Designing Effective and Usable Multimedia Systems presents research and development and industrial experience of usability engineering for multimedia user interfaces. The book discusses the methods, tools and guidelines for multimedia use and implementation and covers the following topics in detail: * Design methods for multimedia (MM) systems; * Social and cognitive models for MM interaction; * Empirical studies of the effects of MM on learning and behavior; * Design and prototyping support tools; * Intelligent MM Systems and Design support; * Usability evaluation. GBP/LISTGBP Designing Effective and Usable Multimedia Systems contains the proceedings of the International Working Conference on Designing Effective and usable Multimedia Systems, sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), held in Stuttgart, Germany, in September 1998. It is essential reading for computer scientists, software developers, information systems managers and human scientists, especially those working in the applied disciplines such as human factors and interface design.

This book contains the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 14th Information Hiding Conference, IH 2012, held in Berkeley, CA, USA, in May 2012. The 18 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on multimedia forensics and counter-forensics, steganalysis, data hiding in unusual content, steganography, covert channels, anonymity and privacy, watermarking, and fingerprinting.

This volume contains papers presented at the fourth working conference on Communications and Multimedia Security (CMS'99), held in Leuven, Belgium from September 20-21, 1999. The Conference, arrangedjointly by Technical Committees 11 and 6 of the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP), was organized by the Department of Electrical Engineering of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. The name "Communications and Multimedia Security" was used for the first time in 1995, when Reinhard Posch organized the first in this series of conferences in Graz, Austria, following up on the previously national (Austrian) IT Sicherheit conferences held in Klagenfurt (1993) and Vienna (1994). In 1996, CMS took place in Essen, Germany; in 1997 the conference moved to Athens, Greece. The Conference aims to provide an international forum for presentations and discussions on protocols and techniques for providing secure information networks. The contributions in this volume review the state-of the-art in communications and multimedia security, and discuss practical of topics experiences and new developments. They cover a wide spectrum inc1uding network security, web security, protocols for entity authentication and key agreement, protocols for mobile environments, applied cryptology, watermarking, smart cards, and legal aspects of digital signatures.

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."

Mastering interoperability in a computing environment consisting of different operating systems and hardware architectures is a key requirement which faces system engineers building distributed information systems. Distributed applications are a necessity in most central application sectors of the contemporary computerized society, for instance, in office automation, banking, manufacturing, telecommunication and transportation. This book focuses on the techniques available or under development, with the goal of easing the burden of constructing reliable and maintainable interoperable information systems. The topics covered in this book include: * Management of distributed systems; * Frameworks and construction tools; * Open architectures and interoperability techniques; * Experience with platforms like CORBA and RMI; * Language interoperability (e.g. Java); * Agents and mobility; * Quality of service and fault tolerance; * Workflow and object modelling issues; and * Electronic commerce .The book contains the proceedings of the International Working Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems II (DAIS'99), which was held June 28-July 1, 1999 in Helsinki, Finland. It was sponsored by the International Federation of 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 6th International Conference on Interactive Storytelling, ICIDS 2013, Istanbul, Turkey, November 2013. The 14 revised full papers presented together with 10 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 51 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on theory and aesthetics; authoring tools and applications; evaluation and user experience reports; virtual characters and agents; new storytelling modes; workshops.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second CCF Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing, NLPCC 2013, held in Chongqing, China, during November 2013. The 31 revised full papers presented together with three keynote talks and 13 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 203 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on fundamentals on language computing; applications on language computing; machine learning for NLP; machine translation and multi-lingual information access; NLP for social media and web mining, knowledge acquisition; NLP for search technology and ads; NLP fundamentals; NLP applications; NLP for social media.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Web-Based Learning, ICWL 2012, held in Sinaia, Romania, in September, 2012. The 28 revised full papers presented together with 10 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from about 105 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, Web 2.0 and Social Learning Environments; Personal Learning Environments; Learning Objects' Management and Ontologies; Game-Based Learning; Personalized and Adaptive Learning; Feedback, Assessment and Learning Analytics; Design, Model and Implementation of E-Learning Platforms and Tools; Pedagogical Issues, Practice and Experience Sharing.

Cellular Automata Transforms describes a new approach to using the dynamical system, popularly known as cellular automata (CA), as a tool for conducting transforms on data. Cellular automata have generated a great deal of interest since the early 1960s when John Conway created the `Game of Life'. This book takes a more serious look at CA by describing methods by which information building blocks, called basis functions (or bases), can be generated from the evolving states. These information blocks can then be used to construct any data. A typical dynamical system such as CA tend to involve an infinite possibilities of rules that define the inherent elements, neighborhood size, shape, number of states, and modes of association, etc. To be able to build these building blocks an elegant method had to be developed to address a large subset of these rules. A new formula, which allows for the definition a large subset of possible rules, is described in the book. The robustness of this formula allows searching of the CA rule space in order to develop applications for multimedia compression, data encryption and process modeling. Cellular Automata Transforms is divided into two parts. In Part I the fundamentals of cellular automata, including the history and traditional applications are outlined. The challenges faced in using CA to solve practical problems are described. The basic theory behind Cellular Automata Transforms (CAT) is developed in this part of the book. Techniques by which the evolving states of a cellular automaton can be converted into information building blocks are taught. The methods (including fast convolutions) by which forward and inverse transforms of any data can be achieved are also presented. Part II contains a description of applications of CAT. Chapter 4 describes digital image compression, audio compression and synthetic audio generation, three approaches for compressing video data. Chapter 5 contains both symmetric and public-key implementation of CAT encryption. Possible methods of attack are also outlined. Chapter 6 looks at process modeling by solving differential and integral equations. Examples are drawn from physics and fluid dynamics.

It is certain that, over the next few years, data traffic will dwarf voice traffic on telecommunications networks. Growth in data-traffic volumes far exceeds that for voice, and is driven by increased use of applications such as e-mail attachments, remote printing and fileserver access, and the now omnipresent World Wide Web. The growth of data networking to connect computers with each other and with their peripheral devices began in earnest in the 1970s, took off in the 1980s and exploded in the 1990s. The early 21st century will see ever faster, more cost effective networks providing flexible data access into ever more businesses and homes. Since the 1970s there have been great advances in technology. For the past twenty years the processing power of computers has continued to grow with no hint of slowing - recall the oft-cited Moore's Law claiming that this power doubles every 18 months. Advances in the data networking equipment required to support the data traffic generated have been enormous. The pace of development from early X. 25 and modem technology through to some of the advanced equipment functionality now available is breathtaking - it is sometimes hard to believe that the practical router is barely ten years old! This book provides an overview of the advanced data networking field by bringing together chapters on local area networks, wide area networks and their application.

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.

Alias|Wavefront's Maya 3D animation software is an integrated collection of tools for creating computer generated images, used in nearly every blockbuster special effects film that has been released in the last few years. The first choice for digital content creators, Maya combines animation, dynamics, modelling and rendering tools, enabling you to create digital characters and visual effects for live action films or stand-alone animation.

Advances in electronics, communications, and the fast growth of the Internet have made the use of a wide variety of computing devices an every day occurrence. These computing devices have different interaction styles, input/output techniques, modalities, characteristics, and contexts of use. Furthermore, users expect to access their data and run the same application from any of these devices. Two of the problems we encountered in our own work [2] in building VIs for different platforms were the different layout features and screen sizes associated with each platform and device. Dan Ol sen [13], Peter Johnson [9], and Stephen Brewster, et al. [4] all talk about problems in interaction due to the diversity of interactive platforms, devices, network services and applications. They also talk about the problems associ ated with the small screen size of hand-held devices. In comparison to desk top computers, hand-held devices will always suffer from a lack of screen real estate, so new metaphors of interaction have to be devised for such de vices. It is difficult to develop a multi-platform user interface (VI) without duplicating development effort. Developers now face the daunting task to build UIs that must work across multiple devices. There have been some ap proaches towards solving this problem of multi-platform VI development in cluding XWeb [14]. Building "plastic interfaces" [5,20] is one such method in which the VIs are designed to "withstand variations of context of use while preserving usability".

Traditionally, scientific fields have defined boundaries, and scientists work on research problems within those boundaries. However, from time to time those boundaries get shifted or blurred to evolve new fields. For instance, the original goal of computer vision was to understand a single image of a scene, by identifying objects, their structure, and spatial arrangements. This has been referred to as image understanding. Recently, computer vision has gradually been making the transition away from understanding single images to analyz ing image sequences, or video understanding. Video understanding deals with understanding of video sequences, e. g. , recognition of gestures, activities, fa cial expressions, etc. The main shift in the classic paradigm has been from the recognition of static objects in the scene to motion-based recognition of actions and events. Video understanding has overlapping research problems with other fields, therefore blurring the fixed boundaries. Computer graphics, image processing, and video databases have obvious overlap with computer vision. The main goal of computer graphics is to gener ate and animate realistic looking images, and videos. Researchers in computer graphics are increasingly employing techniques from computer vision to gen erate the synthetic imagery. A good example of this is image-based rendering and modeling techniques, in which geometry, appearance, and lighting is de rived from real images using computer vision techniques. Here the shift is from synthesis to analysis followed by synthesis.

Content-Based Image And Video Retrieval addresses the basic concepts and techniques for designing content-based image and video retrieval systems. It also discusses a variety of design choices for the key components of these systems. This book gives a comprehensive survey of the content-based image retrieval systems, including several content-based video retrieval systems. The survey includes both research and commercial content-based retrieval systems. Content-Based Image And Video Retrieval includes pointers to two hundred representative bibliographic references on this field, ranging from survey papers to descriptions of recent work in the area, entire books and more than seventy websites. Finally, the book presents a detailed case study of designing MUSE-a content-based image retrieval system developed at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval, CMMR 2012, held in London, UK, in June 2012. The 28 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. The papers have been organized in the following topical sections: music emotion analysis; 3D audio and sound synthesis; computer models of music perception and cognition; music emotion recognition; music information retrieval; film soundtrack and music recommendation; and computational musicology and music education. The volume also includes selected papers from the Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Expressive Performance Workshop held within the framework of CMMR 2012.

Semantic Video Object Segmentation for Content-Based Multimedia Applications provides a thorough review of state-of-the-art techniques as well as describing several novel ideas and algorithms for semantic object extraction from image sequences. Semantic object extraction is an essential element in content-based multimedia services, such as the newly developed MPEG4 and MPEG7 standards. An interactive system called SIVOG (Smart Interactive Video Object Generation) is presented, which converts user's semantic input into a form that can be conveniently integrated with low-level video processing. Thus, high-level semantic information and low-level video features are integrated seamlessly into a smart segmentation system. A region and temporal adaptive algorithm was further proposed to improve the efficiency of the SIVOG system so that it is feasible to achieve nearly real-time video object segmentation with robust and accurate performances. Also included is an examination of the shape coding problem and the object segmentation problem simultaneously. Semantic Video Object Segmentation for Content-Based Multimedia Applications will be of great interest to research scientists and graduate-level students working in the area of content-based multimedia representation and applications and its related fields.

Advanced communications and information technologies provide the basis for operational risk management. In order to support managers in real-time risk assessment and decision-making, the advanced technologies must be complemented by an appropriate reasoning logic. This book presents such a reasoning logic for operational risk management. Chapter 1 discusses the need for operational risk management and the feasibility of its use based upon advances in sensing, mobile communications, and satellite positioning technologies. Chapter II presents a reasoning logic for operational risk management that capitalizes upon these developments. Chapter III illustrates the integration of the reasoning logic in hypermedia, multimedia, and virtual reality systems, coupled with the capabilities provided by the Internet. Chapters IV-VI illustrate the realism of operational risk management for hazardous material transportation, emergency response, air raid command, and emergency response at a nuclear power generation facility. The book closes with an experimental assessment of the logic and associated decision aids in Chapter VII. Audience: Researchers, who will find the most recent advances in operational risk management with experimental assessments. Practitioners, who are provided with a detailed description of operational risk management and the latest advances in information and communications technologies to implement this new approach for managing risks in operational settings, such as transportation of hazardous materials and emergency response. Students, who will learn the basic concepts in theory and practice of building models for decision and risk analysis, and embedding them into commercial software as decision support systems.

The problem of structure and motion recovery from image sequences is an important theme in computer vision. Considerable progress has been made in this field during the past two decades, resulting in successful applications in robot navigation, augmented reality, industrial inspection, medical image analysis, and digital entertainment, among other areas. However, many of these methods work only for rigid objects and static scenes. The study of non-rigid structure from motion is not only of academic significance, but also has important practical applications in real-world, nonrigid or dynamic scenarios, such as human facial expressions and moving vehicles.

This practical guide/reference provides a comprehensive overview of Euclidean structure and motion recovery, with a specific focus on factorization-based algorithms. The book discusses the latest research in this field, including the extension of the factorization algorithm to recover the structure of non-rigid objects, and presents some new algorithms developed by the authors. Readers require no significant knowledge of computer vision, although some background on projective geometry and matrix computation would be beneficial.

Topics and features: presents the first systematic study of structure and motion recovery of both rigid and non-rigid objects from images sequences; discusses in depth the theory, techniques, and applications of rigid and non-rigid factorization methods in three dimensional computer vision; examines numerous factorization algorithms, covering affine, perspective and quasi-perspective projection models; provides appendices describing the mathematical principles behind projective geometry, matrix decomposition, least squares, and nonlinear estimation techniques; includes chapter-ending review questions, and a glossary of terms used in the book.

This unique text offers practical guidance in real applications and implementations of 3D modeling systems for practitioners in computer vision and pattern recognition, as well as serving as an invaluable source of new algorithms and methodologies for structure and motion recovery for graduate students and researchers.

Consumer electronics (CE) devices, providing multimedia entertainment and enabling communication, have become ubiquitous in daily life. However, consumer interaction with such equipment currently requires the use of devices such as remote controls and keyboards, which are often inconvenient, ambiguous and non-interactive. An important challenge for the modern CE industry is the design of user interfaces for CE products that enable interactions which are natural, intuitive and fun. As many CE products are supplied with microphones and cameras, the exploitation of both audio and visual information for interactive multimedia is a growing field of research. Collecting together contributions from an international selection of experts, including leading researchers in industry, this unique text presents the latest advances in applications of multimedia interaction and user interfaces for consumer electronics. Covering issues of both multimedia content analysis and human-machine interaction, the book examines a wide range of techniques from computer vision, machine learning, audio and speech processing, communications, artificial intelligence and media technology. Topics and features: introduces novel computationally efficient algorithms to extract semantically meaningful audio-visual events; investigates modality allocation in intelligent multimodal presentation systems, taking into account the cognitive impacts of modality on human information processing; provides an overview on gesture control technologies for CE; presents systems for natural human-computer interaction, virtual content insertion, and human action retrieval; examines techniques for 3D face pose estimation, physical activity recognition, and video summary quality evaluation; discusses the features that characterize the new generation of CE and examines how web services can be integrated with CE products for improved user experience. This book is an essential resource for researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry working in areas of multimedia analysis, human-computer interaction and interactive user interfaces. Graduate students studying computer vision, pattern recognition and multimedia will also find this a useful reference.

DSSSL (Document Style Semantics and Specification Language) is an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 10179: 1996) published in the year 1996. DSSSL is a standard of the SGML family (Standard Generalized Markup Language, ISO 8879:1986), whose aim is to establish a processing model for SGML documents. For a good understanding of the SGML standard, many books exist including Author's guide[BryanI988] and The SGML handbook[GoldfarbI990]. A DSSSL document is an SGML document, written with the same rules that guide any SGML document. The structure of a DSSSL document is explained in Chapter 2. DSSSL is based, in part, on scheme, a standard functional programming language. The DSSSL subset of scheme along with the procedures supported by DSSSL are explained in Chapter 3. The DSSSL standard starts with the supposition of a pre-existing SGML document, and offers a series of processes that can be performed on it: * Groves The first process that is performed on an SGML document in DSSSL is always the analysis of the document and the creation of a grove. The DSSSL standard shares many common characteristics with another standard of the SGML family, HyTime (ISO/IEC 10744). These standards were developed in parallel, and their developers designed a common data model, the grove, that would support the processing needs of each standard.

Software Visualization: From Theory to Practice was initially selected as a special volume for "The Annals of Software Engineering (ANSE) Journal," which has been discontinued. This special edited volume, is the first to discuss software visualization in the perspective of software engineering. It is a collection of 14 chapters on software visualization, covering the topics from theory to practical systems. The chapters are divided into four Parts: Visual Formalisms, Human Factors, Architectural Visualization, and Visualization in Practice. They cover a comprehensive range of software visualization topics, including
*Visual programming theory and techniques for rapid software prototyping and graph visualization, including distributed programming;
*Visual formalisms such as Flowchart, Event Graph, and Process Communication Graph;
*Graph-oriented distributed programming;
*Program visualization for software understanding, testing/debugging and maintenance;
*Object-oriented re-design based on legacy procedural software;
*Cognitive models for designing software exploration tools;
*Human comprehensibility of visual modeling diagrams in UML;
*UML extended with pattern compositions for software reuse;
*Visualization of software architecture and Web architecture for better understanding;
*Visual programming and program visualization for music synthesizers;
*Drawing diagrams nicely using clustering techniques for software engineering.

Software Visualization: From Theory to Practice is designed to meet the needs of both an academic and a professional audience composed of researchers and software developers. This book is also suitable for senior undergraduate and graduate students in software engineering and computer science, as a secondary text or a reference.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Multimedia and Signal Processing, CMSP 2012, held in Shanghai, China, in December 2012. The 79 full papers included in the volume were selected from 328 submissions from 10 different countries and regions. The papers are organized in topical sections on computer and machine vision, feature extraction, image enhancement and noise filtering, image retrieval, image segmentation, imaging techniques & 3D imaging, pattern recognition, multimedia systems, architecture, and applications, visualization, signal modeling, identification & prediction, speech & language processing, time-frequency signal analysis.

Heterogeneous Network Quality of Service Systems will be especially useful for networking professionals and researchers, advanced level students, and other information technology professionals whose work relate to the Internet.

With a preface by Ton Kalker. Informed Watermarking is an essential tool for both academic and professional researchers working in the areas of multimedia security, information embedding, and communication. Theory and practice are linked, particularly in the area of multi-user communication. From the Preface: Watermarking has become a more mature discipline with proper foundation in both signal processing and information theory. We can truly say that we are in the era of second generation watermarking. This book is first in addressing watermarking problems in terms of second-generation insights. It provides a complete overview of the most important results on capacity and security. The Costa scheme, and in particular a simpler version of it, the Scalar Costa scheme, is studied in great detail. An important result of this book is that it is possible to approach the Shannon limit within a few decibels in a practical system. These results are verified on real-world data, not only the classical category of images, but also on chemical structure sets.Inspired by the work of Moulin and O'Sullivan, this book also addresses security aspects by studying AGWN attacks in terms of game theory. The authors of Informed Watermarking give a well-written expose of how watermarking came of age, where we are now, and what to expect in the future. It is my expectation that this book will be a standard reference on second-generation watermarking for the years to come. Ton Kalker, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven