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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.
 | |  | |  | | The universe, in all its richness, diversity and complexity, is populated by a myriad of intriguing celestial objects. Among the most exotic of them are gravitationally lensed quasars. A quasar is an extremely bright nucleus of a galaxy, and when such an object is gravitationally lensed, multiple images of the quasar are produced – this phenomenon of cosmic mirage can provide invaluable insights on burning questions, such as the nature of dark matter and dark energy. | Wood, as a material, offers several unique advantages: widespread availability, natural renewability, favorable ecological assessment, and flexibility of implementation. Moreover, the polymeric components of wood, together with its porous structure, confer upon it a faculty for transformation exceeding that of other materials. | The novel architectural form of this building, conceived of by the architects of SAANA (winners of the Pritzker Prize in 2010), compelled the building engineers to come up with unprecedented structural, technical and logistical solutions. |
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.
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About the
authors:
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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. |
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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. |
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