In recent years rapid Internet growth has pushed the development of new multimedia applications in all aspects of life such as entertainment, communication, collaborative work and electronic commerce. Future applications will make use of different technologies like voice, data and video, but in order to make such a wide variety of multimedia applications successful, a number of technology and management issues must be addressed. Multimedia Networking: Technology, Management and Applications addresses the dynamic and efficient uses of resources a fundamental aspect of multimedia networks. Geared toward professionals, educators and students alike, this exciting new book will detail current research and the future direction of multimedia networking.

When managers and ecologists need to make decisions about the environment, they use models to simulate the dynamic systems that interest them. All management decisions affect certain landscapes over time, and those landscapes are composed of intricate webs of dynamic processes that need to be considered in relation to each other. With widespread use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), there is a growing need for complex models ncorporating an increasing amount of data. The open-source Spatial Modeling Environment (SME) was developed to build upon common modeling software, such as STELLA (R), and Powersim (R), among others, to create, run, analyze, and present spatial models of ecosystems, watersheds, populations, and landscapes. In this book, the creators of the Spatial Modeling Environment discuss and illustrate the uses of SME as a modeling tool for all kinds of complex spatial systems. The authors demonstrate the entire process of spatial modeling, beginning with the conceptual design, continuing through formal implementation and analysis, and finally with the interpretation and presentation of the results. A variety of applications and case studies address particular types of ecological and management problems and help to identify potential problems for modelers. Researchers and students interested in spatial modeling will learn how to simulate the complex dynamics of landscapes. Managers and decision makers will acquire tools for predicting changes in landscapes while learning about both the possibilities and the limitations of simulation models. The enclosed CD contains SME, color illustrations and models and data from the examples in the book.

Key Features: This work aims to be the most approachable book about UX. Many books on the topic are highly specialized and are not easy to read for people who just want to understand it better. This book is easy to read and aims to popularize the UX mindset while debunking its main misconceptions. Small format size makes it easy to carry around. Includes content relatable and meaningful to the readers by taking many examples from everyday life with a conversational and light writing style. It tackles the psychology, design, research, process, strategy, and ethics behind offering the best experience with products, systems, or services. Includes a glossary.

Geometry is the cornerstone of computer graphics and computer animation, and provides the framework and tools for solving problems in two and three dimensions. This may be in the form of describing simple shapes such as a circle, ellipse, or parabola, or complex problems such as rotating 3D objects about an arbitrary axis.

Geometry for Computer Graphics draws together a wide variety of geometric information that will provide a sourcebook of facts, examples, and proofs for students, academics, researchers, and professional practitioners.

The book is divided into 4 sections: the first summarizes hundreds of formulae used to solve 2D and 3D geometric problems. The second section places these formulae in context in the form of worked examples. The third provides the origin and proofs of these formulae, and communicates mathematical strategies for solving geometric problems. The last section is a glossary of terms used in geometry.

Describing novel mathematical concepts for recommendation engines, Realtime Data Mining: Self-Learning Techniques for Recommendation Engines features a sound mathematical framework unifying approaches based on control and learning theories, tensor factorization, and hierarchical methods. Furthermore, it presents promising results of numerous experiments on real-world data. The area of realtime data mining is currently developing at an exceptionally dynamic pace, and realtime data mining systems are the counterpart of today's "classic" data mining systems. Whereas the latter learn from historical data and then use it to deduce necessary actions, realtime analytics systems learn and act continuously and autonomously. In the vanguard of these new analytics systems are recommendation engines. They are principally found on the Internet, where all information is available in realtime and an immediate feedback is guaranteed. This monograph appeals to computer scientists and specialists in machine learning, especially from the area of recommender systems, because it conveys a new way of realtime thinking by considering recommendation tasks as control-theoretic problems. Realtime Data Mining: Self-Learning Techniques for Recommendation Engines will also interest application-oriented mathematicians because it consistently combines some of the most promising mathematical areas, namely control theory, multilevel approximation, and tensor factorization.

This book looks closely at the endings of narrative digital games, examining their ways of concluding the processes of both storytelling and play in order to gain insight into what endings are and how we identify them in different media. While narrative digital games share many representational strategies for signalling their upcoming end with more traditional narrative media - such as novels or movies - they also show many forms of endings that often radically differ from our conventional understanding of conclusion and closure. From vast game worlds that remain open for play after a story's finale, to multiple endings that are often hailed as a means for players to create their own stories, to the potentially tragic endings of failure and "game over", digital games question the traditional singularity and finality of endings. Using a broad range of examples, this book delves deeply into these and other forms and their functions, both to reveal the closural specificities of the ludonarrative hybrid that digital games are, as well as to find the core elements that characterise endings in any medium. It examines how endings make themselves known to players and raises the question of how well-established closural conventions blend with play and a player's effort to achieve a goal. As an interdisciplinary study that draws on game studies as much as on transmedial narratology, Forms and Functions of Endings in Narrative Digital Games is suited for scholars and students of digital games as well as for narratologists yet to become familiar with this medium.

This book presents a coherent description of the theoretical and practical aspects of Coloured Petri Nets (CP-nets or CPN). It shows how CP-nets have been de veloped - from being a promising theoretical model to being a full-fledged lan guage for the design, specification, simulation, validation and implementation of large software systems (and other systems in which human beings and/or com puters communicate by means of some more or less formal rules). The book contains the formal definition of CP-nets and the mathematical theory behind their analysis methods. However, it has been the intention to write the book in such a way that it also becomes attractive to readers who are more interested in applications than the underlying mathematics. This means that a large part of the book is written in a style which is closer to an engineering textbook (or a users' manual) than it is to a typical textbook in theoretical computer science. The book consists of three separate volumes. The first volume defines the net model (i. e. , hierarchical CP-nets) and the basic concepts (e. g. , the different behavioural properties such as deadlocks, fair ness and home markings). It gives a detailed presentation of many small exam ples and a brief overview of some industrial applications. It introduces the for mal analysis methods. Finally, it contains a description of a set of CPN tools which support the practical use of CP-nets.

This book stages a dialogue between international researchers from the broad fields of complexity science and narrative studies. It presents an edited collection of chapters on aspects of how narrative theory from the humanities may be exploited to understand, explain, describe, and communicate aspects of complex systems, such as their emergent properties, feedbacks, and downwards causation; and how ideas from complexity science can inform narrative theory, and help explain, understand, and construct new, more complex models of narrative as a cognitive faculty and as a pervasive cultural form in new and old media. The book is suitable for academics, practitioners, and professionals, and postgraduates in complex systems, narrative theory, literary and film studies, new media and game studies, and science communication.

What the book is about This book is about the theory and practice of the use of multimedia, multimodal interfaces for leaming. Yet it is not about technology as such, at least in the sense that the authors do not subscribe to the idea that one should do something just because it is technologically possible. 'Multimedia' has been adopted in some commercial quarters to mean little more than a computer with some form of audio ar (more usually) video attachment. This is a trend which ought to be resisted, as exemplified by the material in this book. Rather than merely using a new technology 'because it is there', there is a need to examine how people leam and eommunicate, and to study diverse ways in which computers ean harness text, sounds, speech, images, moving pietures, gestures, touch, etc. , to promote effective human leaming. We need to identify which media, in whieh combinations, using what mappings of domain to representation, are appropriate far which educational purposes . . The word 'multimodal ' in the title underlies this perspective. The intention is to focus attention less on the technology and more on how to strueture different kinds of information via different sensory channels in order to yield the best possible quality of communication and educational interaction. (Though the reader should refer to Chapter 1 for a discussion of the use of the word 'multimodal' . ) Historically there was little problem.

Ontologies tend to be found everywhere. They are viewed as the silver bullet for many applications, such as database integration, peer-to-peer systems, e-commerce, semantic web services, or social networks. However, in open or evolving systems, such as the semantic web, different parties would, in general, adopt different ontologies. Thus, merely using ontologies, like using XML, does not reduce heterogeneity: it just raises heterogeneity problems to a higher level. Euzenat and Shvaiko's book is devoted to ontology matching as a solution to the semantic heterogeneity problem faced by computer systems. Ontology matching aims at finding correspondences between semantically related entities of different ontologies. These correspondences may stand for equivalence as well as other relations, such as consequence, subsumption, or disjointness, between ontology entities. Many different matching solutions have been proposed so far from various viewpoints, e.g., databases, information systems, and artificial intelligence. The second edition of Ontology Matching has been thoroughly revised and updated to reflect the most recent advances in this quickly developing area, which resulted in more than 150 pages of new content. In particular, the book includes a new chapter dedicated to the methodology for performing ontology matching. It also covers emerging topics, such as data interlinking, ontology partitioning and pruning, context-based matching, matcher tuning, alignment debugging, and user involvement in matching, to mention a few. More than 100 state-of-the-art matching systems and frameworks were reviewed. With Ontology Matching, researchers and practitioners will find a reference book that presents currently available work in a uniform framework. In particular, the work and the techniques presented in this book can be equally applied to database schema matching, catalog integration, XML schema matching and other related problems. The objectives of the book include presenting (i) the state of the art and (ii) the latest research results in ontology matching by providing a systematic and detailed account of matching techniques and matching systems from theoretical, practical and application perspectives.

This focuses on the developing field of building probability models with the power of symbolic algebra systems. The book combines the uses of symbolic algebra with probabilistic/stochastic application and highlights the applications in a variety of contexts. The research explored in each chapter is unified by the use of A Probability Programming Language (APPL) to achieve the modeling objectives. APPL, as a research tool, enables a probabilist or statistician the ability to explore new ideas, methods, and models. Furthermore, as an open-source language, it sets the foundation for future algorithms to augment the original code. Computational Probability Applications is comprised of fifteen chapters, each presenting a specific application of computational probability using the APPL modeling and computer language. The chapter topics include using inverse gamma as a survival distribution, linear approximations of probability density functions, and also moment-ratio diagrams for univariate distributions. These works highlight interesting examples, often done by undergraduate students and graduate students that can serve as templates for future work. In addition, this book should appeal to researchers and practitioners in a range of fields including probability, statistics, engineering, finance, neuroscience, and economics.

This book presents the best papers from the 1st International Conference on Mathematical Research for Blockchain Economy (MARBLE) 2019, held in Santorini, Greece. While most blockchain conferences and forums are dedicated to business applications, product development or Initial Coin Offering (ICO) launches, this conference focused on the mathematics behind blockchain to bridge the gap between practice and theory. Every year, thousands of blockchain projects are launched and circulated in the market, and there is a tremendous wealth of blockchain applications, from finance to healthcare, education, media, logistics and more. However, due to theoretical and technical barriers, most of these applications are impractical for use in a real-world business context. The papers in this book reveal the challenges and limitations, such as scalability, latency, privacy and security, and showcase solutions and developments to overcome them.

This book describes various new computer based approaches which can be exploited for the (digital) reconstruction, recognition, restoration, presentation and classification of digital heritage. They are based on applications of virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence, to be used for storing and retrieving of historical artifacts, digital reconstruction, or virtual viewing. The book is divided into three sections: "Classification of Heritage Data" presents chapters covering various domains and aspects including text categorization, image retrieval and classification, and object spotting in historical documents. Next, in "Detection and Recognition of Digital Heritage Artifacts", techniques like neural networks or deep learning are used for the restoration of degraded heritage documents, Tamil Palm Leaf Characters recognition, the reconstruction of heritage images, and the selection of suitable images for 3D reconstruction and classification of Indian land mark heritage images. Lastly, "Applications of Modern Tools in Digital Heritage" highlights some example applications for dance transcription, architectural geometry of early temples by digital reconstruction, and computer vision based techniques for collecting and integrating knowledge on flora. This book is mainly written for researchers and graduate students in digital preservation and heritage, or computer scientists looking for applications of virtual reality, computer vision, and artificial intelligence techniques.

In the third paper in this chapter, Mike Pratt provides an historical intro duction to solid modeling. He presents the development of the three most freqently used techniques: cellular subdivision, constructive solid modeling and boundary representation. Although each of these techniques devel oped more or less independently, today the designer's needs dictate that a successful system allows access to all of these methods. For example, sculptured surfaces are generally represented using a boundary represen tation. However, the design of a complex vehicle generally dictates that a sculptured surface representation is most efficient for the 'skin' while constructive solid geometry representation is most efficent for the inter nal mechanism. Pratt also discusses the emerging concept of design by 'feature line'. Finally, he addresses the very important problem of data exchange between solid modeling systems and the progress that is being made towards developing an international standard. With the advent of reasonably low cost scientific workstations with rea sonable to outstanding graphics capabilities, scientists and engineers are increasingly turning to computer analysis for answers to fundamental ques tions and to computer graphics for present~tion of those answers. Although the current crop of workstations exhibit quite impressive computational ca pability, they are still not capable of solving many problems in a reasonable time frame, e. g. , executing computational fluid dynamics and finite element codes or generating complex ray traced or radiosity based images. In the sixth chapter Mike Muuss of the U. S.

Electronic mail and message handling is a rapidly expanding field which incorporates both telecommunications and computer technologies. It combines the old technologies of telex, telegram, and analog facsimile with the new systems of Teletex, digital facsimile, and computer-based messaging. This book answers the questions What is electronic mail? and Why is it important? The major systems, services, technology, and standardization issues are comprehensively surveyed.

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"Software Exorcism: A Handbook for Debugging and Optimizing Legacy Code" takes an unflinching, no bulls$&# look at behavioral problems in the software engineering industry, shedding much-needed light on the social forces that make it difficult for programmers to do their job. Do you have a co-worker who perpetually writes bad code that "you" are forced to clean up? This is your book. While there are plenty of books on the market that cover debugging and short-term workarounds for bad code, Reverend Bill Blunden takes a revolutionary step beyond them by bringing our attention to the underlying illnesses that plague the software industry as a whole.

Further, "Software Exorcism" discusses tools and techniques for effective and aggressive debugging, gives optimization strategies that appeal to all levels of programmers, and presents in-depth treatments of technical issues with honest assessments that are not biased toward proprietary solutions.

Matthias Schu examines three main topics in his research: The intention of store-based retail and wholesale companies to open up an own online channel, factors determining the foreign market selection behavior of online retailers as well as factors affecting the speed in the internationalization process of online retailers. New insights for retail research and management are presented and contribute to existing knowledge; the study is valuable for academic researchers and for practitioners who are interested in a thorough analysis of online retailing from a strategic and theoretical perspective.

This book is based on contributions to the Seventh European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication that was held at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden, in July of 1999 under the auspices of the European Language and Speech Network (ELSNET). The topic of the summer school was "Multimodality in Language and Speech Systems" (MiLaSS). The issue of multimodality in interpersonal, face-to-face communication has been an important research topic for a number of years. With the increasing sophistication of computer-based interactive systems using language and speech, the topic of multimodal interaction has received renewed interest both in terms of human-human interaction and human-machine interaction. Nine lecturers contri buted to the summer school with courses on specialized topics ranging from the technology and science of creating talking faces to human-human communication, which is mediated by computer for the handicapped. Eight of the nine lecturers are represented in this book. The summer school attracted more than 60 participants from Europe, Asia and North America representing not only graduate students but also senior researchers from both academia and industry."

OpenGL (R): A Primer is a concise presentation of fundamental OpenGL, providing readers with a succinct introduction to essential OpenGL commands as well as detailed listings of OpenGL functions and parameters. Angel uses a top-down philosophy to teach computer graphics based on the idea that students learn modern computer graphics best if they can start programming significant applications as soon as possible. The book makes it easy for students to find functions and their descriptions, and supplemental examples are included in every chapter to illustrate core concepts. This primer can be used both as a companion to a book introducing computer graphics principles and as a stand-alone guide and reference to OpenGL for programmers with a background in computer graphics.

Applied Linear Regression for Business Analytics with R introduces regression analysis to business students using the R programming language with a focus on illustrating and solving real-time, topical problems. Specifically, this book presents modern and relevant case studies from the business world, along with clear and concise explanations of the theory, intuition, hands-on examples, and the coding required to employ regression modeling. Each chapter includes the mathematical formulation and details of regression analysis and provides in-depth practical analysis using the R programming language.

As the use and relevance of robotics for countless scientific purposes grows all the time, research into the many diverse elements of the subject becomes ever more important and in demand. This volume examines in depth the most topical, complex issues of modelling and identification in robotics. The book is divided into three main parts. The !first part is devoted to robot dynamics modelling and identification of robot and load parameters, incorporating friction torques, discussing identification schemes, and presenting simulations and experiment al results of robot and load dynamic parameters identification. A general concept of robot programming language for research and educational purposes is examined and there is a detailed outline of its basic structures along with hardware requirements, which both constitute an open robot controller architecture. Finally a hybrid controller is derived, and several experimental results of this system are outlined. This impressive discussion of the topic covers both the theoretical and practical, illustrated throughout by examples and experimental results, and will be of value to anyone researching or practising within the field of robotics, automation and system i dentification or to control engineers.

Until now, the myths, mysteries, and machinations of the Destiny universe were found hidden throughout the worlds-enticing threads that hinted at a greater tapestry. The Destiny Grimoire Anthology weaves tales from multiple sources together for the first time, casting new light on Destiny's most legendary heroes, infamous villains, and their greatest moments of triumph and tragedy.