Kim Halskov Madsen Up until a few decades ago, business administration and science were the primary areas in which computers were applied, but terms like pervasive computing reflect that interactive computing power is becoming an embedded part of people's every day environment, not only office buildings and private homes but also art and cul At one of the frontiers of multimedia applications computers are used as tural events. part of experimental theatre, puppet theatre, musical performances, museums, entertainment, and learning. In some of these domains, people interact with the computers using a mouse, keyboard and a 17-inch monitor, but present-day inter faces take a variety of forms, including motion-capture technology and displays of up to several metres in height and width. The trend of applying computer technologies in the domain of art and culture has been one of the pivots of a Danish research project, Staging of Virtual Inhabited 3D Spaces. The results of the project are presented in a series of four volumes, of which this book is the last one. The three other publications are: Virtual Interaction: Interaction in Virtual Inhabited 3D Worlds; Virtual Space: The Spatiality of Virtual Inhabited 3D Worlds; and 3D Applications: Applications with Virtual Inhabited 3D Worlds.

Multimedia Signals and Systems is primarily a technical introductory level multimedia textbook, including problems, examples, and MATLAB (R) codes. It will be a stepping-stone for readers who want to research in audio processing, image and video processing, and data compression. This book will also be useful to readers who are carrying out research and development in systems areas such as television engineering and storage media. Anyone who seeks to learn the core multimedia signal processing techniques and systems will need Multimedia Signals and Systems. There are many chapters that are generic in nature and provide key concepts of multimedia systems to technical as well as non-technical persons. There are also several chapters that provide a mathematical/ analytical framework for basic multimedia signal processing. The readers are expected to have some prior knowledge about discrete signals and systems, such as Fourier transform and digital filters. However, a brief review of these theories is provided. Additional material for this book, including several MATLAB (R) codes along with a few test data samples; e.g., audio, image and video may be downloaded from http://extras.springer.com.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 34th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2012, held in Barcelona, Spain, in April 2012. The 37 full papers, 28 poster papers and 7 demonstrations presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 167 submissions. The contributions are organized in sections named: query representation; blogs and online-community search; semi-structured retrieval; evaluation; applications; retrieval models; image and video retrieval; text and content classification, categorisation, clustering; systems efficiency; industry track; and posters.

In order to establish technical prerequisites for efficient electronic business and education on the Internet, appropriate system support is needed as a vital condition for maximization of both short-term and long-term profits. Electronic Business and Education: Recent Advances in Internet Infrastructures discusses current research topics in the domain of system support for e-business and e-education on the Internet, and stresses the synergistic interaction of these two components. Attention is given to both scientific and engineering issues. Electronic Business and Education: Recent Advances in Internet Infrastructures is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry, particularly in the area of e-business and e-education on the Internet. 'There is no longer any question that the Internet and electronic communication are the major new tools for collaborative advances in the creation of new knowledge and in future learning.' Excerpt from Foreword by Robert C. Richardson, Nobel Laureate 1996, Cornell University, USA

Data Management and Internet Computing for Image/Pattern Analysis focuses on the data management issues and Internet computing aspect of image processing and pattern recognition research. The book presents a comprehensive overview of the state of the art, providing detailed case studies that emphasize how image and pattern (IAP) data are distributed and exchanged on sequential and parallel machines, and how the data communication patterns in low- and higher-level IAP computing differ from general numerical computation, what problems they cause and what opportunities they provide. The studies also describe how the images and matrices should be stored, accessed and distributed on different types of machines connected to the Internet, and how Internet resource sharing and data transmission change traditional IAP computing. Data Management and Internet Computing for Image/Pattern Analysis is divided into three parts: the first part describes several software approaches to IAP computing, citing several representative data communication patterns and related algorithms; the second part introduces hardware and Internet resource sharing in which a wide range of computer architectures are described and memory management issues are discussed; and the third part presents applications ranging from image coding, restoration and progressive transmission. Data Management and Internet Computing for Image/Pattern Analysis is an excellent reference for researchers and may be used as a text for advanced courses in image processing and pattern recognition.

This preface tells the story of how Multimodal Usability responds to a special challenge. Chapter 1 describes the goals and structure of this book. The idea of describing how to make multimodal computer systems usable arose in the European Network of Excellence SIMILAR - "Taskforce for cre- ing human-machine interfaces SIMILAR to human-human communication," 2003- 2007, www. similar. cc. SIMILAR brought together people from multimodal signal processing and usability with the aim of creating enabling technologies for new kinds of multimodal systems and demonstrating results in research prototypes. Most of our colleagues in the network were, in fact, busy extracting features and guring out how to demonstrate progress in working interactive systems, while claiming not to have too much of a notion of usability in system development and evaluation. It was proposed that the authors support the usability of the many multimodal pro- types underway by researching and presenting a methodology for building usable multimodal systems. We accepted the challenge, rst and foremost, no doubt, because the formidable team spirit in SIMILAR could make people accept outrageous things. Second, h- ing worked for nearly two decades on making multimodal systems usable, we were curious - curious at the opportunity to try to understand what happens to traditional usability work, that is, work in human-computer interaction centred around tra- tional graphical user interfaces (GUIs), when systems become as multimodal and as advanced in other ways as those we build in research today.

The main objective of pervasive computing systems is to create environments where computers become invisible by being seamlessly integrated and connected into our everyday environment, where such embedded computers can then provide inf- mation and exercise intelligent control when needed, but without being obtrusive. Pervasive computing and intelligent multimedia technologies are becoming incre- ingly important to the modern way of living. However, many of their potential applications have not yet been fully realized. Intelligent multimedia allows dynamic selection, composition and presentation of the most appropriate multimedia content based on user preferences. A variety of applications of pervasive computing and - telligent multimedia are being developed for all walks of personal and business life. Pervasive computing (often synonymously called ubiquitous computing, palpable computing or ambient intelligence) is an emerging ?eld of research that brings in revolutionary paradigms for computing models in the 21st century. Pervasive c- puting is the trend towards increasingly ubiquitous connected computing devices in the environment, a trend being brought about by a convergence of advanced el- tronic - and particularly, wireless - technologies and the Internet. Recent advances in pervasive computers, networks, telecommunications and information technology, along with the proliferation of multimedia mobile devices - such as laptops, iPods, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cellular telephones - have further stimulated the development of intelligent pervasive multimedia applications. These key te- nologiesarecreatingamultimediarevolutionthatwillhavesigni?cantimpactacross a wide spectrum of consumer, business, healthcare and governmental domains.

In his third book on the semiotics of title sequences, Title Sequences as Paratexts, theorist Michael Betancourt offers an analysis of the relationship between the title sequence and its primary text-the narrative whose production the titles credit. Using a wealth of examples drawn from across film history-ranging from White Zombie (1931), Citizen Kane (1940) and Bullitt (1968) to Prince of Darkness (1987), Mission: Impossible (1996), Sucker Punch (2011) and Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (2017)-Betancourt develops an understanding of how the audience interprets title sequences as instances of paranarrative, simultaneously engaging them as both narrative exposition and as credits for the production. This theory of cinematic paratexts, while focused on the title sequence, has application to trailers, commercials, and other media as well.

Peter Flynn has been an enthusiastic and skillful contributor in the world of SGML and XML for many years, and it is a pleasure to see him set some of his expertise down in writing as well. The range and power of SGML tools have taken a sharp upward turn: the first step leading to this was that the Web came along with HTML, and showed the whole world that pointy brackets and (at least somewhat) descriptive markup could make a difference. Soon afterward, 'HTML claustrophobia' began to grow and XML came to the rescue. Since XML is fundamentally an elegant subset of SGML that reduces complexity without reducing functionality, the movement to XML is great for SGML too. The massive interest in XML is bringing forth a huge variety of new, faster, more powerful, and cheaper software tools. Peter has caught the cusp of this change and shows in detail how SGML and XML tools fit together into integrated solutions that return value for your investment in structured information.

Human Face Recognition Using Third-Order Synthetic Neural Networks explores the viability of the application of High-order synthetic neural network technology to transformation-invariant recognition of complex visual patterns. High-order networks require little training data (hence, short training times) and have been used to perform transformation-invariant recognition of relatively simple visual patterns, achieving very high recognition rates. The successful results of these methods provided inspiration to address more practical problems which have grayscale as opposed to binary patterns (e.g., alphanumeric characters, aircraft silhouettes) and are also more complex in nature as opposed to purely edge-extracted images - human face recognition is such a problem. Human Face Recognition Using Third-Order Synthetic Neural Networks serves as an excellent reference for researchers and professionals working on applying neural network technology to the recognition of complex visual patterns.

This book aims at capitalizing and transmitting know-how about the design of Augmented Environments (AE) from some of the most prominent laboratories in the field worldwide. The authors belong to the RUFAE network (Research on User- Friendly Augmented Environments, founded in 2002) who meet in research seminars to share experience; Writing this book was perceived as an opportunity to look back over the last few years to sum up important findings; and formalize their approach and experience, which they never had the time or opportunity to do. Although the authors of this book have very different backgrounds, striking similarities emerge in their approach and design principles: never-endingness, activity-orientedness, continuous design, realism are some of the pillars of this approach; enabling to deal with the complex, heterogeneous, multi-user and mul- purpose constructions which AE designers have to face. The book illustrates how these principles enabled them to construct robust, ef- cient, and user-friendly Augmented Environments in spite of the many challenges to make these operational. We hope their experience will help the reader. Primary audience: Academics, Students and Professionals involved in the CHI, CSCW, Ubicomp, Cooperative Building communities. Computer Scientists int- ested by end-users and applications, Social Scientists operating in the IT domain, IT & Organization Consultants. Secondary audience: Developers of office and conferencing applications or middleware, Architects of office buildings, Space Planners, Designers; Facility Managers; IT, furniture & building Business Communities.

This book provides readers with comprehensive details on how the WWW works, complete with definitions and standards. It discusses the latest versions of the transfer protocol (HTTP 1.1), the description language (HTML 4.0), the foundations of the description language (SGML and XML), style sheets (CSS1), web servers, and security (SSL and CGI). Issues of importance for the future development of the WWW are discussed, including virtual reality (VRML), portable network graphics (PNG), and MathML.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on E-Learning and Games, Edutainment 2012, held in conjunction with the 3rd International Conference on Serious Games for Training, Education, Health and Sports, GameDays 2012, held in Darmstadt, Germany, in September 2012. The 21 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this book. They are organized in topical sections named: game-based training; game-based teaching and learning; emerging learning and gaming technologies; authoring tools and mechanisms; and serious games for health.

Agent technology has recently become one of the most vibrant and fastest growing areas in information technology. Within this booming area, intelligent information agents are attracting particular attention from the research and development community as well as from industry and user communities interested in everyday private and professional applications. This monographic text is the first systematic state-of-the-art survey on intelligent information agents. Eighteen coherently written chapters by leading authorities provide complementary coverage of the relevant issues organized in four parts: cooperative information systems and agents; rational information agents and electronic commerce; adaptive information agents; mobile agents and security. In addition, the volume editor has provided a detailed introductory survey chapter, motivational introductions to the four parts, and a comprehensive bibliography listing more than 700 entries.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th Industrial Conference on Data Mining, ICDM 2012, held in Berlin, Germany in July 2012. The 22 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 97 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on data mining in medicine and biology; data mining for energy industry; data mining in traffic and logistic; data mining in telecommunication; data mining in engineering; theory in data mining; theory in data mining: clustering; theory in data mining: association rule mining and decision rule mining.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Multimedia Modeling Conference, MMM 2012, held in Klagenfurt, Austria, in January 2012. The 38 revised regular papers, 12 special session papers, 15 poster session papers, and 6 demo session papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 142 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: annotation, annotation and interactive multimedia applications, event and activity, mining and mobile multimedia applications, search, summarization and visualization, visualization and advanced multimedia systems, and the special sessions: interactive and immersive entertainment and communication, multimedia preservation: how to ensure multimedia access over time, multi-modal and cross-modal search, and video surveillance.

Image-based rendering (IBR) refers to a collection of techniques and representations that allow 3D scenes and objects to be visualized in a realistic way without full 3D model reconstruction. IBR uses images as the primary substrate. The potential for photorealistic visualization has tremendous appeal, and it is thus not surprising that IBR has been receiving increasing attention over the years. Applications such as video games, virtual travel, and E-commerce stand to benefit from this technology.

Image-Based Rendering examines the theory, practice, and applications associated with image-based rendering and modeling. The authors bring together their backgrounds and research experiences in computer graphics, computer vision and signal processing to address the multi-disciplinary nature of IBR research. The topics to be covered vary from IBR basic concepts and representations on the theory side, to signal processing and data compression on the practical side. These theoretical and practical issues are further disseminated in several IBR systems built to-date. However, this book will not focus on the geometrical modeling aspect of IBR, since 3D modeling has been extensively treated elsewhere in the vision literature.

One of the only titles devoted exclusively to the area of IBR, this book is intended for researchers, professionals, and general readers interested in the topics of computer graphics, computer vision, image processing, and video processing. Advanced-level students in EECS studying related disciplines will be able to seriously expand their knowledge about image-based rendering.

This volume brings together the advanced research results obtained by the European COST Action 2102 "Cross Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication," primarily discussed at the PINK SSPnet-COST2102 International Conference on Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and Enactment: The Processing Issues, held in Budapest, Hungary, in September 2010. The 40 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The volume is arranged into two scientific sections. The first section, Multimodal Signals: Analysis, Processing and Computational Issues, deals with conjectural and processing issues of defining models, algorithms, and heuristic strategies for data analysis, coordination of the data flow and optimal encoding of multi-channel verbal and nonverbal features. The second section, Verbal and Nonverbal Social Signals, presents original studies that provide theoretical and practical solutions to the modelling of timing synchronization between linguistic and paralinguistic expressions, actions, body movements, activities in human interaction and on their assistance for an effective human-machine interactions.

Education and Technology for a Better World was the main theme for WCCE 2009. The conference highlights and explores different perspectives of this theme, covering all levels of formal education as well as informal learning and societal aspects of education. The conference was open to everyone involved in education and training. Additionally players from technological, societal, business and political fields outside education were invited to make relevant contributions within the theme: Education and Technology for a Better World. For several years the WCCE (World Conference on Computers in Education) has brought benefits to the fields of computer science and computers and education as well as to their communities. The contributions at WCCE include research projects and good practice presented in different formats from full papers to posters, demonstrations, panels, workshops and symposiums. The focus is not only on presentations of accepted contributions but also on discussions and input from all participants. The main goal of these conferences is to provide a forum for the discussion of ideas in all areas of computer science and human learning. They create a unique environment in which researchers and practitioners in the fields of computer science and human learning can interact, exchanging theories, experiments, techniques, applications and evaluations of initiatives supporting new developments that are potentially relevant for the development of these fields. They intend to serve as reference guidelines for the research community.

Although the computer's life has been relatively short, it has brought about an information revolution that is transforming our world on a scale that is still difficult to comprehend. This digital convergence is shaping society, technology and the media for the next millennium. Areas as diverse as home banking and shopping over the Internet; WWW access over mobile phone networks; and television systems such as Web TV which combine on-line services with television. But convergence is not just about technology. It is also about services and new ways of doing business and of interacting with society. Digital convergence heralds the 'Information Revolution'. Edited by John Vince and Rae Earnshaw this important new book on Digital Convergence: The Information Revolution is an edited volume of papers, bringing together state-of-the-art developments in the Internet and World Wide Web and should be compulsory reading for all those interested in and working in those areas.

In the third paper in this chapter, Mike Pratt provides an historical intro duction to solid modeling. He presents the development of the three most freqently used techniques: cellular subdivision, constructive solid modeling and boundary representation. Although each of these techniques devel oped more or less independently, today the designer's needs dictate that a successful system allows access to all of these methods. For example, sculptured surfaces are generally represented using a boundary represen tation. However, the design of a complex vehicle generally dictates that a sculptured surface representation is most efficient for the 'skin' while constructive solid geometry representation is most efficent for the inter nal mechanism. Pratt also discusses the emerging concept of design by 'feature line'. Finally, he addresses the very important problem of data exchange between solid modeling systems and the progress that is being made towards developing an international standard. With the advent of reasonably low cost scientific workstations with rea sonable to outstanding graphics capabilities, scientists and engineers are increasingly turning to computer analysis for answers to fundamental ques tions and to computer graphics for present~tion of those answers. Although the current crop of workstations exhibit quite impressive computational ca pability, they are still not capable of solving many problems in a reasonable time frame, e. g. , executing computational fluid dynamics and finite element codes or generating complex ray traced or radiosity based images. In the sixth chapter Mike Muuss of the U. S.

The two-volume proceedings LNCS 7087 + 7088 constitute the proceedings of the 5th Pacific Rim Symposium, PSIVT 2011, held in Gwangju, Korea, in November 2011. The total of 71 revised papers was carefully reviewed and selected from 168 submissions. The topics covered are: image/video coding and transmission; image/video processing and analysis; imaging and graphics hardware and visualization; image/video retrieval and scene understanding; biomedical image processing and analysis; biometrics and image forensics; and computer vision applications.

The two-volume proceedings LNCS 7087 + LNCS 7088 constitute the proceedings of the 5th Pacific Rim Symposium on Image and Video Technology, PSIVT 2011, held in Gwangju, Korea, in November 2011. The total of 71 revised papers was carefully reviewed and selected from 168 submissions. The topics covered are: image/video coding and transmission; image/video processing and analysis; imaging and graphics hardware and visualization; image/video retrieval and scene understanding; biomedical image processing and analysis; biometrics and image forensics; and computer vision applications.

2 chapter contains examples of intelligent agents, arranged according to their appli cation areas. Chapter 7 closes with a prospective view of the future development of intelligent agents. Everyone concerned with the Internet and the new possibilities of information and communication technology knows that nowadays there is no area that is devel oping faster. The authors are aware of the dynamics of this research area and its effects when they describe such a fast developing area in a slow, traditional me dium like a book. One thing is sure today: when the book appears on the market, new intelligent agents will already exist and some of the hypotheses made by this book will have been shown to be incorrect. Why, despite this, does it make sense to write a classical book on this subject? Is there an alternative? Experience shows that the majority of the people in business and public life who make decisions on the use of new technologies continue to prefer books and articles in periodicals rather than electronic sources such as the Internet. Or is there some other reason for the enormous success of Nicolas Negroponte's book Being Digital, which we thank for multimedia and many concepts of the digital and networked world, and even intelligent agents? Today, a book is still the only way to establish a new area."

ThisvolumecontainstheProceedingsofthe2ndInternationalSymposiumon Intelligent Interactive Multimedia Systems and Services (KES-IIMSS 2009) This second edition of the KES-IIMSS Symposium was organized by the Department of Information Technologies of University of Milan, Italy in c- junctionwithHanyangUniversity, KoreaandKESInternational. KES-IIMSS is a new series of international scienti?c symposia aimed at presenting novel research in the ?elds of intelligent multimedia systems relevant to the dev- opment of a new generation of interactive, user-centric services. The major theme underlying this year's symposium is the rapid integration of mul- media processing techniques within a new wave of user-centric services and processes. Indeed, pervasive computing has blurred the traditional disti- tion between conventional information technologies and multimedia proce- ing, making multimedia an integral part of a new generation of IT-based interactive systems. The aim of the KES-IIMSS symposium, following the general structure of KES events, is to provide an internationally respected forum for publishing high-quality results of scienti?c research while all- ing for timely dissemination of research breakthroughs and novel ideas via a number of autonomous special sessions and workshops on emerging - sues and topics identi?ed each year. IMSS 2009 co-located events include the International Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction in Knowled- based Environments, and three invited sessions respectively on Intelligent Systems for Healthcare, Design of Intelligent Environments for Supporting Human Interaction and Multimedia Techniques for Device and Ambient - telligence (MTDAI).