explains how those approaches can apply to digital libraries which are not fully open. Given this rich content, those interested in DLs will be able to find solutions to key problems, using the right technologies and methods. We hope this book will help show how formal approaches can enhance the development of suitable technologies and how they can be better integrated with DLs and other information systems.

Book Dimensionality Reduction with Unsupervised Nearest Neighbors

Download or read book Dimensionality Reduction with Unsupervised Nearest Neighbors written by Oliver Kramer and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-05-30 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is devoted to a novel approach for dimensionality reduction based on the famous nearest neighbor method that is a powerful classification and regression approach. It starts with an introduction to machine learning concepts and a real-world application from the energy domain. Then, unsupervised nearest neighbors (UNN) is introduced as efficient iterative method for dimensionality reduction. Various UNN models are developed step by step, reaching from a simple iterative strategy for discrete latent spaces to a stochastic kernel-based algorithm for learning submanifolds with independent parameterizations. Extensions that allow the embedding of incomplete and noisy patterns are introduced. Various optimization approaches are compared, from evolutionary to swarm-based heuristics. Experimental comparisons to related methodologies taking into account artificial test data sets and also real-world data demonstrate the behavior of UNN in practical scenarios. The book contains numerous color figures to illustrate the introduced concepts and to highlight the experimental results.

Book Nearest Neighbor Search

    Book Details:
  • Author : Apostolos N. Papadopoulos
  • Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
  • Release : 2006-11-22
  • ISBN : 0387275444
  • Pages : 179 pages

Download or read book Nearest Neighbor Search written by Apostolos N. Papadopoulos and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-11-22 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern applications are both data and computationally intensive and require the storage and manipulation of voluminous traditional (alphanumeric) and nontraditional data sets (images, text, geometric objects, time-series). Examples of such emerging application domains are: Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Multimedia Information Systems, CAD/CAM, Time-Series Analysis, Medical Information Sstems, On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), and Data Mining. These applications pose diverse requirements with respect to the information and the operations that need to be supported. From the database perspective, new techniques and tools therefore need to be developed towards increased processing efficiency. This monograph explores the way spatial database management systems aim at supporting queries that involve the space characteristics of the underlying data, and discusses query processing techniques for nearest neighbor queries. It provides both basic concepts and state-of-the-art results in spatial databases and parallel processing research, and studies numerous applications of nearest neighbor queries.

Book Advances in Efficiency and Productivity Analysis

Download or read book Advances in Efficiency and Productivity Analysis written by Christopher F. Parmeter and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-21 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume examines the state-of-the-art of productivity and efficiency analysis. It brings together a selection of the best papers from the 10th North American Productivity Workshop. By analyzing world-wide perspectives on challenges that local economies and institutions may face when changes in productivity are observed, readers can quickly assess the impact of productivity measurement, productivity growth, dynamics of productivity change, measures of labor productivity, measures of technical efficiency in different sectors, frontier analysis, measures of performance, industry instability and spillover effects. The contributions in this volume focus on the theory and application of economics, econometrics, statistics, management science and operational research related to problems in the areas of productivity and efficiency measurement. Popular techniques and methodologies including stochastic frontier analysis and data envelopment analysis are represented. Chapters also cover broader issues related to measuring, understanding, incentivizing and improving the productivity and performance of firms, public services, and industries.