Motion-Free Super-Resolution is a compilation of very recent work on various methods of generating super-resolution (SR) images from a set of low-resolution images. The current literature on this topic deals primarily with the use of motion cues for the purpose of generating SR images. These cues have, it is shown, their advantages and disadvantages. In contrast, this book shows that cues other than motion can also be used for the same purpose, and addresses both the merits and demerits of these new techniques.

Motion-Free Super-Resolution supersedes much of the lead author 's previous edited volume, "Super-Resolution Imaging," and includes an up-to-date account of the latest research efforts in this fast-moving field. This sequel also features a style of presentation closer to that of a textbook, with an emphasis on teaching and explanation rather than scholarly presentation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Web Engineering, ICWE 2009, held in San Sebastian, Spain in June 2009. The 22 revised full papers and 15 revised short papers presented together with 8 posters and 10 demonstration papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 90 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on accessibility and usability, component-based web engineering: portals and mashups, data and semantics, model-driven web engineering, navigation, process, planning and phases, quality, rich internet applications, search, testing, web services, SOA and REST, and web 2.0.

This volume emphasizes the applications and implications of the Geospatial Web and the role of contextual knowledge in shaping the emerging network society. There is a clear focus on applied geospatial aspects. The book has contributions from a very active research community. Containing chapters from renowned researchers and practitioners, this volume will be invaluable to all interested in this field.

For the first time, a comprehensive collection of the latest developments in scripting and representation languages for life-like characters. The text introduces toolkits for authoring animated characters which further supports the practicality and ease of use of this new interface technology. As life-like characters is a vibrant research area, various applications have been designed and implemented. The text covers the most successful and promising applications, ranging from product presentation and student training to knowledge integration and interactive gaming. It also discusses the key challenges in the area and provides design guidelines for employing life-like characters.

Welcome to the Proceedings of ICCHP 2010! We were proud to welcome participants from more than 40 countries from all over the world to this year's ICCHP. Since the late 1980s, it has been ICCHP's mission to support and reflect development in the field of "Assistive Technologies," eAccessibility and eInclusion. With a focus on scientific quality, ICCHP has become an important reference in our field. The 2010 conference and this collection of papers once again fulfilled this mission. The International Programme Committee, comprising 106 experts from all over the world, selected 147 full and 44 short papers out of 328 abstracts submitted to ICCHP. This acceptance ratio of about half of the submissions demonstrates our strict pursuit of scientific quality both of the programme and in particular of the proceedings in your hands. An impressive number of experts agreed to organize "Special Thematic Sessions" (STS) for ICCHP 2010. These STS help to bring the meeting into sharper focus in several key areas. In turn, this deeper level of focus helps to collate a state of the art and mainstream technical, social, cultural and political developments.

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 volume on virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) and gamification for cultural heritage offers an insightful introduction to the theories, development, recent applications and trends of the enabling technologies for mixed reality and gamified interaction in cultural heritage and creative industries in general. It has two main goals: serving as an introductory textbook to train beginning and experienced researchers in the field of interactive digital cultural heritage, and offering a novel platform for researchers in and across the culturally-related disciplines. To this end, it is divided into two sections following a pedagogical model developed by the focus group of the first EU Marie S. Curie Fellowship Initial Training Network on Digital Cultural Heritage (ITN-DCH): Section I describes recent advances in mixed reality enabling technologies, while section II presents the latest findings on interaction with 3D tangible and intangible digital cultural heritage. The sections include selected contributions from some of the most respected scholars, researchers and professionals in the fields of VR/AR, gamification, and digital heritage. This book is intended for all heritage professionals, researchers, lecturers and students who wish to explore the latest mixed reality and gamification technologies in the context of cultural heritage and creative industries. It pursues a pedagogic approach based on trainings, conferences, workshops and summer schools that the ITN-DCH fellows have been following in order to learn how to design next-generation virtual heritage applications, systems and services.

Die 16. GI/ITG-Fachtagung Kommunikation in Verteilten Systemen (KiVS 2009) befasst sich als wichtigstes deutschsprachiges Forum fur Forschung und Entwicklung auf den Gebieten Kommunikation und Verteilte Systeme mit einer grossen Vielfalt von innovativen und zukunftsorientierten Fragestellungen. Sie spannt dabei einen Bogen von allgegenwartigen verteilten Anwendungen uber Middleware-Konzepte und Protokolltechniken bis hin zu modernen Netztechniken mit ihren Mobilitats- und Sicherheitsfragen. Die KiVS dient der Standortbestimmung aktueller Entwicklungen, der Prasentation laufender Forschungsarbeiten und der Diskussion zukunftstrachtiger Ansatze fur die Kommunikation in Verteilten Systemen. "

Mobile Response 2008, the Second International Workshop on Mobile Infor- tion Technology for Emergency Response, aimed at a focussed exchange on how mobile information technology can be e?ectively used to the bene?t of em- gency response. The gap between the great potential bene?t that usable mobile IT could yield in the domain of emergency response and the speci?c design challenges for such technologies in this particularly unforgiving domain was the foundation of our decision to create a venue for researchers and practitioners from di?erent disciplines. During this year's workshopthe latest approachesand technical solutions in the area of mobile information technology for emergency response planning and execution were presented and demonstrated. We invited participation from research, industry and public rescue orga- zations to enable an in-depth discussion of the opportunities and drawbacks of new digital technologies for emergency response. The call for papers for the second Mobile Response workshop attracted over 25 submissions from 11 d- ferent countries, including international submissions from the USA, Brazil and Japan.AninternationalProgramCommitteewithexpertsonmobileinformation technology, emergency response and emergency response equipment selected 12 submissions for presentation during the workshop. The program was completed by two outstanding keynote presentations and one invited presentation on p- vailing topics of high interest to the scienti?c and practitioner communities.

These proceedings contain the papers presented at ECIR 2009, the 31st - ropean Conference on Information Retrieval. The conference was organized by the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT), in cooperation with the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the British Computer So- ety (BCS-IRSG) and was supported by the Special Interest Group on Infor- tion Retrieval (ACM SIGIR), the French Association of Information Retrieval (ARIA) and E-IRSG. It was held during April 6-9, 2007 in Toulouse, hosted by the Pierre Baudis congress center. ECIR 2009 con?rmed the growth trend of submissions, with 188 full-paper submissions. Many of these submissions came from outside Europe, and 25 countries were represented in the ?nal ECIR 2009 program, re?ecting the international po- larityandreputationoftheconferenceseries.Furthermorethetraditionalstrong focus on students was well preserved, with their participation being great. All submitted papers were reviewed by at least three members of the int- national Program Committee. Out of the 188 papers 42 were selected as full research papers and a further 18 were accepted as short research papers. Short papers were given 8 pages in the proceedings (instead of 12). Out of these 60 selected papers, 30 have a student as the primary author. The accepted papers themselves come from a mixture of universities, researchinstitutes and comm- cial organizations. There was also a separate call for posters. Each of the 60 poster submissions wasreviewedbythreeProgramCommitteemembers, aswithpapersubmissions. Twenty-?ve posters were accepted for presentation. Takentogether, thesepaperscoverthestateoftheartininformationretrieval, including topicssuchasretrievalmodels, evaluationandWeb search, andeme- ing topics such as learning to rank, expert search and opinion detect

As future generation information technology (FGIT) becomes specialized and fr- mented, it is easy to lose sight that many topics in FGIT have common threads and, because of this, advances in one discipline may be transmitted to others. Presentation of recent results obtained in different disciplines encourages this interchange for the advancement of FGIT as a whole. Of particular interest are hybrid solutions that c- bine ideas taken from multiple disciplines in order to achieve something more signi- cant than the sum of the individual parts. Through such hybrid philosophy, a new principle can be discovered, which has the propensity to propagate throughout mul- faceted disciplines. FGIT 2009 was the first mega-conference that attempted to follow the above idea of hybridization in FGIT in a form of multiple events related to particular disciplines of IT, conducted by separate scientific committees, but coordinated in order to expose the most important contributions. It included the following international conferences: Advanced Software Engineering and Its Applications (ASEA), Bio-Science and Bio-Technology (BSBT), Control and Automation (CA), Database Theory and Application (DTA), D- aster Recovery and Business Continuity (DRBC; published independently), Future G- eration Communication and Networking (FGCN) that was combined with Advanced Communication and Networking (ACN), Grid and Distributed Computing (GDC), M- timedia, Computer Graphics and Broadcasting (MulGraB), Security Technology (SecTech), Signal Processing, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition (SIP), and- and e-Service, Science and Technology (UNESST).

Direct3D 11 offers such a wealth of capabilities that users can sometimes get lost in the details of specific APIs and their implementation. While there is a great deal of low-level information available about how each API function should be used, there is little documentation that shows how best to leverage these capabilities. Written by active members of the Direct3D community, Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11 provides a deep understanding of both the high and low level concepts related to using Direct3D 11. The first part of the book presents a conceptual introduction to Direct3D 11, including an overview of the Direct3D 11 rendering and computation pipelines and how they map to the underlying hardware. It also provides a detailed look at all of the major components of the library, covering resources, pipeline details, and multithreaded rendering. Building upon this material, the second part of the text includes detailed examples of how to use Direct3D 11 in common rendering scenarios. The authors describe sample algorithms in-depth and discuss how the features of Direct3D 11 can be used to your advantage. All of the source code from the book is accessible on an actively maintained open source rendering framework. The sample applications and the framework itself can be downloaded from http://hieroglyph3.codeplex.com By analyzing when to use various tools and the tradeoffs between different implementations, this book helps you understand the best way to accomplish a given task and thereby fully leverage the potential capabilities of Direct3D 11. Key Features Presents the high level concepts used to design algorithms Describes the nuts and bolts of how to implement the algorithms Explains each of the major components of the Direct3D 11 library Shows how Direct3D 11 can be used in a variety of real-world situations Provides source code and sample programs on a supplementary website

Engineering Interactive Systems 2007 is an IFIP working conference that brings together researchers and practitioners interested in strengthening the scientific foun- tions of user interface design, examining the relationship between software engine- ing (SE) and human-computer interaction (HCI) and on how user-centerd design (UCD) could be strengthened as an essential part of the software engineering process. Engineering Interactive Systems 2007 was created by merging three conferences: * HCSE 2007 - Human-Centerd Software Engineering held for the first time. The HCSE Working Conference is a multidisciplinary conference entirely dedicated to advancing the basic science and theory of human-centerd software systems engineering. It is organized by IFIP WG 13.2 on Methodologies for User-Centerd Systems Design. * EHCI 2007 - Engineering Human Computer Interaction was held for the tenth time. EHCI aims to investigate the nature, concepts, and construction of user interfaces for software systems. It is organized by IFIP WG 13.4/2.7 on User Interface Engineering. * DSV-IS 2007 - Design, Specification and Verification of Interactive Systems was held for the 13th time. DSV-IS provides a forum where researchers wo- ing on model-based techniques and tools for the design and development of - teractive systems can come together with practitioners and with those working on HCI models and theories.

The Second Workshop of Blended Learning (WBL 2008), as part of the 7th Inter- tional Conference on Web-Based Learning (ICWL 2008), was held in Zhejiang N- mal University, Jinhua, Zhejiang, China during August 20-22, 2008. WBL 2008 provided an international forum for the dissemination of original results in the design, implementation, and evaluation of blended learning systems and related areas. In particular, the aim of WBL 2008 was to bring together researchers from academia as well as commercial developers from industry to explore ideas, exchange and share experiences, and further build the blended learning research network. The inspirations and new ideas were expected to emerge from intensive discussions during formal sessions and social activities. The main focus of WBL 2008 was on the most critical areas of blended learning, namely, 'e-Learning Platforms and Tools, ' 'Design, Model and Framework of e- Learning Systems, ' 'Practice and Experience Sharing, ' and 'Pedagogical Issues.' In total, the workshop selected 17 papers from authors of different countries for presen- tion and publication, a task which was not easy due to the high quality of the subm- ted papers. Using stringent selection criteria, submissions were rigorously reviewed based on their originality, significance, relevance, and clarity of presentation by an international Program Committee from Germany, Spain, UK, Italy, Ireland, Romania, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, and Macao.

The 7th International Conference on Entertainment Computing, under the auspices of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), was held September 25-27, 2008 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Based on the very successful first international workshop (IWEC 2002) and the following international conferences (ICEC 2003 through ICEC 2007), ICEC 2008 was an international forum for the exchange of experience and knowledge amongst researchers and developers in the field of entertainment computing. ICEC is the longest established and most prestigious conference in the field of entertainment computing. The conference provides an interdisciplinary forum for advanced research in entertainment computing, broadly defined. ICEC is truly international with leading experts from 14 nations representing academia and industry attending this year's conference. These leaders presented their newest research, insights, products and demonstrations. Although the field of entertainment computing is thought of as new, in fact modern digital computer games go back over 45 years with games such as Spacewar developed in 1961. This is not to say entertainment computing is limited to computer games. As evidenced by papers in this volume, entertainment computing covers virtually every aspect of today's recreational diversions.

WearepleasedtowelcomeyoutotheproceedingsoftheThirdInternationalC- ference onSemantic andDigital Media Technologiesheld inKoblenz, Germany. The SAMT agenda brings together researchers at extreme ends of the - mantic multimedia spectrum. At one end, the Semantic Web and its supporting technologies are becoming established in both the open data environment and within specialist domains, such as corporate intranet search, e-Science (parti- larly life sciences), and cultural heritage. To facilitate the world-wide sharing of media, W3C is developing standard ways of denoting fragments of audio/visual content and of specifying and associating semantics with these. At the other end of the spectrum, media analysis tools continue to grow in sophistication, identifying features that can then be associated with explicit semantics, be they expressed formally or informally, using proprietary formats or open standards. Recent progress at these two fronts of the SAMT spectrum means that research spanningthesemanticgapisnowofvitalimportancetofeedtherealapplications that are emerging. This conference also represents a step towards bridging the gap between the research cultures and their respective approaches at both ends of the spectrum. The papers selected show that SAMT is able to attract researchers from media analysis, who see the bene?ts that more explicit semantics can provide, as well as researchers from knowledge engineering who realize that, while a picture can be expressed as a thousand concepts, a million morearewaiting to be extracted

Smartgraphicsarepervasivein ourlives nowadays.Thewaysartistsand desi- ersproduceimagesthate?ectivelysupporthumancognitionandcommunication are continuously changing and evolving as they incorporate novel methods p- vided by the advances in science and technology. As a counterpart, the radically new visions in most art forms have stimulated scientists to breath-taking levels of achievement. This symbiotic relationship between art and science (and technology) is one of the foundations of the technological culture of contemporary society and is especiallyevidentinthecreationofsmartgraphics.Suchaprocessrestsonadeep understanding of the fundamentals of perception and cognition as they relate to interaction and communication technologies, together with arti?cial intelligence andcomputergraphicstechniques, toautomatereasoningandenhancecognition. The International Symposium on Smart Graphics 2009 was held from May 28-30 in Salamanca, Spain. With this edition we celebrated our tenth anniv- sary: a successful series of inspiring and exciting meetings originating in 2000 as an American Association for Arti?cial Intelligence Spring Symposium. This year we proposed a speci?c emphasis on visual analytics as well as all kinds of transversalresearchthat harnesses the power of humans and technol- icalartifacts in order to convey, understandanddeal with complex scienti?c and socialprocesses.Wewereluckyto haveDanielKeim andJ] ornKohlhammer, two internationally renowned experts on this area of research, as invited speakers

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed joint post-workshop proceedings of three international workshops held in conjunction with the 10th Asia-Pacific Web Conference, APWeb 2008, in Shenyang, China, in April 2008 (see LNCS 4976).

The 15 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited papers and 4 keynote lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. Topics addressed by the workshops are business intelligence and data mining (BIDM 2008), health data management (IWHDM 2008), and data engineering and Web technology research (DeWeb 2008). The papers focus on issues such as Web searching, Web services, database, data mining, bioinformatics, and business intelligence.

The use of computing technology for entertainment purposes is not a recent p- nomenon. Video game consoles, home computers and other entertainment media have been used widely for more than three decades, and people of all ages are spe- ing an increasing amount of time and money on these technologies. More recent is the rise of a vibrant research community focusing on gaming and entertainment applications. Driven by the growth and the coming of age of the g- ing industry, and by its increasing recognition in the media and the minds of the broader public, the study of computer games, game development and experiences is attracting the interest of researchers from very diverse fields: social sciences, comp- ing, electrical engineering, design, etc. Research of this kind looks to extend the boundaries of gaming technologies. In a relentless drive for innovation, it looks to create and understand an ever increasing range of experiences, and examine how games can provide value for educational, therapeutic and other 'serious' purposes. These themes were reflected in the call for participation and eventually the papers accepted for presentation. The Fun n' Games conference was the second event of a bi-annual series of c- ferences. The first event of the series was held in Preston in 2006 organized by the University of Central Lancashire. Following the success of this event it was decided to run a follow up.

The InternationalConferenceonWeb InformationSystems Engineering(WISE) providesanannualforumforexploringresearch, development, novelapplications and industrial innovations in the area of Web Information Systems. The 9th edition ofthis conference(WISE 2008)washeld in Auckland, NewZealandfrom September 1 to 3, 2008. This volume contains the papers that were presented during the WISE 2008 workshops. We commend these papers to you and hope you ?nd them useful. A major objective of the WISE conferences is to identify new issues and directions in Web engineering, to share experiences, to host discussions, and to initiate future workandcollaborations. Associatedworkshopsdevotedto eme- ing or specialist topics are an important part of the WISE conferences helping to make them an inspiring experience for all participants. Three workshopswere organized and held in conjunction with the WISE 2008 main conference: - The First International Workshop on Web Information Systems Engine- ing for Electronic Businesses and Governments (E-BAG 2008), chaired by Sebastian Link (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand), Hui Ma (VictoriaUniversityofWellington, NewZealand), andJianYang(Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia); - The Second International Workshop on Web Usability and Accessibility (IWWUA 2008), chaired by Silvia Abrahao (Valencia University of Techn- ogy, Spain), Cristina Cachero(University ofAlicante, Spain), and Maristella Matera (Politecnico di Milano, Italy); and - The First International Workshop on Mashups, Enterprise Mashups and LightweightCompositionontheWeb(MEM&LCW2008), chairedbyMarek Kowalkiewicz(SAP ResearchBrisbane, Australia), Dominik Flejter (Poznan University of Economics, Poland), and Tomasz Kaczmarek (Poznan Univ- sity of Economics, Poland). Following calls for papers, we received 40 submissions

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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th IFIP/IEEE International Conference on Management of Multimedia and Mobile Networks and Services, MMNS 2009, held in Venice, Italy, in October 2009, as part of the 5th International Week on Management of Networks and Services, Manweek 2009.

The 13 revised full papers presented together with 5 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 37 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on multimedia networks and systems management, multimedia quality, VoIP and vocal applications, and peer-to-peer multimedia networks.

ThepromiseoftheSemanticWeb, atits most expansive, is to allow knowledge to be freely accessed and exchanged by software. It is now recognized that if the SemanticWebis to containdeepknowledge, theneedfornewrepresentationand reasoning techniques is going to be critical. These techniques need to ?nd the righttrade-o?betweenexpressiveness, scalabilityandrobustnesstodealwiththe inherently incomplete, contradictory and uncertain nature of knowledge on the Web. The International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems (RR) was founded to address these needs and has grown into a major international forum in this area. The third RR conference was held during October 25-26, 2009 in Chantilly, Virginia, co-located with the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009). This year 41 papers were submitted from authors in 21 countries. The P- gram Committee performed outstandingly to ensure that each paper submitted to RR 2009 was thoroughly reviewed by at least three referees in a short - riod of time. The resulting conference presented papers of high quality on many of the key issues for reasoning on the Semantic Web. RR 2009 was fortunate to have two distinguished invited speakers. Robert Kowalski, in his talk "- tegrating Logic Programming and Production Systems with Abductive Logic Programming Agents" addressed some of the fundamental considerations - hind reasoning about evolving systems. Benjamin Grossof's talk "SILK: Higher Level Rules with Defaults and Semantic Scalability" described the design of a major next-generation rule system. The invited tutorial "Uncertainty Reas- ing for the Semantic Web" by Thomas Lukasiewicz provided perspectives on a central issue in this area.

The European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2008) was the third event of a series that started in 2006. The two first editions were organized by Pro- Learn (http://www.prolearn-project.org/), a European Network of Excellence. In 2008, several members of Kaleidoscope, the other European Network of Excellence (http://www.noe-kaleidoscope.org/pub/), joined as co-chair, committee members, reviewers and authors. These two networks are no longer funded, but our aim was to turn EC-TEL into a sustainable series of high-quality events and thereby to contribute to the scientific landscape of technology-enhanced learning. A new network, named STELLAR, will be launched in 2009, with members from both existing networks as well as new members and will support the future editions of this conference. The scope of EC-TEL 2008 covered the different fields of learning technologies: e- cation, psychology, computer science. The contributions in this volume address the - sign of innovative environments, computational models and architectures, results of empirical studies on socio-cognitive processes, field studies regarding the use of te- nologies in context, collaborative processes, pedagogical scenarios, reusable learning objects and emerging objects, groups and communities, learning networks, interaction analysis, metadata, personalization, collaboration scripts, learning adaptation, collabo- tive environments, resources, tangible tools, as well as learning management systems.

As the Web continues to grow, increasing amounts of data are being made available for human and machine consumption. This emerging Semantic Web is rapidly entering the mainstream and, as a result, a variety of new solutions for searching, aggregating and the intelligent delivery of information are being produced,bothinresearchandcommercialsettings.Severalnewchallengesarise from this context, both from a technical and human-computer interaction p- spective - e.g., as issues to do with the scalability andusability of Semantic Web solutions become particularly important. The International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is the major inter- tional forum where the latest research results and technical innovations on all aspects of the Semantic Web are presented. ISWC brings together researchers, practitioners, and users from the areas of arti?cial intelligence, databases, social networks,distributedcomputing,Webengineering,informationsystems,natural language processing, soft computing, and human-computer interaction to d- cuss the major challenges and proposed solutions, success stories and failures, as well the visions that can advance the ?eld.