Data Insights: New Ways to Visualize and Make Sense of Data offers thought-provoking insights into how visualization can foster a clearer and more comprehensive understanding of data. The book offers perspectives from people with different backgrounds, including data scientists, statisticians, painters, and writers. It argues that all data is useless, or misleading, if we do not know what it means. Organized into seven chapters, the book explores some of the ways that data visualization and other emerging approaches can make data meaningful and therefore useful. It also discusses some fundamental ideas and basic questions in the data lifecycle; the process of interactions between people, data, and displays that lead to better questions and more useful answers; and the fundamentals, origins, and purposes of the basic building blocks that are used in data visualization. The reader is introduced to tried and true approaches to understanding users in the context of user interface design, how communications can get distorted, and how data visualization is related to thinking machines. Finally, the book looks at the future of data visualization by assessing its strengths and weaknesses. Case studies from business analytics, healthcare, network monitoring, security, and games, among others, as well as illustrations, thought-provoking quotes, and real-world examples are included. This book will prove useful to computer professionals, technical marketing professionals, content strategists, Web and product designers, and researchers.

Everyday Innovators explores the active role of people, collectively and individually, in shaping the use of information and communication technologies. It examines issues around acquiring and using that knowledge of users, how we should conceptualise the role of users and understand the forms and limitations of their participation.

• To what extent should we think of users as being innovative and creative?
• To what extent is this routine or exceptional, confined to particular group of users or part of many people s experience of technologies?
• Where does the nature of the ICT or the particularities of its design impose constraints on the active role that users can play in their interaction with devices and services?
• Where do the horizons and orientations of the users influence or limit what they want and expect of their ICTs and how they use them?

This book enables a cross-fertilisation of perspectives from different disciplines and aims to provide new insights into the role of users, drawing out both applied and theoretical implications"

Principles of Visual Information Retrieval introduces the basic concepts and techniques in VIR and develops a foundation that can be used for further research and study.
Divided into 2 parts, the first part describes the fundamental principles. A chapter is devoted to each of the main features of VIR, such as colour, texture and shape-based search. There is coverage of search techniques for time-based image sequences or videos, and an overview of how to combine all the basic features described and integrate context into the search process.
The second part looks at advanced topics such as multimedia query, specification, visual learning and semantics, and offers state-of-the-art coverage that is not available in any other book on the market.
This book will be essential reading for researchers in VIR, and for final year undergraduate and postgraduate students on courses such as Multimedia Information Retrieval, Multimedia Databases, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

COLLABORATIVE NETWORKS Becoming a pervasive paradigm In recent years the area of collaborative networks is being consolidated as a new discipline (Camarinha-Matos, Afsarmanesh, 2005) that encompasses and gives more structured support to a large diversity of collaboration forms. In terms of applications, besides the "traditional" sectors represented by the advanced supply chains, virtual enterprises, virtual organizations, virtual teams, and their breading environments, new forms of collaborative structures are emerging in all sectors of the society. Examples can be found in e-government, intelligent transportation systems, collaborative virtual laboratories, agribusiness, elderly care, silver economy, etc. In some cases those developments tend to adopt a terminology that is specific of that domain; often the involved actors in a given domain are not fully aware of the developments in the mainstream research on collaborative networks. For instance, the grid community adopted the term "virtual organization" but focused mainly on the resource sharing perspective, ignoring most of the other aspects involved in collaboration. The European enterprise interoperability community, which was initially focused on the intra-enterprise aspects, is moving towards inter-enterprise collaboration. Collaborative networks are thus becoming a pervasive paradigm giving basis to new socio-organizational structures.

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.

Correcting the Great Mistake People often mistake one thing for another. That's human nature. However, one would expect the leaders in a particular ?eld of endeavour to have superior ab- ities to discriminate among the developments within that ?eld. That is why it is so perplexing that the technology elite - supposedly savvy folk such as software developers, marketers and businessmen - have continually mistaken Web-based graphics for something it is not. The ?rst great graphics technology for the Web, VRML, has been mistaken for something else since its inception. Viewed variously as a game system, a format for architectural walkthroughs, a platform for multi-user chat and an augmentation of reality, VRML may qualify as the least understood invention in the history of inf- mation technology. Perhaps it is so because when VRML was originally introduced it was touted as a tool for putting the shopping malls of the world online, at once prosaic and horrifyingly mundane to those of us who were developing it. Perhaps those ?rst two initials,"VR,"created expectations of sprawling, photorealistic f- tasy landscapes for exploration and play across the Web. Or perhaps the magnitude of the invention was simply too great to be understood at the time by the many, ironically even by those spending the money to underwrite its development. Regardless of the reasons, VRML suffered in the mainstream as it was twisted to meet unintended ends and stretched far beyond its limitations.

Both modern mathematical music theory and computer science are strongly influenced by the theory of categories and functors. One outcome of this research is the data format of denotators, which is based on set-valued presheaves over the category of modules and diaffine homomorphisms. The functorial approach of denotators deals with generalized points in the form of arrows and allows the construction of a universal concept architecture. This architecture is ideal for handling all aspects of music, especially for the analysis and composition of highly abstract musical works.

This book presents an introduction to the theory of module categories and the theory of denotators, as well as the design of a software system, called Rubato Composer, which is an implementation of the category-theoretic concept framework. The application is written in portable Java and relies on plug-in components, so-called rubettes, which may be combined in data flow networks for the generation and manipulation of denotators.

The Rubato Composer system is open to arbitrary extension and is freely available under the GPL license. It allows the developer to build specialized rubettes for tasks that are of interest to composers, who in turn combine them to create music. It equally serves music theorists, who use them to extract information from and manipulate musical structures. They may even develop new theories by experimenting with the many parameters that are at their disposal thanks to the increased flexibility of the functorial concept architecture.

Two contributed chapters by Guerino Mazzola and Florian Thalmann illustrate the application of the theory as well as the software in the development of compositional tools and the creation of a musical work with the help of the Rubato framework.

This Second Edition brings readers thoroughly up to date with the emerging field of text mining, the application of techniques of machine learning in conjunction with natural language processing, information extraction, and algebraic/mathematical approaches to computational information retrieval. The book explores a broad range of issues, ranging from the development of new learning approaches to the parallelization of existing algorithms. Authors highlight open research questions in document categorization, clustering, and trend detection. In addition, the book describes new application problems in areas such as email surveillance and anomaly detection.

3D Virtual Applications: Applications with Virtual Inhabited 3D Worlds deals with the use of virtual inhabited 3D spaces in different domains of society. (Other volumes deal with interaction, production methodology and space.) From focusing on virtual reality (a reality into which users and objects from the real world should be moved) we are increasingly focusing on augmented reality (i.e. on moving computers out into the reality of real users, objects and activities). This book deals with the use of virtual inhabited 3D spaces in both contexts. Based on the structuring of the application domains, this book looks at the use of VR and augmented reality in the following major application domains:

- Production oriented applications - use of VR and augmented reality for control of complex production plants, for navigation support (ships, cars, aeroplanes) and for support of collaborative work processes

- Communication support applications - virtual spaces are used for supporting communication in learning environments and for support of organisational communication. Also virtual spaces are used for supporting the navigation of people in public spaces, i.e. as maps, planning tools

- Scientific applications - use of 3D models for medical research; use of dynamic models for representation of abstract concepts and ideas (data-mining applications); use of dynamic 3D models for simulating biological or social processes

- Artistic and cultural applications - the construction of stages representing concepts and/or emotions

This comprehensive book draws together experts to explore how knowledge technologies can be exploited to create new multimedia applications, and how multimedia technologies can provide new contexts for the use of knowledge technologies. Thorough coverage of all relevant topics is given. The step-by-step approach guides the reader from fundamental enabling technologies of ontologies, analysis and reasoning, through to applications which have hitherto had less attention.

Current middleware solutions, e.g., application servers and Web services, are very complex software products that are hard to tame because of intricacies of distributed systems. Their functionalities have mostly been developed and managed with the help of administration tools and corresponding configuration files, recently in XML. Though this constitutes flexibility for developing and administrating a distributed application, the conceptual model underlying the different configurations is only implicit.

To remedy such problems, Semantic Management of Middleware contributes an ontology-based approach to support the development and administration of middleware-based applications. The ontology is an explicit conceptual model with formal logic-based semantics. Its descriptions may therefore be queried, may foresight required actions, or may be checked to avoid inconsistent system configurations.

This book builds a rigorous approach towards giving the declarative descriptions of components and services a well-defined meaning by specifying ontological foundations and by showing how such foundations may be realized in practical, up-and-running systems.

This book reports the newest research and technical achievements on the following theme blocks: Design of mobile map services and its constraints, typology and usability of mobile map services, visualization solutions on small displays for time-critical tasks, mobile map users, interaction and adaptation in mobile environments and applications of map-based mobile services.

Parallel and distributed computing is one of the foremost technologies for shaping
future research and development activities in academia and industry. Hyperthreading in Intel processors, hypertransport links in next generation AMD processors, multicore silicon in today's high-end microprocessors, and emerging cluster and grid computing have moved parallel/distributed computing into the mainstream of computing.

New Horizons of Parallel and Distributed Computing is a collection of self-contained chapters written by pioneering researchers to provide solutions for newly emerging problems in this field. This volume will not only provide novel ideas, work in progress and state-of-the-art techniques in the field, but will also stimulate future research activities in the area of parallel and distributed computing with applications.

New Horizons of Parallel and Distributed Computing is intended for industry researchers and developers, as well as for academic researchers and advanced-level students in computer science and electrical engineering. A valuable reference work, it is also suitable as a textbook.

This book presents research results on data dissemination in mobile networks and peer-to-peer systems for mobile devices. The main focus is a novel resource-sharing mechanism for mobile devices that introduces a new paradigm of information-sharing cooperation among mobile devices not necessarily connected to the internet. The book is geared to the needs of researchers and practitioners in industry, and is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science and electrical engineering.

"Sense of Touch and its Rendering" presents a unique and interdisciplinary approach highlighting the field of haptic research from a neuropsychological as well as a technological point of view. This edited book is the outcome of the TOUCH-HapSys European research project and provides an important contribution towards a new generation of high-fidelity haptic display technologies. The book is structured in two parts: A. Fundamental Psychophysical and Neuropsychological Research and B. Technology and Applications. The two parts are not however separated, and the many connections and synergies between the two complementary domains of research are highlighted in the text. The eleven chapters discuss the recent advances in the study of human haptic (kinaesthetic, tactile, temperature) and multimodal (visual, auditory, haptic) perception mechanisms. Besides the theoretical advancement, the contributions survey the state of the art in the field, report a number of practical applications to real systems, and discuss possible future developments.

In the last decade, ontologies have received much attention within computer science and related disciplines, most often as the semantic web. Ontology Learning and Population from Text: Algorithms, Evaluation and Applications discusses ontologies for the semantic web, as well as knowledge management, information retrieval, text clustering and classification, as well as natural language processing.

Ontology Learning and Population from Text: Algorithms, Evaluation and Applications is structured for research scientists and practitioners in industry. This book is also suitable for graduate-level students in computer science.

Soft computing represents a collection of techniques, such as neural networks, evolutionary computation, fuzzy logic, and probabilistic reasoning. As - posed to conventional "hard" computing, these techniques tolerate impre- sion and uncertainty, similar to human beings. In the recent years, successful applications of these powerful methods have been published in many dis- plines in numerous journals, conferences, as well as the excellent books in this book series on Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing. This volume is dedicated to recent novel applications of soft computing in multimedia processing. The book is composed of 21 chapters written by experts in their respective fields, addressing various important and timely problems in multimedia computing such as content analysis, indexing and retrieval, recognition and compression, processing and filtering, etc. In the chapter authored by Guan, Muneesawang, Lay, Amin, and Lee, a radial basis function network with Laplacian mixture model is employed to perform image and video retrieval. D. Androutsos, P. Androutsos, Plataniotis, and Venetsanopoulos investigate color image indexing and retrieval within a small-world framework. Wu and Yap develop a framework of fuzzy relevance feedback to model the uncertainty of users' subjective perception in image retrieval.

This is an edited volume based on the 2007 Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR), now in its second meeting. Metadata research is a pluri-disciplinary field that encompasses all aspects of the definition, creation, assessment, management and use of metadata. The volume brings together world class leaders to contribute their research and up-to-date information on metadata and semantics applied to library management, e-commerce, e-business, information science and librarianship, to name a few. The book is designed for a professional audience composed of researchers and practitioners in industry.

Written by supply chain researchers, consultants, and practitioners, this book explains the newly emerging techniques and practices for highly efficient supply chain management, made possible by the rapid progress in information and communication technologies.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2011, held in Vancouver, Canada, in November/December 2011. The 17 full papers, 14 short papers and 16 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 72 paper and poster submissions. In addition, the volume includes 6 workshops descriptions. The full and short papers have been organized into the following topical sections: interactive storytelling theory, new authoring modes, virtual characters and agents, story generation and drama managment, narratives in digital games, evaluation and user experience reports, tools for interactive storytelling.

Hugo de Man Professor Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Senior Research Fellow IMEC The steady evolution of hardware, software and communications technology is rapidly transforming the PC- and dot.com world into the world of Ambient Intelligence (AmI). This next wave of information technology is fundam- tally different in that it makes distributed wired and wireless computing and communication disappear to the background and puts users to the foreground. AmI adapts to people instead of the other way around. It will augment our consciousness, monitor our health and security, guide us through traffic etc. In short, its ultimate goal is to improve the quality of our life by a quiet, reliable and secure interaction with our social and material environment. What makes AmI engineering so fascinating is that its design starts from studying person to world interactions that need to be implemented as an int- ligent and autonomous interplay of virtually all necessary networked electronic intelligence on the globe. This is a new and exciting dimension for most elect- cal and software engineers and may attract more creative talent to engineering than pure technology does. Development of the leading technology for AmI will only succeed if the engineering research community is prepared to join forces in order to make Mark Weiser's dream of 1991 come true. This will not be business as usual by just doubling transistor count or clock speed in a microprocessor or increasing the bandwidth of communication.

The two-volume set LNCS 6468-6469 contains the carefully selected and reviewed papers presented at the eight workshops that were held in conjunction with the 10th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, in Queenstown, New Zealand, in November 2010.From a total of 167 submissions to all workshops, 89 papers were selected for publication. The contributions are grouped together according to the main workshops topics, which were: computational photography and aesthetics; computer vision in vehicle technology: from Earth to Mars; electronic cultural heritage; subspace based methods; video event categorization, tagging and retrieval; visual surveillance; application of computer vision for mixed and augmented reality.

The two-volume set LNCS 6468-6469 contains the carefully selected and reviewed papers presented at the eight workshops that were held in conjunction with the 10th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, in Queenstown, New Zealand, in November 2010.From a total of 167 submissions to all workshops, 89 papers were selected for publication. The contributions are grouped together according to the main workshops topics, which were: computational photography and aesthetics; computer vision in vehicle technology: from Earth to Mars; electronic cultural heritage; subspace based methods; video event categorization, tagging and retrieval; visual surveillance; application of computer vision for mixed and augmented reality.

This book contains the thoroughly refereed post-conferernce proceedings of the 13th Information Hiding Conference, IH 2011, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in May 2011. Included in this volume are 23 carefully reviewed papers that were selected out of 69 submissions. The contributions are organized in topical sections on: fingerprinting, anonymity and privacy, steganography and steganalysis, watermarking, digital rights management and digital forensics, and digital hiding in unusual context. Also included are the papers that were presented as part of the special session dedicated to the BOSS (Break Our Steganographic System) contest.

Complete Coverage of OpenGL (R) 4.5-the Latest Version (Includes 4.5, 4.4, SPIR-V, and Extensions) The latest version of today's leading worldwide standard for computer graphics, OpenGL 4.5 delivers significant improvements in application efficiency, flexibility, and performance. OpenGL 4.5 is an exceptionally mature and robust platform for programming high-quality computer-generated images and interactive applications using 2D and 3D objects, color images, and shaders. OpenGL (R) Programming Guide, Ninth Edition, presents definitive, comprehensive information on OpenGL 4.5, 4.4, SPIR-V, OpenGL extensions, and the OpenGL Shading Language. It will serve you for as long as you write or maintain OpenGL code. This edition of the best-selling "Red Book" fully integrates shader techniques alongside classic, function-centric approaches, and contains extensive code examples that demonstrate modern techniques. Starting with the fundamentals, its wide-ranging coverage includes drawing, color, pixels, fragments, transformations, textures, framebuffers, light and shadow, and memory techniques for advanced rendering and nongraphical applications. It also offers discussions of all shader stages, including thorough explorations of tessellation, geometric, and compute shaders. New coverage in this edition includes Thorough coverage of OpenGL 4.5 Direct State Access (DSA), which overhauls the OpenGL programming model and how applications access objects Deeper discussions and more examples of shader functionality and GPU processing, reflecting industry trends to move functionality onto graphics processors Demonstrations and examples of key features based on community feedback and suggestions Updated appendixes covering the latest OpenGL libraries, related APIs, functions, variables, formats, and debugging and profiling techniques