Future technology information technology stands for all of continuously evolving and converging information technologies, including digital convergence, multimedia convergence, intelligent applications, embedded systems, mobile and wireless communications, bio-inspired computing, grid and cloud computing, semantic web, user experience and HCI, security and trust computing and so on, for satisfying our ever-changing needs. In past twenty five years or so, Information Technology (IT) influenced and changed every aspect of our lives and our cultures. These proceedings foster the dissemination of state-of-the-art research in all future IT areas, including their models, services, and novel applications associated with their utilization.

Featuring stunning concept art and visual details, this is the first in the definitive series on the cinematics that bring World of Warcraft vividly to life. World of Warcraft redefined online gaming, and over the last fifteen years each new chapter has delivered new and incredible cinematics. The Cinematic Art of World of Warcraft goes behind the scenes with the Warcraft cinematic team. With never-before-seen concept art and accounts of the creative and technical process, this is the definitive visual gallery of how countless artists brought the world of Azeroth to life in incredible detail and motion.

This book highlights the latest research articles presented at the second Digital Marketing & eCommerce Conference in June 2021. Papers include a diverse set of digital marketing and eCommerce-related topics such as user psychology and behavior in social commerce, influencer marketing in social commerce, social media monetization strategies, social commerce characteristics and their impact on user behavior, branding on social media, social media-based business models, user privacy and security protection on social media, social video marketing and commerce, among other topics.

This book offers a comprehensive explanation of iterated function systems and how to use them in generation of complex objects. Discussion covers the most popular fractal models applied in the field of image synthesis; surveys iterated function system models; explores algorithms for creating and manipulating fractal objects, and techniques for implementing the algorithms, and more. The book includes both descriptive text and pseudo-code samples for the convenience of graphics application programmers.

Master one of the most essential skill sets for the contemporary office As Microsoft Office becomes ever more ubiquitous in modern offices across the world, competence and familiarity with its intricacies is more important than ever. Now you can set yourself apart from the pack and prove your skills with the Microsoft Office Specialist certification. The MCA Microsoft Office Specialist (Office 365 and Office 2019) Complete Study Guide: Word Associate Exam MO-100, Excel Associate Exam MO-200, and PowerPoint Associate Exam MO-300 delivers a comprehensive roadmap to achieving the certification with easy-to-follow instruction for each of the three required proficiencies: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You'll enjoy access to chapter review questions and Exam Essentials, a feature that identifies critical subject areas. Discover practical, hands-on exercises that prepare you for real-world roles and jobs, and gain valuable experience as you reinforce key Microsoft Office skills that you'll be expected to demonstrate in job interviews and your day-to-day professional life. Learn to manage and create text documents in Word, perform operations with formulas in Excel, and create engaging slideshows and presentations in PowerPoint. This practical book also provides: Fully updated information for the latest Microsoft Office Specialist certification exams covering Microsoft Office 365 Access to new career opportunities with a professional certification that's relevant to virtually any office environment Access to the Sybex online study tools, with chapter review questions, full-length practice exams, hundreds of electronic flashcards, and a glossary of key terms The MCA Microsoft Office Specialist (Office 365 and Office 2019) Complete Study Guide offers crystal-clear organization, comprehensive coverage, and easy-to-understand instruction. It's perfect for anyone who hopes to prove their skills with the Microsoft Office Specialist certification or to improve their mastery of Microsoft Office 365.

The world's leading Axapta experts will take you from Axapta novice to pro in this book. This authoritative and comprehensive guide walks you gently through the bulk of what you need to know to productively apply the system in the real worldwith real data, sizing guidelines, deployment architectures, and code.

By the book's end, you will have acquired practical hands-on experience. You'll be able to get Axapta up and running, and identify gaps between the out-of-the-box product and your actual business needs. You'll also know how to automate real-world business functions.

Open source software (free software) has emerged as a major field of scientific inquiry across a number of disciplines. When the concept of open source began to gain mindshare in the global business community, decision makers faced a challenge: to convert hype and potential into sustainable profit and viable business models. This volume addresses this challenge through presenting some of the newest, extensively peer-reviewed research in the area.

Dave Eberly's 3D Game Engine Design was the first professional guide to the essential concepts and algorithms of real-time 3D engines and quickly became a classic of game development. Dave's new book 3D Game Engine Architecture continues the tradition with a comprehensive look at the software engineering and programming of 3D engines. This book is a complete guide to the engineering process, starting with a walk-through of the graphics pipeline showing how to construct the core elements of 3D systems, including data structures, the math system, and the object system. Dave explains how to manage data with scene graphs, how to build rendering and camera systems, and how to handle level of detail, terrain, and animation. Advanced rendering effects such as vertex and pixel shaders are also covered as well as collision detection and physics systems. The book concludes with a discussion of application design, development tools, and coding standards for the source code of the new version of the Wild Magic engine included on the CD-ROM. Wild Magic is a commercial-quality game engine used by many companies and is a unique resource for the game development community.
*CD-ROM with the complete C++ source code for Wild Magic version 3, a commercial-quality game engine for Windows, Linux, and OS X.
*A comprehensive, practical guide to all the steps necessary to build professional-quality real-time simulations with just minimal mathematics required.
*Emphasizes the application of software engineering principles and describes the architecture of large libraries.

Mathematics is undoubtedly the key to state-of-the-art high technology. It is aninternationaltechnicallanguageandprovestobeaneternallyyoungscience to those who have learned its ways. Long an indispensable part of research thanks to modeling and simulation, mathematics is enjoying particular vit- ity now more than ever. Nevertheless, this stormy development is resulting in increasingly high requirements for students in technical disciplines, while general interest in mathematics continues to wane at the same time. This book and its appendices on the Internet seek to deal with this issue, helping students master the di?cult transition from the receptive to the productive phase of their education. The author has repeatedly held a three-semester introductory course - titled Higher Mathematics at the University of Stuttgart and used a series of "handouts" to show further aspects, make the course contents more motiv- ing, and connect with the mechanics lectures taking place at the same time. One part of the book has more or less evolved from this on its own. True to the original objective, this part treats a variety of separate topics of varying degrees of di?culty; nevertheless, all these topics are oriented to mechanics. Anotherpartofthisbookseekstoo?eraselectionofunderstandablereal- ticmodelsthatcanbeimplementeddirectlyfromthemultitudeofmathema- calresources.TheauthordoesnotattempttohidehispreferenceofNumerical Mathematics and thus places importance on careful theoretical preparation.

Computer languages and computer graphics have become the primary modes of human-computer interaction. This book provides a basic introduction to "Real and Virtual Environment" computer modelling. Graphics models are used to illustrate both the way computer languages are processed and also used to create computer models of graphic displays. Computer languages have been bootstrapped from machine code, to high-level languages such as Java, to animation scripting languages. Integrating graphic and computer models takes this support for programming, design and simulation work, one step further, allowing interactive computer graphic displays to be used to construct computer models of both real and virtual environment systems. The Java language is used to implement basic algorithms for language translation, and to generate graphic displays. It is also used to simulate the behaviour of a computer system, to explore the way programming and design-simulation environments can be put together.

This book contains a selection of papers from the 16th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling (SDH), the premier long-running forum in geographical information science. This collection offers readers exemplary contributions to geospatial scholarship and practice from the conference's 30th anniversary.

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) challenge what players understand as "real." Alternate Reality Games and the Cusp of Digital Gameplay is the first collection to explore and define the possibilities of ARGs. Though prominent examples have existed for more than two decades, only recently have ARGs come to the prominence as a unique and highly visible digital game genre. Adopting many of the same strategies as online video games, ARGs blur the distinction between real and fictional. With ARGs continuing to be an important and blurred space between digital and physical gameplay, this volume offers clear analysis of game design, implementation, and ramifications for game studies. Divided into three distinct sections, the contributions include first hand accounts by leading ARG creators, scholarly analysis of the meaning behind ARGs, and explorations of how ARGs are extending digital tools for analysis. By balancing the voices of designers, players, and researchers, this collection highlights how the Alternate Reality Game genre is transforming the ways we play and interact today.

For the first time, the collected texts from the critically and commercially acclaimed fantasy video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim are bound together in three exciting volumes. Lavishly illustrated and produced, these titles are straight out of the world of Skyrim - and a must for any wandering adventurer.

This book is a collection of writings by active researchers in the field of Artificial General Intelligence, on topics of central importance in the field. Each chapter focuses on one theoretical problem, proposes a novel solution, and is written in sufficiently non-technical language to be understandable by advanced undergraduates or scientists in allied fields. This book is the very first collection in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) focusing on theoretical, conceptual, and philosophical issues in the creation of thinking machines. All the authors are researchers actively developing AGI projects, thus distinguishing the book from much of the theoretical cognitive science and AI literature, which is generally quite divorced from practical AGI system building issues. And the discussions are presented in a way that makes the problems and proposed solutions understandable to a wide readership of non-specialists, providing a distinction from the journal and conference-proceedings literature. The book will benefit AGI researchers and students by giving them a solid orientation in the conceptual foundations of the field (which is not currently available anywhere); and it would benefit researchers in allied fields by giving them a high-level view of the current state of thinking in the AGI field. Furthermore, by addressing key topics in the field in a coherent way, the collection as a whole may play an important role in guiding future research in both theoretical and practical AGI, and in linking AGI research with work in allied disciplines

This book includes 23 papers dealing with the impact of modern information and communication technologies that support a wide variety of communities: local communities, virtual communities, and communities of practice, such as knowledge communities and scientific communities. The volume is the result of the second multidisciplinary "Communities and Technologies Conference," a major event in this emerging research field. The various chapters discuss how communities are affected by technologies, and how understanding of the way that communities function can be used in improving information systems design. This state of the art overview will be of interest to computer and information scientists, social scientists and practitioners alike.

This beginner's introduction to MATLAB teaches a sufficient subset of the functionality and gives the reader practical experience on how to find more information. A forty-page appendix contains unique user-friendly summaries and tables of MATLAB functions enabling the reader to find appropriate functions, understand their syntax and get a good overview. The large number of exercises, tips, and solutions mean that the course can be followed with or without a computer. Recent development in MATLAB to advance programming is described using realistic examples in order to prepare students for larger programming projects.  Revolutionary step by step 'guided tour' eliminates the steep learning curve encountered in learning new programming languages. Each chapter corresponds to an actual engineering course, where examples in MATLAB illustrate the typical theory, providing a practical understanding of these courses. Complementary homepage contains exercises, a take-home examination, and an automatic marking that grades the solution. End of chapter exercises with selected solutions in an appendix. The development of MATLAB programming and the rapid increase in the use of MATLAB in engineering courses makes this a valuable self-study guide for both engineering students and practising engineers. Readers will find that this time-less material can be used throughout their education and into their career.

This graduate-level text covers modeling, programming and analysis of simulation experiments and provides a rigorous treatment of the foundations of simulation and why it works. It introduces object-oriented programming for simulation, covers both the probabilistic and statistical basis for simulation in a rigorous but accessible manner (providing all necessary background material); and provides a modern treatment of experiment design and analysis that goes beyond classical statistics. The book emphasizes essential foundations throughout, rather than providing a compendium of algorithms and theorems and prepares the reader to use simulation in research as well as practice.

The book is a rigorous, but concise treatment, emphasizing lasting principles but also providing specific training in modeling, programming and analysis. In addition to teaching readers how to do simulation, it also prepares them to use simulation in their research; no other book does this. An online solutions manual for end of chapter exercises is also be provided. "

The recent pursuits emerging in the realm of big data processing, interpretation, collection and organization have emerged in numerous sectors including business, industry and government organizations. Data sets such as customer transactions for a mega-retailer, weathermonitoring, intelligence gathering, quickly outpace the capacities of traditional techniques and tools of data analysis. The 3V (volume, variability and velocity) challenges led to the emergence of new techniques and tools in data visualization, acquisition, and serialization. Soft Computing being regarded as a plethora of technologies of fuzzy sets (or Granular Computing), neurocomputing and evolutionary optimization brings forward a number of unique features that might be instrumental to the development of concepts and algorithms to deal with big data.

This carefully edited volume provides the reader with an updated, in-depth material on the emerging principles, conceptual underpinnings, algorithms and practice of Computational Intelligence in the realization of concepts and implementation of big data architectures, analysis, and interpretation as well as data analytics. The book is aimed at a broad audience of researchers and practitioners including those active in various disciplines in which big data, their analysis and optimization are of genuine relevance. One focal point is the systematic exposure of the concepts, design methodology, and detailed algorithms. In general, the volume adheres to the top-down strategy starting with the concepts and motivation and then proceeding with the detailed design that materializes in specific algorithms and representative applications. The material is self-contained and provides the reader with all necessary prerequisites and augments some parts with a step-by-step explanation of more advanced concepts supported by a significant amount of illustrative numeric material and some application scenarios to motivate the reader and make some abstract concepts more tangible."

Correcting the Great Mistake People often mistake one thing for another. That's human nature. However, one would expect the leaders in a particular ?eld of endeavour to have superior ab- ities to discriminate among the developments within that ?eld. That is why it is so perplexing that the technology elite - supposedly savvy folk such as software developers, marketers and businessmen - have continually mistaken Web-based graphics for something it is not. The ?rst great graphics technology for the Web, VRML, has been mistaken for something else since its inception. Viewed variously as a game system, a format for architectural walkthroughs, a platform for multi-user chat and an augmentation of reality, VRML may qualify as the least understood invention in the history of inf- mation technology. Perhaps it is so because when VRML was originally introduced it was touted as a tool for putting the shopping malls of the world online, at once prosaic and horrifyingly mundane to those of us who were developing it. Perhaps those ?rst two initials,"VR,"created expectations of sprawling, photorealistic f- tasy landscapes for exploration and play across the Web. Or perhaps the magnitude of the invention was simply too great to be understood at the time by the many, ironically even by those spending the money to underwrite its development. Regardless of the reasons, VRML suffered in the mainstream as it was twisted to meet unintended ends and stretched far beyond its limitations.

The Model-Free Prediction Principle expounded upon in this monograph is based on the simple notion of transforming a complex dataset to one that is easier to work with, e.g., i.i.d. or Gaussian. As such, it restores the emphasis on observable quantities, i.e., current and future data, as opposed to unobservable model parameters and estimates thereof, and yields optimal predictors in diverse settings such as regression and time series. Furthermore, the Model-Free Bootstrap takes us beyond point prediction in order to construct frequentist prediction intervals without resort to unrealistic assumptions such as normality. Prediction has been traditionally approached via a model-based paradigm, i.e., (a) fit a model to the data at hand, and (b) use the fitted model to extrapolate/predict future data. Due to both mathematical and computational constraints, 20th century statistical practice focused mostly on parametric models. Fortunately, with the advent of widely accessible powerful computing in the late 1970s, computer-intensive methods such as the bootstrap and cross-validation freed practitioners from the limitations of parametric models, and paved the way towards the `big data' era of the 21st century. Nonetheless, there is a further step one may take, i.e., going beyond even nonparametric models; this is where the Model-Free Prediction Principle is useful. Interestingly, being able to predict a response variable Y associated with a regressor variable X taking on any possible value seems to inadvertently also achieve the main goal of modeling, i.e., trying to describe how Y depends on X. Hence, as prediction can be treated as a by-product of model-fitting, key estimation problems can be addressed as a by-product of being able to perform prediction. In other words, a practitioner can use Model-Free Prediction ideas in order to additionally obtain point estimates and confidence intervals for relevant parameters leading to an alternative, transformation-based approach to statistical inference.

Maintaining SQL Server 2005 high availability in a global information environment is the database administrators greatest practical challenge. Availability is as much about people and processes as it is about technology. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 High Availability covers the technology, people, processes, and real-world best practices for planning, deploying, administering, and maintaining highly available SQL Server 2005 instances. With years of experience as a database consultant and production DBA, Allan Hirt provides in-depth, detailed advice on what it takes to ensure SQL Server high availability for businesses of any size. This is not an academic text; its not based on lab experiments, but on real-world experience. This book is a dramatic update and revision of the authors previous best-seller on SQL Server 2000. It gives sound guidance to DBAs and system administrators on how to really get the job done.