This book offers a compendium of best practices in game dynamics. It covers a wide range of dynamic game elements ranging from player behavior over artificial intelligence to procedural content generation. Such dynamics make virtual worlds more lively and realistic and they also create the potential for moments of amazement and surprise. In many cases, game dynamics are driven by a combination of random seeds, player records and procedural algorithms. Games can even incorporate the player's real-world behavior to create dynamic responses. The best practices illustrate how dynamic elements improve the user experience and increase the replay value. The book draws upon interdisciplinary approaches; researchers and practitioners from Game Studies, Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, Psychology and other disciplines will find this book to be an exceptional resource of both creative inspiration and hands-on process knowledge.

Recent decades have seen a very rapid success in developing numerical methods based on explicit control over approximation errors. It may be said that nowadays a new direction is forming in numerical analysis, the main goal of which is to develop methods ofreliable computations. In general, a reliable numerical method must solve two basic problems: (a) generate a sequence of approximations that converges to a solution and (b) verify the accuracy of these approximations. A computer code for such a method must consist of two respective blocks: solver and checker.
In this book, we are chiefly concerned with the problem (b) and try to present the main approaches developed for a posteriori error estimation in various problems.
The authors try to retain a rigorous mathematical style, however, proofs are constructive whenever possible and additional mathematical knowledge is presented when necessary. The book contains a number of new mathematical results and lists a posteriori error estimation methods that have been developed in the very recent time.
- computable bounds of approximation errors
- checking algorithms
- iteration processes
- finite element methods
- elliptic type problems
- nonlinear variational problems
- variational inequalities

This book presents multibiometric watermarking techniques for security of biometric data. This book also covers transform domain multibiometric watermarking techniques and their advantages and limitations. The authors have developed novel watermarking techniques with a combination of Compressive Sensing (CS) theory for the security of biometric data at the system database of the biometric system. The authors show how these techniques offer higher robustness, authenticity, better imperceptibility, increased payload capacity, and secure biometric watermarks. They show how to use the CS theory for the security of biometric watermarks before embedding into the host biometric data. The suggested methods may find potential applications in the security of biometric data at various banking applications, access control of laboratories, nuclear power stations, military base, and airports.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is influencing the future of almost every sector and human being. AI has been the primary driving force behind emerging technologies such as big data, blockchain, robots, and the internet of things (IoT), and it will continue to be a technological innovator for the foreseeable future. New algorithms in AI are changing business processes and deploying AI-based applications in various sectors. The Handbook of Research on AI and Knowledge Engineering for Real-Time Business Intelligence is a comprehensive reference that presents cases and best practices of AI and knowledge engineering applications on business intelligence. Covering topics such as deep learning methods, face recognition, and sentiment analysis, this major reference work is a dynamic resource for business leaders and executives, IT managers, AI scientists, students and educators of higher education, librarians, researchers, and academicians.

This proceeding features papers discussing big data innovation for sustainable cognitive computing. The papers feature detail on cognitive computing and its self-learning systems that use data mining, pattern recognition and natural language processing (NLP) to mirror the way the human brain works. This international conference focuses on cognitive computing technologies, from knowledge representation techniques and natural language processing algorithms to dynamic learning approaches. Topics covered include Data Science for Cognitive Analysis, Real-Time Ubiquitous Data Science, Platform for Privacy Preserving Data Science, and Internet-Based Cognitive Platform. The EAI International Conference on Big Data Innovation for Sustainable Cognitive Computing (BDCC 2018), took place on 13 - 15 December 2018 in Coimbatore, India.

This book discusses the design and implementation aspects of ultra-low power biosignal acquisition platforms that exploit analog-assisted and algorithmic approaches for power savings.The authors describe an approach referred to as "analog-and-algorithm-assisted" signal processing.This enables significant power consumption reductions by implementing low power biosignal acquisition systems, leveraging analog preprocessing and algorithmic approaches to reduce the data rate very early in the signal processing chain.They demonstrate savings for wearable sensor networks (WSN) and body area networks (BAN), in the sensors' stimulation power consumption, as well in the power consumption of the digital signal processing and the radio link. Two specific implementations, an adaptive sampling electrocardiogram (ECG) acquisition and a compressive sampling (CS) photoplethysmogram (PPG) acquisition system, are demonstrated. First book to present the so called, "analog-and-algorithm-assisted" approaches for ultra-low power biosignal acquisition and processing platforms; Covers the recent trend of "beyond Nyquist rate" signal acquisition and processing in detail, including adaptive sampling and compressive sampling paradigms; Includes chapters on compressed domain feature extraction, as well as acquisition of photoplethysmogram, an emerging optical sensing modality, including compressive sampling based PPG readout with embedded feature extraction; Discusses emerging trends in sensor fusion for improving the signal integrity, as well as lowering the power consumption of biosignal acquisition systems.

Drawn to Life is a two-volume collection of the legendary lectures of long-time Disney animator Walt Stanchfield. For over 20 years, Walt mentored a new generation of animators at the Walt Disney Studios and influenced such talented artists such as Tim Burton, Brad Bird, Glen Keane, and Andreas Deja. His writing and drawings have become must-have lessons for fine artists, film professionals, animators, and students looking for inspiration and essential training in drawing and the art of animation. Written by Walt Stanchfield (1919–2000), who began work for the Walt Disney Studios in the 1950s. His work can be seen in films such as Sleeping Beauty, The Jungle Book, 101 Dalmatians, and Peter Pan. Edited by Disney Legend and Oscar®-nominated producer Don Hahn, whose credits include the classic Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Drawn to Life is a two-volume collection of the legendary lectures of long-time Disney animator Walt Stanchfield. For over 20 years, Walt mentored a new generation of animators at the Walt Disney Studios and influenced such talented artists such as Tim Burton, Brad Bird, Glen Keane, and Andreas Deja. His writing and drawings have become must-have lessons for fine artists, film professionals, animators, and students looking for inspiration and essential training in drawing and the art of animation. Written by Walt Stanchfield (1919–2000), who began work for the Walt Disney Studios in the 1950s. His work can be seen in films such as Sleeping Beauty, The Jungle Book, 101 Dalmatians, and Peter Pan. Edited by Disney Legend and Oscar®-nominated producer Don Hahn, whose credits include the classic Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Managers today are experiencing an increased focus on emergent collaborative technologies designed to enable virtual organization users to share resources and accomplish complex tasks better. Grid Technology for Maximizing Collaborative Decision Management and Support: Advancing Effective Virtual Organizations provides a state-of-the-art collection of opportunities and applicable practices of grid technology to sustain competitive advantage. Offering a collection of international research studies by leading experts, this book describes how grid technology can be applied to serve the purpose within interconnected organizations in an effective and efficient collaborative setting.

At 70 terabytes and growing, Wal-Mart's data warehouse is still the world's largest, most ambitious, and arguably most successful commercial database. Written by one of the key figures in its design and construction, "Data Warehousing: Using the Wal-Mart Model" gives you an insider's view of this enormous project. Continuously drawing from this example, the author teaches you the general principles and specific techniques you need to understand to be a valuable part of your organization's own data warehouse project, however large or small. You'll emerge with a practical understanding of both the business and technical aspects of building a data warehouse for storing and accessing data in a strategically useful way.

What further sets this book apart is its focus on the informational needs of retail companies-including both market and organizational issues that affect the data's collection and use. If retail is your field, this book will prove especially valuable as you develop and implement your company's ideal data warehouse solution.
* Written by a member of the team of four engineers who designed and built the Wal-Mart Data Warehouse database, a team whose database design was recognized internally in 1991 by Wal-Mart with the company's Team Innovational Technical award.
* Provides essential information for project managers, consultants, data warehouse managers, and data architects.
* Takes an in-depth look at a wide range of technical issues, including architecture, construction approaches, tool selection, database system selection, and maintenance.
* Addresses issues specific to retail business: vendors, inventory, sales analysis, geography, article categories, and more.
* Explains how to determine business requirements at the outset of the project-and how to develop return on investment analyses after the warehouse has been brought online.

This book presents the design of delay-efficient packet schedulers for heterogeneous M2M uplink traffic classified into several classes, based on packet delay requirements, payload size, arrival process, etc. Specifically, the authors use tools from queuing theory to determine the delay-optimal scheduling policy. The proposed packet schedulers are designed for a generic M2M architecture and thus equally applicable to any M2M application. Additionally, due to their low implementation complexity and excellent delay-performance, they authors show how they are also well-suited for practical M2M systems. The book pertains primarily to real-time process scheduler experts in industry/academia and graduate students whose research deals with designing Quality-of-Service-aware packet schedulers for M2M packet schedulers over existing and future cellular infrastructure. Presents queuing theoretic analysis and optimization techniques used to design proposed packet scheduling strategies; Provides utility functions to precisely model diverse delay requirements, which lends itself to formulation of utility-maximization problems for determining the delay- or utility-optimal packet scheduler; Includes detail on low implementation complexity of the proposed scheduler by using iterative and distributed optimization techniques.

As interactive hypermedia systems take an increasingly prevalent role in the workplace, at home and on the web, their usability becomes vitally important to meeting the expectations of users and fulfilling the promise integrating technology into daily life. Quality and Communicability for Interactive Hypermedia Systems: Concepts and Practices for Design explores ways to overcome obstacles to successful communication from theories of communicability to the various levels of design and integration. With a heuristic focus on how current system design affects user understanding, this reference source goes beyond simple usability and fills an important gap in present research by illustrating the importance of communicability in modern technological advancements.

This scholarly treasury of over 450 distinguished quotations, divided into 170 categories, focuses on the best thinking in the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, and artificial intelligence, from the classical period of Greece to contemporary cognitive science. Quotations are arranged chronologically within categories. This work will be of interest to scholars and professionals in psychology, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science as well as undergraduate and graduate students in these disciplines.

A secured system for Healthcare 4.0 is vital to all stakeholders, including patients and caregivers. Using the new Blockchain system of trusted ledgers would help guarantee authenticity in the multi-access system that is Healthcare 4.0. This is the first comprehensive book that explores how to achieve secure systems for Healthcare 4.0 using Blockchain, with emphasis on the key challenges of privacy and security. The book is organized into four sections. The first section is focused on 5G healthcare privacy and security concerns. The second section discusses healthcare architecture and emerging technologies. The third section covers the role of artificial intelligence for data security and privacy in 5G healthcare services. Finally, the last section systematically illustrates the adoption of blockchain in various applications of 5G healthcare. The book is essential reading for all involved in setting up, running, and maintaining healthcare information systems. Engineers, scientists, technologists, developers, designers, and researchers in healthcare technologies, health informatics, security, and information technology will find the content particularly useful.

This book describes the operation and analysis of soft-commutated isolated DC-DC converters used in the design of high efficiency and high power density equipment. It explains the basic principles behind first- and second-order circuits with power switches to enable readers to understand the importance of these converters in high efficiency and high power density power supply design for residential, commercial, industrial and medical use as well as in aerospace equipment. With each chapter featuring a different power converter topology, the book covers the most important resonant converters, including series resonant converters; resonant LLC converters; soft commutation pulse width modulation converters; zero voltage switching; and zero current switching. Each topic is presented with full analysis, a showcase of the power stages of the converters, exercises and their solutions as well as simulation results, which mainly focus on the commutation analysis and output characteristic. This book is a valuable source of information for professionals working in power electronics, power conversion and design of high efficiency and high power density DC-DC converters and switch mode power supplies. The book also serves as a point of reference for engineers responsible for development projects and equipment in companies and research centers and a text for advanced students.

Space-time adaptive processing (STAP) is a technology for advanced radar systems that allows for significant performance enhancements over conventional approaches. Based on a course taught in industry, government and academia, this is a practical introduction to STAP concepts and methods, placing emphasis on implementation in real-world systems. It addresses the needs of radar engineers who are seeking to apply effective STAP techniques to their systems, and can also be used as a reference by non-radar specialists with an interest in the signal processing applications of STAP. The authors aim to explain critical topics in a manner that should be understandable to anyone with a basic background in radar and signal processing.

This book brings the reader up-to-date on all aspects concerning ECCM at the antenna level. It is a reference tool for professionals seeking quick answers to on-the-job problems. This text delivers an accurate description of working principles, processing schemes and performance evaluation techniques. In addition, it provides engineering details on the newest digital techiques for sidelobe jamming cancellation and digital beamforming (DFB).

This volume presents the second part of the proceedings of the Mediterranean Conference on Information & Communication Technologies (MedICT 2015), which was held at Saidia, Morocco during 7-9 May, 2015. MedICT provides an excellent international forum to the researchers and practitioners from both academia as well as industry to meet and share cutting-edge development. The conference has also a special focus on enabling technologies for societal challenges, and seeks to address multidisciplinary challenges in Information & Communication Technologies such as health, demographic change, wellbeing, security and sustainability issues. The proceedings publish high quality papers which are closely related to the various theories, as well as emerging and practical applications of particular interest to the ICT community. This second volume provides a compact yet broad view of recent developments in Data, Systems, Services and Education, and covers recent research areas in the field including Control Systems, Software Engineering, Data Mining and Big Data, ICT for Education and Support Activities, Networking, Cloud Computing and Security, ICT Based Services and Applications, Mobile Agent Systems, Software Engineering, Data Mining and Big Data, Online Experimentation & Artificial Intelligence in Education, Networking, Cloud Computing and Security, ICT Based Education and Services ICT Challenges and Applications, Advances in ICT Modeling and Design ICT Developments.

This unique book discusses machine understanding (MU). This new branch of classic machine perception research focuses on perception that leads to understanding and is based on the categories of sensory objects. In this approach the visual and non-visual knowledge, in the form of visual and non-visual concepts, is used in the complex reasoning process that leads to understanding. The book presents selected new concepts, such as perceptual transformations, within the machine understanding framework, and uses perceptual transformations to solve perceptual problems (visual intelligence tests) during understanding, where understanding is regarded as an ability to solve complex visual problems described in the authors' previous books. Thanks to the uniqueness of the research topics covered, the book appeals to researchers from a wide range of disciplines, especially computer science, cognitive science and philosophy.

This book presents original research articles addressing various aspects of economics, management and optimization. The topics discussed include economics, finance, marketing, resource allocation strategies, fuzzy logic, and network-based techniques for the analysis of economics, management and mathematical optimization. Combining the input of contributing professors and researchers from various Spanish, Italian and Latin American universities, the book will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners, as well as members of the general public interested in the world of Economics and Management.

The most thrilling and challenging intellectual issues of humanity - whether and how a consistent account of reality can be obtained, which field of knowledge is capable to deal with the whole of reality and its formal representation, and how powerful intelligent machines can be brought into existence - are research areas demanding innovative and comprehensive study.""Reality, Universal Ontology and Knowledge Systems: Toward the Intelligent World"" provides cutting-edge research on reality, its nature and fundamental structure, and how it may be effectively represented both by human minds and intelligent machines. Striving to describe a standard world model and universal formal ontology, it offers a uniformly organized human knowledge. It includes powerful reasoning systems, and secure communication interoperability between two species of intelligences, as well as existing human beings and nascent computing reasoning systems promising the profound revolution in human values and ways of life.

Electrical Engineering/Circuits and Systems Principles of Data Conversion System Design This advanced text and reference deals with the design and implementation of integrated circuits for analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion. It begins with basic concepts and systematically leads the reader to advanced topics, describing design issues and techniques at both circuit and system levels. Key topics covered include:

• Sampling circuits and architectures and D/A and A/D architectures
• Comparator and op amp design
• Calibration techniques, testing, and characterization
• Circuit techniques for high-speed and high-precision applications
• An explanation of issues in CMOS, bipolar, and BiCMOS technologies

This book will appeal to engineering students in the field of circuits and systems, as well as design engineers who want to gain a system-level perspective of data conversion units and their trade-offs. Behzad Razavi is a technical staff member at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey. He has had several IEEE papers published, including: "A 12-bit 10-MHz BiCMOS Comparator," "Design Techniques for High-Speed, High-Resolution Comparators," and "Low-Voltage Techniques for High-Speed Digital Bipolar Circuits." Dr. Razavi earned his Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Tehran University of Technology. Also of Interest from IEEE Press