This book on multimedia tools for communicating mathematics arose from presentations at an international workshop organized by the Centro de Matematica e Aplicacoes Fundamentais at the University of Lisbon, in November 2000, with the collaboration of the Sonderforschungsbereich 288 at the University of Technology in Berlin, and of the Centre for Experimental and Constructive Mathematics at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. The MTCM2000 meeting aimed at the scientific methods and algorithms at work inside multimedia tools, and it provided an overview of the range of present multimedia projects, of their limitations and the underlying mathematical problems.
This book presents some of the tools and algorithms currently being used to create new ways of making enhanced interactive presentations and multimedia courses. It is an invaluable and up-to-date reference book on multimedia tools presently available for mathematics and related subjects."

ConieD is the biannual Congress on Computers in Education, organised by the Spanish Association for the Development of Computers in Education (ADIE). The last Congress, held in Puertollano (Ciudad Real), brought together researchers in different areas, ranging from web applications, educational environments, or Human-Computer Interaction to Artificial Intelligence in Education. The common leitmotiv of the major part of the lectures was the World Wide Web. In particular, the focus was on the real possibilities that this media presents in order to make the access of students to educational resources possible anywhere and anytime. This fact was highlighted in the Conclusions of the Congress following this Preface as the Introduction. From the full 92 papers presented to the Programme Committee we have selected the best 24 papers that we are presenting in this book. The selection of papers was a very difficult process, taking into account that the papers presented in the Congress (60) were all good enough to appear in this book. Only the restrictions of the extension of this book have limited the number of papers to 24. These papers represent the current high-quality contributions of Spanish research groups in Computers in Education. Manuel Ortega Cantero Jose Bravo Rodriguez Editors xiii Introduction ConieD 99 (1st National Congress on Computers in Education) has brought together a very important group of Spanish and Latin American researchers devoted to studying the application and use of computers in education."

Unity for Absolute Beginners walks you through the fundamentals of creating a small third-person shooter game with Unity. Using the free version of Unity to begin your game development career, you'll learn how to import, evaluate and manage your game resources to create awesome third-person shooters. This book assumes that you have little or no experience with game development, scripting, or 3D assets, and that you're eager to start creating games as quickly as possible, while learning Unity in a fun and interactive environment. With Unity for Absolute Beginners you'll become familiar with the Unity editor, key concepts and functionality. You'll learn how to import, evaluate and manage resources. You'll explore C# scripting in Unity, and learn how to use the Unity API. Using the provided art assets, you will learn the fundamentals of good game design and iterative refinement as you take your game from a simple prototype to a quirky, but challenging variation of the ever-popular first-person shooter. As can be expected, there will be plenty of destruction, special effects and mayhem along the way. Unity for Absolute Beginners assumes that you have little or no experience with game development, scripting, or 3D assets, but are eager to get up-to-speed as quickly as possible while learning Unity in a fun and interactive environment.

This SpringerBriefs is an overview of the emerging field of wireless access and mobile network virtualization. It provides a clear and relevant picture of the current virtualization trends in wireless technologies by summarizing and comparing different architectures, techniques and technologies applicable to a future virtualized wireless network infrastructure. The readers are exposed to a short walkthrough of the future Internet initiative and network virtualization technologies in order to understand the potential role of wireless virtualization in the broader context of next-generation ubiquitous networks. Three main wireless virtualization perspectives are explored, along with the potential challenges and requirements of a sustainable wireless virtualization framework. Finally, it presents an example of a multi-perspective wireless virtualization framework. The readers learn the latest concepts in the application of wireless virtualization as well as its relationship with cutting-edge wireless technologies such as software-defined radio (SDR) and cognitive radio.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Haptic and Audio Interaction Design, HAID 2013, held in Daejeon, Korea, in April 2013.
The 14 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on non-intrusive and thermal haptics, new interfaces and interactions, emotion and affect, music, and mobile devices and applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Persuasive Technology, PERSUASIVE 2014, held in Padua, Italy, in May 2014. The 27 revised full papers and 12 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. In addition to the themes of persuasive technology dealt with in the previous editions of the conference, this edition highlighted a special theme, i.e. persuasive, motivating, empowering videogames.

This is the first part of the two-volume set (LNCS 8023-8024) that constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Cross-Cultural Design, held as part of the 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2013, held in Las Vegas, USA in July 2013, jointly with 12 other thematically similar conferences. The total of 1666 papers and 303 posters presented at the HCII 2013 conferences was carefully reviewed and selected from 5210 submissions. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of 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. This two-volume set contains 113 papers. The papers in this volume focus on the following topics: cross-cultural product design, cross-cultural design methods and techniques, international usability evaluation, and case studies in cross-cultural design.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Webble World Summit, WWS 2013, held in Erfurt, Germany, in June 2013. The focus of the event is on Webble technology and its applications. The 14 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on challenging the Webble technology; Webble core technology; applications of Webble technology; outlook and vision; the big picture.

Distributed applications are a necessity in most central application sectors of the contemporary information society, including e-commerce, e-banking, e-learning, e-health, telecommunication and transportation. This results from a tremendous growth of the role that the Internet plays in business, administration and our everyday activities. This trend is going to be even further expanded in the context of advances in broadband wireless communication. New Developments in Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems focuses on the techniques available or under development with the goal to ease the burden of constructing reliable and maintainable interoperable information systems providing services in the global communicating environment. The topics covered in this book include: * Context-aware applications; * Integration and interoperability of distributed systems; * Software architectures and services for open distributed systems; * Management, security and quality of service issues in distributed systems; * Software agents and mobility; * Internet and other related problem areas.The book contains the proceedings of the Third International Working Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS'2001), which was held in September 2001 in Krakow, Poland, and sponsored by the International Federation on Information Processing (IFIP). The conference program presents the state of the art in research concerning distributed and interoperable systems. This is a topical research area where much activity is currently in progress. Interesting new aspects and innovative contributions are still arising regularly. The DAIS series of conferences is one of the main international forums where these important findings are reported.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Serious Games for Training, Education, Health and Sports, Game Days 2014, held in Darmstadt, Germany, in April 2014. The 13 full papers presented together with 3 short papers, 2 keynotes, and 3 workshop papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this book. The topics of the papers are settled in the fields of (game-based) training, teaching and learning, authoring tools, mobile gaming, health and rehabilitation, and citizen science. The papers address a broad scope of issues, including mechanisms and effects of (Serious) Games, adaptation and personalisation, local, mobile, and internet learning and education applications, game, reuse and evaluation, game settings, types of learners, problem solving etc.

Electronic Multimedia Publishing brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast moving area. Electronic Mulitmedia Publishing serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.

The term "haptics" refers to the science of sensing and manipulation through touch. Multiple disciplines such as biomechanics, psychophysics, robotics, neuroscience, and software engineering converge to support haptics, and generally, haptic research is done by three communities: the robotics community, the human computer interface community, and the virtual reality community.

This book is different from any other book that has looked at haptics. The authors treat haptics as a new medium rather than just a domain within one of the above areas. They describe human haptic perception and interfaces and present fundamentals in haptic rendering and modeling in virtual environments. Diverse software architectures for standalone and networked haptic systems are explained, and the authors demonstrate the vast application spectrum of this emerging technology along with its accompanying trends. The primary objective is to provide a comprehensive overview and a practical understanding of haptic technologies. An appreciation of the close relationship between the wide range of disciplines that constitute a haptic system is a key principle towards being able to build successful collaborative haptic environments.

Structured as a reference to allow for fast accommodation of the issues concerned, this book is intended for researchers interested in studying touch and force feedback for use in technological multimedia systems in computer science, electrical engineering, or other related disciplines. With its novel approach, it paves the way for exploring research trends and challenges in such fields as interpersonal communication, games, or military applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computer-Aided Architectural Design Futures, CAAD Futures 2013, held in Shanghai, China, in July 2013. The 35 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 78 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on digital aids to design creativity, concepts, and strategies; digital fabrication and local materialization; human-computer interaction, user participation, and collaborative design; modeling and simulation; shape and form studies.

Great advances have been made in the database field. Relational and object- oriented databases, distributed and client/server databases, and large-scale data warehousing are among the more notable. However, none of these advances promises to have as great and direct an effect on the daily lives of ordinary citizens as video databases. Video databases will provide a quantum jump in our ability to deal with visual data, and in allowing people to access and manipulate visual information in ways hitherto thought impossible. Video Database Systems: Issues, Products and Applications gives practical information on academic research issues, commercial products that have already been developed, and the applications of the future driving this research and development. This book can also be considered a reference text for those entering the field of video or multimedia databases, as well as a reference for practitioners who want to identify the kinds of products needed in order to utilize video databases. Video Database Systems: Issues, Products and Applications covers concepts, products and applications. It is written at a level which is less detailed than that normally found in textbooks but more in-depth than that normally written in trade press or professional reference books. Thus, it seeks to serve both an academic and industrial audience by providing a single source of information about the research issues in the field, and the state-of-the-art of practice.

Palmprint Authentication is the first book to provide a comprehensive introduction to palmprint technologies. It reveals automatic biometric techniques for personal identification using palmprint, from the approach based on offline palmprint images, to the current state-of-the-art algorithm using online palmprint images. Palmprint Authentication provides the reader with a basic concept of Palmprint Authentication. It also includes an in-depth discussion of Palmprint Authentication technologies, a detailed description of Palmprint Authentication systems, and an up-to-date coverage of how these issues are developed. This book is suitable for different levels of readers: those who want to learn more about palmprint technology, and those who wish to understand, participate, and/or develop a palmprint authentication system. Palmprint Authentication is effectively a handbook for biometric research and development. Graduate students and researchers in computer science, electrical engineering, systems science, and information technology will all find it uniquely useful, not only as a reference book, but also as a text book. Researchers and practitioners in industry, and R&D laboratories working in the fields of security system design, biometrics, immigration, law enforcement, control, and pattern recognition will also benefit from this volume.

In modern medicine, imaging is the most effective tool for diagnostics, treatment planning and therapy. Almost all modalities have went to directly digital acquisition techniques and processing of this image data have become an important option for health care in future. This book is written by a team of internationally recognized experts from all over the world. It provides a brief but complete overview on medical image processing and analysis highlighting recent advances that have been made in academics. Color figures are used extensively to illustrate the methods and help the reader to understand the complex topics.

Computer vision algorithms for the analysis of video data are obtained from a camera aimed at the user of an interactive system. It is potentially useful to enhance the interface between users and machines. These image sequences provide information from which machines can identify and keep track of their users, recognize their facial expressions and gestures, and complement other forms of human-computer interfaces. Facial Analysis from Continuous Video with Applications to Human-Computer Interfaces presents a learning technique based on information-theoretic discrimination which is used to construct face and facial feature detectors. This book also describes a real-time system for face and facial feature detection and tracking in continuous video. Finally, this book presents a probabilistic framework for embedded face and facial expression recognition from image sequences. Facial Analysis from Continuous Video with Applications to Human-Computer Interfaces is designed for a professional audience composed of researchers and practitioners in industry. This book is also suitable as a secondary text for graduate-level students in computer science and engineering.

Content-Based Analysis Of Digital Video focuses on fundamental issues underlying the development of content access mechanisms for digital video. It treats topics that are critical to successfully automating the video content extraction and retrieval processes, and includes coverage of: - Video parsing, - Video content indexing and representation, - Affective video content analysis. In this well illustrated book the author integrates related information currently scattered throughout the literature and combines it with new ideas into a unified theoretical approach to video content analysis. The material also suggests ideas for future research. Systems developers, researchers and students working in the area of content-based analysis and retrieval of video and multimedia in general will find this book invaluable.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Grid and Pervasive Computing, GPC 2013, held in Seoul, Korea, in May 2013 and the following colocated workshops: International Workshop on Ubiquitous and Multimedia Application Systems, UMAS 2013; International Workshop DATICS-GPC 2013: Design, Analysis and Tools for Integrated Circuits and Systems; and International Workshop on Future Science Technologies and Applications, FSTA 2013. The 111 revised papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. They have been organized in the following topical sections: cloud, cluster and grid; middleware resource management; mobile peer-to-peer and pervasive computing; multi-core and high-performance computing; parallel and distributed systems; security and privacy; ubiquitous communications, sensor networking, and RFID; ubiquitous and multimedia application systems; design, analysis and tools for integrated circuits and systems; future science technologies and applications; and green and human information technology.

Design is an art form in which the designer selects from a myriad of alternatives to bring an "optimum" choice to a user. In many complex of "optimum" is difficult to define. Indeed, the users systems the notion themselves will not agree, so the "best" system is simply the one in which the designer and the user have a congruent viewpoint. Compounding the design problem are tradeoffs that span a variety of technologies and user requirements. The electronic business system is a classically complex system whose tradeoff criteria and user views are constantly changing with rapidly developing underlying technology. Professor Milutinovic has chosen this area for his capstone contribution to the computer systems design. This book completes his trilogy on design issue in computer systems. His first work, "Surviving the Design of a 200 MHz RISC Microprocessor" (1997) focused on the tradeoffs and design issues within a processor. His second work, "Surviving the Design of Microprocessor and Multiprocessor Systems" (2000) considers the design issues involved with assembling a number of processors into a coherent system. Finally, this book generalizes the system design problem to electronic commerce on the Internet, a global system of immense consequence.

ICMCCA 2012 is the first International Conference on Multimedia Processing, Communication and Computing Applications and the theme of the Conference is chosen as 'Multimedia Processing and its Applications'. Multimedia processing has been an active research area contributing in many frontiers of today's science and technology. This book presents peer-reviewed quality papers on multimedia processing, which covers a very broad area of science and technology. The prime objective of the book is to familiarize readers with the latest scientific developments that are taking place in various fields of multimedia processing and is widely used in many disciplines such as Medical Diagnosis, Digital Forensic, Object Recognition, Image and Video Analysis, Robotics, Military, Automotive Industries, Surveillance and Security, Quality Inspection, etc. The book will assist the research community to get the insight of the overlapping works which are being carried out across the globe at many medical hospitals and institutions, defense labs, forensic labs, academic institutions, IT companies and security & surveillance domains. It also discusses latest state-of-the-art research problems and techniques and helps to encourage, motivate and introduce the budding researchers to a larger domain of multimedia.

Video technology promises to be the key for the transmission of motion video. A number of video compression techniques and standards have been introduced in the past few years, particularly the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 for interactive multimedia and for digital NTSC and HDTV applications, and H.2611H.263 for video telecommunications. These techniques use motion estimation techniques to reduce the amount of data that is stored and transmitted for each frame. This book is about these motion estimation algorithms, their complexity, implementations, advantages, and drawbacks. First, we present an overview of video compression techniques with an emphasis to techniques that use motion estimation, such as MPEG and H.2611H.263. Then, we give a survey of current motion estimation search algorithms, including the exhaustive search and a number of fast search algorithms. An evaluation of current search algorithms, based on a number of experiments on several test video sequences, is presented as well. The theoretical framework for a new fast search algorithm, Densely-Centered Uniform-P Search (DCUPS), is developed and presented in the book. The complexity of the DCUPS algorithm is comparable to other popular motion estimation techniques, however the algorithm shows superior results in terms of compression ratios and video qUality. We should stress out that these new results, presented in Chapters 4 and 5, have been developed by Joshua Greenberg, as part of his M.Sc. thesis entitled "Densely-Centered Uniform P-Search: A Fast Motion Estimation Algorithm" (FAU, 1996).

Representation and Retrieval of Video Data in Multimedia Systems brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this important area. Representation and Retrieval of Video Data in Multimedia Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most important research issues in the field.

Foreword by Lars Knudsen Practical Intranet Security focuses on the various ways in which an intranet can be violated and gives a thorough review of the technologies that can be used by an organization to secure its intranet. This includes, for example, the new security architecture SESAME, which builds on the Kerberos authentication system, adding to it both public-key technology and a role-based access control service. Other technologies are also included such as a description of how to program with the GSS-API, and modern security technologies such as PGP, S/MIME, SSH, SSL IPSEC and CDSA. The book concludes with a comparison of the technologies. This book is different from other network security books in that its aim is to identify how to secure an organization's intranet. Previously books have concentrated on the Internet, often neglecting issues relating to securing intranets. However the potential risk to business and the ease by which intranets can be violated is often far greater than via the Internet. The aim is that network administrators and managers can get the information that they require to make informed choices on strategy and solutions for securing their own intranets. The book is an invaluable reference for network managers and network administrators whose responsibility it is to ensure the security of an organization's intranet. The book also contains background reading on networking, network security and cryptography which makes it an excellent research reference and undergraduate/postgraduate text book.

Video on Demand Systems brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast moving area. Video on Demand Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.