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.

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"

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.

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.

TheInternationalConferenceonScienti?candStatisticalDatabaseManagement (SSDBM)isanestablishedforumfortheexchangeofthelatestresearchresultson concepts, tools, andtechniquesforscienti?candstatisticaldatabaseapplications. The2008meetingmarkedthe20thtimethatscienti?cdomainexperts, databases researchers, practitioners, and developers came together to share their new - sightsand to discuss ina stimulating environmentfuture researchdirections. This volume contains the proceedings of the 20th SSDBM Conference, held in Hong Kong, China, July 9-11,2008.The conference included 3 keynote talks, 28 long and 7 short papers in 9 sessions, and 8 posters and demonstrations in a single session. Distinguishedmembersofthe communitydeliveredthethree keynotes, which wereabout the past, present, and future managementof scienti?c and statistical data. Alex Szalay, an expert in large-scalescienti?c data management, discussed "New Challenges in Petascale Scienti?c Databases," managing huge scienti?c data repositories, with a focus on particular examples taken from astronomy. Nick Koudas, a leader in semi-structured text management, talked about "- ventures in the Blogosphere," a huge network of textual data (including blogs, social networks, wikis), and BlogScope, a system that collects and analyzes such data. Finally, Per Svensson, a pioneer in database systems development for s- enti?c applications, provided a historical review on "The Evolution of Vertical Database Architectures" from the perspective and performance needs of a s- enti?c or statistical large-scale data analyst user. The Program Committee, consisting of 37 members, accepted 43 papers (28 long,7short, and8posters/demos)fromatotalof84submissions.Thereviewing process was managed by the EasyChair Conference System, an excellent free conference management system, developed by Andrei Voronkov.

Information technology is a rapidly changing field in which researchers and devel- ers must continuously set their vision on the next generation of technologies and the systems that they enable. The Next Generation Information Technologies and Systems (NGITS) series of conferences provides a forum for presenting and discussing the latest advances in information technology. NGITS conferences are international events held in Israel; previous conferences have taken place in 1993, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2002, and 2006. In addition to 14 reviewed papers, the conference featured two keynote lectures and an invited talk by notable experts. The selected papers may be classified roughly in five broad areas: * Middleware and Integration * Modeling * Healthcare/Biomedical * Service and Information Management * Applications NGITS 2009 also included a demonstration session and an industrial track focusing on how to make software development more efficient by cutting expenses with techn- ogy and infrastructures. This event is the culmination of efforts by many talented and dedicated individuals.

This bookis aselectionoftherevisedcontributionsthatwereinitially submitted to the International Workshop on Adaptive Multimedia Retrieval (AMR 2007). The workshop was organized at the University Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris, France, during July 5-6, 2007. The goalof the AMR workshopsis to intensify the exchangeof ideasbetween di?erent research communities, to provide an overview of current activities in this area and to point out connections between the diverse involved researches communities, among them the most important ones focussing on multimedia retrieval and arti?cial intelligence. In this spirit, the ?rst three events where collocated with Arti?cial Intelligence conferences: in 2003 as a workshop of the 26th German Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (KI 2003); in 2004 as part of the 16th European Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (ECAI 2004) and in 2005 as part of the 19th International Joint Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (IJCAI05).Becauseofitssuccess, in2006theUniversityofGeneva, Switzerland, organized the workshop for the ?rst time as a standalone event. In 2007 the workshop revealed three main topics: retrieval, user and sem- tics.Retrieval, acoresubject, wastackledfromseveralperspectives.Researchers were interested not only in the e?ciency of the multimedia access by looking at peer-to-peermethods, middlewareanddatabasestechniques, butalsointhetype of retrieved data, ranging from music to images and video. The user was also at the center of attention. Several papers investigated the di?erent ways m- timedia data can be searched, as, for instance, through navigation, summaries andinteraction.Particularattentionwasgivento methods thattryto modelthe user and its feedback. Finally, in this set of works, it becomes clear that behind the idea of retrievaland user the notion that connects both is hidden: sema

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

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Entertainment Computing, ICEC 2009, held in Paris, France, in September 2009, under the auspices of IFIP.

The 14 revised long papers, 19 short papers and 23 poster papers and demos presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 105 submissions for inclusion in the book.

The papers cover all main domains of entertainment computing, from interactive music to games, taking a wide range of scientific domains from aesthetic to computer science.

This volume contains the proceedings of UIC 2009, the 6th International C- ference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing: Building Smart Worlds in Real and Cyber Spaces. The UIC 2009 conference was technically co-sponsored by the IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Scalable Computing. The conference was also sponsored by the Australian Centre of - cellence in Information and Communication Technologies (NICTA). UIC 2009 was accompanied by six workshops on a variety of research challenges within the area of ubiquitous intelligence and computing. The conference was held in Brisbane, Australia, July 7-9, 2009. The event was the sixth meeting of this conference series. USW 2005 (First International Workshop on Ubiquitous Smart World), held in March 2005 in Taiwan, was the ?rst event in the series. This event was followed by UISW 2005 (Second International Symposium on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Smart Worlds) held in December 2005 in Japan. Since 2006, the conference has been held annually under the name UIC (International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing). UIC 2006 was held in September 2006 in Wuhan andThreeGorges, China, followedbyUIC2007heldinJuly2007inHongKong, and UIC 2008 held in June 2008 in Oslo, Norway. Ubiquitous sensors, computers, networksand informationare paving the way towardasmartworldinwhichcomputationalintelligenceisdistributedthrou- out the physical environment to provide reliable and relevant services to peop

Asdataminingtechniquesandtoolsmature, theirapplicationdomainsextendto previousuncharteredterritories.The commontheme ofthe workshopsorganized along with the main 2008 Paci?c Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD) in Osaka, Japan was to extend the application of data mining techniques to new frontiers. Thus the title of the proceedings: "New Frontiers in Application of Data Mining." For the 2008 program, three workshops were organized. 1. Algorithms for Large-Scale Information Processing (ALSIP). The focus of the workshop was novel algorithms and data structures to deal with p- cessing of very large data sets. 2. Data Mining for Decision Making and Risk Management (DMDRM), which emphasized applications of risk information derived from data mining te- niques on diverse applications ranging from medicine to marketing to chemistry. 3. Interactive Data Mining (IDM), which emphasized the relationship between techniques in data mining and human-computer interaction. In total 38 papers were submitted to the workshops. After consultation with theworkshopChairswhowereaskedto ranktheir submissions,18wereaccepted for publicationin this volume.We hope that the published papers propelfurther interest in the growing ?eld of knowledge discovery in databases (KDD). The paper selection of the industrial track and the workshops was made by the Program Committee of each organization. Upon the paper selection, the book was edited and managed by the volume editors.

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.

Welcome to the proceedings of 9th Pacific-Rim Conference on Multimedia (PCM 2008) held at the National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan during Dec- ber 9-13, 2008. The first PCM was held in Sydney in 2000. Since then, it has been held successfully around the Pacific Rim, including Beijing in 2001, Hsinchu in 2002, Singapore in 2003, Tokyo in 2004, Jeju in 2005, Zhejiang in 2006, Hong Kong in 2007 and finally Tainan. PCM is a major annual international conference bringing together researchers, developers, and educators in the field of multimedia from around the world. It covers a wide spectrum of multimedia research, from state-of-the-art theoretical breakthroughs to the practical systems of multimedia analysis and processing. PCM 2008 featured a comprehensive program including tutorials, keynote talks, regular oral presentations, special sessions, and poster sessions. This year, we - cepted 79 papers out of 210 submissions, giving an acceptance rate of 37%. In addition, 39 papers were accepted for poster presentation. The submissions were categorized into five different tracks: multimedia compression, communication and networking, multimedia processing, analysis and retrieval, multimedia databases, systems, and applications, multimedia human-computer interfaces, multimedia security and digital right management, with a total of 210 submissions from 18 countries and regions. Among the five tracks, "multimedia analysis and retrieval" received the most submissions (34% of the submissions). We kindly appreciate the great effort made by the Program Committee members and the additional reviewers in the reviewing of submissions.

With great pleasure we present the second volume of the new journal Trans- tions on Edutainment. This journal, part of the Springer series Lecture Notes in ComputerScience,isdevotedtoresearchanddevelopmentinthe?eldofeduta- ment. Edutainment, also known as educational entertainment or entertainme- education, denotes all forms of entertainment designed to educate as well as to provide fun. This approach is motivated by the increasing demands on indivi- alsforlife-longlearningandtheneedtointegratee?ectivelearningopportunities throughout life. As such, edutainment has attracted increasing interest in the last few years. The ?rst ?ve articles of this issue represent a selection of outstanding cont- butionsfromGDTW2008,the6thInternationalConferenceinGameDesignand Technology held in the UK, in November 2008. The main aims of the workshop are: (1) To provide a forum to discuss state-of-the-art games design and current and future games technology with the specialists. (2) To enable academics and researchersincomputergametechnologyandcomputerentertainmenttopresent their work during the research sessions, and to seek opportunities for collabo- tion with industry and for academic researchpartners. (3) To facilitate relati- ships and collaboration between academics promoting computer games techn- ogy courses, the UK games industry and supporting organizations. These ?ve papers cover mainly the topic of edutainment platforms or methodology: "Co- dinating Heterogeneous Game-Based Learning Approaches in Online Learning Environments," "Networking Middleware and Online-Deployment Mechanisms for Java-Based Games," "A Testbed for P2P Gaming Using Time Warp, How to Steer Characters in Group Games," and "Time-Based Personalized Mobile Game Downloading. " The next six articles represent a selection of outstanding contributions from Cyberworlds 2008 held in Hangzhou, China, in September 2008.

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.