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The Art of Structures to be published in English

Building on the success of the French and Italian editions of the classic L'art des structures by Professor Aurelio Muttoni, the EPFL Press has announced the publication of the English edition of this work, revised and updated, for Sping 2010.  This work, dedicated to the conception of architectural structures, aims to facilitate the dialogue between architects and engineers. The book describes the full spectrum of supporting structures and their function, showing how loads are sustained and ultimately transferred to the ground.  The book favors the intuitive approach; the basics of equilibrium are thus explained by a visual study of the internal forces of both historic and modern structures, by the use of simple graphical tools.

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Inside an insulating vacuum chamber in a tunnel about 100 meters below the surface of the Franco-Swiss plain near Geneva, packets of protons whirl around the 27-km circumference of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at a speed close to that of light, colliding every 25 nanoseconds at four beam crossings.
Robot Programming by Demonstration (PbD) examines methods by which a robot learns new skills through human guidance. Also referred to as learning by imitation, tutelage or apprenticeship learning, PbD takes inspiration from the way humans learn new skills by imitation, thereby developing methods by which new skills can be transmitted to a robot.
Solidication is one of the oldest processes for producing complex shapes for applications ranging from art to industry, and it remains as one of the most important commercial processes for many materials. Since the 1980's, numerous fundamental developments in the understanding of solidication processes and microstructure formation have come from both analytical theories and the application of computational techniques using commonly available powerful computers.
In the spotlight
Book cover
Signal Processing for communications
Authors:
Prandoni Paolo, Vetterli Martin
Series: Computer and Communication Sciences
Information
ISBN EPFL Press: 978-2-940222-20-9
2008, 392 pages, 16x24cm, Hardcover
ISBN CRC Press: 978-0-8493-8239-4
 





With a novel, less classical approach to the subject, the authors have written a book with the conviction that signal processing should be taught to be fun. The treatment is therefore less focused on the mathematics and more on the conceptual aspects, the idea being to allow the readers to think about the subject at a higher conceptual level, thus building the foundations for more advanced topics.

The book remains an engineering text, with the goal of helping students solve real-world problems. In this vein, the last chapter pulls together the individual topics as discussed throughout the book into an in-depth look at the development of an end-to-end communication system, namely, a modem for communicating digital information over an analog channel.

Richly illustrated with examples and exercises in each chapter, the book offers a fresh approach to the teaching of signal processing to upper-level undergraduates. 
About the authors:
 

After studies in Padua and Berkeley, Paolo Prandoni received his Doctorate from the EPFL in the Audiovisual Communications Laboratory in 1999. His interests have included musical timbre, audio modelling and compression, communication system design and image analysis.  He is now the founder and Director of  Quividi, a company based in Paris, France, and is a visiting lecturer in signal processing at the EPFL.
   


Martin Vetterli works at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) on signal processing and communications, with an emphasis on wavelet theory and applications, image and video compression, joint source-channel coding, self-organized communication systems and sensor networks. He is currently a Vice-President of EPFL, in charge of international relations. He has won many prizes including the Swiss National Latsis Prize in 1996, the SPIE Presidential award in 1999, and the IEEE Signal Processing Technical Achievement Award in 2001. He is a fellow of the IEEE, a member of SIAM, and has held numerous editorial roles. He is the author of two other books and more than 150 research articles.