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 volume presents high quality, state-of-the-art research ideas and results from theoretic, algorithmic and application viewpoints. It contains contributions by leading experts in the obsequious scientific and technological field of multimedia. The book specifically focuses on interaction with multimedia content with special emphasis on multimodal interfaces for accessing multimedia information. The book is designed for a professional audience composed of practitioners and researchers in industry. It is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science.

The advent of the digital era, the Internet, and the development of fast com puting devices that can access mass storage servers at high communication bandwidths have brought within our reach the world of ambient intelligent systems. These systems provide users with information, communication, and entertainment at any desired place and time. Since its introduction in 1998, the vision of Ambient Intelligence has attracted much attention within the re search community. Especially, the need for intelligence generated by smart al gorithms, which run on digital platforms that are integrated into consumer elec tronics devices, has strengthened the interest in Computational Intelligence. This newly developing research field, which can be positioned at the inter section of computer science, discrete mathematics, and artificial intelligence, contains a large variety of interesting topics including machine learning, con tent management, vision, speech, data mining, content augmentation, profiling, contextual awareness, feature extraction, resource management, security, and privacy."

Appendices 133 A Mathematical Results 133 A.1 Singularities of the Displacement Error Covariance Matrix 133 A.2 A Class of Matrices and their Eigenvalues 134 A.3 Inverse of the Power Spectral Density Matrix 134 A.4 Power Spectral Density of a Frame 136 Glossary 137 References 141 Index 159 Preface This book aims to capture recent advances in motion compensation for - ficient video compression. It investigates linearly combined motion comp- sated signals and generalizes the well known superposition for bidirectional prediction in B-pictures. The number of superimposed signals and the sel- tion of reference pictures will be important aspects of the discussion. The application oriented part of the book employs this concept to the well known ITU-T Recommendation H.263 and continues with the improvements by superimposed motion-compensated signals for the emerging ITU-T R- ommendation H.264 and ISO/IEC MPEG-4 (Part 10). In addition, it discusses a new approach for wavelet-based video coding. This technology is currently investigated by MPEG to develop a new video compression standard for the mid-term future.

MPEG-4 is the multimedia standard for combining interactivity, natural and synthetic digital video, audio and computer-graphics. Typical applications are: internet, video conferencing, mobile videophones, multimedia cooperative work, teleteaching and games. With MPEG-4 the next step from block-based video (ISO/IEC MPEG-1, MPEG-2, CCITT H.261, ITU-T H.263) to arbitrarily-shaped visual objects is taken. This significant step demands a new methodology for system analysis and design to meet the considerably higher flexibility of MPEG-4. Motion estimation is a central part of MPEG-1/2/4 and H.261/H.263 video compression standards and has attracted much attention in research and industry, for the following reasons: it is computationally the most demanding algorithm of a video encoder (about 60-80% of the total computation time), it has a high impact on the visual quality of a video encoder, and it is not standardized, thus being open to competition. Algorithms, Complexity Analysis, and VLSI Architectures for MPEG-4 Motion Estimation covers in detail every single step in the design of a MPEG-1/2/4 or H.261/H.263 compliant video encoder: Fast motion estimation algorithms Complexity analysis tools Detailed complexity analysis of a software implementation of MPEG-4 video Complexity and visual quality analysis of fast motion estimation algorithms within MPEG-4 Design space on motion estimation VLSI architectures Detailed VLSI design examples of (1) a high throughput and (2) a low-power MPEG-4 motion estimator. Algorithms, Complexity Analysis and VLSI Architectures for MPEG-4 Motion Estimation is an important introduction to numerous algorithmic, architectural and system design aspects of the multimedia standard MPEG-4. As such, all researchers, students and practitioners working in image processing, video coding or system and VLSI design will find this book of interest.

Company network administrators are compelled today to aggressively pursue a robust network security regime. Network Security Policies and Procedures gives the reader a strong, multi-disciplinary understanding of how to pursue this goal.

This professional volume introduces the technical issues surrounding security as well as how security policies are formulated at the executive level and communicated throughout the organization. Readers will gain a better understanding of how their colleagues on "the other side of the fence" view an organization s security and will thus be better equipped to act in a way that forwards an organization s goals.

Network Security Policies and Procedures is intended for both technical and management professionals interested in learning how security manifests itself throughout all levels of an organization. This book is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science and electrical engineering."

A large number of information systems use many different individual schemas to represent data. Semantically linking these schemas is a necessary precondition to establish interoperability between agents and services. Consequently, ontology alignment and mapping for data integration has become central to building a world-wide semantic web.

Ontology Alignment: Bridging the Semantic Gap introduces novel methods and approaches for semantic integration. In addition to developing new methods for ontology alignment, the author provides extensive explanations of up-to-date case studies. The topic of this book, coupled with the application-focused methodology, will appeal to professionals from a number of different domains.

Designed for practitioners and researchers in industry, Ontology Alignment: Bridging the Semantic Web Gap is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science and electrical engineering.

We welcome you to the First International Conference on Arts and Technology (ArtsIT 2009), hosted by CSIE of the National Ilan University and co-organized by the National Science Council, ICST, College of EECS at National Ilan University, Software Simulation Society in Taiwan, ISAC, TCA, NCHC, CREATE-NET, and Institute for Information Industry. ArtsIT2009 was held in Yilan, Taiwan, during September 24-25, 2009. The conference comprised the following themes: * New Media Technologies (Evolutionary systems that create arts or display art works, such as tracking sensors, wearable computers, mixed reality, etc. ) * Software Art (Image processing or computer graphics techniques that create arts, including algorithmic art, mathematic art, advanced modeling and rend- ing, etc. ) * Animation Techniques (2D or 3D computer animations, AI-based animations, etc. ) * Multimedia (Integration of different media, such as virtual reality systems, audio, performing arts, etc. ) * Interactive Methods (Vision-based tracking and recognition, interactive art, etc. ) The conference program started with an opening ceremony, followed by three keynote speeches and four technical sessions distributed over a period of two days. Two poster sessions, one hour each, were scheduled before the afternoon oral sessions. An Int- active Arts Exhibition was held in conjunction with ArtsIT 2009. Twelve well-known digital arts teams from Taiwan exhibited 15 artworks in this event, including 10 int- active installation arts, 4 video arts, and 1 digital print. The conference received around 50 submissions from 15 different countries.

With the advances of the digital information revolution and the societal changes they have prompted, it has become critical to facilitate secure management of content usage and delivery across communication networks. Data hiding and digital watermarking are promising new technologies for multimedia information protection and rights management. Multimedia Data Hiding addresses the theory, methods, and design of multimedia data hiding and its application to multimedia rights management, information security, and communication. It offers theoretical and practical aspects, and both design and attack problems. Applications discussed include: annotation, tamper detection, copy/access control, fingerprinting, and ownership protection. Countermeasures for attacks on data hiding are discussed, and a chapter assesses attack problems on digital music protection under a unique competitive environment. Topics and features: * Comprehensive and practical coverage of data hiding for various media types, including binary image, grayscale and color images and video, and audio * Provides unique analysis of problems and solutions, such as data hiding in binary signature and generic binary documents, block concealment attacks, and attacks on audio watermarking * Authoritative discussion and analysis of data hiding and effective countermeasures, supported by concrete application examples * Accessible, well-organized progression from the fundamentals to specific approaches to various data-hiding problems This work offers a state-of-the-art presentation covering theoretical, algorithmic, and design topics for digital content/data security protection, and rights management. It is an essential resource for multimedia security researchers and professionals in electrical engineering, computer science, IT, and digital rights management.

"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.

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.

MARTENS Bob and BROWN Andre Co-conference Chairs, CAAD Futures 2005 Computer Aided Architectural Design is a particularly dynamic field that is developing through the actions of architects, software developers, researchers, technologists, users, and society alike. CAAD tools in the architectural office are no longer prominent outsiders, but have become ubiquitous tools for all professionals in the design disciplines. At the same time, techniques and tools from other fields and uses, are entering the field of architectural design. This is exemplified by the tendency to speak of Information and Communication Technology as a field in which CAAD is embedded. Exciting new combinations are possible for those, who are firmly grounded in an understanding of architectural design and who have a clear vision of the potential use of ICT. CAAD Futures 2005 called for innovative and original papers in the field of Computer Aided Architectural Design, that present rigorous, high-quality research and development work. Papers should point towards the future, but be based on a thorough understanding of the past and present.

Multimedia Applications discusses the basic characteristics of multimedia document handling, programming, security, human computer interfaces, and multimedia application services. The overall goal of the book is to provide a broad understanding of multimedia systems and applications in an integrated manner: a multimedia application and its user interface must be developed in an integrated fashion with underlying multimedia middleware, operating systems, networks, security, and multimedia devices.

Fundamental information and properties of hypermedia document handling, multimedia security and various aspects of multimedia applications are presented, especially about document handling and their standards, programming of multimedia applications, design of multimedia information at human computer interfaces, multimedia security challenges such as encryption and watermarking, multimedia in education, as well as multimedia applications to assist preparation, processing and application of multimedia content.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Advances in Communication, Network, and Computing, CNC 2011, held in Bangalore, India, in March 2011. The 41 revised full papers, presented together with 50 short papers and 39 poster papers, were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers feature current research in the field of Information Technology, Networks, Computational Engineering, Computer and Telecommunication Technology, ranging from theoretical and methodological issues to advanced applications.

Thisbook presentsrecentadvancesinthedomainofthe3Dphysiologicalhuman that werepresentedlastDecember at the Workshopon 3D PhysiologicalHuman 2009 that was held in Zermatt, Switzerland. This workshop was funded by the "Third Cycle in Computer Science of Western Switzerland" named CUSO, the European project Focus K3D (ICT-2007-214993), the European Marie Curie project 3D Anatomical Human (MRTN-CT-2006-035763) and the European Network of Excellence InterMedia (NoE-IST-2006-038419). 3D physiological human research is a very active ?eld supported by several scienti?c projects. Many of them are funded by the European Union, such as the 3D Anatomical Human project and those present in the seventh framework programme "Virtual Physiological Human"(FP7-ICT-2007-2). One of the main objectivesof the researchon 3D physiologicalhuman is to create patient-speci?c computer models for personalized healthcare.These models are used to simulate and hence better understand the human physiology and pathology.There is also a synergy in this research in the way medical information is distributed: to have any model available anytime, anywhere on any mobile equipment. A collection of scienti?c articles was proposed to highlight the necessity to exchange and disseminate novel ideas and techniques from a wide range of d- ciplines (computer graphics, biomechanics, knowledge representation, human- machine interface, mobile computing, etc. ) associated with medical imaging, medical simulation, computer-assisted surgery and 3D semantics. The emphasis wason technicalnoveltyalongwith currentandfuture applications for modeling and simulating the anatomical structures and functions of the human body.

TheIMC2009programconsistedofthreeinvitedtalksfrominternational- perts, four tutorials on fundamental techniques related to the conference topics, nine regular paper sessions, and a short paper / poster session. We received close to 50 submissions from 15 countries world-wide. Based on the ano- mous reviews provided by members of the international Program Committee, the Steering Committee recommended accepting 50% of the contributions as regular papers and another 15% as short papers with poster presentation. To our regret there were a few interesting papers that we had to reject. However, the reviewing results showed a high quality as well as an interesting variety of submissions. We would like to thank all authors for carefully preparing the results of their worksubmitted to IMC 2009,thus enabling an interesting and high-quality c- ferenceprogram.Moreover,wearedeeplygratefultoallmembersoftheProgram and Steering Committees for their e?orts in quickly and thoroughly evaluating the papers. Finally, our special thanks go to the organizers Ulrike Lucke and Daniel Versick for their great work.They handled all the organizationaltasks as well as the communications, the electronic submission, reviewing, and publi- tion procedure in an e? cient and timely manner.

Biometrics is a rapidly evolving field with applications ranging from accessing one 's computer to gaining entry into a country. The deployment of large-scale biometric systems in both commercial and government applications has increased public awareness of this technology. Recent years have seen significant growth in biometric research resulting in the development of innovative sensors, new algorithms, enhanced test methodologies and novel applications. This book addresses this void by inviting some of the prominent researchers in Biometrics to contribute chapters describing the fundamentals as well as the latest innovations in their respective areas of expertise.

Fuzzy Database Modeling with XML aims to provide a single record of current research and practical applications in the fuzzy databases. This volume is the outgrowth of research the author has conducted in recent years. Fuzzy Database Modeling with XML introduces state-of-the-art information to the database research, while at the same time serving the information technology professional faced with a non-traditional application that defeats conventional approaches.

The research on fuzzy conceptual models and fuzzy object-oriented databases is receiving increasing attention, in addition to fuzzy relational database models. With rapid advances in network and internet techniques as well, the databases have been applied under the environment of distributed information systems. It is essential in this case to integrate multiple fuzzy database systems. Since databases are commonly employed to store and manipulate XML data, additional requirements are necessary to model fuzzy information with XML. Secondly, this book maps fuzzy XML model to the fuzzy databases. Very few efforts at investigating these issues have thus far occurred.

Fuzzy Database Modeling with XML is designed for a professional audience of researchers and practitioners in industry. This book is also suitable for graduate-level students in computer science.

With the daily addition of million documents and new users, there is no doubt that the World Wide Web (WWW or Web shortly) is still expanding its global information infrastructure. Thanks to low-cost wireless technology, the Web is no more limited to homes or offices, but it is simply everywhere. The Web is so large and growing so rapidly that the 40 million page "WebBase" repository of Inktomi corresponds to only about 4% of the estimated size of the publicly indexable Web as of January 2000 and there is every reason to believe these numbers will all swell significantly in the next few years. This unrestrainable explosion is not bereft of troubles and drawbacks, especially for inexpert users. Probably the most critical problem is the effectiveness of Web search engines: though the Web is rich in providing numerous services, the primary use of the Internet falls in emails and information retrieval activities. Focusing in this latter, any user has felt the frustrating experience to see as result of a search query overwhelming numbers of pages that satisfy the query but that are irrelevant to the user.

Images and video play a crucial role in visual information systems and multimedia. There is an extraordinary number of applications of such systems in entertainment, business, art, engineering, and science. Such applications often involved large image and video collections, and therefore, searching for images and video in large collections is becoming an important operation. Because of the size of such databases, efficiency is crucial. We strongly believe that image and video retrieval need an integrated approach from fields such as image processing, shape processing, perception, database indexing, visualization, and querying, etc. This book contains a selection of results that was presented at the Dagstuhl Seminar on Content-Based Image and Video Retrieval, in December 1999. The purpose of this seminar was to bring together people from the various fields, in order to promote information exchange and interaction among researchers who are interested in various aspects of accessing the content of image and video data. The book provides an overview of the state of the art in content-based image and video retrieval. The topics covered by the chapters are integrated system aspects, as well as techniques from image processing, computer vision, multimedia, databases, graphics, signal processing, and information theory. The book will be of interest to researchers and professionals in the fields of multimedia, visual information (database) systems, computer vision, and information retrieval.

Multimedia Content Analysis: Theory and Applications covers the latest in multimedia content analysis and applications based on such analysis. As research has progressed, it has become clear that this field has to appeal to other disciplines such as psycho-physics, media production, etc. This book consists of invited chapters that cover the entire range of the field. Some of the topics covered include low-level audio-visual analysis based retrieval and indexing techniques, the TRECVID effort, video browsing interfaces, content creation and content analysis, and multimedia analysis-based applications, among others. The chapters are written by leading researchers in the multimedia field.

This book is based on contributions to the Seventh European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication that was held at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden, in July of 1999 under the auspices of the European Language and Speech Network (ELSNET). The topic of the summer school was "Multimodality in Language and Speech Systems" (MiLaSS). The issue of multimodality in interpersonal, face-to-face communication has been an important research topic for a number of years. With the increasing sophistication of computer-based interactive systems using language and speech, the topic of multimodal interaction has received renewed interest both in terms of human-human interaction and human-machine interaction. Nine lecturers contri buted to the summer school with courses on specialized topics ranging from the technology and science of creating talking faces to human-human communication, which is mediated by computer for the handicapped. Eight of the nine lecturers are represented in this book. The summer school attracted more than 60 participants from Europe, Asia and North America representing not only graduate students but also senior researchers from both academia and industry."

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 analyzing image sequences, or video Video understanding deals with understanding of video understanding. sequences, e.g., recognition of gestures, activities, facial 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 obvi ous overlap with computer vision. The main goal of computer graphics is to generate and animate realistic looking images, and videos. Re searchers in computer graphics are increasingly employing techniques from computer vision to generate the synthetic imagery. A good exam pIe of this is image-based rendering and modeling techniques, in which geometry, appearance, and lighting is derived from real images using computer vision techniques. Here the shift is from synthesis to analy sis followed by synthesis. Image processing has always overlapped with computer vision because they both inherently work directly with images."

This book is the first in aseries on novellow power design architectures, methods and design practices. It results from of a large European project started in 1997, whose goal is to promote the further development and the faster and wider industrial use of advanced design methods for reducing the power consumption of electronic systems. Low power design became crucial with the wide spread of portable information and cornrnunication terminals, where a small battery has to last for a long period. High performance electronics, in addition, suffers from a permanent increase of the dissipated power per square millimetre of silicon, due to the increasing eIock-rates, which causes cooling and reliability problems or otherwise limits the performance. The European Union's Information Technologies Programme 'Esprit' did there fore launch a 'Pilot action for Low Power Design', wh ich eventually grew to 19 R&D projects and one coordination project, with an overall budget of 14 million Euro. It is meanwhile known as European Low Power Initiative for Electronic System Design (ESD-LPD) and will be completed by the end of 2001. It involves 30 major Euro pean companies and 20 well-known institutes. The R&D projects aims to develop or demonstrate new design methods for power reduction, while the coordination project takes care that the methods, experiences and results are properly documented and pub licised."

Intelligent Multimedia Multi-Agent Systems focuses on building intelligent successful systems. The book adopts a human-centered approach and considers various pragmatic issues and problems in areas like intelligent systems, software engineering, multimedia databases, electronic commerce, data mining, enterprise modeling and human-computer interaction for developing a human-centered virtual machine. The authors describe an ontology of the human-centered virtual machine which includes four components: activity-centered analysis component, problem solving adapter component, transformation agent component, and multimedia based interpretation component. These four components capture the external and internal planes of the system development spectrum. They integrate the physical, social and organizational reality on the external plane with stakeholder goals, tasks and incentives, and organization culture on the internal plane. The human-centered virtual machine and its four components are used for developing intelligent multimedia multi-agent systems in areas like medical decision support and health informatics, medical image retrieval, e-commerce, face detection and annotation, internet games and sales recruitment. The applications in these areas help to expound various aspects of the human-centered virtual machine including, human-centered domain modeling, distributed intelligence and communication, perceptual and cognitive task modeling, component based software development, and multimedia based data modeling. Further, the applications described in the book employ various intelligent technologies like neural networks, fuzzy logic and knowledge based systems, software engineering artifacts like agents and objects, internet technologies like XML and multimedia artifacts like image, audio, video and text.