- Written by a team of scholars who developed the first major Black Digital Humanities program at a research institution (the African American Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Maryland). - Written for an audience of practitioners, researchers, and graduate students to help prepare them to take on their own research and projects. - Each chapter features guiding questions, bullet lists of practical advice, and resources readers can use to implement best practices in their own work.

This comprehensive guide walks readers through the entire process of getting and keeping a writing job in the games industry. It outlines exactly what a beginner needs to know about education requirements, finding opportunities, applying for roles, and acing studio interviews. Professional writers will learn how to navigate studio hierarchies, transfer roles and companies, work overseas, and keep developing their careers. Written by an experienced games writer with nearly two decades of industry knowledge, the book contains a wealth of interviews and perspectives with industry leaders, hiring managers, and developers from marginalized communities, all offering their tips and insights. Included are examples of materials such as job posts, writing samples, and portfolios, as well as chapter end challenges for readers to directly apply the skills they have learnt. This book will be of great interest to all beginner and aspiring games writers and narrative designers, as well as more experienced writers looking to hone their skills.

This text takes a practical, step-by-step approach to algebraic curves and surface interpolation motivated by the understanding of the many practical applications in engineering analysis, approximation, and curve plotting problems. Because of its usefulness for computing, the algebraic approach is the main theme, but a brief discussion of the synthetic approach is also presented as a way of gaining additional insight before proceeding with the algebraic manipulation. The authors start with simple interpolation, including splines, and extend this in an intuitive fashion to the production of conic sections. They then introduce projective co-ordinates as tools for dealing with higher order curves and singular points. They present many applications and concrete examples, including parabolic interpolation, geometric approximation, and the numerical solution of trajectory problems. In the final chapter they apply the basic theory to the construction of finite element basis functions and surface interpolants over non-regular shapes.

Lying at the intersection of education, art, and cultural heritage, visualization is a powerful tool for representing and interpreting complex information.

This unique text/reference reviews the evolution of the field of visualization, providing innovative examples of applied knowledge visualization from disciplines as varied as law, business management, the arts and humanities. With coverage of theoretical and practical aspects of visualization from ancient Sumerian tablets through to twenty-first century legal contracts, this work underscores the important role that the process of visualization plays in extracting, organizing, and crystallizing the concepts found in complex data.

Topics and features: contains contributions from an international selection of preeminent authorities; presents a thorough introduction to the discipline of knowledge visualization, its current state of affairs and possible future developments; examines how tables have been used for information visualization in historical textual documents; discusses the application of visualization techniques for knowledge transfer in business relationships, and for the linguistic exploration and analysis of sensory descriptions; investigates the use of visualization to understand orchestral music scores, the optical theory behind Renaissance art, and to assist in the reconstruction of an historic church; describes immersive 360 degree stereographic visualization, knowledge-embedded embodied interaction, and a novel methodology for the analysis of architectural forms.

This interdisciplinary collection of the state of the art in knowledge visualization will be of considerable interest to researchers from a broad spectrum of backgrounds in both industry and academia.

In both video games and animated films, worlds are constructed through a combination of animation, which defines what players see on the screen, and music and sound, which provide essential cues to action, emotion, and narrative. This book offers a rich exploration of the intersections between animation, video games, and music and sound, bringing together a range of multidisciplinary lenses. In fourteen chapters, the contributors consider similarities and differences in how music and sound structure video games and animation, as well as the animation within video games, and explore core topics of nostalgia, adaptation, gender and sexuality. Offering fresh insights into the aesthetic interplay of animation, video games, and sound, this volume provides a gateway into new areas of study that will be of interest to scholars and students across musicology, animation studies, game studies, and media studies more broadly.

This book offers a systematic and comprehensive introduction to the visual simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM) technology, which is a fundamental and essential component for many applications in robotics, wearable devices, and autonomous driving vehicles. The book starts from very basic mathematic background knowledge such as 3D rigid body geometry, the pinhole camera projection model, and nonlinear optimization techniques, before introducing readers to traditional computer vision topics like feature matching, optical flow, and bundle adjustment. The book employs a light writing style, instead of the rigorous yet dry approach that is common in academic literature. In addition, it includes a wealth of executable source code with increasing difficulty to help readers understand and use the practical techniques. The book can be used as a textbook for senior undergraduate or graduate students, or as reference material for researchers and engineers in related areas.

This book opens with an introduction to the main purpose and tasks of the GIANA challenge, as well as a summary and an analysis of the results and performance obtained by the 20 participating teams. The early and accurate diagnosis of gastrointestinal diseases is critical for increasing the chances of patient survival, and efficient screening is vital for locating precursor lesions. Video colonoscopy and wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) are the gold-standard tools for colon and intestinal tract screening, respectively. Yet these tools still present some drawbacks, such as lesion miss rate, lack of in vivo diagnosis capabilities, and perforation risk. To mitigate these, computer-aided detection/diagnosis systems can play a key role in assisting clinicians in the different stages of the exploration. This book presents the latest, state-of-the-art approaches in this field, and also tackles the clinical considerations required to efficiently deploy these systems in the exploration room. The coverage draws upon results from the Gastrointestinal Image Analysis (GIANA) Challenge, part of the EndoVis satellite events of the conferences MICCAI 2017 and 2018. Each method proposed to address the different subtasks of the challenges is detailed in a separate chapter, offering a deep insight into this topic of interest for public health. This book appeals to researchers, practitioners, and lecturers spanning both the computer vision and gastroenterology communities.

In today's security-conscious society, real-world applications for authentication or identification require a highly accurate system for recognizing individual humans. The required level of performance cannot be achieved through the use of a single biometric such as face, fingerprint, ear, iris, palm, gait or speech. Fusing multiple biometrics enables the indexing of large databases, more robust performance and enhanced coverage of populations. Multiple biometrics are also naturally more robust against attacks than single biometrics. This book addresses a broad spectrum of research issues on multibiometrics for human identification, ranging from sensing modes and modalities to fusion of biometric samples and combination of algorithms. It covers publicly available multibiometrics databases, theoretical and empirical studies on sensor fusion techniques in the context of biometrics authentication, identification and performance evaluation and prediction.

Describing and evaluating the basic principles and methods of subsurface sensing and imaging, Introduction to Subsurface Imaging is a clear and comprehensive treatment that links theory to a wide range of real-world applications in medicine, biology, security and geophysical/environmental exploration. It integrates the different sensing techniques (acoustic, electric, electromagnetic, optical, x-ray or particle beams) by unifying the underlying physical and mathematical similarities, and computational and algorithmic methods. Time-domain, spectral and multisensor methods are also covered, whilst all the necessary mathematical, statistical and linear systems tools are given in useful appendices to make the book self-contained. Featuring a logical blend of theory and applications, a wealth of color illustrations, homework problems and numerous case studies, this is suitable for use as both a course text and as a professional reference.

This book gives a comprehensive view of the developed procrustes models, including the isotropic, the generalized and the anisotropic variants. These represent original tools to perform, among others, the bundle block adjustment and the global registration of multiple 3D LiDAR point clouds. Moreover, the book also reports the recently derived total least squares solution of the anisotropic Procrustes model, together with its practical application in solving the exterior orientation of one image. The book is aimed at all those interested in discovering valuable innovative algorithms for solving various photogrammetric computer vision problems. In this context, where functional models are non-linear, Procrustean methods prove to be powerful since they do not require any linearization nor approximated values of the unknown parameters, furnishing at the same time results comparable in terms of accuracy with those given by the state-of-the-art methods.

This book contains extended, in-depth presentations of the plenary talks from the 16th French-German-Polish Conference on Optimization, held in Krakow, Poland in 2013. Each chapter in this book exhibits a comprehensive look at new theoretical and/or application-oriented results in mathematical modeling, optimization, and optimal control. Students and researchers involved in image processing, partial differential inclusions, shape optimization, or optimal control theory and its applications to medical and rehabilitation technology, will find this book valuable. The first chapter by Martin Burger provides an overview of recent developments related to Bregman distances, which is an important tool in inverse problems and image processing. The chapter by Piotr Kalita studies the operator version of a first order in time partial differential inclusion and its time discretization. In the chapter by Gunter Leugering, Jan Sokolowski and Antoni Zochowski, nonsmooth shape optimization problems for variational inequalities are considered. The next chapter, by Katja Mombaur is devoted to applications of optimal control and inverse optimal control in the field of medical and rehabilitation technology, in particular in human movement analysis, therapy and improvement by means of medical devices. The final chapter, by Nikolai Osmolovskii and Helmut Maurer provides a survey on no-gap second order optimality conditions in the calculus of variations and optimal control, and a discussion of their further development.

Group and Crowd Behavior for Computer Vision provides a multidisciplinary perspective on how to solve the problem of group and crowd analysis and modeling, combining insights from the social sciences with technological ideas in computer vision and pattern recognition. The book answers many unresolved issues in group and crowd behavior, with Part One providing an introduction to the problems of analyzing groups and crowds that stresses that they should not be considered as completely diverse entities, but as an aggregation of people. Part Two focuses on features and representations with the aim of recognizing the presence of groups and crowds in image and video data. It discusses low level processing methods to individuate when and where a group or crowd is placed in the scene, spanning from the use of people detectors toward more ad-hoc strategies to individuate group and crowd formations. Part Three discusses methods for analyzing the behavior of groups and the crowd once they have been detected, showing how to extract semantic information, predicting/tracking the movement of a group, the formation or disaggregation of a group/crowd and the identification of different kinds of groups/crowds depending on their behavior. The final section focuses on identifying and promoting datasets for group/crowd analysis and modeling, presenting and discussing metrics for evaluating the pros and cons of the various models and methods. This book gives computer vision researcher techniques for segmentation and grouping, tracking and reasoning for solving group and crowd modeling and analysis, as well as more general problems in computer vision and machine learning.

Indie developers and other people who work on games for a living face all kinds of interesting income tax and small business formation issues that more traditional businesses simply don't: not being geographically bound, relying on alternative funding, long periods of time with no income, and having multiple options for tax treatment of game development costs. The Definitive Guide to Taxes for Indie Game Developers addresses income tax issues that the average indie game developer is most likely to encounter, in the context of the American Internal Revenue Code and types of taxes. Written by a former tax law practitioner turned game developer and industry consultant with a decade of tax and accounting experience, the newly revised Second Edition includes key provisions of the 2018 tax reform such as the new qualified business income deduction, R&D credit expansion, and permanent reduction to corporate income taxes. In-depth explanations and examples are provided along with references to Tax Court and Supreme Court cases relevant to each tax benefit. Key Features: Includes authoritative sources with relevant IRS publications, Revenue Rulings, and Tax Court cases. Features easy to read, accessible and humorous language No legalese! Approaches how business decisions as an indie developer affect personal finances. Readers will gain a thorough understanding of taxation's role in managing a game studio of any size and going indie with any lifestyle. The accompanying companion website is a valuable resource that is annually updated to keep current on any tax reforms.

Nordic Animation examines the state of the animation industry within the Nordic countries. It looks at the success of popular brands such as the Moomins and Angry Birds, studios such as Anima Vitae and Qvisten, and individuals from the Nordics that have made their mark on the global animation industry. The book begins with some historical findings before moving to look at the stories of some of the most well-known Nordic animation brands. A section on Nordic animation studios looks at the international success and impact on the global animation industry that has been made by these companies. The book is forward thinking in scope and places these stories within the context of what the future holds for the Nordic animation industry. This book will be of great interest to those in the fields of animation and film studies, as well as those with a general interest in Nordic animation.

Written by a AAA industry expert with over twenty years of experience, this book offers comprehensive coverage of the practical skills that all successful level designers need to know. It covers everything from practical production skills to the social and soft skills required to thrive in the games industry. The book begins with a theoretical and abstract approach that sets a common language for the later hard-skill applications and practical examples. These later chapters cover a wealth of practical skills for use during the concept phase, while creating layouts, scripting, and working with AI. The book includes essential chapters on topics such as social and soft skills, world building, level design direction, production, as well as how to gain a job in the industry. This book will be of great interest to all level designers, content leads and directors looking to enhance their skillset. It will also appeal to students of level and game design looking for tips on how to break into the industry.

This book is a theoretical and practical deep dive into the craft of worldbuilding for video games, with an explicit focus on how different job disciplines contribute to worldbuilding. In addition to providing lenses for recognizing the various components in creating fictional and digital worlds, the author positions worldbuilding as a reciprocal and dynamic process, a process which acknowledges that worldbuilding is both created by and instrumental in the design of narrative, gameplay, art, audio, and more. Collaborative Worldbuilding for Video Games encourages mutual respect and collaboration among teams and provides game writers and narrative designers tools for effectively incorporating other job roles into their own worldbuilding practice and vice versa. Features: Provides in-depth exploration of worldbuilding via respective job disciplines Deep dives and case studies into a variety of games, both AAA and indie Includes boxed articles for deeper interrogation and exploration of key ideas Contains templates and checklists for practical tips on worldbuilding

This book is a theoretical and practical deep dive into the craft of worldbuilding for video games, with an explicit focus on how different job disciplines contribute to worldbuilding. In addition to providing lenses for recognizing the various components in creating fictional and digital worlds, the author positions worldbuilding as a reciprocal and dynamic process, a process which acknowledges that worldbuilding is both created by and instrumental in the design of narrative, gameplay, art, audio, and more. Collaborative Worldbuilding for Video Games encourages mutual respect and collaboration among teams and provides game writers and narrative designers tools for effectively incorporating other job roles into their own worldbuilding practice and vice versa. Features: Provides in-depth exploration of worldbuilding via respective job disciplines Deep dives and case studies into a variety of games, both AAA and indie Includes boxed articles for deeper interrogation and exploration of key ideas Contains templates and checklists for practical tips on worldbuilding

Making a great board game and pitching it to publishers are two completely different things. If you've got a game that you want to share with the world but don't know what to do next, this book will help you navigate through exactly what steps to take. You'll discover: How to find the right publisher Exactly what publishers are looking for How to create a sell sheet that will actually sell your game How to negotiate the best deal and get paid more for your game What to look out for in contracts to make sure you don't get exploited You'll learn from Joe's experiences as a full-time board game designer and instructor, along with tips and stories from a dozen other published designers, plus the exact things that publishers want. Direct from 16 established publishers.

Are you thinking about working in the board game industry? Here's what you need to know. There are so many jobs and roles that need to be filled in the board game industry. You might just have the right skills and experience to excel. But first you need to know what opportunities exist and what the hardest gaps are to fill! In this book, you'll discover * What jobs are really in demand * How you can get your foot in the door with a publisher * Jobs in the industry you've never even thought of * What other opportunities exist for people with skills just like yours With insights from over 40 industry pros, as well as the author's many years of experience, you'll be able to put your own skills and experience to great use in an amazing, growing industry.

Are you thinking about working in the board game industry? Here's what you need to know. There are so many jobs and roles that need to be filled in the board game industry. You might just have the right skills and experience to excel. But first you need to know what opportunities exist and what the hardest gaps are to fill! In this book, you'll discover * What jobs are really in demand * How you can get your foot in the door with a publisher * Jobs in the industry you've never even thought of * What other opportunities exist for people with skills just like yours With insights from over 40 industry pros, as well as the author's many years of experience, you'll be able to put your own skills and experience to great use in an amazing, growing industry.

This book provides a thorough overview of recent methods using higher level information (object or scene level) for advanced tasks such as image understanding along with their applications to medical images. Advanced methods for fuzzy image processing and understanding are presented, including fuzzy spatial objects, geometry and topology, mathematical morphology, machine learning, verbal descriptions of image content, fusion, spatial relations, and structural representations. For each methodological aspect covered, illustrations from the medical imaging domain are provided. This is an ideal book for graduate students and researchers in the field of medical image processing.

Machine Learning Algorithms for Signal and Image Processing Enables readers to understand the fundamental concepts of machine and deep learning techniques with interactive, real-life applications within signal and image processing Machine Learning Algorithms for Signal and Image Processing aids the reader in designing and developing real-world applications using advances in machine learning to aid and enhance speech signal processing, image processing, computer vision, biomedical signal processing, adaptive filtering, and text processing. It includes signal processing techniques applied for pre-processing, feature extraction, source separation, or data decompositions to achieve machine learning tasks. Written by well-qualified authors and contributed to by a team of experts within the field, the work covers a wide range of important topics, such as: Speech recognition, image reconstruction, object classification and detection, and text processing Healthcare monitoring, biomedical systems, and green energy How various machine and deep learning techniques can improve accuracy, precision rate recall rate, and processing time Real applications and examples, including smart sign language recognition, fake news detection in social media, structural damage prediction, and epileptic seizure detection Professionals within the field of signal and image processing seeking to adapt their work further will find immense value in this easy-to-understand yet extremely comprehensive reference work. It is also a worthy resource for students and researchers in related fields who are looking to thoroughly understand the historical and recent developments that have been made in the field.

Making a great board game and pitching it to publishers are two completely different things. If you've got a game that you want to share with the world but don't know what to do next, this book will help you navigate through exactly what steps to take. You'll discover: How to find the right publisher Exactly what publishers are looking for How to create a sell sheet that will actually sell your game How to negotiate the best deal and get paid more for your game What to look out for in contracts to make sure you don't get exploited You'll learn from Joe's experiences as a full-time board game designer and instructor, along with tips and stories from a dozen other published designers, plus the exact things that publishers want. Direct from 16 established publishers.