"Introducing Spoken Dialogue Systems into Intelligent Environments "outlines the formalisms of a novel knowledge-driven framework for spoken dialogue management and presents the implementation ofa model-based Adaptive Spoken Dialogue Manager(ASDM) called OwlSpeak. The authors have identified three stakeholders thatpotentially influence the behavior of the ASDM: the user, the SDS, and a complex Intelligent Environment (IE) consisting of various devices, services, and task descriptions.
The theoretical foundation of a working ontology-based spoken dialogue description framework, the prototype implementation of the ASDM, and the evaluation activities that are presented as part of this book contribute to the ongoing spoken dialogue research by establishing the fertile ground of model-based adaptive spoken dialogue management.
Thismonograph is ideal for advanced undergraduate students, PhD students, and postdocs as well as academic and industrial researchers and developers in speech and multimodal interactive systems."

This book examines the architectures, technologies, and design methods that make it possible to achieve a survivable fiber network, both practically and economically. Combining theory and actual results, it explores alternative methods and presents analytical and computational optimization approaches.

"It strikes an excellent balance between underlying theory and principles, rigorous derivation of design formulae and description of practical applications, ranging from device to system and network, performances and properties." -- International Journal of Optoelectronics

"I would recommend it as a reference for those seeking to gain a basic understanding of fiber optic access networks and for technical managers who want an up-to-date overview of advances in this technology." -- Laser Focus World

This book develops valuable new approaches to digital out-of-home media and digital signage in urban environments. It offers solutions for communicating interactive features of digital signage to passers-by. Digital out-of-home media and digital signage screens are becoming increasingly interactive thanks to touch input technology and gesture recognition. To optimize their conversion rate, interactive public displays must 1) attract attention, 2) communicate to passers-by that they are interactive, 3) explain the interaction, and 4) provide a motivation for passers-by to interact. This book highlights solutions to problems 2 and 3 above. The focus is on whole-body interaction, where the positions and orientations of users and their individual body parts are captured by specialized sensors (e.g., depth cameras). The book presents revealing findings from a field study on communicating interactivity, a laboratory on analysing visual attention, a field study on mid-air gestures, and a field study on using mid-air gestures to select items on interactive public displays.

Advances in the synthesis of new materials with often complex, nano-scaled structures require increasingly sophisticated experimental techniques that can probe the electronic states, the atomic magnetic moments and the magnetic microstructures responsible for the properties of these materials.

At the same time, progress in synchrotron radiation techniques has ensured that these light sources remain a key tool of investigation, e.g. synchrotron radiation sources of the third generation are able to support magnetic imaging on a sub-micrometer scale.

With the Fifth Mittelwihr School on Magnetism and Synchrotron Radiation the tradition of teaching the state-of-the-art on modern research developments continues and is expressed through the present set of extensive lectures provided in this volume. While primarily aimed at postgraduate students and newcomers to the field, this volume will also benefit researchers and lecturers actively working in the field.

Images are all around us The proliferation of low-cost, high-quality imaging devices has led to an explosion in acquired images. When these images are acquired from a microscope, telescope, satellite, or medical imaging device, there is a statistical image processing task: the inference of something--an artery, a road, a DNA marker, an oil spill--from imagery, possibly noisy, blurry, or incomplete. A great many textbooks have been written on image processing. However this book does not so much focus on images, per se, but rather on spatial data sets, with one or more measurements taken over a two or higher dimensional space, and to which standard image-processing algorithms may not apply. There are many important data analysis methods developed in this text for such statistical image problems. Examples abound throughout remote sensing (satellite data mapping, data assimilation, climate-change studies, land use), medical imaging (organ segmentation, anomaly detection), computer vision (image classification, segmentation), and other 2D/3D problems (biological imaging, porous media). The goal, then, of this text is to address methods for solving multidimensional statistical problems. The text strikes a balance between mathematics and theory on the one hand, versus applications and algorithms on the other, by deliberately developing the basic theory (Part I), the mathematical modeling (Part II), and the algorithmic and numerical methods (Part III) of solving a given problem. The particular emphases of the book include inverse problems, multidimensional modeling, random fields, and hierarchical methods.

This book shows how to model selected communication scenarios using game theory. The book helps researchers specifically dealing with scenarios motivated by the increasing use of the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G Communications by using game theory to approach the study of such challenging scenarios. The author explains how game theory acts as a mathematical tool that models decision making in terms of strategies and mechanisms that can result in optimal payoffs for a number of interacting entities, offering often antagonistic behaviors. The book explores new technologies in terms of design, development and management from a theoretical perspective, using game theory to analyze strategic situations and demonstrate profitable behaviors of the cooperative entities. The book identifies and explores several significant applications/uses/situations that arise from the vast deployment of the IoT. The presentation of the technological scenarios is followed in each of the first four chapters by a step-by-step theoretical model often followed by equilibrium proof, and numerical simulation results, that are explained in a tutorial-like manner. The four chapters tackle challenging IoT and 5G related issues, including: new security threats that IoT brings, e.g. botnets, ad hoc vehicular networks and the need for trust in vehicular communications, content repetition by offloading traffic onto mobile users, as well as issues due to new wearable devices that enable data collection to become more intrusive.

Written by the inventor of Raman lasers, this reference describes their developments, fundamentals, operation characteristics and application methods. It is for optoelectronic researchers, system engineers and researchers in nonlinear optics, crystal optics and metrology.

"Advances in Imaging and Electron Physics " merges two long-running serials--"Advances in Electronics and Electron Physics" and "Advances in Optical and Electron Microscopy."
This series features extended articles on the physics of electron devices (especially semiconductor devices), particle optics at high and low energies, microlithography, image science and digital image processing, electromagnetic wave propagation, electron microscopy, and the computing methods used in all these domains.
* Contributions from leading international scholars and industry experts
* Discusses hot topic areas and presents current and future research trends
* Invaluable reference and guide for physicists, engineers and mathematicians

The book presents information about Terahertz science, Terahertz photodetectors and Terahertz Lasers. A special emphasis is given to room temperature operation of long wavelength photodetectors based on novel quantum dots (Centered Defect Spherical Quantum Dots). Moreover, a complete analysis of systems based on Quantum Cascade structures to detect far infrared wavelengths is provided. Finally, the book presents Terahertz laser principles considering multi-color lasers in this range of wavelengths. Written as a background for graduate students in the Optics field.

This dissertation provides the first systematic analysis of the dynamic energy efficiency of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) for optical interconnects, a key technology to address the pressing ecological and economic issues of the exponentially growing energy consumption in data centers. Energy-efficient data communication is one of the most important fields in "Green Photonics" enabling higher bit rates at significantly reduced energy consumption per bit. In this thesis the static and dynamic properties of GaAs-based oxide-confined VCSELs emitting at 850 nm and 980 nm are analyzed and general rules for achieving energy-efficient data transmission using VCSELs at any wavelength are derived. These rules are verified in data transmission experiments leading to record energy-efficient data transmission across a wide range of multimode optical fiber distances and at high temperatures up to 85 DegreesC. Important trade-offs between energy efficiency, temperature stability, modulation bandwidth, low current-density operation and other VCSEL properties are revealed and discussed.

The Proceedings of First International Conference on Opto-Electronics and Applied Optics 2014, IEM OPTRONIX 2014 presents the research contributions presented in the conference by researchers from both India and abroad. Contributions from established scientists as well as students are included. The book is organized to enable easy access to various topics of interest. The first part includes the Keynote addresses by Phillip Russell, Max Planck Institute of the Light Sciences, Erlangen, Germany and Lorenzo Pavesi, University of Trento, Italy. The second part focuses on the Plenary Talks given by eminent scientists, namely, Azizur Rahman, City University London, London; Bishnu Pal, President, The Optical Society of India; Kamakhya Ghatak, National Institute of Technology, Agartala; Kehar Singh, Former Professor, India Institute of Technology Delhi; Mourad Zghal, SUPCOM, University of Carthage, Tunisia; Partha Roy Chaudhuri, IIT Kharagpur; S K. Bhadra, CSIR-Central Glass and Ceramic Research Institute, Kolkata; Sanjib Chatterjee, Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology, Indore; Takeo Sasaki, Tokyo University, Japan; Lakshminarayan Hazra, Emeritus Professor, University of Calcutta, Kolkata; Shyam Akashe, ITM University, Gwalior and Vasudevan Lakshminarayanan, University of Waterloo, Canada. The subsequent parts focus on topic-wise contributory papers in Application of Solar Energy; Diffraction Tomography; E.M. Radiation Theory and Antenna; Fibre Optics and Devices; Photonics for Space Applications; Micro-Electronics and VLSI; Nano-Photonics, Bio-Photonics and Bio-Medical Optics; Non-linear Phenomena and Chaos; Optical and Digital Data and Image Processing; Optical Communications and Networks; Optical Design; Opto-Electronic Devices; Opto-Electronic Materials and Quantum Optics and Information Processing.

This book deals with timing attacks on cryptographic ciphers. It describes and analyzes various unintended covert timing channels that are formed when ciphers are executed in microprocessors. The book considers modern superscalar microprocessors which are enabled with features such as multi-threaded, pipelined, parallel, speculative, and out-of order execution. Various timing attack algorithms are described and analyzed for both block ciphers as well as public-key ciphers. The interplay between the cipher implementation, the system architecture, and the attack's success is analyzed. Further hardware and software countermeasures are discussed with the aim of illustrating methods to build systems that can protect against these attacks.

"Advanced Technologies in Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks "collects selected papers from the 7th China Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks (CWSN2013) held in Qingdao, October 17-19, 2013. The book features state-of-the-art studies on Sensor Networks in China with the theme of Advances in wireless sensor networks of China . The selected works can help promote development of sensor network technology towards interconnectivity, resource sharing, flexibility and high efficiency. Researchers and engineers in the field of sensor networks can benefit from the book.

Xue Wang is a professor at Tsinghua University; Li Cui is a professor at Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Zhongwen Guo is a professor at Ocean University of China."

"Advances in Imaging and Electron Physics " merges two long-running serials--"Advances in Electronics and Electron Physics" and "Advances in Optical and Electron Microscopy."
This series features extended articles on the physics of electron devices (especially semiconductor devices), particle optics at high and low energies, microlithography, image science and digital image processing, electromagnetic wave propagation, electron microscopy, and the computing methods used in all these domains.
* Contributions from leading international scholars and industry experts
* Discusses hot topic areas and presents current and future research trends
* Invaluable reference and guide for physicists, engineers and mathematicians

Accessing remote instrumentation worldwide is one of the goals of e-Science. The task of enabling the execution of complex experiments that involve the use of distributed scientific instruments must be supported by a number of different architectural domains, which inter-work in a coordinated fashion to provide the necessary functionality. These domains embrace the physical instruments, the communication network interconnecting the distributed systems, the service oriented abstractions and their middleware. The Grid paradigm (or, more generally, the Service Oriented Architecture -- SOA), viewed as a tool for the integration of distributed resources, plays a significant role, not only to manage computational aspects, but increasingly as an aggregator of measurement instrumentation and pervasive large-scale data acquisition platforms. In this context, the functionality of a SOA allows managing, maintaining and exploiting heterogeneous instrumentation and acquisition devices in a unified way, by providing standardized interfaces and common working environments to their users, but the peculiar aspects of dealing with real instruments of widely different categories may add new functional requirements to this scenario. On the other hand, the growing transport capacity of core and access networks allows data transfer at unprecedented speed, but new challenges arise from wireless access, wireless sensor networks, and the traversal of heterogeneous network domains.

The book focuses on all aspects related to the effective exploitation of remote instrumentation and to the building complex virtual laboratories on top of real devices and infrastructures. These include SOA and related middleware, high-speed networking in support of Grid applications, wireless Grids for acquisition devices and sensor networks, Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning for real-time control, measurement instrumentation and methodology, as well as metrology issues in distributed systems.

"Advances in Imaging and Electron Physics " merges two long-running serials--"Advances in Electronics and Electron Physics" and "Advances in Optical and Electron Microscopy."
This series features extended articles on the physics of electron devices (especially semiconductor devices), particle optics at high and low energies, microlithography, image science and digital image processing, electromagnetic wave propagation, electron microscopy, and the computing methods used in all these domains.
* Contributions from leading international scholars and industry experts
* Discusses hot topic areas and presents current and future research trends
* Invaluable reference and guide for physicists, engineers and mathematicians

This book describes the use of low-power low-cost and extremely small radios to provide essential time reference for wireless sensor networks. The authors explain how to integrate such radios in a standard CMOS process to reduce both cost and size, while focusing on the challenge of designing a fully integrated time reference for such radios. To enable the integration of the time reference, system techniques are proposed and analyzed, several kinds of integrated time references are reviewed, and mobility-based references are identified as viable candidates to provide the required accuracy at low-power consumption. Practical implementations of a mobility-based oscillator and a temperature sensor are also presented, which demonstrate the required accuracy over a wide temperature range, while drawing 51-uW from a 1.2-V supply in a 65-nm CMOS process."

Semiconductor heterostructures represent the backbone for an increasing variety of electronic and photonic devices, for applications including information storage, communication and material treatment, to name but a few. Novel structural and material concepts are needed in order to further push the performance limits of present devices and to open up new application areas. This thesis demonstrates how key performance characteristics of three completely different types of semiconductor lasers can be tailored using clever nanostructure design and epitaxial growth techniques. All aspects of laser fabrication are discussed, from design and growth of nanostructures using metal-organic vapor-phase epitaxy, to fabrication and characterization of complete devices.

The basic principle of protective relaying of power systems has not changed for more than half a century. Almost all power system protective relaying algorithms are dominated by integral transforms such as the Fourier transform and the wavelet transform. The integral transform can only provide an average attribute of the s- nals or their components. The accuracy of the attribute extraction is signi?cantly sacri?ced by the assumption of periodicity of the signals if the integral transform is appliedto transientsignals. Itis also wellknownthatthe signalsare liable to bec- taminatedbynoiseintheformofexponentiallydecayingDCoffsets,highfrequency transients, harmonic distortion, errors caused by non-linearityin the response of the sensors, and unwanted behaviour of power systems. This contamination is often provoked by fault conditions, just at the time when the protection relay is required to respond and trip the circuit breaker to limit damage caused by the fault. On the other hand, as we know, in most protection relays, complex computation has to be undertakenwithin a sampling interval, no matter how small the interval, to calculate the coef?cients relevantto the attributes of the signals byusing the integral transform based on a window of samples, and to calculate the relaying algorithms, which are derivedto representthe relationship betweenthese coef? cientsandpower system faults. If fast transients and high-order harmonics are to be addressed, - tra computing power and facilities are required. Therefore, it can be seen that the current power system relaying algorithms suffer from many problems including - curacy, fast responses, noise, disturbance rejections and reliability.

Recent studies have shown that novel processing and modeling techniques may be used to create patient-specific prostheses, artificial tissues, and other implants using data obtained from magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography, or other imaging techniques. For example, customized prostheses may be fabricated that possess suitable features, including geometry, size, and weight, for a given medical condition. Many advances have been made in the development of patient-specific implants in the past decade, yet this information is not readily available to scientists and students. Printed Biomaterials: Novel Processing and Modeling Techniques for Medicine and Surgery provides the biomaterials scientist and engineer, as well as advanced undergraduate or graduate students, with a comprehensive discussion of contemporary medical implant research and development. The development of printed biomaterials is multidisciplinary, and includes concepts traditionally associated with engineering, materials science, medicine, and surgery. This text highlights important topics in these core fields in order to provide the fundamentals necessary to comprehend current processing and modeling technologies and to develop new ones.

"Advances in Imaging and Electron Physics " merges two long-running serials--"Advances in Electronics and Electron Physics" and "Advances in Optical and Electron Microscopy."
This series features extended articles on the physics of electron devices (especially semiconductor devices), particle optics at high and low energies, microlithography, image science and digital image processing, electromagnetic wave propagation, electron microscopy, and the computing methods used in all these domains.
* Contributions from leading international scholars and industry experts
* Discusses hot topic areas and presents current and future research trends
* Invaluable reference and guide for physicists, engineers and mathematicians

This book systematically summarizes China Internet development over the past 25 years, highlighting its strong impact on China's economy and society, and discussing the Chinese people's transition from beneficiaries and participants to builders, contributors and joint maintainers of cyberspace development. It describes the development achievements, status and development and trends in China Internet in 2019, systematically summarizes the main lessons learned during development, and analyzes China's strategic planning and policy actions. Further, it discusses topics such as development outcomes, future trends in information infrastructure, network information technology, digital economy, e-government, construction and management of network contents, cyberspace security, the legal construction of cyberspace, and international cyberspace governance. In addition, the book suggests improvements to the index system for China Internet development and offers an overall assessment of cyberspace security and informatization work throughout China in order to comprehensively and accurately demonstrate the level of China Internet development.

The book written by Dr. Radu B. Rusu presents a detailed description of 3D Semantic Mapping in the context of mobile robot manipulation. As autonomous robotic platforms get more sophisticated manipulation capabilities, they also need more expressive and comprehensive environment models that include the objects present in the world, together with their position, form, and other semantic aspects, as well as interpretations of these objects with respect to the robot tasks.

The book proposes novel 3D feature representations called Point Feature Histograms (PFH), as well as a frameworks for the acquisition and processing of Semantic 3D Object Maps with contributions to robust registration, fast segmentation into regions, and reliable object detection, categorization, and reconstruction. These contributions have been fully implemented and empirically evaluated on different robotic systems, and have been the original kernel to the widely successful open-source project the Point Cloud Library (PCL) -- see http: //pointclouds.org.