Assuming only background knowledge of algebra and elementary calculus, and access to a modern personal computer, Nonlinear Computer Modeling of Chemical and Biochemical Data presents the fundamental basis and procedures of data modeling by computer using nonlinear regression analysis. Bypassing the need for intermediary analytical stages, this method allows for rapid analysis of highly complex processes, thereby enabling reliable information to be extracted from raw experimental data.
By far the greater part of the book is devoted to selected applications of computer modeling to various experiments used in chemical and biochemical research. The discussions include a short review of principles and models for each technique, examples of computer modeling for real and theoretical data sets, and examples from the literature specific to each instrumental technique.
The book also offers detailed tutorial on how to construct suitable models and a score list of appropriate mathematics software packages.

The ease of use of the programs in the application to ever more complex cases of disease and pestilence. The lack of need on the part of the student or modelers of mathematics beyond algebra and the lack of need of any prior computer programming experience. The surprising insights that can be gained from initially simple systems models.

KES International (KES) is a worldwide organisation that provides a professional community and association for researchers, originally in the discipline of Knowledge Based and Intelligent Engineering Systems, but now extending into other related areas. Through this, KES provides its members with opportunities for publication and beneficial interaction. The focus of KES is research and technology transfer in the area of Intelligent S- tems, i.e. computer-based software systems that operate in a manner analogous to the human brain, in order to perform advanced tasks. Recently KES has started to extend its area of interest to encompass the contribution that intelligent systems can make to sustainability and renewable energy, and also the knowledge transfer, innovation and enterprise agenda. Involving several thousand researchers, managers and engineers drawn from u- versities and companies world-wide, KES is in an excellent position to facilitate - ternational research co-operation and generate synergy in the area of artificial intel- gence applied to real-world 'Smart' systems and the underlying related theory. The KES annual conference covers a broad spectrum of intelligent systems topics and attracts several hundred delegates from a range of countries round the world. KES also organises symposia on specific technical topics, for example, Agent and Multi Agent Systems, Intelligent Decision Technologies, Intelligent Interactive M- timedia Systems and Services, Sustainability in Energy and Buildings and Innovations through Knowledge Transfer. KES is responsible for two peer-reviewed journals, the International Journal of Knowledge based and Intelligent Engineering Systems, and Intelligent Decision Technologies: an International Journal.

Among all information systems that are nowadays available, web sites are definitely the ones having the widest potential audience and the most significant impact on the everyday life of people. Web sites contribute largely to the information society: they provide visitors with a large array of services and information and allow them to perform various tasks without prior assumptions about their computer literacy. Web sites are assumed to be accessible and usable to the widest possible audience. Consequently, usability has been recognized as a critical success factor for web sites of every kind. Beyond this universal recognition, usability still remains a notion that is hard to grasp. Summative evaluation methods have been introduced to identify potential usability problems to assess the quality of web sites. However, summative evaluation remains limited in impact as it does not necessarily deliver constructive comments to web site designers and developers on how to solve the usability problems. Formative evaluation methods have been introduced to address this issue. Evaluation remains a process that is hard to drive and perform, while its potential impact is probably maximal for the benefit of the final user. This complexity is exacerbated when web sites are very large, potentially up to several hundreds of thousands of pages, thus leading to a situation where eval uating the web site is almost impossible to conduct manually. Therefore, many attempts have been made to support evaluation with: * Models that capture some characteristics of the web site of interest.

The virtual digital domain allows the capture, processing, transmission, storage, retrieval and display of text, images, audio and animation, without familiar materials such as paper, celluloid, magnetic tape and plastic. But moving from these media to the digital domain introduces all sorts of problems, such as the conversion of analogue archives, multimedia databases, content-based retrieval and the design of new content that exploits the benefits offered by digital systems. It is this issue of digital content creation that is addressed in this book.Different aspects of digital content creation are discussed in this volume, contributed by authors from around the world. Although each chapter addresses an individual aspect of the digital domain, there are common threads that unite them into an exciting vision of the future.

The advances in the generation and processing of multimedia data (e. g. documents, images, video, audio, animations, etc. ) have had an immense impact on multimedia applications and, as a result, multimedia has permeated almost every aspect of our daily lives. This development has also brought with it a whole host of issues and ch- lenges which were either not as apparent before or were non-existent. Today, digital media is relied upon as primary news and information resource, as evidence in a court of law, as part of medical records or as financial documents. However, there is still lack of authoritative mechanisms to verify the origin and veracity of media data. - deed, multimedia content has become an extremely valuable asset, and it is being both disseminated and consumed on a larger scale than ever before, but the issues conce- ing how the content owners and publishers should control the distribution of and - cess to their content have not been satisfactorily resolved yet. There are various other issues related to use of multimedia that require further analysis and research. For example, it is a known fact that some criminal organi- tions communicate with its members by posting information embedded media to p- lic forums and web-sites to evade surveillance by law enforcement. Conventional multimedia processing approaches do not provide sufficiently effective means for - fending against such communication.

Graphics Gems V is the newest volume in "The Graphics Gems Series." It is intended to provide the graphics community with a set of practical tools for implementing new ideas and techniques, and to offer working solutions to real programming problems. These tools are written by a wide variety of graphics programmers from industry, academia, and research. The books in the series have become essential, time-saving tools for many programmers.
Key Features
* Latest collection of graphics tips in The Graphics Gems Series written by the leading programmers in the field
* Contains over 50 new gems displaying some of the most recent and innovative techniques in graphics programming
* Includes gems covering ellipses, splines, Bezier curves, and ray tracing
* Disk included containing source code from the gems available in both IBM and Macintosh versions

This is the sixth volume in a series dealing with such topics as information systems practice and theory, information systems and the accounting/auditing environment, and differing perspectives on information systems research.

Intelligent Multimedia Multi-Agent Systems focuses on building intelligent successful systems. The book adopts a human-centered approach and considers various pragmatic issues and problems in areas like intelligent systems, software engineering, multimedia databases, electronic commerce, data mining, enterprise modeling and human-computer interaction for developing a human-centered virtual machine. The authors describe an ontology of the human-centered virtual machine which includes four components: activity-centered analysis component, problem solving adapter component, transformation agent component, and multimedia based interpretation component. These four components capture the external and internal planes of the system development spectrum. They integrate the physical, social and organizational reality on the external plane with stakeholder goals, tasks and incentives, and organization culture on the internal plane. The human-centered virtual machine and its four components are used for developing intelligent multimedia multi-agent systems in areas like medical decision support and health informatics, medical image retrieval, e-commerce, face detection and annotation, internet games and sales recruitment. The applications in these areas help to expound various aspects of the human-centered virtual machine including, human-centered domain modeling, distributed intelligence and communication, perceptual and cognitive task modeling, component based software development, and multimedia based data modeling. Further, the applications described in the book employ various intelligent technologies like neural networks, fuzzy logic and knowledge based systems, software engineering artifacts like agents and objects, internet technologies like XML and multimedia artifacts like image, audio, video and text.

The interaction between a user and a device forms the foundation of today's application design. Covering the following topics: A suite of five structural principles helping designers to structure their mockups; An agile method for exploiting desktop eye tracker equipment in combination with mobile devices; An approach to explore large-scale collections based on classification systems; A framework based on the use of modeling and components composition techniques to simplify the development of organizational collaborative systems; A low-cost virtual reality system that provides highly satisfying virtual experiences; Popular hardware and software tools and technologies for developing augmented and virtual reality applications; An implementation to handle connectivity between virtual reality applications and SensAble (R) Technology Phantom Haptic Devices; The results of a research study implementing a teaching technological strategy to help Down syndrome children develop their reading skills; Platform independent models decreasing the level of cohesion between communication technologies and software for ubiquitous computing; A method for applying gamification as a tool to improve the participation and motivation of people in performing different tasks. New Trends in Interaction, Virtual Reality and Modeling collects the best research from Interaccion 2012 and MexIHC 2012, and presents the state-of-the-art in human-computer interaction, user interfaces, user experience and virtual reality. Written by researchers from leading universities, research institutes and industry, this volume forms a valuable source of reference for researchers in HCI and VR.

This volume contains the lectures given in honor to Georg Farber as tribute to his contributions in the area of real-time and embedded systems. The chapters of many leading scientists cover a wide range of aspects, like robot or automotive vision systems or medical aspects. "

New data communication technologies, and the resulting policies and management, can have a profound effect on the success of business organizations. By quantifying the impact of these new innovations, researchers can help these businesses thrive in the networking and business data communications fields. Web-Based Multimedia Advancements in Data Communications and Networking Technologies highlights comprehensive research which will enable readers to understand, manage, use, and maintain business data communication networks more effectively. It also addresses key technology, management, and policy issues for utilizing data communications and networking in business and the current best practices for aligning this important technology with the strategic goals of the organization.

Dynamic Modeling of Environmental Systems is a primer on using models to understand environmental problems. With their many natural, economic, political, and technical aspects, environmental problems require a systems approach. This book provides an introduction to modeling concepts and applications that is specifically geared toward the environmental field. Sections on modeling terminology, the uses of models, the model-building process, and the interpretation of output provide the foundation for detailed applications. After an introduction to the basics of dynamic modeling, the book leads students through an analysis of several environmental problems, including surface-water pollution, matter-cycling disruptions, and global warming. The scientific and technical context is provided for each problem, and the methods for analyzing and designing appropriate modeling approaches is provided. An accompanying CD for both Macintosh and Windows computers contains a run-time version of STELLA modeling software with models from the text. While the mathematical content does not exceed the level of a first-semester Calculus course, the book gives students all of the background, examples, and practice exercises needed both to use and understand environmental modeling. It is suitable for upper-level undergraduate and beginning-graduate-level environmental science courses. The text is also useful for environmental professionals seeking an introduction to modeling in their field. About the Series: The availability of powerful, intuitive software for developing and running simulation models of real-world phenomena promises a revolution in studying, teaching, and thinking about complex problems that range from the functioning of a cell to that of an ecosystem to that of a national economy. The books in the series Modeling Dynamic Systems will promote the spread of "systems thinking" by integrating state-of-the-art modeling techniques with the theories and concepts of specific disciplines or interdisciplinary topics. The unifying theme of the series is the ease, power, and transparency of model-building.

This book prepares students to execute the quantitative and computational needs of the finance industry. The quantitative methods are explained in detail with examples from real financial problems like option pricing, risk management, portfolio selection, etc. Codes are provided in R programming language to execute the methods. Tables and figures, often with real data, illustrate the codes. References to related work are intended to aid the reader to pursue areas of specific interest in further detail. The comprehensive background with economic, statistical, mathematical, and computational theory strengthens the understanding. The coverage is broad, and linkages between different sections are explained. The primary audience is graduate students, while it should also be accessible to advanced undergraduates. Practitioners working in the finance industry will also benefit.

The explosion of information technology has led to substantial growth of web-accessible linguistic data in terms of quantity, diversity and complexity. These resources become even more useful when interlinked with each other to generate network effects.

The general trend of providing data online is thus accompanied by newly developing methodologies to interconnect linguistic data and metadata. This includes linguistic data collections, general-purpose knowledge bases (e.g., the DBpedia, a machine-readable edition of the Wikipedia), and repositories with specific information about languages, linguistic categories and phenomena. The Linked Data paradigm provides a framework for interoperability and access management, and thereby allows to integrate information from such a diverse set of resources.

The contributions assembled in this volume illustrate the band-width of applications of the Linked Data paradigm for representative types of language resources. They cover lexical-semantic resources, annotated corpora, typological databases as well as terminology and metadata repositories. The book includes representative applications from diverse fields, ranging from academic linguistics (e.g., typology and corpus linguistics) over applied linguistics (e.g., lexicography and translation studies) to technical applications (in computational linguistics, Natural Language Processing and information technology).

This volume accompanies the Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics 2012 (LDL-2012) in Frankfurt/M., Germany, organized by the Open Linguistics Working Group (OWLG) of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN). It assembles contributions of the workshop participants and, beyond this, it summarizes initial steps in the formation of a Linked Open Data cloud of linguistic resources, the Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud (LLOD).

A reference for the field of particle modelling - the study of dynamical behaviour of solids and fluids in response to external forces, with the solids and fluids modelled as systems of atoms and molecules.

Multimedia Database Management Systems brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this important area. Multimedia Database Management Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most important research issues in the field.

In recent years the concept of energy has been revised and a new model based on the principle of sustainability has become more and more pervasive. The appraisal of energy technologies and projects is complex and uncertain as the related decision making has to encompass environmental, technical, economic and social factors and information sources. The scientific procedure of assessment has a vital role as it can supply the right tools to evaluate the actual situation and make realistic forecasts of the effects and outcomes of any actions undertaken. "Assessment and Simulation Tools for Sustainable Energy Systems" offers reviews of the main assessment and simulation methods used for effective energy assessment.

Divided across three sections, "Assessment and Simulation Tools for Sustainable Energy Systems" develops the reader s ability to select suitable tools to support decision making and implementation of sustainable energy projects. The first is dedicated to the analysis of theoretical foundations and applications of multi-criteria decision making. This is followed by chapters concentrating on the theory and practice of fuzzy inference, neural nets and algorithms genetics. Finally, simulation methods such as Monte Carlo analysis, mathematical programming and others are detailed.

This comprehensive illustration of these tools and their application makes "Assessment and Simulation Tools for Sustainable Energy Systems" a key guide for researchers, scientists, managers, politicians and industry professionals developing the field of sustainable energy systems. It may also prompt further advancements in soft computing and simulation issues for students and researchers."

Automated and semi-automated manipulation of so-called labelled transition systems has become an important means in discovering flaws in software and hardware systems. Process algebra has been developed to express such labelled transition systems algebraically, which enhances the ways of manipulation by means of equational logic and term rewriting.The theory of process algebra has developed rapidly over the last twenty years, and verification tools have been developed on the basis of process algebra, often in cooperation with techniques related to model checking. This textbook gives a thorough introduction into the basics of process algebra and its applications.

This research monograph utilizes exact and Monte Carlo permutation statistical methods to generate probability values and measures of effect size for a variety of measures of association. Association is broadly defined to include measures of correlation for two interval-level variables, measures of association for two nominal-level variables or two ordinal-level variables, and measures of agreement for two nominal-level or two ordinal-level variables. Additionally, measures of association for mixtures of the three levels of measurement are considered: nominal-ordinal, nominal-interval, and ordinal-interval measures. Numerous comparisons of permutation and classical statistical methods are presented. Unlike classical statistical methods, permutation statistical methods do not rely on theoretical distributions, avoid the usual assumptions of normality and homogeneity of variance, and depend only on the data at hand. This book takes a unique approach to explaining statistics by integrating a large variety of statistical methods, and establishing the rigor of a topic that to many may seem to be a nascent field. This topic is relatively new in that it took modern computing power to make permutation methods available to those working in mainstream research. Written for a statistically informed audience, it is particularly useful for teachers of statistics, practicing statisticians, applied statisticians, and quantitative graduate students in fields such as psychology, medical research, epidemiology, public health, and biology. It can also serve as a textbook in graduate courses in subjects like statistics, psychology, and biology.

See How to Unobtrusively Incorporate Good Teaching into Your Game's Mechanics Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games shows how to embed a tutorial directly into your game design mechanics so that your games naturally and comfortably teach players to have fun. The author deciphers years of research in game studies, education, psychology, human computer interaction, and user interface and experience that equip you to make dynamic tutorials that help players enjoy your games. The book links game design principles with psychology through the game tutorial. It offers easy-to-implement changes that can make a huge difference in how players receive your games. It explains how you can educate new players and engage experienced players at the same time through a combination of good design and basic understanding of human educational, motivational, and cognitive psychologies. Transcending disciplinary boundaries, this book improves your understanding of the science of learning and the art of teaching. It helps you design game mechanics, or tutorials, that teach people how to have fun with your games without ever feeling as though they re being instructed.