This monograph book is focused on the recent advances in smart, multimedia and computer gaming technologies. The Contributions include: *Smart Gamification and Smart Serious Games. *Fusion of secure IPsec-based Virtual Private Network, mobile computing and rich multimedia technology. *Teaching and Promoting Smart Internet of Things Solutions Using the Serious-game Approach. *Evaluation of Student Knowledge using an e-Learning Framework. *The iTEC Eduteka. *3D Virtual Worlds as a Fusion of Immersing, Visualizing, Recording, and Replaying Technologies. *Fusion of multimedia and mobile technology in audio guides for Museums and Exhibitions: from Bluetooth Push to Web Pull. The book is directed to researchers, students and software developers working in the areas of education and information technologies.

This textbook on computational statistics presents tools and concepts of univariate and multivariate statistical data analysis with a strong focus on applications and implementations in the statistical software R. It covers mathematical, statistical as well as programming problems in computational statistics and contains a wide variety of practical examples. In addition to the numerous R sniplets presented in the text, all computer programs (quantlets) and data sets to the book are available on GitHub and referred to in the book. This enables the reader to fully reproduce as well as modify and adjust all examples to their needs. The book is intended for advanced undergraduate and first-year graduate students as well as for data analysts new to the job who would like a tour of the various statistical tools in a data analysis workshop. The experienced reader with a good knowledge of statistics and programming might skip some sections on univariate models and enjoy the various ma thematical roots of multivariate techniques. The Quantlet platform quantlet.de, quantlet.com, quantlet.org is an integrated QuantNet environment consisting of different types of statistics-related documents and program codes. Its goal is to promote reproducibility and offer a platform for sharing validated knowledge native to the social web. QuantNet and the corresponding Data-Driven Documents-based visualization allows readers to reproduce the tables, pictures and calculations inside this Springer book.

This book reports on the development and validation of a generic defeasible logic programming framework for carrying out argumentative reasoning in Semantic Web applications (GF@SWA). The proposed methodology is unique in providing a solution for representing incomplete and/or contradictory information coming from different sources, and reasoning with it. GF@SWA is able to represent this type of information, perform argumentation-driven hybrid reasoning to resolve conflicts, and generate graphical representations of the integrated information, thus assisting decision makers in decision making processes. GF@SWA represents the first argumentative reasoning engine for carrying out automated reasoning in the Semantic Web context and is expected to have a significant impact on future business applications. The book provides the readers with a detailed and clear exposition of different argumentation-based reasoning techniques, and of their importance and use in Semantic Web applications. It addresses both academics and professionals, and will be of primary interest to researchers, students and practitioners in the area of Web-based intelligent decision support systems and their application in various domains.

The book presents a conceptually novel oscillations based paradigm, the Oscillation-Based Multi-Agent System (OSIMAS), aimed at the modelling of agents and their systems as coherent, stylized, neurodynamic processes. This paradigm links emerging research domains via coherent neurodynamic oscillation based representations of the individual human mind and society (as a coherent collective mind) states. Thus, this multidisciplinary paradigm delivers an empirical and simulation research framework that provides a new way of modelling the complex dynamics of individual and collective mind states. This book addresses a conceptual problem - the lack of a multidisciplinary, connecting paradigm, which could link fragmented research in the fields of neuroscience, artificial intelligence (AI), multi-agent system (MAS) and the social network domains. The need for a common multidisciplinary research framework essentially arises because these fields share a common object of investigation and simulation, i.e., individual and collective human behavior. Although the fields of research mentioned above all approach this from different perspectives, their common object of investigation unites them. By putting the various pathways of research as they are interrelated into perspective, this book provides a philosophical underpinning, experimental background and modelling tools that the author anticipates will reveal new frontiers in multidisciplinary research. Fundamental investigation of the implicit oscillatory nature of agents' mind states and social mediums in general can reveal some new ways of understanding the periodic and nonperiodic fluctuations taking place in real life. For example, via agent states-related diffusion properties, we could investigate complex economic phenomena like the spread of stock market crashes, currency crises, speculative oscillations (bubbles and crashes), social unrest, recessionary effects, sovereign defaults, etc. All these effects are closely associated with social fragility, which follows and is affected by cycles such as production, political, business and financial. Thus, the multidisciplinary OSIMAS paradigm can yield new knowledge and research perspectives, allowing for a better understanding of social agents and their social organization principles.

Design is an art form in which the designer selects from a myriad of alternatives to bring an "optimum" choice to a user. In many complex of "optimum" is difficult to define. Indeed, the users systems the notion themselves will not agree, so the "best" system is simply the one in which the designer and the user have a congruent viewpoint. Compounding the design problem are tradeoffs that span a variety of technologies and user requirements. The electronic business system is a classically complex system whose tradeoff criteria and user views are constantly changing with rapidly developing underlying technology. Professor Milutinovic has chosen this area for his capstone contribution to the computer systems design. This book completes his trilogy on design issue in computer systems. His first work, "Surviving the Design of a 200 MHz RISC Microprocessor" (1997) focused on the tradeoffs and design issues within a processor. His second work, "Surviving the Design of Microprocessor and Multiprocessor Systems" (2000) considers the design issues involved with assembling a number of processors into a coherent system. Finally, this book generalizes the system design problem to electronic commerce on the Internet, a global system of immense consequence.

"The Definitive Guide to SQLite" is the perfect book about SQLite. It covers everything needed to start working with SQLite including installation, using the SQLite shell, and programming with SQLite using six different language extensions. -- Joe Topjian, Adminspotting

Traditional relational databases and embedded databases both have shortcomings that can leave a developer perplexed. So for many people, the solution resides in SQLite, an open source embeddable database with an amazingly small footprint (less than 250 kilobytes). SQLite packs a powerful array of features and can handle databases as large as 2 terabytes. It offers a flexible set of datatypes and the ability to perform transactions, and it is supported by languages like C, PHP, Perl, and Python. And because SQLite's databases are completely file based, privileges are granted at the operating system level, allowing for easy and fast user management.

"The Definitive Guide to SQLite" is the first book to devote complete coverage to the latest version of this powerful database. It offers you a thorough overview of SQLite capabilities and APIs, while remaining cognizant of newcomers who may be making their first foray into a database environment with SQLite. This book serves as both a first-time tutorial and future reference guide." Youll learn about SQLite extensions available for C, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Tcl. The book thoroughly covers SQLite internals to help you take full advantage of its features while minimally impacting resource consumption. Author Mike Owens is the original creator of Pysqlite, the popular Python extension for SQLite.

Advancing medical technologies are now developing cutting-edge computer applications useful to the field of oral studies. Informatics in Oral Medicine: Advanced Techniques in Clinical and Diagnostic Technologies provides innovative research techniques on current technologies in the management of problems in oral health and medicine. A unique and comprehensive reference source, this enriched collection contains valuable computational tools and the latest applications in dental and oral research topics such as artificial mouths, laser melting, and dentist appointment management.

"Global Change Scenarios of the 21st Century" informs readers of conceivable environmental changes in the next hundred years. Integrated scenarios are used to communicate large amounts of information about different aspects of the global environmental system, together with society's role within this system. Uniquely, the scenarios are generated by an integrated computer model, IMAGE 2.1, which enhances consistency and provides a framework for linking environmental and social aspects of global change.
The book is divided into four parts, the volume begins by describing the model used to generate these scenarios, explaining its current features. This is followed by scenarios of changing climate, energy and food use, land cover, acidification, sea level and many other indicators of global change up to 2100. The long term consequences of actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are then explored in a section which uses the concepts of 'safe landing' and 'safe emission corridors' to address the connection between the long-term climate protection and short-term emission reductions. The final sections examines how the complicated and crucial issue of how complex global scenario information can be communicated to policy makers.

Cross-Media Service Delivery is of interest to professionals and academicians working in content authoring and electronic publishing platforms; as well as in media and broadcasting.
The digitization of traditional media formats, such as text, images, video, and sound provides us with the ability to store, process, and transport content in a uniform way. This has led the formerly distinct industries of media, telecommunications, and information technology to converge. Cross-media publishing and service delivery are important new trends emerging in the content industry landscape. Mass-media organizations and content providers transitionally targeted content production towards a single delivery channel. However, recent economic and technological changes in the industry led content providers to extend their brands to cover multiple delivery channels. Following the content industry trend to "create once and publish everywhere" - COPE, a number of architectures, technologies, and tools are currently being developed and deployed to facilitate the automatic conversion of content to multiple formats, and the creation of innovative multi-platform services. This new approach enables the seamless access to information over different network infrastructures and client platforms.
This work uniquely brings together a cross-disciplinary core of contributors to address the technical and business issues of cross-media publishing and service delivery. The contributions are organized into four different areas: the business issues driving the requirements for cross media content delivery, the architectures used for delivering content to multiple platforms, technologies that address specificpractical problems, and, last but not least, concrete applications.

This book is broadly organized in three parts. The first section ('Enhancing and Managing Customer Value') focuses on presenting the state-of-knowledge in managing and enhancing customer value through extraction of consumer-centric knowledge from mountains of data that modern interactive applications generate. The extracted information can then be used to provide more personalized information to customers, provide more relevant information or products, and even to create innovative business processes to enhance overall value to customers. The second section in the book ('Computational Approaches for Business Processes') focuses on presenting several specific innovative computing artifacts and tools developed by researchers that are not yet commercially used. These represent cutting-edge thought and advances in business computing research that should soon find utility in real-world applications or as a tool to analyze real-world scenarios. The final section in the book ('Supporting Knowledge Enterprise') presents approaches and frameworks that focus on ability of an enterprise to analyze, build, and protect computing infrastructure that supports value-added dimensions to the enterprise's existing business processes.

Mobile Intention Recognition addresses problems of practical relevance for mobile system engineers: how can we make mobile assistance systems more intelligent? How can we model and recognize patterns of human behavior which span more than a limited spatial context? This text provides an overview on plan and intention recognition, ranging from the late 1970s to very recent approaches. This overview is unique as it discusses approaches with respect to the specificities of mobile intention recognition. This book covers problems from research on mobile assistance systems using methods from artificial intelligence and natural language processing. It thus addresses an extraordinary interdisciplinary audience.

The author introduces the reader to the creation and implementation of space-related models by applying a learning-by-doing and problem-oriented approach. The required procedural skills are rarely taught at universities and many scientists and engineers struggle to transfer a model into a computer program. The purpose of this book is to fill this gap. It moves from simple to more complex applications, covering various important topics in the sequence: dynamic matrix processing, 2D and 3D graphics, databases, Java applets and parallel computing. A file (SMOP.zip) with all examples can be downloaded free of charge from the Internet at http: //de.geocities.com/bsttc2/book.

Despite the significance and potential benefits of data-exchange standards, a void remains in literature of a research publication dedicated to its barriers and critical success factors. ""Data-Exchange Standards and International Organizations: Adoption and Diffusion"" establishes factors related to the implementation and dissemination of data-exchange standards. A cutting-edge reference source written by an international collaboration of field experts, this book covers advanced topics such as product life cycle support, IT standardization, and innovation- and adopter-centric data analysis.

Polymers, main components of plastics and rubbers, are being discarded in increasing quantities. But this waste can also be considered as plastic gold'. Public concern, coupled with the inherent value of the material, means that recycling is imperative. The present book presents a survey of current knowledge in the form of case studies, including current legal and educational issues. Topics covered also include regulation and practice in NATO countries, the economics of recycling, the reprocessing of single polymers and mixtures, and future prospects and strategies. Audience: Vital reading for all polymer scientists, technicians and engineers.

The short history of the International Working Conference on Educating Professionals for Network Centric Organizations is a good illustration of the tremendous rate of development of global networking, its impact and of its deep penetration into management of business, industty and administration. In 1996, when the theme and name of the conference had been set, there was yet no heavy use of networks in the fields just mentioned. However, it has been already established well enough to enable those with a visionary sense to feel that it will be an important subject and it could be an interesting theme for a conference to be held within two years. It seemed a risky decision at the time but it turned out to be very successful when conducted in 1998. It has been stated that "it took until 1997 for the business world to discover the Internet." In less than two years, the Internet and the Intranets are a vital component for running major parts of the business world. This fast pace puts some pressure on writing papers and holding a conferenc- effort has to be made to have meaningful contents despite the changes. A time span of 9 months between writing a paper and having it published, seemed once to be very short, but it is not so any more when referring to a dynamic issue like global networking.

Process Modelling and simulation have proved to be extremely successful engineering tools for the design and optimisation of physical, chemical and biochemical processes. The use of simulation has expanded rapidly over the last two decades because of the availability of large high-speed computers and indeed has become even more widespread with the rise of the desk-top PC resources now available to nearly every engineer and student.
In the chemical industry large, realistic non-linear problems are routinely solved with the aid of computer simulation. This has a number of benefits, including easy assessment of the economic desirability of a project, convenient investigation of the effects of changes to system variables, and finally the introduction of mathematical rigour into the design process and inherent assumptions that may not have been there before.
'Computational Methods for Process Simulation' develops the methods needed for the simulation of real processes to be found in the process industries. It also stresses the engineering fundamentals used in developing process models. Steady state and dynamic systems are considered, for both spatially lumped and spatially distributed problems. It develops analytical and numerical computational techniques for algebraic, ordinary and partial differential equations, and makes use of computer software routines that are widely available. Dedicated software examples are available via the internet.
Written for a compulsory course element in the US
Includes examples using software used in academia and industry
Software available via the Internet

As interactive application software such as apps, installations, and multimedia presentations have become pervasive in everyday life, more and more computer scientists, engineers, and technology experts acknowledge the influence that exists beyond visual explanations. Computational Solutions for Knowledge, Art, and Entertainment: Information Exchange Beyond d104 focuses on the methods of depicting knowledge-based concepts in order to assert power beyond a visual explanation of scientific and computational notions. This book combines formal descriptions with graphical presentations and encourages readers to interact by creating visual solutions for science-related concepts and presenting data. This reference is essential for researchers, computer scientists, and academics focusing on the integration of science, technology, computing, art, and mathematics for visual problem solving.

Process Technology brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast moving area. Process Technology serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.

Computer simulation techniques are now having a major impact on almost all areas of the physical and biological sciences. This book concentrates on the application of these methods to inorganic materials, including topical and industrially relevant systems including zeolites and high Tc superconductors.
The central theme of the book is the use of modern simulation techniques as a structural tool in solid state science. Computer Modelling in Inorganic Crystallography describes the current range of techniques used in modeling crystal structures, and strong emphasis is given to the use of modeling in predicting new crystal structures and refining partially known structures. It also reviews new opportunities being opened up by electronic structure calculation and explains the ways in which these techniques are illuminating our knowledge of bonding in solids.
Key Features
* Includes a thorough review of the technical basis of relevant contemporary methodologies including minimization, Monte-Carlo, molecular dynamics, simulated annealing methods, and electronic structure methods
* Highlights applications to amorphous and crystalline solids
* Surveys simulations of surface and defect properties of solids
* Discusses applications to molecular and inorganic solids

This book discusses the latest advances in algorithms for symbolic summation, factorization, symbolic-numeric linear algebra and linear functional equations. It presents a collection of papers on original research topics from the Waterloo Workshop on Computer Algebra (WWCA-2016), a satellite workshop of the International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation (ISSAC'2016), which was held at Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) on July 23-24, 2016. This workshop and the resulting book celebrate the 70th birthday of Sergei Abramov (Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow), whose highly regarded and inspirational contributions to symbolic methods have become a crucial benchmark of computer algebra and have been broadly adopted by many Computer Algebra systems.

A comprehensive, systematic approach to multimedia database management systems. It presents methods for managing the increasing demands of multimedia databases and their inherent design and architecture issues, and covers how to create an effective multimedia database by integrating the various information indexing and retrieval methods available. It also addresses how to measure multimedia database performance that is based on similarity to queries and routinely affected by human judgement. The book concludes with a discussion of networking and operating system support for multimedia databases and a look at research and development in this dynamic field.

The "European Experiment on the Transport and Transformation of Environmentally Relevant Trace Constituents over Europe" (EUROTRAC) was established in 1986 to tackle the scientific problem and combine the expertise, knowledge and resources in Europe, in order to apply them over a large region covering the greater part of the continent. EUROTRAC is a coordinated multidisciplinary scientific research project involving field measurements, laboratory studies, instrument development and development of comprehensive computer models for the simulation of the physical and chemical processes in the lower atmosphere.