Geometric Modelling is concerned with the computer aided design, manipulation, storage and transmission of geometric shape. It provides fundamental techniques to different areas of application as CAD/CAM, computer graphics, scientific visualization, and virtual Reality. 20 papers presented by leading experts give a state-of-the-art survey of the following topics: surface design and fairing; multiresolution models; reverse engineering; solid modelling; constrained based modelling.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects, AMDO 2002, held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain in November 2002.The 21 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. Among the topics addressed are geometric and physical deformable objects, motion analysis, articulated models and animation, visualization of deformable models, 3D recovery from motion, single or multiple human motion analysis and synthesis, applications of deformable models and motion analysis, face tracking, recovery and recognition models.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry, ACRI 2002, held in Geneva, Switzerland in October 2002.The 31 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from around 50 submissions. The topics covered range from theoretical issues to applications in various fields, including lattice gases, pattern recognition, cryptography, and authentication. Less known models receive attention as well, such as probabilistic, asynchronous, and multi-level automata. Among novel applications and models are highway traffic, population and growth dynamics, environmental applications, and collective intelligence.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2002, held in Tampere, Finland in October 2002.The 30 revised full papers presented with abstracts of various invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from close to 130 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on semantics and meta-models, principles of ontology, web environments, theory and methods, methods and tools, applications for practice, applying ontology in conceptual modeling, applying ontology in coneptual modeling, systems and data integration, quality assessment, and XML and object systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2001, held in Tokohama, Japan, in November 2001.The 45 revised full papers presented together with three keynote presentations were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 197 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on spatial databases, spatio-temporal databases, XML, information modeling, database design, data integration, data warehouse, UML, conceptual models, systems design, method reengineering and video databases, workflows, web information systems, applications, and software engineering.

This special volume collects invited articles by participants of the Third International Workshop on Methods for Macromolecular Modeling, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Oct. 12-14, 2000. Leading developers of methods for biomolecular simulations review advances in Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics methods, free energy computational methods, fast electrostatics (particle-mesh Ewald and fast multipole methods), mathematics, and molecular neurobiology, nucleic acid simulations, enzyme reactions, and other essential applications in biomolecular simulations. A Perspectives article by the editors assesses the directions and impact of macromolecular modeling research, including genomics and proteomics. These reviews and original papers by applied mathematicians, theoretical chemists, biomedical researchers, and physicists are of interest to interdisciplinary research students, developers and users of biomolecular methods in academia and industry.

The 2002 IFIP Workshop on Internet Technologies, Applications, and Societal Impact (WITASI 2002), held in Wroclaw, Poland, October 10-11, 2002, presents different research aspects of the Internet, both technical and societal. The workshop aims at getting together scientists and practitioners from different research areas to work together on Internet development and reflect on Internet consequences to the economy and society. The papers presented in these proceedings describe state-of-the-art research in such areas of Internet applications as languages, mobility, multimedia, quality of service, voice over IP, and wireless access. A total of 40 papers were submitted to WITASI 2002 out of which 18 papers were selected for presentation at the workshop and inclusion in the proceedings. The workshop also includes 4 invited papers. WIT ASI 2002 was sponsored by IFIP -the International Federation for Information Processing. It was organized by Working Group WG 6.4 on Internet Applications Engineering of the Technical Committee TC 6 on Communication Systems. Locally, WITASI 2002 was organized by the Institute of Control and Systems Engineering, Wroclaw University of Technology.

What should be every software organization's primary goal? Managing Software Quality. Producing and sustaining the high quality of products and processes in evolutionary systems are at the core of software engineering, and it is only through a comprehensive measurement program that a successful outcome can be assured. Cost and budget limitations, schedule due dates, all represent systems engineering constraints which impinge on the degree to which software development and maintenance professional can achieve maximum quality. Richard Nance and James Arthur's guide to managing software quality goes beyond the usual answers to the "why" and "what" questions generally provided in the standards documents. They not only look at the "how to" in their focus of the measurement of software quality, but also come up with specific suggestions to the pressing needs of practising software engineers, quality assurance engineers and software and project managers."This is one of the few books in this area that addresses the 'quality' aspect based upon the important aspect of documentation. In addition, the book provides a basis for not only the software manager concerned with measurement implementation, but also the researcher in identifying the current state of the art and practice. This will be a key reference guide for anyone that is concerned with developing quality software."(William H Farr, PhD, Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division)About the Authors: Research motivated by problems arising in large, complex software systems is what stimulates Richard Nance. His collaboration with the U.S. Navy on major software-intensive programs spans over 30 years. James Arthur is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech.

This book is devoted to investigating and developing the synergy between software engineering for multi-agent systems and agent-based social simulation; it originates from the Second International Workshop on Multi-Agend-Based Simulation, MABS 2000, held in Boston, MA, USA in July 2000, in conjunction with ICAMS 2000. Besides the thoroughly revised full papers accepted for presentation at the workshop, two invited papers and an introductory survey by one of the volume editors have been added in order to round off the scope and achieve complete coverage of all relevant topics. The book competently surveys the state of the art in the area by offering topical sections on model design issues, applications, simulating social relations and processes, and formal approaches.

Why is the question of the di?erence between living and non-living matter - tellectually so attractive to the man of the West? Where are our dreams about our own ability to understand this di?erence and to overcome it using the ?rmly established technologies rooted? Where are, for instance, the cultural roots of the enterprises covered nowadays by the discipline of Arti?cial Life? Cont- plating such questions, one of us has recognized [6] the existence of the eternal dream of the man of the West expressed, for example, in the Old Testament as follows: . . . the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being (Genesis, 2. 7). This is the dream about the workmanlike act of the creation of Adam from clay, about the creation of life from something non-living, and the con?dence in the magic power of technologies. How has this dream developed and been converted into a reality, and how does it determine our present-day activities in science and technology? What is this con?dence rooted in? Then God said: "Let us make man in our image. . . " (Genesis, 1. 26). Man believes in his own ability to repeat the Creator's acts, to change ideas into real things, because he believes he is godlike. This con?dence is - using the trendy Dawkins' term - perhaps the most important cultural meme of the West.

Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) are adaptive systems inspired by the biological immune system and applied to problem solving. This book provides an accessible introduction that will be suitable for anyone who is beginning to study or work in this area. It gives a clear definition of an AIS, sets out the foundations of the topic (including basic algorithms), and analyses how the immune system relates to other biological systems and processes. No prior knowledge of immunology is needed - all the essential background information is covered in the introductory chapters.Key features of the book include:- A discussion of AIS in the context of Computational Intelligence;- Case studies in Autonomous Navigation, Computer Network Security, Job-Shop Scheduling and Data Analysis =B7 An extensive survey of applications;- A framework to help the reader design and understand AIS;- A web site with additional resources including pseudocodes for immune algorithms, and links to related sites.Written primarily for final year undergraduate and postgraduate students studying Artificial Intelligence, Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Computing, this book will also be of interest to industrial and academic researchers working in related areas.

Seventeen papers report on the latest scientific advances in the fields of immersive projection technology and virtual environments. The main topics included here are human computer interaction (user interfaces, interaction techniques), software developments (virtual environment applications, rendering techniques), and input/output devices.

From reviews of the series:
'Many of the articles are indeed accessible to any interested nonspecialist, even without theoretical background.'
Journal of the American Chemical Society
'...an invaluable resource for the serious molecular modeler.' Chemical Design Automation News

This book is the third official archival publication devoted to RoboCup and documents the achievements presented at the Third Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences, Robo-Cup-99, held in Stockholm, Sweden in July/August 1999. The book presents the following parts
- Introductory overview and survey
- Research papers of the champion teams and scientific award winners
- Technical papers presented at the RoboCup-99 Workshop
- Team description of a large number of participating teams.
This book is mandatory reading for the rapidly growing RoboCup community as well as a valuable source or reference and inspiration for R&D professionals interested in multi-agent systems, distributed artificial intelligence, and intelligent robotics.

It is now 30 years since the network for digital communication, the ARPA-net, first came into operation. Since the first experiments with sending electronic mail and performing file transfers, the development of networks has been truly remarkable. Today's Internet continues to develop at an exponential rate that even surpasses that of computing and storage technologies. About five years after being commercialized, it has become as pervasive as the tele phone had become 30 years after its initial deployment. In the United States, the size of the Internet industry already exceeds that of the auto industry, which has been in existence for about 100 years. The exponentially increas ing capabilities of communication, computing, and storage systems is also reshaping the way science and engineering are pursued. Large-scale simulation studies in chemistry, physics, engineering, and sev eral other disciplines may now produce data sets of ,several terabytes or petabytes. Similarly, almost all measurements today produce data in digital form, whether from collections of sensors, three-dimensional digital images, or video. These data sets often represent complex phenomena that require rich visualization capabilities and efficient data-mining techniques to under stand. Furthermore, the data may be produced and archived in several differ ent locations, and the analysis carried out by teams with members at several locations-possibly distinct from those with significant storage, computation, or visualization facilities. The emerging computational Grids enable the transparent use of remote instruments, computational and data resources.

This book contains 33 papers presented at the Third Joint Visualization Symposium of the Eurographics Association and the Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics of the IEEE Computer Society. The main topics treated are: visualization of geoscience data; multi-resolution and adaptive techniques; unstructured data, multi-scale and visibility; flow visualization; biomedical applications; information visualization; object representation; volume rendering; information visualization applications; and automotive applications.

This book focuseson the use of computer visionand graphics in architecture. It arose from a convergenceof several hot topics: 1. visualization of built environments for engineering, historical and other purposes, 2. virtual reconstruction of architecture from visual data of existing struc tures, whether via photogrammetric or range sensing techniques, and 3. augmentation of video data of architecture with useful information. The focus here is on architecture and howto present it, enhance it's abilities, make it easier to understand and make it accessibleto a larger public. Collective interest in this topic led to the International Symposium on Virtual and Augmented Architecture, whose papers are contained in this book. As editors, we were very pleased about how well the different papers chosen gavea nice focus to the topic and conference.It is clear that there are many different research approaches still active in this area - this makes it an exciting time. Wehope that this book captures that excitement and succeeds in bringing it to you.

This book provides a comprehensive state-of-the-art, in conceptual modeling. It grew out of research papers presented at the 18th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER '99) and arranged by the editors. The plan of the conference is to cover the whole spectrum of conceptual modeling as it relates to database and information systems design and to offer a complete coverage of data and process modeling, database technology, and database applications. The aim of the conference and of these proceedings is to present new insights related to each of these topics. This book contains both selected and invited papers. The 33 selected papers are organized in 11 sessions encompassing the major themes of the conference, especially : - schema transformation, evolution, and integration - temporal database design - views and reuse in conceptual modeling - advanced conceptual modeling - business process modeling and workflows - data warehouse design. Besides the selected papers, 3 invited papers present the views of three keynote speakers, internationally known for their contribution to conceptual modeling and database research and for their active role in knowledge dissemination. Peter Chen presents the results of his ongoing research on ER model, XML, and the Web. Georges Gardarin presents the first results of an ESPRIT project federating various data sources with XML and XML-QL. Finally, Matthias Jarke develops a way to capture and evaluate the experiences gained about process designs in so-called process data warehouses.

Increasing the designer's con dence that a piece of software or hardwareis c- pliant with its speci cation has become a key objective in the design process for software and hardware systems. Many approaches to reaching this goal have been developed, including rigorous speci cation, formal veri cation, automated validation, and testing. Finite-state model checking, as it is supported by the explicit-state model checkerSPIN, is enjoying a constantly increasingpopularity in automated property validation of concurrent, message based systems. SPIN has been in large parts implemented and is being maintained by Gerard Ho- mann, and is freely available via ftp fromnetlib.bell-labs.comor from URL http: //cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/what/spin/Man/README.html. The beauty of nite-state model checking lies in the possibility of building \push-button" validation tools. When the state space is nite, the state-space traversal will eventually terminate with a de nite verdict on the property that is being validated. Equally helpful is the fact that in case the property is inv- idated the model checker will return a counterexample, a feature that greatly facilitates fault identi cation. On the downside, the time it takes to obtain a verdict may be very long if the state space is large and the type of properties that can be validated is restricted to a logic of rather limited expressiveness.

This second volume of the series 'Reviews in Computational Chemistry' explores new applications, new methodologies, and new perspectives. The topics covered include conformational analysis, protein folding, force field parameterizations, hydrogen bonding, charge distributions, electrostatic potentials, electronic spectroscopy, molecular property correlations, and the computational chemistry literature. Methodologies described include conformational search strategies, distance geometry, molecular mechanics, molecular dynamics, ab initio and semiempirical molecular orbital calculations, and quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR) using topological and electronic descriptors.
A compendium of molecular modeling software will help users select the computational tools they need. Each chapter in 'Reviews in Computational Chemistry' serves as a brief tutorial for organic, physical, pharmaceutical, and biological chemists new to the field. Practitioners will be interested in the recent advances.

This volume contains the papers presented at the Second International and - terdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT 99), held in Trento (Italy) from 9 to 11 September 1999. CONTEXT 99 is the second in the CONTEXT series. The rst was held in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in 1997. The CONTEXT conference series is meant to provide an interdisciplinary - rum where researchers can exchange ideas, methodologies, and results on c- text, and is increasingly becoming an important reference for all people doing research on context. This is testi ed by the larger number of research areas that are represented at CONTEXT 99 (in particular, Philosophy and Cognitive Psychology were not signi cantly present at the rst conference), and by the number and quality of submitted papers. Speci cally, we received 118 papers, mostly of good or excellent quality. Among them, 33 (28%) have been accepted as full papers, and 21 as short papers. We think it is fair to say that the 54 papers collected in this volume provide a signi cant picture of the international research on context currently going on. The notion of context plays an important role in many areas, both theoretical and applied, such as Formal Logic, Arti cial Intelligence, Philosophy, Pragm- ics, Computational Linguistics, Computer Science, Cognitive Psychology."

A complete guide to creating usable, realistic game characters with two powerful tools

Creating viable game characters requires a combination of skills. This book teaches game creators how to create usable, realistic game assets using the power of an open-source 3D application and a free game engine. It presents a step-by-step approach to modeling, texturing, and animating a character using the popular Blender software, with emphasis on low polygon modeling and an eye for using sculpting and textures, and demonstrates how to bring the character into the Unity game engine. Game creation is a popular and productive pursuit for both hobbyists and serious developers; this guide brings together two effective tools to simplify and enhance the processArtists who are familiar with Blender or other 3D software but who lack experience with game development workflow will find this book fills important gaps in their knowledgeProvides a complete tutorial on developing a game character, including modeling, UV unwrapping, sculpting, baking displacements, texturing, rigging, animation, and exportEmphasizes low polygon modeling for game engines and shows how to bring the finished character into the Unity game engine

Whether you're interested in a new hobby or eager to enter the field of professional game development, this book offers valuable guidance to increase your skills.

User modeling researchers look for ways of enabling interactive software systems to adapt to their users-by constructing, maintaining, and exploiting user models, which are representations of properties of individual users. User modeling has been found to enhance the effectiveness and/or usability of software systems in a wide variety of situations. Techniques for user modeling have been developed and evaluated by researchers in a number of fields, including artificial intelligence, education, psychology, linguistics, human-computer interaction, and information science. The biennial series of International Conferences on User Modeling provides a forum in which academic and industrial researchers from all of these fields can exchange their complementary insights on user modeling issues. The published proceedings of these conferences represent a major source of information about developments in this area.

The SISDEP 93 conference proceedings present outstanding research and development results in the area of numerical process and device simulation. The miniaturization of today's semiconductor devices, the usage of new materials and advanced process steps in the development of new semiconductor technologies suggests the design of new computer programs. This trend towards more complex structures and increasingly sophisticated processes demands advanced simulators, such as fully three-dimensional tools for almost arbitrarily complicated geometries. With the increasing need for better models and improved understanding of physical effects, these proceedings support the simulation community and the process- and device engineers who need reliable numerical simulation tools for characterization, prediction, and development. This book covers the following topics: process simulation and equipment modeling, device modeling and simulation of complex structures, device simulation and parameter extraction for circuit models, integration of process, device and circuit simulation, practical applications of simulation, algorithms and software.

Neural networks have had considerable success in a variety of disciplines including engineering, control, and financial modelling. However a major weakness is the lack of established procedures for testing mis-specified models and the statistical significance of the various parameters which have been estimated. This is particularly important in the majority of financial applications where the data generating processes are dominantly stochastic and only partially deterministic. Based on the latest, most significant developments in estimation theory, model selection and the theory of mis-specified models, this volume develops neural networks into an advanced financial econometrics tool for non-parametric modelling. It provides the theoretical framework required, and displays the efficient use of neural networks for modelling complex financial phenomena. Unlike most other books in this area, this one treats neural networks as statistical devices for non-linear, non-parametric regression analysis.