The 13th issue of the Transactions on Computational Science journal consists of two parts. The six papers in Part I span the areas of computing collision probability, digital image contour extraction, multiplicatively weighted Voronoi diagrams, multi-phase segmentation, the rough-set approach to incomplete information systems, and fault-tolerant systolic arrays for matrix multiplications. The five papers in Part II focus on neural-network-based trajectory prediction, privacy in vehicular ad-hoc networks, augmented reality for museum display and the consumer garment try-on experience, and geospatial knowledge discovery for crime analysis.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Cooperative Design, Visualization, and Engineering, CDVE 2011, held in Hong Kong, China, in September 2011.
The 33 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers address all aspects of distributed computing, and were organized in topical sections on cooperative design, cooperative applications, cooperative engineering, cooperative visualization, and basic theory and technology.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th VLDB Workshop on Secure Data Management held in Seattle, WA, USA in September 2, 2011 as a satellite workshop of the VLDB 2011 Conference . The 10 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 19 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on privacy protection and quantification, security in cloud and sensor networks and secure data managment technologies.

Digital gaming is today a significant economic phenomenon as well as being an intrinsic part of a convergent media culture in postmodern societies. Its ubiquity, as well as the sheer volume of hours young people spend gaming, should make it ripe for urgent academic enquiry, yet the subject was a research backwater until the turn of the millennium. Even today, as tens of millions of young people spend their waking hours manipulating avatars and gaming characters on computer screens, the subject is still treated with scepticism in some academic circles. This handbook aims to reflect the relevance and value of studying digital games, now the subject of a growing number of studies, surveys, conferences and publications.

As an overview of the current state of research into digital gaming, the 42 papers included in this handbook focus on the social and cultural relevance of gaming. In doing so, they provide an alternative perspective to one-dimensional studies of gaming, whose agendas do not include cultural factors. The contributions, which range from theoretical approaches to empirical studies, cover various topics including analyses of games themselves, the player-game interaction, and the social context of gaming. In addition, the educational aspects of games and gaming are treated in a discrete section. With material on non-commercial gaming trends such as 'modding', and a multinational group of authors from eleven nations, the handbook is a vital publication demonstrating that new media cultures are far more complex and diverse than commonly assumed in a debate dominated by concerns over violent content.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IFIP WG 8.4/8.9 International Cross Domain Conference and Workshop on Availability, Reliability and Security - Multidisciplinary Research and Practice for Business, Enterprise and Health Information Systems, ARGES 2011, held in Vienna, Austria, in August 2011.The 29 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the volume. The papers concentrate on the many aspects of availability, reliability and security for information systems as a discipline bridging the application fields and the well- defined computer science field. They are organized in three sections: multidisciplinary research and practice for business, enterprise and health information systems; massive information sharing and integration and electronic healthcare; and papers from the colocated International Workshop on Security and Cognitive Informatics for Homeland Defense.

One of the major problems in the development of virtual societies, in particular in electronic commerce and computer-mediated interactions in organizations, is trust and deception. This book provides analyses by various researchers of the different types of trust that are needed for various tasks, such as facilitating on-line collaboration, building virtual communities and network organizations, and even the design of effective and user-friendly human-computer interfaces. The book has a multi-disciplinary character providing theoretical models of trust and deception, empirical studies, and practical solutions for creating trust in electronic commerce and multi-agent systems.

The primary thesis here is the authors' belief that the emergence of computers as an elemental force in our society must be viewed with a sceptical eye. Crandall and Levich, one a mathematician, the other a philosopher, strive, however, to present a balanced viewpoint, investigating and reflecting on the good and bad sides of this revolution, and seek meaning in this "Information Age". Their examination is stripped of journalistic hyperbole, the cries of self-serving prophets, and the sales pitches of the soft- and hardware industries. In separating the wheat from the chaff, the authors provide readers with a much better understanding of the limitations of these new technologies, along with propositions for their better use and within the societal context.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Third International ICST Conference on Forensic Applications and Techniques in Telecommunications, Information and Multimedia, E-Forensics 2010, held in Shanghai, China, in November 2010. The 32 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions in total. These, along with 5 papers from a collocated workshop of E-Forensics Law, cover a wide range of topics including digital evidence handling, data carving, records tracing, device forensics, data tamper identification, and mobile device locating.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 7th European Workshop on Public Key Infrastructures, Services and Applications, EuroPKI 2010, held in Athens, Greece, in September 2010. The 14 revised full papers presented together with an invited article were carefully reviewed and selected from 41 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on authentication mechanisms; privacy preserving techniques; PKI & PKC applications; electronic signature schemes; identity management.

The 12th issue of the Transactions on Computational Science journal, edited by Alexei Sourin and Olga Sourina, is devoted to the topic of cyberworlds. The 13 papers in the volume constitute revised and extended versions of a selection of contributions presented at CW 2010, the 20th International Conference on Cyberworlds, held in Singapore in October 2010. The selected papers span the areas of tangible interfaces, emotion recognition, haptic modeling, decision making under uncertainty, reliability measures, use of biometrics for avatar recognition, cybernavigation, multiuser virtual environments, spatial data sampling, web visualization, and interactive character animation system design.

Digital Homecare is a collection of services to deliver, maintain and improve care in the home environment using the latest ICT technology and devices. It is important to recognize the wide range of issues that are covered by digital homecare. This book shows a good selection of related issues, be it experience, technologies, managerial issues or standardization. A very diverse "audience"; elderly, people with chronic conditions, disabled, to name the most important groups, benefits from digital homecare, within the comfort and protection of their own homes.

While a sharp debate is emerging about whether conventional biometric technology offers society any significant advantages over other forms of identification, and whether it constitutes a threat to privacy, technology is rapidly progressing. Politicians and the public are still discussing fingerprinting and iris scan, while scientists and engineers are already testing futuristic solutions. Second generation biometrics - which include multimodal biometrics, behavioural biometrics, dynamic face recognition, EEG and ECG biometrics, remote iris recognition, and other, still more astonishing, applications - is a reality which promises to overturn any current ethical standard about human identification. Robots which recognise their masters, CCTV which detects intentions, voice responders which analyse emotions: these are only a few applications in progress to be developed.

This book is the first ever published on ethical, social and privacy implications of second generation biometrics. Authors include both distinguished scientists in the biometric field and prominent ethical, privacy and social scholars. This makes this book an invaluable tool for policy makers, technologists, social scientists, privacy authorities involved in biometric policy setting. Moreover it is a precious instrument to update scholars from different disciplines who are interested in biometrics and itswider social, ethical and political implications.

While everyone is talking about "big data," the truth is that understanding the "little data"--the stats that underlie newspaper headlines, stock reports, weather forecasts, and so on--is what helps you make smarter decisions at work, at home, and in every aspect of your life. The average person consumes approximately 30 gigabytes of data every single day, but has no idea how to interpret it correctly. EVERYDATA explains, through the eyes of an expert economist and statistician, how to decipher the small bytes of data we consume in a day. EVERYDATA is filled with countless examples of people misconstruing data--with results that range from merely frustrating to catastrophic: The space shuttle Challenger exploded in part because the engineers were reviewing a limited sample set. Millions of women avoid caffeine during pregnancy because they interpret correlation as causation. Attorneys faced a $1 billion jury verdict because of outlier data. Each chapter highlights one commonly misunderstood data concept, using both realworld and hypothetical examples from a wide range of topics, including business, politics, advertising, law, engineering, retail, parenting, and more. You'll find the answer to the question--"Now what?"--along with concrete ways you can use this information to immediately start making smarter decisions, today and every day.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Electronic Participation, ePart 2011, held in Delft, The Netherlands, in August/September 2011. The 26 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on appreciation of social media; visualizing arguments; understanding eParticipation; eParticipation initiatiaves and country studies; participation and eServices; and innovative technologies.

The four-volume set LNCS 6946-6949 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, INTERACT 2011, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in September 2011. The 47 papers included in the first volume are organized in topical sections on accessibility, affective HCI, computer-mediated communication, computer-supported cooperative work, evaluation, finding and retrieving, fun/aesthetic design, gestures, and HCI in the classroom.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference, EGOV 2011, held in Delft, The Netherlands, in August/September 2011.
The 38 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 84 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on foundations, acceptance and diffusion, governance, openess and institutions, architecture, security and interoperability, transformation, values and change.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Online Communities and Social Computing, OCSC 2011, held in Orlando, FL, USA in July 2011 in the framework of the 14th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2011 with 10 other thematically similar conferences. The 77 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the thematic area of online communities and social computing, addressing the following major topics: on-line communities and intelligent agents in education and research; blogs, Wikis and Twitters; social computing in business and the enterprise; social computing in everyday life; information management in social computing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Pacific Asia Workshop on Intelligence and Security Informatics, PAISI 2011, held in Beijing, China, in July 2011. The 8 revised full papers and the 5 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on terrorism informatics and crime analysis; intelligence analysis and knowledge discovery; information access and security; and infectious disease informatics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12 International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement, PROFES 2011, held in Torre Canne, Italy, in June 2011. The 24 revised full papers presented together with the abstracts of 2 keynote addresses were carefully reviewed and selected from 54 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on agile and lean practices, cross-model quality improvement, global and competitive software development, managing diversity, product and process measurements, product-focused software process improvement, requirement process improvement, and software process improvement.

The application of new computational techniques and visualisation technologies in the Arts and Humanities are resulting in fresh approaches and methodologies for the study of new and traditional corpora. This 'computational turn' takes the methods and techniques from computer science to create innovative means of close and distant reading. This book discusses the implications and applications of 'Digital Humanities' and the questions raised when using algorithmic techniques. Key researchers in the field provide a comprehensive introduction to important debates surrounding issues such as the contrast between narrative versus database, pattern-matching versus hermeneutics, and the statistical paradigm versus the data mining paradigm. Also discussed are the new forms of collaboration within the Arts and Humanities that are raised through modular research teams and new organisational structures, as well as techniques for collaborating in an interdisciplinary way.

The use of information and communication technologies to support public administrations, governments and decision makers has been recorded for more than 20 years and dubbed e-Government. Moving towards open governance roadmaps worldwide, electronic participation and citizen engagement stand out as a new domain, important both for decision makers and citizens; and over the last decade, there have been a variety of related pilot projects and innovative approaches.

With contributions from leading researchers, Charalabidis and Koussouris provide the latest research findings such as theoretical foundations, principles, methodologies, architectures, technical frameworks, cases and lessons learnt within the domain of open, collaborative governance and online citizen engagement. The book is divided into three sections: Section one, "Public Policy Debate Foundations," lays the foundations regarding processes and methods for scoping, planning, evaluating and transforming citizen engagement. The second section, "Information and Communication Technologies for Citizen Participation," details practical approaches to designing and creating collaborative governance infrastructures and citizen participation for businesses and administrations. Lastly, the third section on "Future Research Directions of Open, Collaborative ICT-enabled Governance" provides a constructive critique of the developments in the past and presents prospects regarding future challenges and research directions.

The book is mainly written for academic researchers and graduate students working in the computer, social, political and management sciences. Its audience includes researchers and practitioners in e-Governance, public administration officials, policy and decision makers at the local, national and international level engaged in the design and creation of policies and services, and ICT professionals engaged in e-Governance and policy modelling projects and solutions.

This book contains a selection of thoroughly refereed and revised papers from the Second International ICST Conference on Wireless and Mobile Communication in Healthcare, MobiHealth 2010, held in Ayia Napa, Cyprus, in October 2010. The 33 papers in this volume describe various applications of information and communication technologies in healthcare and medicine and cover a wide range of topics such as intelligent public health monitoring services, mobile health technologies, signal processing techniques for monitoring services, wearable biomedical devices, ambient assistive technologies, emergency and disaster applications, and integrated systems for chronic monitoring and management.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Symposium, PETS 2011, held in Waterloo, Canada, in July 2011.
The 15 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 61 submissions. The papers address design and realization of privacy services for the Internet, other data systems and communication networks. Presenting novel research on all theoretical and practical aspects of privacy technologies, as well as experimental studies of fielded systems the volume also features novel technical contributions from other communities such as law, business, and data protection authorities, that present their perspectives on technological issues.

Nationwide, and indeed worldwide, there has been a growing awareness of the importance of access to information. Accordingly, information technology (IT), broadly defined and its role beyond the internal workings of businesses has leapt into the social consciousness.

Diving into the Bitstream distinguishes itself by weaving together the concepts and conditions of IT. What distinguishes these trends is their focus on the impacts of IT on societies, and the responsibilities of IT s creators and users. The author pulls together important, often complex issues in the relationships among information, information technologies, and societal constructs.

The text explores a synopsis of these issues that are foundations for further consideration.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, held in Alicante, Spain, in June 2011. The 11 revised full papers and 11 revised short papers presented together with 23 poster papers, 1 invited talk and 6 papers of the NLDB 2011 doctoral symposium were carefully reviewed and selected from 74 submissions. The papers address all aspects of Natural Language Processing related areas and present current research on topics such as natural language in conceptual modeling, NL interfaces for data base querying/retrieval, NL-based integration of systems, large-scale online linguistic resources, applications of computational linguistics in information systems, management of textual databases NL on data warehouses and data mining, NLP applications, as well as NL and ubiquitous computing.