This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Network and System Security, NSS 2012, held in Wuyishan, Fujian, China, in November 2012. The 39 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 173 submissions. The papers cover the following topics: network security, system security, public key cryptography, privacy, authentication, security analysis, and access control.

Information Hiding: Steganography and Watermarking - Attacks and Countermeasures deals with information hiding. With the proliferation of multimedia on the Internet, information hiding addresses two areas of concern: privacy of information from surveillance (steganography) and protection of intellectual property (digital watermarking). Steganography (literally, covered writing) explores methods to hide the existence of hidden messages. These methods include invisible ink, microdot, digital signature, covert channel, and spread spectrum communication. Digital watermarks represent a commercial application of steganography. Watermarks can be used to track the copyright and ownership of electronic media. In this volume, the authors focus on techniques for hiding information in digital media. They analyze the hiding techniques to uncover their limitations. These limitations are employed to devise attacks against hidden information. The goal of these attacks is to expose the existence of a secret message or render a digital watermark unusable. In assessing these attacks, countermeasures are developed to assist in protecting digital watermarking systems.Understanding the limitations of the current methods will lead us to build more robust methods that can survive various manipulation and attacks. The more information that is placed in the public's reach on the Internet, the more owners of such information need to protect themselves from theft and false representation. Systems to analyze techniques for uncovering hidden information and recover seemingly destroyed information will be useful to law enforcement authorities in computer forensics and digital traffic analysis. Information Hiding: Steganography and Watermarking - Attacks and Countermeasures presents the authors' research contributions in three fundamental areas with respect to image-based steganography and watermarking: analysis of data hiding techniques, attacks against hidden information, and countermeasures to attacks against digital watermarks. Information Hiding: Steganography and Watermarking -- Attacks and Countermeasures is suitable for a secondary text in a graduate level course, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

Learn to measure and manage the real value of IT investment and spending

IT investments are becoming more than just business enablers or assets on the books; they provide capability that can drive the business. Thought leadership should migrate towards information investment, getting a bigger bang for the buck from the 'I' in IT and from the 'I' in CIO.

"The IT Value Network: From IT Investment to Stakeholder Economic Value" incorporates new emerging decision support methods, such as real options, which are considered to complement traditional financial measures. Organizational and informational economic based techniques are also incorporated to manage and assess IT investments, including the balanced scorecard (BSC), and investment and portfolio management; in addition to coverage of IT key performance indicators and competitive benchmarking.

Selected as a top 10 best IT-Business book for 2009 by CIO Insight - Praises for "The IT Value Network: From IT Investment to Stakeholder Value"

"This is probably the best 'up-to-date' executive information management resource since Strassmann's works of fifteen years ago. Tony Read provides a comprehensive and insightful assessment of the state of IT investment and the value of various technologies and information management in the modern enterprise. For corporate executives trying to navigate this rapidly changing landscape, this book is highly recommended."
--Paul A. Brinkley, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (U.S.) for Business Transformation Agency

"Managing technology investments with a value-based approach just works--it has provided significant stakeholder value at Indigo. This book is a must-read for both IT and business managers who want to improve the return on their IT investments."
--Michael Serbinis, President, Shortcovers, CIO & EVP, Indigo Books & Music Inc.

"Difficulty proving the business value of IT remains a key barrier to IT executives. IT Value Network provides a clear road map to chief information officers interested in moving beyond simply aligning business and technology strategies. It is a must-read for IT executives who wish to become true partners to the business."
--Gary Beach, Publisher Emeritus, CIO magazine

"This book is a complete study of how value is derived and measured from IT investments. All IT strategy professionals should read it and have access to it. I strongly recommend it."
--Ali Hamza, Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)

"IT spending continues to climb, but IT value is invariably left on the table. Tony's new book will enlighten both the practitioner and academic to new approaches and techniques for capturing and realizing stakeholder economic value--with a great perspective to sustaining competitive advantage or as the book promotes network advantage, across the firm's value system."
--Edward Lieblein, PhD, Dean and Professor, Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences, Nova Southeastern University

"Tony Read's book provides excellent insight and strategies for maximizing shareholder return from IT investments. The book gives a timely response to the challenges every CIO and CFO face in the current economic environment. It is now more important than ever to demonstrate IT return on investment and this book is a valuable aid for Cx's looking to leverage every IT dollar to secure maximum business return"
--Albert R. Hitchcock, CIO, Vodafone Group

High-dimensional spaces arise as a way of modelling datasets with many attributes. Such a dataset can be directly represented in a space spanned by its attributes, with each record represented as a point in the space with its position depending on its attribute values. Such spaces are not easy to work with because of their high dimensionality: our intuition about space is not reliable, and measures such as distance do not provide as clear information as we might expect.

There are three main areas where complex high dimensionality and large datasets arise naturally: data collected by online retailers, preference sites, and social media sites, and customer relationship databases, where there are large but sparse records available for each individual; data derived from text and speech, where the attributes are words and so the corresponding datasets are wide, and sparse; and data collected for security, defense, law enforcement, and intelligence purposes, where the datasets are large and wide. Such datasets are usually understood either by finding the set of clusters they contain or by looking for the outliers, but these strategies conceal subtleties that are often ignored. In this book the author suggests new ways of thinking about high-dimensional spaces using two models: a skeleton that relates the clusters to one another; and boundaries in the empty space between clusters that provide new perspectives on outliers and on outlying regions.

The book will be of value to practitioners, graduate students and researchers."

First, I would like to thank my principal supervisor Dr Qiang Shen for all his help, advice and friendship throughout. Many thanks also to my second supervisor Dr Peter Jarvis for his enthusiasm, help and friendship. I would also like to thank the other members of the Approximate and Qualitative Reasoning group at Edinburgh who have also helped and inspired me. This project has been funded by an EPSRC studentship, award num ber 97305803. I would like, therefore, to extend my gratitude to EPSRC for supporting this work. Many thanks to the staff at Edinburgh University for all their help and support and for promptly fixing any technical problems that I have had . My whole family have been both encouraging and supportive throughout the completion of this book, for which I am forever indebted. York, April 2003 Ian Miguel Contents List of Figures XV 1 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1. 1 Solving Classical CSPs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1. 2 Applicat ions of Classical CSP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1. 3 Limitations of Classical CSP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1. 3. 1 Flexible CSP 6 1. 3. 2 Dynamic CSP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1. 4 Dynamic Flexible CSP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1. 5 Flexible Planning: a DFCSP Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 1. 6 Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 1. 7 Contributions and their Significance 11 2 The Constraint Satisfaction Problem 13 2. 1 Constraints and Constraint Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2. 2 Tree Search Solution Techniques for Classical CSP . . . . . . . . . . 16 2. 2. 1 Backtrack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2. 2. 2 Backjumping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2. 2. 3 Conflict-Directed Backjumping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 2. 2. 4 Backmarking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This book deals with Web applications in product design and manufacture, thus filling an information gap in digital manufacturing in the Internet era. It helps both developers and users to appreciate the potentials, as well as difficulties, in developing and adopting Web applications. The objective is to equip potential users and practitioners of Web applications with a better appreciation of the technology. In addition, Web application developers and new researchers in this field will gain a clearer understanding of the selection of system architecture and design, development and implementation techniques, and deployment strategies. The book is divided into two main parts. The first part gives an overview of Web and Internet and the second explains eight typical Web applications.

Over the past years, business schools have been experimenting with distance learning and online education. In many cases this new technology has not brought the anticipated results. Questions raised by online education can be linked to the fundamental problem of education and teaching, and more specifically to the models and philosophy of education and teaching. Virtual Corporate Universities: A Matrix of Knowledge and Learning for the New Digital Dawn offers a source for new thoughts about those processes in view of the use of new technologies. Learning is considered as a key-strategic tool for new strategies, innovation, and significantly improving organizational effectiveness. The book blends the elements of knowledge management, as well as organizational and individual learning. The book is not just a treatment of technology, but a fusion of a novel dynamic learner (student)-driven learning concept, the management and creation of dynamic knowledge, and next-generation technologies to generic business, organizational and managerial processes, and the development of human capital. Obviously, the implications of online learning go far beyond the field of business as presented in this book.

Processes and Foundations for Virtual Organizations contains selected articles from PRO-VE'03, the Fourth Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises, which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Lugano, Switzerland in October 2003. This fourth edition includes a rich set of papers revealing the progress and achievements in the main current focus areas: -VO breeding environments; -Formation of collaborative networked organizations; -Ontologies and knowledge management; -Process models and interoperability; -Infrastructures; -Multi-agent approaches. In spite of many valid contributions in these areas, many research challenges remain. This is clearly stated in a number of papers suggesting a new research agenda and strategic research roadmaps for advanced virtual organizations. With the selected papers included in this book, PRO-VE pursues its double mission as a forum for presentation and discussion of achievements as well as a place to discuss and suggest new directions and research strategies.

This volume contains 9 thoroughly refereed and revised papers detailing recent advances in research on designing trading agents and mechanisms for agent-mediated e-commerce. They were originally presented at the 12th International Workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC 2010), collocated with AAMAS 2010 in Toronto, Canada, or the 2010 Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis (TADA 2010), collocated with EC 2010 in Cambridge, MA, USA. The papers examine emerging topics such as ad auctions and supply chains, or the interactions between competing markets, and present novel algorithms and rigorous theoretical results. Several of them evaluate their results using real data from large e-commerce sites or from experiments with human traders.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th Security Research Conference, Future Security 2012, held in Bonn, Germany, in September 2012. The 78 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 137 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on supply chain and critical infrastructure protection; security situational awareness; crisis management; security for critical infrastructure and urban areas; sensor technology; social, psychological and political aspects; cyber defense and information security; maritime and border security; detection of hazardous materials; food chain security; aviation security; ergonomic aspects.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th European Symposium on Computer Security, ESORICS 2012, held in Pisa, Italy, in September 2012. The 50 papers included in the book were carefully reviewed and selected from 248 papers. The articles are organized in topical sections on security and data protection in real systems; formal models for cryptography and access control; security and privacy in mobile and wireless networks; counteracting man-in-the-middle attacks; network security; users privacy and anonymity; location privacy; voting protocols and anonymous communication; private computation in cloud systems; formal security models; identity based encryption and group signature; authentication; encryption key and password security; malware and phishing; and software security.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies (EC-Web) held in Vienna, Austria, in September 2012. The 15 full and four short papers accepted for EC-Web, selected from 45 submissions, were carefully reviewed based on their originality, quality, relevance, and presentation. They are organized into topical sections on recommender systems, security and trust, mining and semantic services, negotiation, and agents and business services.

In recent years, the field of information and communication technology has started to change dramatically. Carriers are threatened by high revenue losses requiring them to identify new revenue potentials beyond their core business. Targeted advertising can be one of these revenue opportunities. Christian Schlee provides a broad overview of the latest developments and trends in targeted advertising in the ICT space. The author focuses on the technological aspects of targeted advertising, but also covers business and legal aspects. He analyzes the most interesting use cases in the Web, IPTV, the mobile environment, and in converged scenarios and examines important technological key building blocks.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IFIP WG 8.4, 8.9, TC 5 International Cross Domain Conference and Workshop on Availability, Reliability and Security, CD-ARES 2012, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in August 2012. The 50 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the volume. The papers concentrate on the many aspects of information systems bridging the gap between research results in computer science and the many application fields. They are organized in the following topical sections: cross-domain applications: aspects of modeling and validation; trust,security, privacy, and safety; mobile applications; data processing and management; retrieval and complex query processing; e-commerce; and papers from the colocated International Workshop on Security and Cognitive Informatics for Homeland Defense, SeCIHD 2012.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Internet of Things, IOT 2012, held in Changsha, China, during August 17-19. The 95 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on wireless sensor networks; RFID; sensors and equipments; data processing; security; applications and others.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses, former Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection, RAID 2013, held in Rodney Bay, St. Lucia in October 2013. The volume contains 22 full papers that were carefully reviewed and selected from 95 submissions, as well as 10 poster papers selected from the 23 submissions. The papers address all current topics in computer security ranged from hardware-level security, server, web, mobile, and cloud-based security, malware analysis, and web and network privacy.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information Theoretic Security, ICITS 2012, held in Montreal, Canada, in August 2012. The 11 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 46 submissions. In addition 11 papers were selected for the workshop track, abstracts of 7 of these contributions are also included in this book. Topics of interest are: physical layer security; multiparty computations; codes, lattices and cryptography; authentication codes; randomness extraction; cryptography from noisy channels; wiretap channels; bounded-storage models; information-theoretic reductions; quantum cryptography; quantum information theory; nonlocality and nonsignaling; key and message rates; secret sharing; physical models and assumptions; network coding security; adversarial channel models; information-theoretic tools in computational settings; implementation challenges; and biometric security.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses, former Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection, RAID 2012, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands in September 2012. The 18 full and 12 poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 84 submissions. The papers address all current topics in virtualization, attacks and defenses, host and network security, fraud detection and underground economy, web security, intrusion detection.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems, PRIMA 2013, held in Dunedin, New Zealand, in December 2013. The conference was co-located with the 26th Australasian Artificial International Conference, AI 2013. The 24 revised full papers presented together with 18 short papers and 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 81 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on foundations of agents and multi-agent systems; agent and multi-agent system architectures; agent-oriented software engineering; agent-based modelling and simulation; cooperation/collaboration, coordination/communication; hybrid technologies, application domains; and applications.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 7th Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems, MCIS 2012, held in Guimaraes, Portugal, in September 2012. MCIS 2012 comprised theories, research, and practices based on knowledge management and innovations in organizations, society, and businesses. The 18 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 89 submissions. They are organized in topical sections on: emerging and innovative information systems, enterprise systems and enterprise engineering, Web 2.0 enabled business models, information quality management and data accuracy in innovative IS, and ICT applications in healthcare.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20 th International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization, held in Montreal, Canada, in July 2012. The 22 long and 7 short papers of the Research Paper Track presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 101 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on user engagement; trust; user motivation, attention, and effort; recommender systems (including topics such as matrix factorization, critiquing, noise and spam in recommender systems); user centered design and evaluation; educational data mining; modeling learners; user models in microblogging; and visualization. The Industry Paper Track covered innovative commercial implementations or applications of UMAP technologies, and experience in applying recent research advances in practice. 2 long and 1 short papers were accepted of 5 submissions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th IFIP TC 6/TC 11 International Conference on Communications and Multimedia Security, CMS 2013, held in Magdeburg, Germany, in September 2013. The 5 revised full papers presented together with 11 short papers, 5 extended abstracts describing the posters that were discussed at the conference, and 2 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 30 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on biometrics; applied cryptography; digital watermarking, steganography and forensics; and social network privacy, security and authentication.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th IFIP TC 6/TC 11 International Conference on Communications and Multimedia Security, CMS 2012, held in Canterbury, UK, in September 2012. The 6 revised full papers presented together with 8 short papers, 8 extended abstracts describing the posters that were discussed at the conference, and 2 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 43 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on image and handwriting analysis, authentication and performance, biometrics, forensics and watermarking, and communications security.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th European Symposium on Computer Security, ESORICS 2013, held in Egham, UK, in September 2013.

The 43 papers included in the book were carefully reviewed and selected from 242 papers. The aim of ESORICS is to further the progress of research in computer security by establishing a European forum for bringing together researchers in this area, by promoting the exchange of ideas with system developers and by encouraging links with researchers in related areas. The papers cover all topics related to security, privacy and trust in computer systems and networks.

The next generation of Business Process Management (BPM) methods and tools will support the development of a new generation of service-enabled applications that change and evolve over time. The trend is moving from relatively stable, organization-specific applications to dynamic ones supporting business processes. This book is an outcome of the International Workshop on Business System Management and Engineering (BSME 2010), held in Malaga, Spain, in June/July 2010, in conjunction with the TOOLS 2010 federated conferences and under the aegis of the EU Network of Excellence on Service Software and Systems (S-Cube). The goal of the workshop was to bring together experts in the fields of business process management, service-oriented architectures, and service security to discuss the current state of research and identify new issues, challenges, and research directions. The results of these discussions are reflected in this book.