The research in content-based indexing and retrieval of visual information such as images and video has become one of the most populated directions in the vast area of information technologies. Social networks such as YouTube, Facebook, FileMobile, and DailyMotion host and supply facilities for accessing a tremendous amount of professional and user generated data. The areas of societal activity, such as, video protection and security, also generate thousands and thousands of terabytes of visual content. This book presents the most recent results and important trends in visual information indexing and retrieval. It is intended for young researchers, as well as, professionals looking for an algorithmic solution to a problem.

Both pragmatic and motivational, this book addresses what it means to have a successful long-term career in the arts, taking stock of the current landscape of the art world, introducing new venues in the field, reflecting on issues of social media and exhibition, and ultimately encouraging artists to take control of their professional lives. Weaving conversations from a range of internationally based artists who have negotiated alternative paths to success, lauded artist and teacher Stacy Miller provides a practical, lively reflection on what it takes to be an artist in our new global landscape. This book covers practical needs, different approaches, and philosophical ways of creating a life and career in the arts. It lays out conventional and nonconventional means to representation, describes being an entrepreneur versus funding independent creative projects, and examines social media for the potential powerhouse it is. Most importantly, it gives artists a way to think about being a professional and the different paths to a successful career in the arts. Perfect for emerging, mid-career, and experienced artists, this book encourages readers to redefine personal success and to act locally, nationally, and internationally in an expanding art world.

This book presents the state of the art in the areas of ontology evolution and knowledge-driven multimedia information extraction, placing an emphasis on how the two can be combined to bridge the semantic gap. This was also the goal of the EC-sponsored BOEMIE (Bootstrapping Ontology Evolution with Multimedia Information Extraction) project, to which the authors of this book have all contributed. The book addresses researchers and practitioners in the field of computer science and more specifically in knowledge representation and management, ontology evolution, and information extraction from multimedia data. It may also constitute an excellent guide to students attending courses within a computer science study program, addressing information processing and extraction from any type of media (text, images, and video). Among other things, the book gives concrete examples of how several of the methods discussed can be applied to athletics (track and field) events.

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.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Internationalization, Design and Global Development, IDGD 2011, held in Orlando, FL, USA, in July 2011 in the framework of the 14th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2011. The 71 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of internationalization, design and global development and address the following major topics: Cultural and cross-cultural design, culture and usability, design, emotion, trust and aesthetics, cultural issues in business and industry, culture, communication and society.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Web-Based Learning, ICWL 2010, held in Shanghai, China, in December 2010. The 36 revised full papers and 8 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 192 submissions. They deal with topics such as e-learning platforms and tools, technology enhanced learning, Web-based learning for oriental languages, mobile/situated e-learning, learning resource deployment, organization and management, design, model and framework of e-learning systems, e-learning metadata and standards, collaborative learning and game-based learning, as well as practice and experience sharing, and pedagogical issues.

This two-volume set (CCIS 150 and CCIS 151) constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Multimedia Applications, UCMA 2011, held in Daejeon, Korea, in April 2011. The 86 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 570 submissions. Focusing on various aspects of advances in multimedia applications and ubiquitous computing with computational sciences, mathematics and information technology the papers present current research in the area of multimedia and ubiquitous environment including models and systems, new directions, novel applications associated with the utilization, and acceptance of ubiquitous computing devices and systems.

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.

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.

Multimedia Database Systems: Design and Implementation Strategies is a compendium of the state-of-the-art research and development work pertaining to the problems and issues in the design and development of multimedia database systems. The chapters in the book are developed from presentations given at previous meetings of the International Workshop on Multi-Media Data Base Management Systems (IW-MMDBMS), and address the following issues: development of adequate multimedia database models, design of multimedia database query and retrieval languages, design of indexing and organization techniques, development of efficient and reliable storage models, development of efficient and dependable retrieval and delivery strategies, and development of flexible, adaptive, and reliable presentation techniques.

Augmented and virtual reality are media innovations with specific characteristics. They create immersion in the user, as the user is immersed in the medium and its 360 Degrees environment. To successfully develop content and applications for AR and VR, psychological effects, the specifics of the 360 Degrees environment, the story, and the way the media is used must be aligned with the needs and experiences of the user. Content producers face novel challenges in content development, method selection, teamwork, and the overall production process of AR and VR experiences. The book introduces readers to the characteristics of immersive media and provides scientific evidence and practical tips to help them produce high-quality, user-centric content for immersive media. The scientifically derived success factors in the form of checklists are a guide and an ideal basis for standardizing the production process and further developing one's own projects.This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Medieninnovationen AR und VR by Elle Langer, published by Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.

Photoshop is the tool of the modern artist and provides everything you need to succeed as a designer in the popular and growing video games and movie industries. Featuring thorough guidance from the point of installing Photoshop to the creation of your very first concept, this reboot of the definitive beginner's guide to digital painting is sure to both educate and inspire. Photoshop is an expansive and daunting piece of software, but in-depth tutorials and insightful exercises will help even a complete novice build up the skills they need to bring their own imagination to life as digital concepts. This second edition of Beginner's Guide to Digital Painting in Photoshop is a complete resource for any artist wanting to start their adventure into the world of digital art.

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.

Details multimodal biometrics and its exceptional utility for increasingly reliable human recognition systems.

Reveals the substantial advantages of multimodal systems over conventional identification methods.

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.

The concept of content delivery (also known as content distribution) is be coming increasingly important due to rapidly growing demands for efficient distribution and fast access of information in the Internet. Content delivery is very broad and comprehensive in that the contents for distribution cover a wide range of types with significantly different characteristics and performance concerns, including HTML documents, images, multimedia streams, database tables, and dynamically generated contents. Moreover, to facilitate ubiqui tous information access, the network architectures and hardware devices also vary widely. They range from broadband wired/fixed networks to bandwid- constrained wireless/mobile networks, and from powerful workstations/PCs to personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cellular phones with limited processing and display capabilities. All these levels of diversity are introducing numerous challenges on content delivery technologies. It is desirable to deliver contents in their best quality based on the nature of the contents, network connections and client devices. This book aims at providing a snapshot of the state-of-the-art research and development activities on web content delivery and laying the foundations for future web applications. The book focuses on four main areas: (1) web con tent delivery; (2) dynamic web content; (3) streaming media delivery; and (4) ubiquitous web access. It consists of 17 chapters written by leading experts in the field. The book is designed for a professional audience including academic researchers and industrial practitioners who are interested in the most recent research and development activities on web content delivery."

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.

The main intention of this book is to give an impression of the state-of-the-art in system-level memory management (data transfer and storage) related issues for complex data-dominated real-time signal and data processing applications. The material is based on research at IMEC in this area in the period 1989- 1997. In order to deal with the stringent timing requirements and the data dominated characteristics of this domain, we have adopted a target architecture style and a systematic methodology to make the exploration and optimization of such systems feasible. Our approach is also very heavily application driven which is illustrated by several realistic demonstrators, partly used as red-thread examples in the book. Moreover, the book addresses only the steps above the traditional high-level synthesis (scheduling and allocation) or compilation (traditional or ILP oriented) tasks. The latter are mainly focussed on scalar or scalar stream operations and data where the internal structure of the complex data types is not exploited, in contrast to the approaches discussed here. The proposed methodologies are largely independent of the level of programmability in the data-path and controller so they are valuable for the realisation of both hardware and software systems. Our target domain consists of signal and data processing systems which deal with large amounts of data."

Hard real-time systems are very predictable, but not sufficiently flexible to adapt to dynamic situations. They are built under pessimistic assumptions to cope with worst-case scenarios, so they often waste resources. Soft real-time systems are built to reduce resource consumption, tolerate overloads and adapt to system changes. They are also more suited to novel applications of real-time technology, such as multimedia systems, monitoring apparatuses, telecommunication networks, mobile robotics, virtual reality, and interactive computer games. This unique monograph provides concrete methods for building flexible, predictable soft real-time systems, in order to optimize resources and reduce costs. It is an invaluable reference for developers, as well as researchers and students in Computer Science.

This textbook was inspired by an undergraduate elective course given on virtual organizations and technology. The instructor could not find a suitable text that covered both the organizational and technological aspects including examples based on today's industry. Other books were either too strategic or too technical for an audience of undergraduate business and technology students who were to use the book. But why was that the case? For the same reason that business and IT people in industry tended not to speak the same "language": indeed, the integration of technology into business strategy has been a recent occurrence, and traditional strategy issues have been decided too high in the organizational structure while technology was too detailed in tactical implementation. With the Internet and the advent of e-commerce, m-commerce, and c-commerce (and the other letters of the alphabet soon to follow), business and technology finally started to become closer, and the interest in technology as an enabler for strategic business decision-making evolved into a mainstream concept. How are we defining a virtual organization? Most definitions of the concept of virtual organizations start with stating that it is "a network between organisations or individuals . . . ". The Oxford Concise Dictionary defines 'virtual' as: "that is such/or practical purposes, though not in name or according to a strict definition. " An organization may be thought of as a number of individuals systematically united for some end or work.

Multimedia Encryption and Watermarking presents a comprehensive survey of contemporary multimedia encryption and watermarking techniques, which enable a secure exchange of multimedia intellectual property. Part I, Digital Rights Management (DRM) for Multimedia, introduces DRM concepts and models for multimedia content protection, and presents the key players. Part II, Multimedia Cryptography, provides an overview of modern cryptography, with the focus on modern image, video, speech, and audio encryption techniques. This book also provides an advanced concept of visual and audio sharing techniques. Part III, Digital Watermarking, introduces the concept of watermarking for multimedia, classifies watermarking applications, and evaluates various multimedia watermarking concepts and techniques, including digital watermarking techniques for binary images. Multimedia Encryption and Watermarking is designed for researchers and practitioners, as well as scientists and engineers who design and develop systems for the protection of digital multimedia content. This volume is also suitable as a textbook for graduate courses on multimedia security.

In many applications, e.g., bioinformatics, web access traces, system u- lization logs, etc., the data is naturally in the form of sequences. It has been of great interests to analyze the sequential data to find their inherent char- teristics. The sequential pattern is one of the most widely studied models to capture such characteristics. Examples of sequential patterns include but are not limited to protein sequence motifs and web page navigation traces. In this book, we focus on sequential pattern mining. To meet different needs of various applications, several models of sequential patterns have been proposed. We do not only study the mathematical definitions and application domains of these models, but also the algorithms on how to effectively and efficiently find these patterns. The objective of this book is to provide computer scientists and domain - perts such as life scientists with a set of tools in analyzing and understanding the nature of various sequences by : (1) identifying the specific model(s) of - quential patterns that are most suitable, and (2) providing an efficient algorithm for mining these patterns. Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION Data Mining is the process of extracting implicit knowledge and discovery of interesting characteristics and patterns that are not explicitly represented in the databases. The techniques can play an important role in understanding data and in capturing intrinsic relationships among data instances. Data mining has been an active research area in the past decade and has been proved to be very useful.

Information intermediation is the foundation stone of some of the most successful Internet companies, and is perhaps second only to the Internet Infrastructure companies. On the heels of information integration and interoperability, this book on information brokering discusses the next step in information interoperability and integration. The emerging Internet economy based on burgeoning B2B and B2C trading will soon demand semantics-based information intermediation for its feasibility and success. B2B ventures are involved in the rationalization' of new vertical markets and construction of domain specific product catalogs. This book provides approaches for re-use of existing vocabularies and domain ontologies as a basis for this rationalization and provides a framework based on inter-ontology interoperation. Infrastructural trade-offs that identify optimizations in performance and scalability of web sites will soon give way to information based trade-offs as alternate rationalization schemes come into play and the necessity of interoperating across these schemes is realized. Information Brokering Across Heterogeneous Digital Data's intended readers are researchers, software architects and CTOs, advanced product developers dealing with information intermediation issues in the context of e-commerce (B2B and B2C), information technology professionals in various vertical markets (e.g., geo-spatial information, medicine, auto), and all librarians interested in information brokering.

Digital Baseband Transmission and Recording provides an integral, in-depth and up-to-date overview of the signal processing techniques that are at the heart of digital baseband transmission and recording systems. The coverage ranges from fundamentals to applications in such areas as digital subscriber loops and magnetic and optical storage. Much of the material presented here has never before appeared in book form. The main features of Digital Baseband Transmission and Recording include: a survey of digital subscriber lines and digital magnetic and optical storage; a review of fundamental transmission and reception limits; an encyclopedic introduction to baseband modulation codes; development of a rich palette of equalization techniques; a coherent treatment of Viterbi detection and many near-optimum detection schemes; an overview of adaptive reception techniques that encompasses adaptive gain and slope control, adaptive detection, and novel forms of zero-forcing adaptation; an in-depth review of timing recovery and PLLs, with an extensive catalog of timing-recovery schemes. . Featuring around 450 figures, 200 examples, 350 problems and exercises, and 750 references, Digital Baseband Transmission and Recording is an essential reference source to engineers and researchers active in telecommunications and digital recording. It will also be useful for advanced courses in digital communications.

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."