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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Security Practice and Experience, ISPEC 2011, held in Guangzhou, China, in May/June 2011.
The 26 papers presented together with 6 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 108 submissions. They are grouped in sections on public key encryption, cloud security, security applications, post-quantum cryptography and side-channel attack, block ciphers and MACs, signature, secrete sharing and traitor tracing, system security and network security, and security protocols.

The two-volume set LNCS 6769 + LNCS 6770 constitutes the proceedings of the First International Conference on Design, User Experience, and Usability, DUXU 2011, held in Orlando, FL, USA in July 2011 in the framework of the 14th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2011, incorporating 12 thematically similar conferences. A total of 4039 contributions was submitted to HCII 2011, of which 1318 papers were accepted for publication. The total of 154 contributions included in the DUXU proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on DUXU theory, methods and tools; DUXU guidelines and standards; novel DUXU: devices and their user interfaces; DUXU in industry; DUXU in the mobile and vehicle context; DXU in Web environment; DUXU and ubiquitous interaction/appearance; DUXU in the development and usage lifecycle; DUXU evaluation; and DUXU beyond usability: culture, branding, and emotions.

Social networks provide a powerful abstraction of the structure and dynamics of diverse kinds of people or people-to-technology interaction. Web 2.0 has enabled a new generation of web-based communities, social networks, and folksonomies to facilitate collaboration among different communities.

This unique text/reference compares and contrasts the ethological approach to social behavior in animals with web-based evidence of social interaction, perceptual learning, information granulation, the behavior of humans and affinities between web-based social networks. An international team of leading experts present the latest advances of various topics in intelligent-social-networks and illustrates how organizations can gain competitive advantages by applying the different emergent techniques in real-world scenarios. The work incorporates experience reports, survey articles, and intelligence techniques and theories with specific network technology problems.

Topics and Features: Provides an overview social network tools, and explores methods for discovering key players in social networks, designing self-organizing search systems, and clustering blog sites, surveys techniques for exploratory analysis and text mining of social networks, approaches to tracking online community interaction, and examines how the topological features of a system affects the flow of information, reviews the models of network evolution, covering scientific co-citation networks, nature-inspired frameworks, latent social networks in e-Learning systems, and compound communities, examines the relationship between the intent of web pages, their architecture and the communities who take part in their usage and creation, discusses team selection based on members' social context, presents social network applications, including music recommendation and face recognition in photographs, explores the use of social networks in web services that focus on the discovery stage in the life cycle of these web services.

This useful and comprehensive volume will be indispensible to senior undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses in Social Intelligence, as well as to researchers, developers, and postgraduates interested in intelligent-social-networks research and related areas.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Web-Based Learning, ICWL 2010, held in Shanghai, China, in December 2010. The 36 revised full papers and 8 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 192 submissions. They deal with topics such as e-learning platforms and tools, technology enhanced learning, Web-based learning for oriental languages, mobile/situated e-learning, learning resource deployment, organization and management, design, model and framework of e-learning systems, e-learning metadata and standards, collaborative learning and game-based learning, as well as practice and experience sharing, and pedagogical issues.

Computers are already approving financial transactions, controlling electrical supplies, and driving trains. Soon, service robots will be taking care of the elderly in their homes, and military robots will have their own targeting and firing protocols. Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach argue that as robots take on more and more responsibility, they must be programmed with moral decision-making abilities, for our own safety. Taking a fast paced tour through the latest thinking about philosophical ethics and artificial intelligence, the authors argue that even if full moral agency for machines is a long way off, it is already necessary to start building a kind of functional morality, in which artificial moral agents have some basic ethical sensitivity. But the standard ethical theories don't seem adequate, and more socially engaged and engaging robots will be needed. As the authors show, the quest to build machines that are capable of telling right from wrong has begun.
Moral Machines is the first book to examine the challenge of building artificial moral agents, probing deeply into the nature of human decision making and ethics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Information Theoretic Security, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in May 2011.
The 12 revised full papers presented together with 7 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. Understanding the minimal requirements for information-theoretic security is a central part of this line of research. Very attractive is the mathematical neatness of the field, and its rich connections to other areas of mathematics, like probability and information theory, algebra, combinatorics, coding theory, and quantum information processing, just to mention the most prominent ones.

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.

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.

Simplicity in nature is the ultimate sophistication. The world's magnificence has been enriched by the inner drive of instincts, the profound drive of our everyday life. Instinct is an inherited behavior that responds to environmental stimuli. Instinctive computing is a computational simulation of biological and cognitive instincts, which influence how we see, feel, appear, think and act. If we want a computer to be genuinely secure, intelligent, and to interact naturally with us, we must give computers the ability to recognize, understand, and even to have primitive instincts.

This book, Computing with Instincts, comprises the proceedings of the Instinctive Computing Workshop held at Carnegie Mellon University in the summer of 2009. It is the first state-of-the-art survey on this subject. The book consists of three parts: Instinctive Sensing, Communication and Environments, including new experiments with in vitro biological neurons for the control of mobile robots, instinctive sound recognition, texture vision, visual abstraction, genre in cultures, human interaction with virtual world, intuitive interfaces, exploitive interaction, and agents for smart environments.