This volume presents state-of-the-art research from a wide area of subjects brought about by the digital convergence of computing, television, telecommunications and the World-Wide Web. It represents a unique snapshot of trends across a wide range of subjects including virtual environments; virtual reality; telepresence; human-computer interface design; interactivity; avatars; and the Internet. Both researchers and practitioners will find it an invaluable source of reference.

"Convergence" is defined as the intertwinement of species or technologies. "Tech- logical convergence," on the other hand, refers to a trend where a single product such as a cell phone, used in the past solely for communication, evolves into a product that functions not only as a communication device but incorporates the distinct function- ities of a number of other technologies, thereby enabling users to take pictures, listen to music, access the Web, send and receive e-mail messages, find their way, and so on, equally successfully. Social networks such as Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and LinkedIn, where users congregate, discuss certain issues, entertain themselves, and share information in t- tual, audio and video formats, are among the most frequented web sites. Social networks having Web 2. 0 features offer personalized services, allowing users to - corporate their own content easily and describe, organize and share it with others, thereby enriching users' experience. More often than not, a capable cell phone is all you need to get access to such social networks and carry out all those tasks. Such tools tend to change our private, social and professional lives and blur the boundaries among them. In other words, our private, social and professional lives are converging, too: someone using a cell phone could be communicating with his/her friend(s), accessing information services, taking an exam using a learning management system, or conducting business.

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.

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

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.

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).

Large-scale information systems in public utility services depend on computing infrastructure. Many research e?orts are being made in related areas, such as mobile computing, cloud computing, sensor networks, high-level user interfaces and information accesses by Web users. Government agencies in many countries plan to launch facilities in education, health-care and information support as a part of e-government initiative. In this context, information interchange m- agement has become an active research ?eld. A number of new opportunities have evolved in design and modeling based on the new computing needs of the users. Database systems play a centralrole in supporting networkedinformation systems for access and storage management aspects. The 6thinternationalworkshoponDatabasesin NetworkedInformationS- tems (DNIS) 2010 was held during March 29-31, 2010 at University of Aizu in Japan. The workshop program included research contributions and invited c- tributions. A view of research activity in information interchange management and related research issues was provided by the sessions on related topics. The keynoteaddresswascontributedbyDivyakantAgrawal. Theworkshopsessionon "NetworkedInformationSystems:Infrastructure"had invitedpapersbyHarumi KunoandMaluCastellanos. Thesessionon"AccessestoInformationResources" had an invited contribution from Joachim Biskup. The following section on "Information and Knowledge Management Systems" included invited contri- tions from Toyoaki Nishida and Tetsuo Kinoshita. The session on "Information Extraction from Data Resources" included the invited contribution of Polepalli Krishna Reddy. The section on "Geospatial Decision Making" comprised c- tributions by Cyrus Shahabi and Yoshiharu Ishikawa. We would like to thank the members of the Program Committee for their support and all authors who contributed to DNIS 2010.

This two volume set LNCS 5981 and LNCS 5982 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications, DASFAA 2010, held in Tsukuba, Japan, in April 2010. The 39 revised full papers and 16 revised short papers presented together with 3 invited keynote papers, 22 demonstration papers, 6 industrial papers, and 2 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 285 submissions. The papers of the first volume are organized in topical sections on P2P-based technologies, data mining technologies, XML search and matching, graphs, spatialdatabases, XML technologies, time series and streams, advanced data mining, query processing, Web, sensor networks and communications, information management, as well as communities and Web graphs. The second volume contains contributions related to trajectories and moving objects, skyline queries, privacy and security, data streams, similarity search and event processing, storage and advanced topics, industrial, demo papers, and tutorials and panels.

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.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Information Systems, Technology and Management, ICISTM 2010, held in Bangkok, Thailand, in March 2010. The 28 revised full papers presented together with 3 keynote lectures, 9 short papers, and 2 tutorial papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 86 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on information systems, information technology, information management, and applications.

Following the very successful Motion in Games event in June 2008, we or- nized the Second International Workshop on Motion in Games (MIG) during November 21-24, 2009 in Zeist, The Netherlands. Games have become a very important medium for both education and - tertainment. Motion plays a crucial role in computer games. Characters move around, objects are manipulated or move due to physical constraints, entities are animated, and the camera moves through the scene. Even the motion of the player nowadays is used as input to games. Motion is currently studied in many di?erent areas of research, including graphics and animation, game technology, robotics, simulation, computer vision, and also physics, psychology, and urban studies. Cross-fertilizationbetween these communities can considerably advance the state of the art in this area. The goal of the workshop Motion in Games is to bring together researchers from this variety of ?elds to present the most recent results and to initiate collaboration. The workshop is organized by the Dutch research project GATE. In total, the workshop this year consisted of 27 high-quality presentations by a selection of internationally renownedspeakers in the ?eld of games and simulations. We were extremely pleased with the quality of the contributions to the MIG workshop and we look forward to organizing a follow-up MIG event.

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

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.

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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Active Media Technology, AMT 2009, held in Beijing, China, in October 2009.

The 47 revised full papers and the 6 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected. The papers reflect the shared forum for researchers and practitioniers from diverse fields, such as computer science, information technology, artificial intelligence, media engineering, economics, data mining, data and knowledge engineering, intelligent agent technology, human computer interaction, complex systems and systems science.

It offered new insights into the main research challenges and development of AMT by revealing the interplay between the studies of human informatics and research of informatics on the Web/Internet, mobile and wireless centric intelligent information processing systems.

Adaptive Hypermedia has emerged as an important area of both academic and deployed research. It encompasses a broad range of research that will enable personalized, adaptive hypermedia systems to play an even more e?ective role in people's lives. The Web has enabled the widespread use of many person- ized systems, such as recommenders, personalized ?lters and retrieval systems, e-learning systems and various forms of collaborative systems. Such systems have been widely deployed in diverse domains such as e-Commerce, e-Health, e-Government, digital libraries, personalized travel planning as well as tourist and cultural heritage services. They are particularly promising for users with special needs. The exciting possibilities of such deployed adaptive hypermedia systems rely on research progress in a broad range of areas such as: user pro- ing and modeling; acquisition, updating and management of user models; group modeling and community-based pro?ling;recommender systems and recomm- dation strategies; data mining for personalization; the Semantic Web; adaptive multimedia content authoring and delivery; ubiquitous computing environments and Smart Spaces; personalization for the plethora of mobile devices, such as PDAs, mobile phones and other hand-held devices; and pragmatics such as p- vacy, trust and security. Empirical studies of adaptive hypermedia and Web systems are also critical to informing future directions. The AdaptiveHypermediaconferenceshavebecomethe majorforumsforthe scienti?c exchange and presentation of research results on adaptive hypermedia and adaptive Web-based systems.

Welcome to the tenth anniversary of the International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, WISE 2009. This year the WISE conference continued the tradition that has evolved from the inaugural conference held in 2000 in Hong Kong and since then has made its journey around the world: 2001 Kyoto (Japan), 2002 Singapore, 2003 Rome (Italy), 2004 Brisbane (Australia), 2005 New York (USA), 2006 Wuhan (China), 2007 Nancy (France), and 2008 Auckland (New Zealand). This year we were happy to hold the event in Poznan, a city of 600,000 inhabitants in western Poland. Poznan is the capital of the most affluent province of the country - Wielkopolska - which means "Greater Poland". For more than 1,000 years, Poznan's geographical location has predestined the city to be a significant scientific, cultural and economic center with more than just regional influence. The city is situated on the strategic cross-roads from Paris and Berlin in the west, to Warsaw and Moscow in the east, and from Scandinavia through the Baltic Sea in the north to the Balkans in the south. Poznan is a great research and university center with a dynamic potential. In all, 140,000 students are enrolled in 26 state-run and private institutions of higher education here, among which the Poznan University of Economics with its 12,000 students is one of the biggest. The WISE 2009 Conference provided a forum for engineers and scientists to present their latest findings in Web-related technologies and solutions.

Since the mid 1990s, data hiding has been proposed as an enabling technology for securing multimedia communication, and is now used in various applications including broadcast monitoring, movie fingerprinting, steganography, video indexing and retrieval, and image authentication. Data hiding and cryptographic techniques are often combined to complement each other, thus triggering the development of a new research field of multimedia security. Besides, two related disciplines, steganalysis and data forensics, are increasingly attracting researchers and becoming another new research field of multimedia security. This journal, LNCS Transactions on Data Hiding and Multimedia Security, aims to be a forum for all researchers in these emerging fields, publishing both original and archival research results.

This fourth issue contains five contributions in the area of digital watermarking. The first three papers deal with robust watermarking. The fourth paper introduces a new least distortion linear gain model for halftone image watermarking and the fifth contribution presents an optimal histogram pair based image reversible data hiding scheme.

This volume contains the full and short papers of SAMT 2009, the 4th Int- national Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies 2009 held in Graz, Austria. SAMT brings together researchers dealing with a broad range of research topics related to semantic multimedia and a great diversity of application - eas. The current research shows that adding and using semantics of multimedia content is broadening its scope from search and retrieval to the complete media life cycle, from content creation to distribution and consumption, thus lever- ing new possibilities in creating, sharing and reusing multimedia content. While some of the contributions present improvements in automatic analysis and - notation methods, there is increasingly more work dealing with visualization, user interaction and collaboration. We can also observe ongoing standardization activities related to semantic multimedia in both W3C and MPEG, forming a solid basis for a wide adoption. Theconferencereceived41submissionsthisyear, ofwhichtheProgramC- mittee selected 13 full papers for oral presentation and 8 short papers for poster presentation. In addition to the scienti?c papers, the conference program - cluded two invited talks by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Stefan Rug ] er and a demo session showing results from three European projects. The day before the main conference o?ered an industry day with presen- tions and demos that showed the growing importance of semantic technologies in real-world applications as well as the research challenges coming from them."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, EC-TEL 2009, held in Nice, France in September/October 2009.

The 35 revised full papers, 17 short papers, and 35 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 136 paper submissions and 22 poster submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on adaptation and personalization, interoperability, semantic Web, Web 2.0., data mining and social networks, collaboration and social knowledge construction, learning communities and communities of practice, learning contexts, problem and project-based learning, inquiry, learning, learning design, motivation, engagement, learning games, and human factors and evaluation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, ECDL 2009, held in Corfu, Greece, in September/October 2009.

The 28 revised full papers and 6 revised short papers presented together with 2 panel description, the extended abstracts of 20 revised poster and 16 demo papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 181 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on services, infrastructures, interaction, knowledge organization systems, interfaces, resource discovery, architectures, information retrieval, preservation, and evaluation.

The modern world has made available a wealth of new possibilities for interacting with computers, through advanced Web applications, while on the go with handheld smart telephones or using electronic tabletops or wall-sized displays. Developers of modern interactive systems face great problems: how to design applications which will work well with newly available technologies, and how to efficiently and correctly implement such designs. Design, Specification and Verification of Interactive Systems 2008 was the 15th of a series of annual workshops devoted to helping designers and implementers of interactive systems unleash the power of modern interaction devices and techniques. DSV-IS 2008 was held at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, during July 16-18, 2008. This book collects the best papers submitted to the workshop. There were 17 full papers, 10 late-breaking and experience report papers, and two demonstrations. Keynote presentations were provided by Judy Brown of Carleton University and Randy Ellis of Queen's University. The first day of the workshop addressed the problems of user interface evaluation and specification, with particular emphasis on the use of task models to provide hi- level approaches for capturing the intended functionality of a user interface. Day two continued this theme, examining techniques for modeling user interfaces, particularly for mobile and ubiquitous applications. Presenters also discussed advanced implem- tation techniques for interactive systems. Finally, day three considered how to arc- tect interactive systems, and returned to the themes of evaluation and specification.

These proceedings contain the papers presented at ECIR 2010, the 32nd Eu- pean Conference on Information Retrieval. The conference was organizedby the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), the Open University, in co-operation with Dublin City University and the University of Essex, and was supported by the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the British Computer Society (BCS- IRSG) and the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (ACM SIGIR). It was held during March 28-31, 2010 in Milton Keynes, UK. ECIR 2010 received a total of 202 full-paper submissions from Continental Europe (40%), UK (14%), North and South America (15%), Asia and Australia (28%), Middle East and Africa (3%). All submitted papers were reviewed by at leastthreemembersoftheinternationalProgramCommittee.Outofthe202- pers 44 were selected asfull researchpapers. ECIR has alwaysbeen a conference with a strong student focus. To allow as much interaction between delegates as possible and to keep in the spirit of the conference we decided to run ECIR 2010 as a single-track event. As a result we decided to have two presentation formats for full papers. Some of them were presented orally, the others in poster format. The presentation format does not represent any di?erence in quality. Instead, the presentation format was decided after the full papers had been accepted at the Program Committee meeting held at the University of Essex. The views of the reviewers were then taken into consideration to select the most appropriate presentation format for each paper.

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.

It's the little things that turn a good digital product into a great one. With this full color practical book, you'll learn how to design effective microinteractions: the small details that exist inside and around features. How can users change a setting? How do they turn on mute, or know they have a new email message? Through vivid, real-world examples from today's devices and applications, author Dan Saffer walks you through a microinteraction's essential parts, then shows you how to use them in a mobile app, a web widget, and an appliance. You'll quickly discover how microinteractions can change a product from one that's tolerated into one that's treasured. Explore a microinteraction's structure: triggers, rules, feedback, modes, and loops Learn the types of triggers that initiate a microinteraction Create simple rules that define how your microinteraction can be used Help users understand the rules with feedback, using graphics, sounds, and vibrations Use modes to let users set preferences or modify a microinteraction Extend a microinteraction's life with loops, such as "Get data every 30 seconds"