This volume contains the proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Mobile Entity Localization and Tracking in GPS-less Environments (MELT 2009), held in Orlando, Florida on September 30, 2009 in conjunction with the 11th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2009). MELT provides a forum for the presentation of state-of-the-art technologies in mobile localization and tracking and novel applications of location-based s- vices. MELT 2009 continued the success of the ?rst workshop in the series (MELT 2008), which was held is San Francisco, California on September 19, 2008 in conjunction with Mobicom. Location-awareness is a key component for achieving context-awareness. - cent years have witnessed an increasing trend towards location-based services and applications. In most cases, however, location information is limited by the accessibility to GPS, which is unavailable for indoor or underground fac- ities and unreliable in urban environments. Much research has been done, in both the sensor network community and the ubiquitous computing community, to provide techniques for localization and tracking in GPS-less environments. Novel applications based on ad-hoc localization and real-time tracking of - bile entities are growing as a result of these technologies. MELT brings together leaders from both the academic and industrial research communities to discuss challenging and open problems, to evaluate pros and cons of various approaches, to bridge the gap between theory and applications, and to envision new research opportunities.

This book contains the best papers of the Third International Conference on Software and Data Technologies (ICSOFT 2008), held in Porto, Portugal, which was organized by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Communication and Control (INSTICC), co-sponsored by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), in cooperation with the Interdisciplinary Institute for Collaboration and Research on Enterprise Systems and Technology (IICREST). The purpose of ICSOFT 2008 was to bring together researchers, engineers and practitioners interested in information technology and software development. The conference tracks were "Software Engineering", "Information Systems and Data Management", "Programming Languages", "Distributed and Parallel Systems" and "Knowledge Engineering". Being crucial for the development of information systems, software and data te- nologies encompass a large number of research topics and applications: from imp- mentation-related issues to more abstract theoretical aspects of software engineering; from databases and data-warehouses to management information systems and kno- edge-base systems; next to that, distributed systems, pervasive computing, data qu- ity and other related topics are included in the scope of this conference.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the International Conference on Personal Satellite Services (PSATS 2009) in Rome, Italy in March 2009.

The 17 papers papers demonstrate recent advances in Internet applications over satellites, satellites technologies, and future satellite location-based systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 23nd International Symposium on Distributed Computing, DISC 2009, held in Elche, Spain, in September 2009.

The 33 revised full papers, selected from 121 submissions, are presented together with 15 brief announcements of ongoing works; all of them were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers address all aspects of distributed computing, and were organized in topical sections on Michel Raynal and Shmuel Zaks 60th birthday symposium, award nominees, transactional memory, shared memory, distributed and local graph algorithms, modeling issues, game theory, failure detectors, from theory to practice, graph algorithms and routing, consensus and byzantine agreement and radio networks.

These proceedings contain the papers presented at VoteID 2009, the Second - ternationalConferenceonE-votingandIdentity.TheconferencewasheldinL- embourgduring September 7-8,2009, hostedbythe Universityof Luxembourg. VoteID 2009 built on the success of the 2007 edition held in Bochum. Events have moved on dramatically in the intervening two years: at the time of writing, people are in the streets of Tehran protesting against the claimed outcome of the June12thpresidentialelectionin Iran.Banners bearingthe words"Whereis my vote?" bear testimony to the strength of feeling and the need for elections to be trusted. These events show that the search for high-assurance voting is not a purely academic pursuit but one of very real importance. We hope that VoteID 2009 will help contribute to our understanding of the foundations of democracy. TheProgramCommitteeselected11papersforpresentationattheconference out of a total of 24 submissions. Each submission was reviewed by at least four Program Committee members. The EasyChair conference management system proved instrumental in the reviewing process as well as in the preparation of these proceedings. The selected papers cover a wide range of aspects of voting: proposals for high-assurancevotingsystems, evaluationofexistingsystems, assessmentofp- lic response to electronic voting and legal aspects. The program also included a keynote by Mark Ryan.

The aim of the FMICS workshop series is to provide a forum for researchers who are interested in the development and application of formal methods in industry. In particular, these workshops are intended to bring together scientists and practitioners who are active in the area of formal methods and interested in exchanging their experiences in the industrial usage of these methods. These workshopsalso striveto promoteresearchand developmentfor the improvement of formal methods and tools for industrial applications. The topics for which contributions to FMICS 2008 were solicited included, but were not restricted to, the following: - Design, speci?cation, code generation and testing based on formal methods - Veri?cation and validation of complex, distributed, real-time systems and embedded systems - Veri?cation and validation methods that address shortcomings of existing methods with respect to their industrial applicability (e. g. , scalability and usability issues) - Tools for the development of formal design descriptions - Case studies and experience reports on industrial applications of formal methods, focusing on lessons learned or identi?cation of new research - rections - Impact of the adoption of formal methods on the development process and associated costs - Application of formal methods in standardization and industrial forums The workshop included six sessions of regular contributions in the areas of model checking, testing, software veri?cation, real-time performance, and ind- trial case studies. There were also three invited presentations, given by Steven Miller,Rance Cleaveland,and Werner Damm, coveringthe applicationof formal methods in the avionics and automotive industries.

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.

The two volume set LNCS 5506 and LNCS 5507 constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICONIP 2008, held in Auckland, New Zealand, in November 2008.

The 260 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous ordinary paper submissions and 15 special organized sessions. 116 papers are published in the first volume and 112 in the second volume. The contributions deal with topics in the areas of data mining methods for cybersecurity, computational models and their applications to machine learning and pattern recognition, lifelong incremental learning for intelligent systems, application of intelligent methods in ecological informatics, pattern recognition from real-world information by svm and other sophisticated techniques, dynamics of neural networks, recent advances in brain-inspired technologies for robotics, neural information processing in cooperative multi-robot systems.

This year's edition of the international federated conferences on Distributed Computing Techniques took place in Lisbon during June 9-11, 2009. It was hosted by the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon and formally or- nized by Instituto de Telecomunica, c oes. The DisCoTecconferences jointly coverthe completespectrum ofdistributed computing subjects ranging from theoretical foundations to formal speci?cation techniques to practical considerations. The event consisted of the 11th Inter- tional Conference on Coordination Models and Languages(COORDINATION), the 9th IFIP International Conference on Distributed Applications and Inter- erable Systems (DAIS), and the IFIP International Conference on Formal Te- niquesforDistributedSystems(FMOODS/FORTE).COORDINATIONfocused on languages, models, and architectures for concurrentand distributed software. DAIS emphasized methods, techniques, and system infrastructures needed to design, build, operate, evaluate, and manage modern distributed applications in any kind of application environment and scenario. FMOODS (11th Formal MethodsforOpenObject-BasedDistributedSystems)joinedforceswithFORTE (29thFormalTechniquesfor NetworkedandDistributed Systems), creatinga - rum for fundamental researchon theory and applications of distributed systems."

Self-driving cars, natural language recognition, and online recommendation engines are all possible thanks to Machine Learning. Now you can create your own genetic algorithms, nature-inspired swarms, Monte Carlo simulations, cellular automata, and clusters. Learn how to test your ML code and dive into even more advanced topics. If you are a beginner-to-intermediate programmer keen to understand machine learning, this book is for you. Discover machine learning algorithms using a handful of self-contained recipes. Build a repertoire of algorithms, discovering terms and approaches that apply generally. Bake intelligence into your algorithms, guiding them to discover good solutions to problems. In this book, you will: Use heuristics and design fitness functions. Build genetic algorithms. Make nature-inspired swarms with ants, bees and particles. Create Monte Carlo simulations. Investigate cellular automata. Find minima and maxima, using hill climbing and simulated annealing. Try selection methods, including tournament and roulette wheels. Learn about heuristics, fitness functions, metrics, and clusters. Test your code and get inspired to try new problems. Work through scenarios to code your way out of a paper bag; an important skill for any competent programmer. See how the algorithms explore and learn by creating visualizations of each problem. Get inspired to design your own machine learning projects and become familiar with the jargon. What You Need: Code in C++ (>= C++11), Python (2.x or 3.x) and JavaScript (using the HTML5 canvas). Also uses matplotlib and some open source libraries, including SFML, Catch and Cosmic-Ray. These plotting and testing libraries are not required but their use will give you a fuller experience. Armed with just a text editor and compiler/interpreter for your language of choice you can still code along from the general algorithm descriptions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference On Smart Homes and and Health Telematics, ICOST 2009, held in Tours, France, in July 2009. The 27 revised full papers and 20 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on cognitive assistance and chronic diseases management; ambient living systems; service continuity and context awareness; user modeling and human-machine interaction; ambient intelligence modeling and privacy issues, human behavior and activities monitoring.

in the algorithmic and foundational aspects, high-level approaches as well as more applied and technology-related issues regarding tools and applications of wireless sensor networks. June 2009 Jie Wu Viktor K. Prasanna Ivan Stojmenovic Message from the Program Chair This proceedings volume includes the accepted papers of the 5th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems. This year we int- duced some changes in the composition of the three tracks to increase cro- disciplinary interactions. The Algorithms track was enhanced to include topics pertaining to performance analysis and network optimization and renamed "- gorithms and Analysis. " The Systems and Applications tracks, previously s- arate, were combined into a single track. And a new track was introduced on "Signal Processing and Information Theory. " DCOSS 2009 received 116 submissions for the three tracks. After a thorough reviewprocess, inwhichatleastthreereviewsweresolicitedforallpapers, atotal of 26 papers were accepted. The research contributions in this proceedings span many aspects of sensor systems, including energy-e?cient mechanisms, tracking and surveillance, activity recognition, simulation, query optimization, network coding, localization, application development, data and code dissemination. Basedonthereviews, wealsoidenti?edthebestpaperfromeachtrack, which are as follows: BestpaperintheAlgorithmsandAnalysistrack: "E?cientSensorPlacement for Surveillance Problems" by Pankaj Agarwal, Esther Ezra and Shashidhara Ganjugunte. Best paper in the Applications and Systems track: "Optimal Allocation of Time-Resources for Multihypothesis Activity-Level Detection," by Gautam Thatte, ViktorRozgic, MingLi, SabyasachiGhosh, UrbashiMitra, ShriNarayanan, Murali Annavaram and Donna Spruijt-Metz. Best paper in the Signal Processing and Information Theory track: "D- tributed Computation of Likelihood Maps for Target Tracking" by Jonathan Gallagher, Randolph Moses and Emre Ertin.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Hybrid Systems Computation and Control (HSCC 2009) held in San Francisco, CaliforniaduringApril13-15,2009. Theannualconferenceonhybridsystems- cuses on researchin embedded, reactive systems involving the interplay between discrete switching and continuous dynamics. HSCC is a forum for academic and industrial researchers and practitioners to exchange information on the latest advancements, both practical and theoretical, in the design, analysis, control, optimization, and implementation of hybrid systems. HSCC 2009 was the 12th in a series of successful meetings. Previous versions wereheld in Berkeley(1998), Nijmegen (1999), Pittsburgh(2000), Rome (2001), PaloAlto (2002), Prague(2003), Philadelphia (2004), Zurich (2005), Santa B- bara (2006), Pisa (2007), and St. Louis (2008). HSCC 2009 was part of the 2nd Cyber-Physical Systems Week (CPSWeek), whichconsistedoftheco-locationofHSCCwiththeInternationalConferenceon Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN) and the Real-Time and - bedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS). Through CPSWeek, the three conferences had joint invited speakers, poster sessions, and joint - cial events. In addition to the workshops sponsored by CPSWeek, HSCC 2009 sponsored two workshops: - NSV II: Second International Workshop on Numerical Software Veri?cation - HSCB 2009: Hybrid Systems Approaches to Computational Biology We would like to thank the authors of submitted papers, the Program C- mittee members, the additional reviewers, the workshop organizers, and the HSCC Steering Committee members for their help in composing a strong p- gram. We also thank the CPSWeek Organizing Committee, in particular Rajesh Gupta, for their strenuous work in handling the local arrangemen

The advances in wireless communication technologies and the proliferation of mobile devices have enabled the realization of intelligent environments for people to com- nicate with each other, interact with information-processing devices, and receive a wide range of mobile wireless services through various types of networks and systems everywhere, anytime. This "Internet of Things" will dramatically modify our lives allowing progress in various domains such as health, security, and ITS (intelligent transportation systems). A key enabler of this pervasive and ubiquitous connectivity environment is the - vancement of software technology in various communication sectors, ranging from communication middleware and operating systems to networking protocols and app- cations. The international conference series on Mobile Wireless Middleware, Oper- ing Systems, and Applications (MOBILWARE) is dedicated to addressing emerging topics and challenges in various mobile wireless software-related areas. The scope of the conference includes the design, implementation, deployment, and evaluation of middleware, operating systems, and applications for computing and communications in mobile wireless systems. MOBILWARE 2009 was the second edition of this conference, which was made possible thanks to the sponsorship of ICST and Create-Net and most importantly the hard work of the TPC and reviewers.

Clustertechnologien.- High Performance Computing.- Public Resource Computing: vernetzte Welt zum Rechnen nutzen?.- Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).- Architektur des BOINC-Systems.- Technik.- Serveristallation.- Serveradministration.- Die Grundlagen der BOINC-Programmierung.- Die BOINC-Schaltzentrale modifizieren - Programmierung der BOINC Server Komponenten.- Debuggen - Fehlersuche in BOINC.- Praxis.- Kreiszahl@home: Monte-Carlo-Algorithmus fur die Kreiszahl.- Eine Filmsequenz mit Bildverarbeitungsfunktionen modifizieren.- ComsolGrid: COMSOL Multiphysics und BOINC.- [email protected] Verwendung von Legacy-Applikationen.- Die C/C++-Schnittstelle von BOINC.- BOINC-Fehlernummern und Fehlermeldungen.- BOINC-Konfigurationsdateien.- Literaturverzeichnis.- Sachverzeichnis.

This volume contains scientific papers and case studies presented at Interactive Sto- telling '08: The First Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS), held November 26-29, 2008, in Erfurt, Germany. Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) is a cross-disciplinary topic, which explores new uses of interactive technologies for creating and experiencing narratives. IDS is also a huge step forward in games and learning. This can be seen through its ability to enrich virtual characters with intelligent behavior, to allow collaboration of humans and machines in the creative process, and to combine narrative knowledge and user activity in interactive artifacts. IDS involves concepts from many aspects of Computer Science, above all from Artificial Intelligence, with topics such as narrative intelligence, automatic dialogue and drama management, and smart graphics. In order to process stories in real time, traditional storytelling needs to be formalized into computable models by drawing from narratological studies. As it is currently hardly accessible for creators and e- users, there is a need for new authoring concepts and tools supporting the creation of such dynamic stories, allowing for rich and meaningful interaction with the content.

The Workshop on Self-sustaining Systems (S3) is a forum for the discussion of topics relating to computer systems and languages that are able to bootstrap, implement, modify, and maintain themselves. One property of these systems is that their implementation is based onsmall but powerfulabstractions;examples include (amongst others) Squeak/Smalltalk, COLA, Klein/Self, PyPy/Python, Rubinius/Ruby, andLisp.Suchsystemsaretheenginesoftheirownreplacement, giving researchers and developers great power to experiment with, and explore future directions from within, their own small language kernels. S3 took place on May 15-16, 2008 at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute (HPI) in Potsdam, Germany. It was an exciting opportunity for researchers and prac- tioners interested in self-sustaining systems to meet and share their knowledge, experience, and ideas for future research and development. S3 provided an - portunity for a community to gather and discuss the need for self-sustainability in software systems, and to share and explore thoughts on why such systems are needed and how they can be created and deployed. Analogies were made, for example, with evolutionary cycles, and with urban design and the subsequent inevitable socially-driven change. TheS3participantsleftwithagreatersenseofcommunityandanenthusiasm for probing more deeply into this subject. We see the need for self-sustaining systems becoming critical not only to the developer's community, but to e- users in business, academia, learning and play, and so we hope that this S3 workshop will become the ?rst of many.

Belief revision is a topic of much interest in theoretical computer science and logic, and it forms a central problem in research into artificial intelligence. In simple terms: how do you update a database of knowledge in the light of new information? What if the new information is in conflict with something that was previously held to be true? An intelligent system should be able to accommodate all such cases. This book contains a collection of research articles on belief revision that are completely up to date and an introductory chapter that presents a survey of current research in the area and the fundamentals of the theory. Thus this volume will be useful as a textbook on belief revision.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS), held November 21-23, 2008 in Detroit, Michigan USA. SSS started as the Workshop on Self-Stabilizing Systems (WSS), which was ?rst held at Austin in 1989. From the second WSS in Las Vegas in 1995, the - rum was held biennially, at Santa Barbara(1997), Austin (1999), Lisbon (2001), San Francisco (2003) and Barcelona (2005). The title of the forum changed to the Symposium on Self-Stabilizing Systems (SSS) in 2003. Since 2005, SSS was run annually, and in 2006 (Dallas) the scope of the conference was extended to cover all safety and security-related aspects of self-* systems. This extension followed the demand for self-stabilization in various areas of distributed c- puting including peer-to-peer networks, wireless sensor networks, mobile ad-hoc networks, robotic networks. To re?ect this change, the name of the symposium changed to the International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS). This year we received 43 submissions from 13 countries. Most submissions were from the USA and France. Each submission was carefully reviewed by three to six Program Committee members with the help of external reviewers. For the ?rst time a rebuttal phase allowed the authors to react to the reviews beforethediscussionofthepaperswithintheProgramCommittee. Outofthe43 submissions,17excellentpaperswereselectedforpresentationatthesymposium, whichcorrespondsto anacceptancerateof40%. Itcanbenotedthatthehighest acceptance rate was for papers with keywordssensor networks (86%), MANETs (67%), andsecurityof sensorandmobile networksprotocols (67

Embedded and ubiquitous computing systems have considerably increased their scope of application over the past few years, and they now also include missi- and business-critical scenarios. The advances call for a variety of compelling - sues, including dependability, real-time, quality-of-service, autonomy, resource constraints, seamless interaction, middleware support, modeling, veri?cation, validation, etc. The International Workshop on Software Technologies for Future Embedded and Ubiquitous Systems (SEUS) brings together experts in the ?eld of emb- ded and ubiquitous computing systems with the aim of exchanging ideas and advancing the state of the art about the above-mentioned issues. I was honored to chair the sixth edition of the workshop, which continued the tradition of past editions with high-quality research results. I was particularly pleased to host the workshop in the wonderful scenario of Capri, with its stunning views and traditions. The workshop started in 2003 as an IEEE event, and then in 2007 it became a ?agship event of the IFIP Working Group 10.2 on embedded systems. The last few editions, held in Hakodate (Japan), Vienna (Austria), Seattle (USA), Gyeongju (Korea), and Santorini (Greece), were co-located with the IEEE - ternationalSymposiumonObject/Component/Service-OrientedReal-TimeD- tributed Computing (ISORC). This year, SEUS was held as a stand-alone event for the ?rst time, and, - spite the additionalorganizationaldi?culties, it resultedina high-qualityevent, with papers from four continents (from USA, Europe, East Asia and Australia), (co-) authored and presented from senior scientists coming from academia or leading industrial research centers.

The Halden Man-Machine Laboratory (HAMMLAB) has been at the heart of human factors research at the OECD Halden Reactor Project (HRP). The HRP is sponsored by a group of national organizations, representing nuclear power plant regulators, utilities, and research institutions. The HRP is hosted by the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) in Halden, Norway. HAMMLAB comprises three full-scale nuclear power plant control room research simulators. The simulator studies performed in HAMMLAB have traditionally been experimental in nature. In a simulator it is possible to study events as they unfold in real time, in a highly realistic operational environment under partially controlled conditions. This means that a wide range of human factors issues, which would be impossible or highly impracticable to study in real-life settings, can thus be addressed in HAMMLAB. Simulator-based Human Factors Studies Across 25 Years celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of HAMMLAB by reviewing the human factors studies performed in HAMMLAB across this time-span. A range of human factors issues have been addressed, including: * human-system interfaces; * alarm systems; * computerized procedures; * human-automation interaction; * staffing, teamwork and human reliability. The aim of HAMMLAB studies has always been the same: to generate knowledge for solving current and future challenges in nuclear power plant operation to contribute to safety. The outcomes of HAMMLAB studies have been used to support design and assessment of nuclear power plant control rooms.

Software development for the automotive domain has become the enabling te- nologyforalmostallsafety-criticalandcomfortfunctionso?eredtothecustomer. Ninety percentofallinnovations inautomotive systems aredirectly or indirectly enabled by embedded software. The numbers of serious accidents have declined in recent years, despite constantly increasing tra?c; this is correlated with the introduction of advanced, software-enabled functionality for driver assistance, such as electronic stability control. Software contributes signi?cantly to the - tomotive value chain. By 2010 it is estimated that software will make up 40% of the value creation of automotive electrics/electronics. However, with the large number of software-enabled functions, their int- actions, and the corresponding networking and operating infrastructure, come signi?cant complexities both during the automotive systems engineering p- cess and at runtime. A central challenge for automotive systems development is the scattering of functionality across multiple subsystems, such as electronic control units (ECUs) and the associated networks. As an example, consider the central locking systems (CLS), whose functionality is spread out over up to 19 di?erent ECUs in some luxury cars. Of course, this includes advanced functi- ality, such as seat positioning and radio tuning according to driver presets upon entry, as well as unlocking in case of a detected impact or accident. However, thisexampledemonstratesthatmodernautomotivesystemsbridgecomfort-and safety-critical functionality. This induces particular demands on safety and - curity, and, in general, software and systems quality. The resulting challenges and opportunities were discussed, in depth, at the second Automotive Software Workshop San Diego (ASWSD) 2006, on whose results we report here.

Knowledge representation is a key area of modern AI, underlying the development of semantic networks. Description logics are languages that represent knowledge in a structured and formally well-understood way: they are the cornerstone of the Semantic Web. This is the first textbook describing this importan new topic and will be suitable for courses aimed at advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students, or for self-study. It assumes only a basic knowledge of computer science concepts. After generla introducitons motivating and overviewing the subject, the authors describe a simple DL and how it works and can be used, utilizing a running example that recurs through the book. Methods of reasoning and their implementation and complexity are examined, Finally, the authors provide a non-trivial DL knowledge base and use it to illsutrate featues that have been introduced: this base is available for free online access in a form usable by modern ontology editors.

This volume serves as the post-conference proceedings for the Second GeoSensor Networks Conference that was held in Boston, Massachusetts in October 2006. The conference addressed issues related to the collection, management, processing, ana- sis, and delivery of real-time geospatial data using distributed geosensor networks. This represents an evolution of the traditional static and centralized geocomputational paradigm, to support the collection of both temporally and spatially high-resolution, up-to-date data over a broad geographic area, and to use sensor networks as actuators in geographic space. Sensors in these environments can be static or mobile, and can be used to passively collect information about the environment or, eventually, to actively influence it. The research challenges behind this novel paradigm extend the frontiers of tra- tional GIS research further into computer science, addressing issues like data stream processing, mobile computing, location-based services, temporal-spatial queries over geosensor networks, adaptable middleware, sensor data integration and mining, au- mated updating of geospatial databases, VR modeling, and computer vision. In order to address these topics, the GSN 2006 conference brought together leading experts in these fields, and provided a three-day forum to present papers and exchange ideas.

IMPROVE stands for "Information Technology Support for Collaborative and Distributed Design Processes in Chemical Engineering" and is a large joint project of research institutions at RWTH Aachen University. This volume summarizes the results after 9 years of cooperative research work.

The focus of IMRPOVE is on understanding, formalizing, evaluating, and, consequently, improving design processes in chemical engineering. In particular, IMPROVE focuses on conceptual design and basic engineering, where the fundamental decisions concerning the design or redesign of a chemical plant are undertaken. Design processes are analyzed and evaluated in collaboration with industrial partners.