Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Information Technology and Software Engineering presents selected articles from this major event, which was held in Beijing, December 8-10, 2012. This book presents the latest research trends, methods and experimental results in the fields of information technology and software engineering, covering various state-of-the-art research theories and approaches. The subjects range from intelligent computing to information processing, software engineering, Web, unified modeling language (UML), multimedia, communication technologies, system identification, graphics and visualizing, etc. The proceedings provide a major interdisciplinary forum for researchers and engineers to present the most innovative studies and advances, which can serve as an excellent reference work for researchers and graduate students working on information technology and software engineering. Prof. Wei Lu, Dr. Guoqiang Cai, Prof. Weibin Liu and Dr. Weiwei Xing all work at Beijing Jiaotong University.

This textbook addresses postgraduate students in applied mathematics, probability, and statistics, as well as computer scientists, biologists, physicists and economists, who are seeking a rigorous introduction to applied stochastic processes. Pursuing a pedagogic approach, the content follows a path of increasing complexity, from the simplest random sequences to the advanced stochastic processes. Illustrations are provided from many applied fields, together with connections to ergodic theory, information theory, reliability and insurance. The main content is also complemented by a wealth of examples and exercises with solutions.

The chapters of this book summarize the lectures delivered du ring the NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) on Computational Methods in Mechanisms, that took place in the Sts. Constantin and Elena Resort, near Varna, on the Bulgarian Coast of the Black Sea, June 16-28, 1997. The purpose of the ASI was to bring together leading researchers in the area of mechanical systems at large, with special emphasis in the computational issues around their analysis, synthesis, and optimization, during two weeks of lectures and discussion. A total of 89 participants from 23 count ries played an active role during the lectures and sessions of contributed papers. Many of the latter are being currently reviewed for publication in specialized journals. The subject of the book is mechanical systems, Le., systems composed of rigid and flexible bodies, coupled by mechanical means so as to constrain their various bodies in a goal-oriented manner, usually driven under computer con trol. Applications of the discipline are thus of the most varied nature, ranging from transportation systems to biomedical devices. U nder normal operation conditions, the constitutive bodies of a mechanical system can be consid ered to be rigid, the rigidity property then easing dramatically the analysis of the kinematics and dynamics of the system at hand. Examples of these systems are the suspension of a terrestrial vehicle negotiating a curve at speeds within the allowed or recommended limits and the links of multiaxis industrial robots performing conventional pick-and-place operations."

This handy textbook covers all you need to know about word processing.Learning Made Simple books give you skills without frills. They are matched to the main qualifications, and written by experienced teachers and authors to make often tricky subjects simple to learn. Every book is designed carefully to provide bite-sized lessons matched to your needs. Learning Made Simple titles provide both a new colorful way to study and a useful adjunct to any training course. Using full color throughout, and written by leading teachers and writers, Learning Made Simple books will help you learn new skills and develop your talents. Whether studying at college, training at work, or reading at home, aiming for a qualification or simply getting up to speed, Learning Made Simple books will give you the advantage of easy, well-organised training materials in a handy volume with two and four-page sections for each topic for ease of use.

This handy textbook covers all you need to know to get started using Powerpoint for presentations.Learning Made Simple books give you skills without frills. They are matched to the main qualifications, and written by experienced teachers and authors to make often tricky subjects simple to learn. Every book is designed carefully to provide bite-sized lessons matched to your needs. Learning Made Simple titles provide both a new colourful way to study and a useful adjunct to any training course. Using full colour throughout, and written by leading teachers and writers, Learning Made Simple books will help readers learn new skills and develop their talents. Whether studying at college, training at work, or reading at home, aiming for a qualification or simply getting up to speed, Learning Made Simple books will give you the advantage of easy, well-organised training materials in a handy volume with two or four-page sections for each topic for ease of use.

These Proceedings of the Third International Workshop introduce research results in the areas of information integration, development of GIS and GIS-applications for a wide spectrum of information systems varying considerably in purpose and scale. The new class of GIS - intelligent GIS - is considered, including principles of their building and programming technologies. Special attention is drawn to the development of ontologies and their use in GIS and GIS-applications.

Management and Engineering of Critical Infrastructures focuses on two important aspects of CIS, management and engineering. The book provides an ontological foundation for the models and methods needed to design a set of systems, networks and assets that are essential for a society's functioning, and for ensuring the security, safety and economy of a nation. Various examples in agriculture, the water supply, public health, transportation, security services, electricity generation, telecommunication, and financial services can be used to substantiate dangers. Disruptions of CIS can have serious cascading consequences that would stop society from functioning properly and result in loss of life. Malicious software (a.k.a., malware), for example, can disrupt the distribution of electricity across a region, which in turn can lead to the forced shutdown of communication, health and financial sectors. Subsequently, proper engineering and management are important to anticipate possible risks and threats and provide resilient CIS. Although the problem of CIS has been broadly acknowledged and discussed, to date, no unifying theory nor systematic design methods, techniques and tools exist for such CIS.

Project management has become a widespread instrument enabling organizations to efficiently master the challenges of steadily shortening product life cycles, global markets and decreasing profit margins. With projects increasing in size and complexity, their planning and control represents one of the most crucial management tasks. This is especially true for scheduling, which is concerned with establishing execution dates for the sub-activities to be performed in order to complete the project. The ability to manage projects where resources must be allocated between concurrent projects or even sub-activities of a single project requires the use of commercial project management software packages. However, the results yielded by the solution procedures included are often rather unsatisfactory. Scheduling of Resource-Constrained Projects develops more efficient procedures, which can easily be integrated into software packages by incorporated programming languages, and thus should be of great interest for practitioners as well as scientists working in the field of project management. The book is divided into two parts. In Part I, the project management process is described and the management tasks to be accomplished during project planning and control are discussed. This allows for identifying the major scheduling problems arising in the planning process, among which the resource-constrained project scheduling problem is the most important. Part II deals with efficient computer-based procedures for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem and its generalized version. Since both problems are NP-hard, the development of such procedures which yield satisfactory solutions in a reasonable amount of computation time is very challenging, and a number of new and very promising approaches are introduced. This includes heuristic procedures based on priority rules and tabu search as well as lower bound methods and branch and bound procedures which can be applied for computing optimal solutions.

Presenting theory while using "Mathematica" in a complementary way, Modern Differential Geometry of Curves and Surfaces with Mathematica, the third edition of Alfred Gray's famous textbook, covers how to define and compute standard geometric functions using "Mathematica" for constructing new curves and surfaces from existing ones. Since Gray's death, authors Abbena and Salamon have stepped in to bring the book up to date. While maintaining Gray's intuitive approach, they reorganized the material to provide a clearer division between the text and the "Mathematica" code and added a "Mathematica" notebook as an appendix to each chapter. They also address important new topics, such as quaternions.

The approach of this book is at times more computational than is usual for a book on the subject. For example, Brioshi's formula for the Gaussian curvature in terms of the first fundamental form can be too complicated for use in hand calculations, but"Mathematica "handles it easily, either through computations or through graphing curvature. Another part of "Mathematica" that can be used effectively in differential geometry is its special function library, where nonstandard spaces of constant curvature can be defined in terms of elliptic functions and then plotted.

Using the techniques described in this book, readers will understand concepts geometrically, plotting curves and surfaces on a monitor and then printing them. Containing more than 300 illustrations, the book demonstrates how to use "Mathematica" to plot many interesting curves and surfaces. Including as many topics of the classical differential geometry and surfaces as possible, it highlights important theorems with many examples.It includes 300 miniprograms for computing and plotting various geometric objects, alleviating the drudgery of computing things such as the curvature and torsion of a curve in space.

From security training simulations to war games to role-playing games, to sports games to gambling, playing video games has become a social phenomena, and the increasing number of players that cross gender, culture, and age is on a dramatic upward trajectory. "Playing Video Games: Motives, Responses, and Consequences" integrates communication, psychology, and technology to examine the psychological and mediated aspects of playing video games. It is the first volume to delve deeply into these aspects of computer game play. It fits squarely into the media psychology arm of entertainment studies, the next big wave in media studies. The book targets one of the most popular and pervasive media in modern times, and it will serve to define the area of study and provide a theoretical spine for future research.
This unique and timely volume will appeal to scholars, researchers, and graduate students in media studies and mass communication, psychology, and marketing.

This study centers on issues of marginality and monstrosity in medieval England. In the middle ages, geography was viewed as divinely ordered, so Britain's location at the periphery of the inhabitable world caused anxiety among its inhabitants. Far from the world's holy center, the geographic margins were considered monstrous. Medieval geography, for centuries scorned as crude, is now the subject of several careful studies. Monsters have likewise been the subject of recent attention in the growing field of "monster studies," though few works situate these creatures firmly in their specific historical contexts. This study sits at the crossroads of these two discourses (geography and monstrosity), treated separately in the established scholarship but inseparable in the minds of medieval authors and artists.

Games are poised for a major evolution, driven by growth in technical sophistication and audience reach. Characters that create powerful social and emotional connections with players throughout the game-play itself (not just in cut scenes) will be essential to next-generation games. However, the principles of sophisticated character design and interaction are not widely understood within the game development community. Further complicating the situation are powerful gender and cultural issues that can influence perception of characters. Katherine Isbister has spent the last 10 years examining what makes interactions with computer characters useful and engaging to different audiences. This work has revealed that the key to good design is leveraging player psychology: understanding what's memorable, exciting, and useful to a person about real-life social interactions, and applying those insights to character design. Game designers who create great characters often make use of these psychological principles without realizing it. Better Game Characters by Design gives game design professionals and other interactive media designers a framework for understanding how social roles and perceptions affect players' reactions to characters, helping produce stronger designs and better results.

This book contains 24 technical papers presented at the fourth edition of the Advances in Architectural Geometry conference, AAG 2014, held in London, England, September 2014. It offers engineers, mathematicians, designers, and contractors insight into the efficient design, analysis, and manufacture of complex shapes, which will help open up new horizons for architecture. The book examines geometric aspects involved in architectural design, ranging from initial conception to final fabrication. It focuses on four key topics: applied geometry, architecture, computational design, and also practice in the form of case studies. In addition, the book also features algorithms, proposed implementation, experimental results, and illustrations. Overall, the book presents both theoretical and practical work linked to new geometrical developments in architecture. It gathers the diverse components of the contemporary architectural tendencies that push the building envelope towards free form in order to respond to multiple current design challenges. With its introduction of novel computational algorithms and tools, this book will prove an ideal resource to both newcomers to the field as well as advanced practitioners.

This book presents a comprehensive survey of the Vesta system for software configuration management (SCM). Vesta, unlike other SCM systems, is specifically designed to handle very large software projects comprising tens of millions of lines of code and beyond. Researchers in the field of software engineering and specialists in the construction of software development tools will especially benefit from this work, but it will also appeal to those responsible for designing and deploying configuration management solutions for large software systems.

Three important but hard-to-achieve properties lie at the heart of Vesta's unique approach to software configuration management:

Every build is repeatable

Every build is incremental

Every build is consistent

To realize these properties in a practical SCM system, Vesta provides a novel repository to store the versions of the files that make up an evolving software system and a flexible language for writing modular configuration descriptions that define how the system is put together. This book explains in depth these facilities and the suite of tools that supports them, together with a methodology for applying them in practice.

Readers who seek more information about Vesta may download the entire system as well as other publications, reference documents, and user documentation from the Vesta home page at http: //www.vestasys.org.

Computersystemsresearch is heavilyinfluencedby changesincomputertechnol- ogy. As technology changes alterthe characteristics ofthe underlying hardware com- ponents of the system, the algorithms used to manage the system need to be re- examinedand newtechniques need to bedeveloped. Technological influencesare par- ticularly evident in the design of storage management systems such as disk storage managers and file systems. The influences have been so pronounced that techniques developed as recently as ten years ago are being made obsolete. The basic problem for disk storage managers is the unbalanced scaling of hard- warecomponenttechnologies. Disk storage managerdesign depends on the technolo- gy for processors, main memory, and magnetic disks. During the 1980s, processors and main memories benefited from the rapid improvements in semiconductortechnol- ogy and improved by several orders ofmagnitude in performance and capacity. This improvement has not been matched by disk technology, which is bounded by the me- chanics ofrotating magnetic media. Magnetic disks ofthe 1980s have improved by a factor of 10in capacity butonly a factor of2 in performance. This unbalanced scaling ofthe hardware components challenges the disk storage manager to compensate for the slower disks and allow performance to scale with the processor and main memory technology. Unless the performance of file systems can be improved over that of the disks, I/O-bound applications will be unable to use the rapid improvements in processor speeds to improve performance for computer users. Disk storage managers must break this bottleneck and decouple application perfor- mance from the disk.

This book presents the most up-to-date coverage of procedural content generation (PCG) for games, specifically the procedural generation of levels, landscapes, items, rules, quests, or other types of content. Each chapter explains an algorithm type or domain, including fractal methods, grammar-based methods, search-based and evolutionary methods, constraint-based methods, and narrative, terrain, and dungeon generation. The authors are active academic researchers and game developers, and the book is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students of courses on games and creativity; game developers who want to learn new methods for content generation; and researchers in related areas of artificial intelligence and computational intelligence.

This book features the latest research in the area of immersive technologies as presented at the 7th International Extended Reality (XR) Conference, held in Lisbon, Portugal in 2022. Bridging the gap between academia and industry, it showcases the latest advances in augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), extended reality (XR) and metaverse and their applications in various sectors such as business, marketing, retail, education, healthcare, tourism, events, fashion, entertainment, and gaming. The volume gathers selected research papers by prominent AR, VR, XR and metaverse scholars from around the world. Presenting the most significant topics and latest findings in the fields of augmented reality, virtual reality, extended reality and metaverse, it will be a valuable asset for academics and practitioners alike.

Multimedia has two fundamental characteristics that can be expressed by the following formula: Multimedia = Multiple Media + Hypermedia. How can software engineering take advantage of these two characteristics? Will these two characteristics pose problems in multimedia systems design? These are some of the issues to be explored in this book. The first two chapters will be of interest to managers, software engineers, programmers, and people interested in gaining an overall understanding of multimedia software engineering. The next six chapters present multimedia software engineering according to the conceptual framework introduced in Chapter One. This is of particular use to practitioners, system developers, multimedia application designers, programmers, and people interested in prototyping multimedia applications. The next three chapters are more research-oriented and are mainly intended for researchers working on the specification, modeling, and analysis of distributed multimedia systems, but will also be relevant to scientists, researchers, and software engineers interested in the systems and theoretical aspects of multimedia software engineering. Multimedia Software Engineering can be used as a textbook in a graduate course on multimedia software engineering or in an undergraduate course on software design where the emphasis is on multimedia applications. It is especially suitable for a project-oriented course.

Object-oriented database management systems (OODBMS) are expected to serve advanced application domains such as engineering design, office information systems, imaging systems, and multimedia. This book, based on a NATO Advanced Research Workshop, covers all aspects of object-oriented database systems from design principles to implementation of prototypes. Topics covered include model concepts, query optimization, query languages, functional programming formalism, storage systems, transaction models, interoperability, distributed computing, rule languages, open architectures, hypermedia systems, and many others. Designers and developers will benefit from the comprehensive presentation of the various modules of such systems, while practitioners will find examples of implemented prototypes.

Multilevel and Longitudinal Modeling with IBM SPSS, Third Edition, demonstrates how to use the multilevel and longitudinal modeling techniques available in IBM SPSS Versions 25-27. Annotated screenshots with all relevant output provide readers with a step-by-step understanding of each technique as they are shown how to navigate the program. Throughout, diagnostic tools, data management issues, and related graphics are introduced. SPSS commands show the flow of the menu structure and how to facilitate model building, while annotated syntax is also available for those who prefer this approach. Extended examples illustrating the logic of model development and evaluation are included throughout the book, demonstrating the context and rationale of the research questions and the steps around which the analyses are structured. The book opens with the conceptual and methodological issues associated with multilevel and longitudinal modeling, followed by a discussion of SPSS data management techniques that facilitate working with multilevel, longitudinal, or cross-classified data sets. The next few chapters introduce the basics of multilevel modeling, developing a multilevel model, extensions of the basic two-level model (e.g., three-level models, models for binary and ordinal outcomes), and troubleshooting techniques for everyday-use programming and modeling problems along with potential solutions. Models for investigating individual and organizational change are next developed, followed by models with multivariate outcomes and, finally, models with cross-classified and multiple membership data structures. The book concludes with thoughts about ways to expand on the various multilevel and longitudinal modeling techniques introduced and issues (e.g., missing data, sample weights) to keep in mind in conducting multilevel analyses. Key features of the third edition: Thoroughly updated throughout to reflect IBM SPSS Versions 26-27. Introduction to fixed-effects regression for examining change over time where random-effects modeling may not be an optimal choice. Additional treatment of key topics specifically aligned with multilevel modeling (e.g., models with binary and ordinal outcomes). Expanded coverage of models with cross-classified and multiple membership data structures. Added discussion on model checking for improvement (e.g., examining residuals, locating outliers). Further discussion of alternatives for dealing with missing data and the use of sample weights within multilevel data structures. Supported by online data sets, the book's practical approach makes it an essential text for graduate-level courses on multilevel, longitudinal, latent variable modeling, multivariate statistics, or advanced quantitative techniques taught in departments of business, education, health, psychology, and sociology. The book will also prove appealing to researchers in these fields. The book is designed to provide an excellent supplement to Heck and Thomas's An Introduction to Multilevel Modeling Techniques, Fourth Edition; however, it can also be used with any multilevel or longitudinal modeling book or as a stand-alone text.

The Distance Education Evolution: Case Studies addresses issues regarding the development and design of online courses, and the implementation and evaluation of an online learning program. Several chapters include design strategies for online courses that range from the specific to the universal. Many authors address pedagogical issues from both a theoretical and applied perspective. This diverse compilation of contributions by Temple University administrators and faculty gives a comprehensive overview of the distance education experience that can serve as a guide to others interested in providing quality distance education.

Since the establishment of the CAAD Futures Foundation in 1985, CAAD experts from all over the world meet every two years to present and document the state of the art of research in Computer Aided Architectural Design. Together, the series provides a good record of the evolving state of research in this area over the last fourteen years. The Proceedings this year is the eighth in the series. The conference held at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, includes twenty-five papers presenting new and exciting results and capabilities in areas such as computer graphics, building modeling, digital sketching and drawing systems, Web-based collaboration and information exchange. An overall reading shows that computers in architecture is still a young field, with many exciting results emerging out of both greater understanding of the human processes and information processing needed to support design and also the continuously expanding capabilities of digital technology.