Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is an integrating technology for supporting a pervasive and transparent infrastructure for implementing smart environments. Such technology is used to enable environments for detecting events and behaviors of people and for responding in a contextually relevant fashion. AmI proposes a multi-disciplinary approach for enhancing human machine interaction. Ambient Intelligence: A Novel Paradigm is a compilation of edited chapters describing current state-of-the-art and new research techniques including those related to intelligent visual monitoring, face and speech recognition, innovative education methods, as well as smart and cognitive environments. The authors start with a description of the iDorm as an example of a smart environment conforming to the AmI paradigm, and introduces computer vision as an important component of the system. Other computer vision examples describe visual monitoring for the elderly, classic and novel surveillance techniques using clusters of cameras installed in indoor and outdoor application domains, and the monitoring of public spaces. Face and speech recognition systems are also covered as well as enhanced LEGO blocks for novel educational purposes. The book closes with a provocative chapter on how a cybernetic system can be designed as the backbone of a human machine interaction.

Correlation is a robust and general technique for pattern recognition and is used in many applications, such as automatic target recognition, biometric recognition and optical character recognition. The design, analysis and use of correlation pattern recognition algorithms requires background information, including linear systems theory, random variables and processes, matrix/vector methods, detection and estimation theory, digital signal processing and optical processing. This book provides a needed review of this diverse background material and develops the signal processing theory, the pattern recognition metrics, and the practical application know-how from basic premises. It shows both digital and optical implementations. It also contains state-of-the-art technology presented by the team that developed it and includes case studies of significant current interest, such as face and fingerprint recognition. Suitable for advanced undergraduate or graduate students taking courses in pattern recognition theory, whilst reaching technical levels of interest to the professional practitioner.

Welcome to the Proceedings of ICCHP 2010! We were proud to welcome participants from more than 40 countries from all over the world to this year's ICCHP. Since the late 1980s, it has been ICCHP's mission to support and reflect development in the field of "Assistive Technologies," eAccessibility and eInclusion. With a focus on scientific quality, ICCHP has become an important reference in our field. The 2010 conference and this collection of papers once again fulfilled this mission. The International Programme Committee, comprising 106 experts from all over the world, selected 147 full and 44 short papers out of 328 abstracts submitted to ICCHP. This acceptance ratio of about half of the submissions demonstrates our strict pursuit of scientific quality both of the programme and in particular of the proceedings in your hands. An impressive number of experts agreed to organize "Special Thematic Sessions" (STS) for ICCHP 2010. These STS help to bring the meeting into sharper focus in several key areas. In turn, this deeper level of focus helps to collate a state of the art and mainstream technical, social, cultural and political developments.

This volume collects the papers accepted for presentation atMIRAGE 2009. TheMIRAGE conference is continuing to receive international recognition, with this year's presentations coming from 25 countries despite the large wor- wide ?nancial crisis. This time Asia submitted far fewer papers than previously and fewer than Europe. France provedto be the most active scienti?cally with a total of 16 submitted papers. Germany came second (10 submitted papers) and China third (8 papers). We received a total of 83 submissions and accepted 41 as oral presentations, over the three-day event. All papers were reviewed by three to four members of theProgramCommittee.The?nalselectionwasmadebytheConferenceChairs. At this point, we wish to thank the Program Committee and additional referees for their timely and high-quality reviews. We also thank the invited speakers Luc Van Gool, Frank Multon and Raquel Urtasun for kindly accepting to present very interesting talks. mirage 2009 was organizedbyinria Rocquencourt and took place atinria, Rocquencourt, close to Versailles. We believe that the conference proved to be a stimulating experience for all. March 2009 A. Gagalowicz W. Philips Organization Mirage 2009 was organized byinria and Ghent University.

Arti?cial intelligence has recently been re-energized to provide the clues needed to resolve complicated problems. AI is also expected to play a central role in enhancing a wide variety of daily activities. JSAI (The Japanese Society for Arti?cial Intelligence) is responsible for boosting the activities of AI researchers in Japan, and their series of annual conferences o?ers attractive forums for the exposition of the latest achievements and inter-group communication. In the past, the best papers of the conferences were published in the LNAI series. This book consists of award papers from the 22nd annual conference of the JSAI (JSAI 2008) and selected papers from the three co-located workshops. Eight papers were selected among more than 400 presentations at the conference and 18 papers were selected from the 34 presentations at the co-located wo- shops; Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics 5 (LENLS 2008), the 2nd International Workshop on Juris-informatics (JURISIN 2008), and the First International Workshop on Laughter in Interaction and Body Movement (LIBM 2008). The award papers from JSAI 2008 were selected through a r- orous selection process. In the process, papers recommended by session chairs, session commentators, and PC members were carefully reviewed, before the ?nal decision was made.

The application of geometric algebra to the engineering sciences is a young, active subject of research. The promise of this field is that the mathematical structure of geometric algebra together with its descriptive power will result in intuitive and more robust algorithms.

This book examines all aspects essential for a successful application of geometric algebra: the theoretical foundations, the representation of geometric constraints, and the numerical estimation from uncertain data. Formally, the book consists of two parts: theoretical foundations and applications. The first part includes chapters on random variables in geometric algebra, linear estimation methods that incorporate the uncertainty of algebraic elements, and the representation of geometry in Euclidean, projective, conformal and conic space. The second part is dedicated to applications of geometric algebra, which include uncertain geometry and transformations, a generalized camera model, and pose estimation.

Graduate students, scientists, researchers and practitioners will benefit from this book. The examples given in the text are mostly recent research results, so practitioners can see how to apply geometric algebra to real tasks, while researchers note starting points for future investigations. Students will profit from the detailed introduction to geometric algebra, while the text is supported by the author's visualization software, CLUCalc, freely available online, and a website that includes downloadable exercises, slides and tutorials.

As future generation information technology (FGIT) becomes specialized and fr- mented, it is easy to lose sight that many topics in FGIT have common threads and, because of this, advances in one discipline may be transmitted to others. Presentation of recent results obtained in different disciplines encourages this interchange for the advancement of FGIT as a whole. Of particular interest are hybrid solutions that c- bine ideas taken from multiple disciplines in order to achieve something more signi- cant than the sum of the individual parts. Through such hybrid philosophy, a new principle can be discovered, which has the propensity to propagate throughout mul- faceted disciplines. FGIT 2009 was the first mega-conference that attempted to follow the above idea of hybridization in FGIT in a form of multiple events related to particular disciplines of IT, conducted by separate scientific committees, but coordinated in order to expose the most important contributions. It included the following international conferences: Advanced Software Engineering and Its Applications (ASEA), Bio-Science and Bio-Technology (BSBT), Control and Automation (CA), Database Theory and Application (DTA), D- aster Recovery and Business Continuity (DRBC; published independently), Future G- eration Communication and Networking (FGCN) that was combined with Advanced Communication and Networking (ACN), Grid and Distributed Computing (GDC), M- timedia, Computer Graphics and Broadcasting (MulGraB), Security Technology (SecTech), Signal Processing, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition (SIP), and- and e-Service, Science and Technology (UNESST).

The International Gesture Workshop is an interdisciplinary event where researchers working on human gesture-based communication present advanced research currently inprogressandexchangeideasongestureacrossmultidisciplinaryscienti?cdisciplines. This workshop encompasses all fundamental aspects of gestural studies in the ?eld of human-computer interaction and simulation, including all multifaceted issues of m- elling, analysis and synthesis of human gesture, encompassing hand and body gestures andfacial expressions. A focusof these eventsis a sharedinterest in usinggesturein the contextofsign languageanalysis, understandingandsynthesis. Anotherstreamof int- est is the user-centric approach of considering gesture in multimodal human-computer interaction, in the framework of the integration of such interaction into the natural - vironment of users. In addition to welcoming submission of work by established - searchers, it is the tradition of the GW series of workshops to encourage submission of student work at various stages of completion, enabling a broader dissemination of ?nished or on-going novel work and the exchangeof experiences in a multidisciplinary environment. Gesture Workshop 2007 (GW 2007) was the 7th European Gesture Workshop in the GW series initiated in 1996. Since that date, the Gesture Workshops have been held roughly every second year, with fully reviewed proceedings typically published by Springer. GW 2007 was organized by ADETTI at ISCTE-Lisbon University - stitute, during May 23-25, 2007. In GW 2007, from the 53 contributions that were received, 15 high-quality full papers were accepted, along with 16 short papers and 10 posters and demos, showing on-going promising gesture research. Two brilliant keynote speakers honored the event with their presentations.

th It is our great pleasure to present in this volume the proceedings of the 6 Inter- tional Workshop on Digital Watermarking (IWDW), which was held in Guangzhou, China, during December 3-5, 2007. The workshop was hosted by the Sun Yat-sen University and sponsored by both the National Science Foundation of China and the Korea Institute of Information Security and Cryptology. Since its birth in the early 1990s, digital watermarking has become a mature e- bling technology for solving security problems associated with multimedia distribution schemes. Digital watermarks are now used in applications such as broadcast monit- ing, movie fingerprinting, digital rights management, and document authentication, to name but a few. Still, many research challenges remain open, among them security and robustness issues, reversibility and authentication. Continuing the tradition of previous workshops, IWDW 2007 also featured-besides papers dealing with digital watermarking-contributions from other related fields, such as steganography, ste- nalysis and digital forensics.

This book includes selected papers from VISIGRAPP 2007, the Joint Conference on Computer Vision and Computer Graphics, comprising two component conferences, namely, the International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications (VISAPP) and the International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and App- cations (GRAPP), held in Barcelona, Spain, during March 8-11, 2007. We received quite a high number of paper submissions: 382 in total for both conf- ences. We had contributions from more than 50 countries in all five continents. This confirms the success and global dimension of these jointly organized conferences. After a rigorous double-blind evaluation method, a total of 78 submissions were accepted as full papers. From those, 18 got selected for inclusion in this book. To ensure the sci- tific quality of the contributions, these were selected from papers that were evaluated with the highest scores by the VISIGRAPP Program Committee members and then they were extended and revised by the authors. Special thanks go to all contributors and re- rees, without whom this book would not have been possible. VISIGRAPP 2007 included four invited keynote lectures, presented by internati- ally recognized researchers. The presentations represented an important contribution to increasing the overall quality of the conference. We would like to express our - preciation to all invited keynote speakers, in alphabetical order: Jake K. Aggarwal (The University of Texas at Austin/USA), Andre Gagalowicz (INRIA/France), Wo- gang Heidrich (University of British Columbia/Canada), Mel Slater (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya/Spain)."

We are pleased to present this set of peer-reviewed papers from the ?rst MICCAI Workshop on Medical Content-Based Retrieval for Clinical Decision Support. The MICCAI conference has been the ?agship conference for the m- ical imaging community re?ecting the state of the art in techniques of segm- tation, registration, and robotic surgery. Yet, the transfer of these techniques to clinical practice is rarely discussed in the MICCAI conference. To address this gap, we proposed to hold this workshop with MICCAI in London in September 2009. The goal of the workshop was to show the application of content-based retrieval in clinical decision support. With advances in electronic patient record systems, a large number of pre-diagnosed patient data sets are now bec- ing available. These data sets are often multimodal consisting of images (x-ray, CT, MRI), videos and other time series, and textual data (free text reports and structuredclinicaldata). Analyzing thesemultimodalsourcesfordisease-speci?c information across patients can reveal important similarities between patients and hence their underlying diseases and potential treatments. Researchers are now beginning to use techniques of content-based retrieval to search for disea- speci?c information in modalities to ?nd supporting evidence for a disease or to automatically learn associations of symptoms and diseases. Benchmarking frameworks such as ImageCLEF (Image retrieval track in the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum) have expanded over the past ?ve years to include large m- ical image collections for testing various algorithms for medical image retrieval and classi?cation.

The Workgroup Human-Computer Interaction & Usability Engineering (HCI&UE) of the Austrian Computer Society (OCG) serves as a platform for interdisciplinary - change, research and development. While human-computer interaction (HCI) tra- tionally brings together psychologists and computer scientists, usability engineering (UE) is a software engineering discipline and ensures the appropriate implementation of applications. Our 2008 topic was Human-Computer Interaction for Education and Work (HCI4EDU), culminating in the 4th annual Usability Symposium USAB 2008 held during November 20-21, 2008 in Graz, Austria (http: //usab-symposium.tugraz.at). As with the field of Human-Computer Interaction in Medicine and Health Care (HCI4MED), which was our annual topic in 2007, technological performance also increases exponentially in the area of education and work. Learners, teachers and knowledge workers are ubiquitously confronted with new technologies, which are available at constantly lower costs. However, it is obvious that within our e-Society the knowledge acquired at schools and universities - while being an absolutely necessary basis for learning - may prove insufficient to last a whole life time. Working and learning can be viewed as parallel processes, with the result that li- long learning (LLL) must be considered as more than just a catch phrase within our society, it is an undisputed necessity. Today, we are facing a tremendous increase in educational technologies of all kinds and, although the influence of these new te- nologies is enormous, we must never forget that learning is both a basic cognitive and a social process - and cannot be replaced by technology.

This volume brings together the peer-reviewed contributions of the participants at the COST 2102 International Conference on "Cross-Modal Analysis of Speech, Gestures, Gaze and Facial Expressions" held in Prague, Czech Republic, October 15-18, 2008. The conference was sponsored by COST (European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research, www. cost. esf. org/domains_actions/ict) in the - main of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for disseminating the research advances developed within COST Action 2102: "Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication" http://cost2102. cs. stir. ac. uk. COST 2102 research networking has contributed to modifying the conventional theoretical approach to the cross-modal analysis of verbal and nonverbal communi- tion changing the concept of face to face communication with that of body to body communication as well as developing the idea of embodied information. Information is no longer the result of a difference in perception and is no longer measured in terms of quantity of stimuli, since the research developed in COST 2102 has proved that human information processing is a nonlinear process that cannot be seen as the sum of the numerous pieces of information available. Considering simply the pieces of inf- mation available, results in a model of the receiver as a mere decoder, and produces a huge simplification of the communication process.

INSTICC organized the third edition of VISIGRAPP that took place in Funchal- Madeira, Portugal in January 2008 after successful previous editions. This book - cludes selected papers from VISIGRAPP 2008, the Joint Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications (VISAPP) and Computer Graphics Theory and - plications (GRAPP). The conference was intended to stimulate the exchange of ideas on the topics of c- puter vision and computer graphics. We received a high number of paper submissions: 374 in total for both conferences. We had contributions from more than 50 countries in all continents. This confirms the success and global dimension of these jointly organized conferences. After a rigorous double-blind evaluation method, 78 submissions were accepted as full papers. From those, 20 were selected for this book. To ensure the sci- tific quality of the contributions, these were selected from the ones that were evaluated with the highest scores by the VISIGRAPP Program Committee Members and then they were extended and revised by the authors. Special thanks go to all contributors and re- rees, without whom this book would not have been possible. VISIGRAPP 2008 also featured the comments of keynote speakers, in alphabetical order, Adrian Hilton (University of Surrey, UK), Genevieve Lucet (Computer S- vices for Research at the UNAM, Mexico), Peter Sturm (INRIA Rhone-Alpes, France) and Sharathchandra Pankanti (IBM - Exploratory Computer Vision Group, USA), who are internationally recognized researchers. The presentations represented an - portant contribution to the overall quality of the conference.

Welcome to the 2008EuropeanConference onComputer Vision. These proce- ings are the result of a great deal of hard work by many people. To produce them, a total of 871 papers were reviewed. Forty were selected for oral pres- tation and 203 were selected for poster presentation, yielding acceptance rates of 4.6% for oral, 23.3% for poster, and 27.9% in total. Weappliedthreeprinciples.First, sincewehadastronggroupofAreaChairs, the ?nal decisions to accept or reject a paper rested with the Area Chair, who wouldbeinformedbyreviewsandcouldactonlyinconsensuswithanotherArea Chair. Second, we felt that authors were entitled to a summary that explained how the Area Chair reached a decision for a paper. Third, we were very careful to avoid con?icts of interest. Each paper was assigned to an Area Chair by the Program Chairs, and each Area Chair received a pool of about 25 papers. The Area Chairs then identi?ed and rankedappropriatereviewersfor eachpaper in their pool, and a constrained optimization allocated three reviewers to each paper. We are very proud that every paper received at least three reviews. At this point, authors wereable to respond to reviews. The Area Chairs then needed to reach a decision. We used a series of procedures to ensure careful review and to avoid con?icts of interest. ProgramChairs did not submit papers. The Area Chairs were divided into three groups so that no Area Chair in the group was in con?ict with any paper assigned to any Area Chair in the group

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition, CIARP 2008, held in Havana, Cuba, in September 2008.

The 93 revised full papers presented together with 3 keynote articles were carefully reviewed and selected from 182 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on signal analysis for characterization and filtering, analysis of shape and texture, analysis of speech and language, data mining, clustering of images and documents, statistical pattern recognition, classification and description of objects, classification and edition, geometric image analysis, neural networks, computer vision, image coding, associative memories and neural networks, interpolation and video tracking, images analysis, music and speech analysis, as well as classifier combination and document filtering.

Following the very successful Motion in Games event in June 2008, we or- nized the Second International Workshop on Motion in Games (MIG) during November 21-24, 2009 in Zeist, The Netherlands. Games have become a very important medium for both education and - tertainment. Motion plays a crucial role in computer games. Characters move around, objects are manipulated or move due to physical constraints, entities are animated, and the camera moves through the scene. Even the motion of the player nowadays is used as input to games. Motion is currently studied in many di?erent areas of research, including graphics and animation, game technology, robotics, simulation, computer vision, and also physics, psychology, and urban studies. Cross-fertilizationbetween these communities can considerably advance the state of the art in this area. The goal of the workshop Motion in Games is to bring together researchers from this variety of ?elds to present the most recent results and to initiate collaboration. The workshop is organized by the Dutch research project GATE. In total, the workshop this year consisted of 27 high-quality presentations by a selection of internationally renownedspeakers in the ?eld of games and simulations. We were extremely pleased with the quality of the contributions to the MIG workshop and we look forward to organizing a follow-up MIG event.

This Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) volume contains the papers presented at the Second International Workshop on Computational Forensics (IWCF 2008), held August 7-8, 2008. It was a great honor for the organizers to host this scienti?c event at the renowned National Academy of Sciences: Keck Center in Washington, DC, USA. Computational Forensics is an emerging research domain focusing on the investigation of forensic problems using computational methods. Its primary goalis the discoveryand advancement of forensicknowledgeinvolving modeling, computer simulation, and computer-based analysis and recognition in studying and solving forensic problems. The Computational Forensics workshop series is intended as a forum for researchers and practitioners in all areas of computational and forensic sciences. This forum discusses current challenges in computer-assisted forensic investi- tions and presents recent progress and advances. IWCF addresses a broad spectrum of forensic disciplines that use computer tools for criminal investigation. This year's edition covers presentations on c- putational methods for individuality studies, computer-based3D processing and analysis of skulls and human bodies, shoe print preprocessing and analysis, n- ural language analysis and information retrieval to support law enforcement, analysis and group visualization of speech recordings, scanner and print device forensics, and computer-based questioned document and signature analysis.

This book contains a selection of higher quality and reviewed papers of the 14th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence, EPIA 2009, held in Aveiro, Portugal, in October 2009.

The 55 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 163 submissions.

The papers are organized in topical sections on artificial intelligence in transportation and urban mobility (AITUM), artificial life and evolutionary algorithms (ALEA), computational methods in bioinformatics and systems biology (CMBSB), computational logic with applications (COLA), emotional and affective computing (EAC), general artificial intelligence (GAI), intelligent robotics (IROBOT), knowledge discovery and business intelligence (KDBI), muli-agent systems (MASTA) social simulation and modelling (SSM), text mining and application (TEMA) as well as web and network intelligence (WNI).

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems, ACIVS 2009, held in Bordeaux, France in September/October 2009.

The 43 revised full papers and 25 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 115 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on technovision, fundamental mathematical techniques, image processing, coding and filtering, image and video analysis, computer vision, tracking, color, multispectral and special-purpose imaging, medical imaging, and biometrics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of HCI and Usability for e-Inclusion, held as the 5th Symposium of the Workgroup Human-Computer Interaction and Usability Engineering of the Austrian Computer Society, USAB 2009, in Linz, Austria, in November 2009.

The 12 revised full papers and 26 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 60 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on gender and cognitive performance, usefulness, usability, accessibility, emotion, confidence and elderly, usability testing, evaluation, measurement, education, learning and e-inclusion, design for adaptive content processing, grounded theory, activity theory and situated action, smart home, health and ambient assistent living, user centred design and usability practice, interaction, assistive technologies and virtual environments, communication, interfaces and haptic technology as well as new technologies and challenges for people with disabilities.

Overthelastdecades, energyminimizationmethods havebecomeanestablished paradigm to resolve a variety of challenges in the ?elds of computer vision and pattern recognition. While traditional approaches to computer vision were often based on a heuristic sequence of processing steps and merely allowed very l- ited theoretical understanding of the respective methods, most state-of-the-art methods are nowadays based on the concept of computing solutions to a given problem by minimizing respective energies. This volume contains the papers presented at the 7th International Conf- ence on Energy Minimization Methods in Computer Vision and Pattern Rec- nition (EMMCVPR 2009), held at the University of Bonn, Germany, August 24-28, 2009. These papers demonstrate that energy minimization methods have become a mature ?eld of research spanning a broad range of areas from discrete graph theoretic approaches and Markov random ?elds to variational methods and partial di?erential equations. Application areas include image segmentation and tracking, shape optimization and registration, inpainting and image deno- ing, color and texture modeling, statistics and learning. Overall, we received 75 high-quality double-blind submissions. Based on the reviewer recommendations, 36paperswereselectedforpublication,18asoraland18asposterpresentations. Both oral and poster papers were attributed the same number of pages in the conference proceedings. Furthermore, we were delighted that three leading experts from the ?elds of computer vision and energy minimization, namely, Richard Hartley (C- berra, Australia), Joachim Weickert (Saarbruc ] ken, Germany) and Guillermo Sapiro(Minneapolis, USA)agreedtofurtherenrichtheconferencewithinspiring keynote lectures.

The First Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML 2009) was held at Nanjing, China during November 2-4, 2009.This was the ?rst edition of a series of annual conferences which aim to provide a leading international forum for researchers in machine learning and related ?elds to share their new ideas and research ?ndings. This year we received 113 submissions from 18 countries and regions in Asia, Australasia, Europe and North America. The submissions went through a r- orous double-blind reviewing process. Most submissions received four reviews, a few submissions received ?ve reviews, while only several submissions received three reviews. Each submission was handled by an Area Chair who coordinated discussions among reviewers and made recommendation on the submission. The Program Committee Chairs examined the reviews and meta-reviews to further guarantee the reliability and integrity of the reviewing process. Twenty-nine - pers were selected after this process. To ensure that important revisions required by reviewers were incorporated into the ?nal accepted papers, and to allow submissions which would have - tential after a careful revision, this year we launched a "revision double-check" process. In short, the above-mentioned 29 papers were conditionally accepted, and the authors were requested to incorporate the "important-and-must"re- sionssummarizedbyareachairsbasedonreviewers'comments.Therevised?nal version and the revision list of each conditionally accepted paper was examined by the Area Chair and Program Committee Chairs. Papers that failed to pass the examination were ?nally rejected.

The 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCI Inter- tional 2009, was held in San Diego, California, USA, July 19-24, 2009, jointly with the Symposium on Human Interface (Japan) 2009, the 8th International Conference on Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics, the 5th International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction, the Third International Conf- ence on Virtual and Mixed Reality, the Third International Conference on Internati- alization, Design and Global Development, the Third International Conference on Online Communities and Social Computing, the 5th International Conference on Augmented Cognition, the Second International Conference on Digital Human Mod- ing, and the First International Conference on Human Centered Design. A total of 4,348 individuals from academia, research institutes, industry and gove- mental agencies from 73 countries submitted contributions, and 1,397 papers that were judged to be of high scientific quality were included in the program. These papers - dress the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of the design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of human-computer interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas.

Similarity-based learning methods have a great potential as an intuitive and ?exible toolbox for mining, visualization,and inspection of largedata sets. They combine simple and human-understandable principles, such as distance-based classi?cation, prototypes, or Hebbian learning, with a large variety of di?erent, problem-adapted design choices, such as a data-optimum topology, similarity measure, or learning mode. In medicine, biology, and medical bioinformatics, more and more data arise from clinical measurements such as EEG or fMRI studies for monitoring brain activity, mass spectrometry data for the detection of proteins, peptides and composites, or microarray pro?les for the analysis of gene expressions. Typically, data are high-dimensional, noisy, and very hard to inspect using classic (e. g. , symbolic or linear) methods. At the same time, new technologies ranging from the possibility of a very high resolution of spectra to high-throughput screening for microarray data are rapidly developing and carry thepromiseofane?cient,cheap,andautomaticgatheringoftonsofhigh-quality data with large information potential. Thus, there is a need for appropriate - chine learning methods which help to automatically extract and interpret the relevant parts of this information and which, eventually, help to enable und- standingofbiologicalsystems,reliablediagnosisoffaults,andtherapyofdiseases such as cancer based on this information. Moreover, these application scenarios pose fundamental and qualitatively new challenges to the learning systems - cause of the speci?cs of the data and learning tasks. Since these characteristics are particularly pronounced within the medical domain, but not limited to it and of principled interest, this research topic opens the way toward important new directions of algorithmic design and accompanying theory.