This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th Annual Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science, STACS 2002, held in Antibes - Juan les Pins, France, in March 2002.The 50 revised full papers presented together with three invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 209 submissions. The book offers topical sections on algorithms, current challenges, computational and structural complexity, automata and formal languages, and logic in computer science.

Das Buch Unternehmensportale Grundlagen, Architekturen, Technologien ist das erste deutschsprachige Grundlagenwerk uber modernes Informations- und Geschaftsprozessmanagement mit Hilfe von Unternehmensportalen.

Das umfassende Kompendium ist Grundlagenwerk, Kochbuch und Wegweiser fur alle fachlich-inhaltlichen, technischen und betriebswirtschaftlichen Aspekte von Unternehmensportalen. Diese ganzheitliche Sichtweise bietet dem Leser einen umfassenden Uberblick und versetzt ihn grundsatzlich in die Lage, die Einfuhrung eines Unternehmensportals fur das eigene Unternehmen zu kalkulieren, zu planen und durchzufuhren sowie den Betrieb des Unternehmensportals zu organisieren. Checklisten und Best Practices geben dabei konkrete Hilfestellungen."

This book includes 2 keynote presentations, 18 papers and 1 demonstration presented at this year's Eurographics multimedia workshop. A wide range of subjects were covered, from media production to content processing and delivery, with a special focus on issues related to interactive video environments. These included standards and approaches for interactive television, hypervideo, collaborative video, augmented reality, mobile multimedia, the integration of TV and the web, content analysis, processing and presentation. The papers are organized in six sessions: 3D in multimedia, multimedia architectures and authoring, video and coding, content based retrieval and security, interactive media and interactive TV.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Wavelet Analysis and Its Applications, WAA 2001, held in Hong Kong, China in December 2001. The 24 revised full papers and 27 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 67 full paper submissions. The book offers topical sections on image compression and coding, video coding and processing, theory, image processing, signal processing, and systems and applications.

Virtual reality technology has been developed commercially since the early 1990s but it is only recently, with the popularity of the internet, that it has become feasible to link many users simultaneously in shared virtual environments. This raises a number of interesting questions such as: what is the difference between face-to-face and avatar-to-avatar interaction? What patterns govern the formation of virtual communities? How does the appearance of the avatar change the nature of the communication? There has been much speculation about issues such as these but research is still at a relatively early stage. This is the first book to bring together work from relevant disciplines to form a reference guide for practitioners, students and researchers interested in how we interact in computer-generated environments. It contains contributions from most of the key people in this area (including Microsoft Research's Virtual Worlds Group) and presents their findings in a way which is accessible to readers who are new to this field or who come from related areas. It is divided into 2 parts; chapters 2-6 deal with internet-based virtual worlds which have been widely used by the public; chapters 7-10 deal with networked VR systems which have been primarily used in pilot studies and research. Some chapters take the viewpoint of a participant observer, whilst others take a more experimental approach and assess the results of relevant trials. This book will be essential reading for anyone involved in developing, using or researching virtual worlds, and will also be of interest to students on courses such as VR and Computer-mediated communication.

Welcome to the second IEEE Pacific Rim Conference on Multimedia (IEEE PCM 2001) held in Zhongguanchun, Beijing, China, October 22 24, 2001. Building upon the success of the inaugural IEEE PCM 2000 in Sydney in December 2000, the second PCM again brought together the researchers, developers, practitioners, and educators of multimedia in the Pacific area. Theoretical breakthroughs and practical systems were presented at this conference, thanks to the sponsorship by the IEEE Circuit and Systems Society, IEEE Signal Processing Society, China Computer Foundation, China Society of Image and Graphics, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Tsinghua University, and Microsoft Research, China. IEEE PCM 2001 featured a comprehensive program including keynote talks, regular paper presentations, posters, demos, and special sessions. We received 244 papers and accepted only 104 of them as regular papers, and 53 as poster papers. Our special session chairs, Shin'ichi Satoh and Mohan Kankanhalli, organized 6 special sessions. We acknowledge the great contribution from our program committee members and paper reviewers who spent many hours reviewing submitted papers and providing valuable comments for the authors. The conference would not have been successful without the help of so many people. We greatly appreciated the support of our honorary chairs: Prof. Sun Yuan Kung of Princeton University, Dr. Ya Qin Zhang of Microsoft Research China, and Prof.

In recent years we have witnessed the explosion of multimedia traffic on the Internet. The availability of high bandwidth connections together with the recent advances in high quality video and audio compression techniques have created a fertile ground for the growth of multimedia applications such as interactive video on demand, collaborative distance learning, and remote medical diagnosis. Furthermore, the availability of low bit rate video and audio applications (e.g., H.263 and G.728) and the proliferation of pervasive devices create a new demand for wireless multimedia communication systems. After a decade or more of research and development in multimedia networking, the research community has learned a number of lessons. First, increasing the capacity of the "best effort" networks and services does not provide an effective and permanent solution for offering a guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS). Second, the integration of service and network management is a key element in providing end to end service management. Third, management techniques for Internet multimedia services must be scalable and adaptive to guarantee QoS and maintain fairness with optimal network resource.

This conference in Enschede, The Netherlands, is the sixth in a series of international conferences and workshops under the title Protocols for Multimedia Systems, abbreviated as PROMS. The first PROMS workshop took place in June 1994 in Berlin, Germany, followed by workshops in Salzburg, Austria (October 1995) and Madrid, Spain (October 1996). In 1997, PROMS formed a temporary alliance with Multimedia Networking, a conference previously held in Aizu, Japan, in 1995. This led to the international conference on Protocols for Multimedia Systems - Multimedia Networking, PROMS MmNet, that took place in Santiago, Chile (November 1997). Since then PROMS has been announced as an international conference, although informal contacts and interactive sessions - as in a workshop - were retained as a desirable feature of PROMS. After a gap of three years, PROMS was organized in Cracow, Poland (October 2000), for the fifth time. We consider it a challenge to make this sixth edition of PROMS as successful as the previous events. The goal of the PROMS series of conferences and workshops is to contribute to scientific, strategic, and practical cooperation between research institutes and industrial companies in the area of multimedia protocols. This is also the goal of PROMS 2001. The basic theme of this conference continues to be multimedia protocols, both at the network and application level, although the increasing interest in wireless, mobility, and quality of service as interrelated topics with relevance to multimedia are reflected in the current program.

In this book, the author develops a generative theory of shape with two properties fundamental to intelligence: maximizing transfer of structure, and maximizing recoverability of generative operations. The theory is applied in considerable detail to CAD, perception, and robotics. A significant aspect of this book is the development of an object-oriented theory of geometry. This includes a group-theoretic formulation of object-oriented inheritance. In particular, a class of groups is developed called "unfolding groups", which define any complex shape as unfolded from a maximally collapsed version of itself called an "alignment kernel". The group is decomposed into levels corresponding to the inheritance hierarchy within the complex object. This achieves one of the main goals of the theory - the conversion of complexity into understandability. The advantages of the theory are demonstrated with lengthy studies of robot manipulators, perceptual organization, constructive solid geometry, assembly planning, architectural CAD, and mechanical CAD/CAM.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on the Design, Specification, and Verification of Interactive Systems, DSV-IS 2001, held in Glasgow, Scotland, UK, in June 2001.The 12 revised full papers presented have gone through two rounds of reviewing, selection, and revision. The book offers topical sections on mobile interface design, context-sensitive interfaces, supervision and control systems, temporal and stochastic issues, and new perspectives.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 23rd Symposium of the German Association for Pattern Recognition, DAGM 2001, held in Munich, Germany in September 2001.The 58 revised full papers and posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 105 submissions. The book offers topical sections on image analysis, 3D-gathering and visualization, image processing, image sequence analysis, classification, active vision, 3D-reconstruction, and interaction of virtual and real worlds.

Volume graphics is in the process of evolving into a general graphics technology. The papers included in this book are testimonial to the wide spectrum of unique applications and solutions that volumetric representations are able to offer. They span a wide range of topics pertinent to volume graphics: volume-based modeling, volume data acquisition and generation, volume rendering using software, hardware, and hybrid approaches, theoretical considerations, and a number of applications and case studies. This book provides a valuable, comprehensive, and up-to-date source of information on this rapidly evolving technology.

th We are very happy to present the proceedings of the 8 International Workshop on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems IDMS 2001, in co-operation with ACM SIGCOMM and SIGMM. These proceedings contain the technical programme for IDMS 2001, held September 4 7, 2001 in Lancaster, UK. For the technical programme this year we received 48 research papers from both a- demic and industrial institutions all around the world. After the review process, 15 were accepted as full papers for publication, and a further 8 as short positional papers, intended to provoke debate. The technical programme was complimented by three invited papers: QoS for Multimedia What s Going to Make It Pay? by Derek McAuley, E nabling the Internet to Provide Multimedia Services by Markus H- mann, and MPEG-21 Standard: Why an Open Multimedia Framework? by Fernando Pereira. The organisers are very grateful for the help they received to make IDMS 2001 a successful event. In particular, we would like to thank the PC for their first class - views of papers, particularly considering the tight reviewing deadlines this year. Also, we would like to acknowledge the support from Agilent, BTexact Technologies, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft Research, Orange, and Sony Electronics without whom IDMS 2001 would not have been such a memorable event. We hope that readers will find these proceedings helpful in their future research, and that IDMS will continue to be an active forum for the discussion of distributed mul- media research for years to come."

Digital manipulation of landform is revolutionizing how our built environment is designed and constructed. On a technical level, three dimensional geometric modeling of topography has its origins at the interface of geographic information systems (GIS) and computer aided geometric modeling (CAD): the former with its representations of spatial attribute information with digital terrain in several representations (Triangulated Irregular Networks, contour lines, etc. ); the latter focusing primarily on the parameterization and combination of geometric primitives. The broadening of these two disciplines to embrace new surveying and navigation advances, e. g. global positioning systems (GPS), together with developments in engineering on the application side, are leading to powerful new suites of functionality. There has been a pronounced need for a forum where these traditionally separate parties can interact. These proceedings contain the technical papers selected and formally presented as part of the scientific program of the First International Symposium on Digital Earth Moving, 2001 (DEM 2001) held September 5 7, 2001 at the CIM Institute for Computing Science and Industrial Technologies of the University of Applied Science of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI iCIMSI) in Manno (Lugano), Switzerland. It is the first volume published on this explicit theme. Thirty six submissions were received, from fifteen countries, with thirteen select papers and posters presented in the official program and in this publication.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Japanese Conference on Discrete Computational Geometry, JCDCG 2001, held in Tokyo, Japan in November 2001. The 35 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected. Among the topics covered are polygons and polyhedrons, divissible dissections, convex polygon packings, symmetric subsets, convex decompositions, graph drawing, graph computations, point sets, approximation, Delauny diagrams, triangulations, chromatic numbers, complexity, layer routing, efficient algorithms, and illumination problems.

This book provides the background and introduces a practical methodology for developing autonomous camera-equipped robot systems which solve deliberate tasks in open environments based on their competences acquired from training, interaction, and learning in the real task-relevant world; visual demonstration and neural learning for the backbone for acquiring the situated competences. The author verifies the practicability of the proposed methodology by presenting a structured case study including high-level sub-tasks such as localizing, approaching, grasping, and carrying objects.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Visual Form, IWVF-4, held in Capri, Italy, in May 2001.
The 66 revised full papers presented together with seven invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 117 submissions. The book covers theoretical and applicative aspects of visual form processing. The papers are organized in topical sections on representation, analysis, recognition, modelling and retrieval, and applications.

Computer Graphics through Key Mathematics introduces the mathematics that support computer graphics on a 'need to know' basis. Its approach means you don't have to do advanced mathematical manipulation in order to understand the capabilities, scope and limitations of the computer graphics systems that create impressive images. The book is written in a clear, easy-to-understand way and is aimed at all those who have missed out on an extended mathematical education but who are studying or working in areas where computer graphics or 3D design plays an vital part. All those who have no formal training but who want to understand the foundations of computer graphics systems should read this book, as should mathematicians who want to understand how their subject is used in computer image synthesis.

With a standard program committee and a pre-review process, the Third - ternational Workshop on Automated Deduction in Geometry (ADG 2000) held in Zurich, Switzerland, September 25-27, 2000 was made more formal than the previous ADG '96 (Toulouse, September 1996) and ADG '98 (Beijing, August 1998). The workshop program featured two invited talks given by Christoph M. Ho?mann and Jurgen ] Bokowski, one open session talk by Wen-tsun ] Wu, 18 regular presentations, and 7 short communications, together with software demonstrations (see http: //calfor.lip6.fr/ wang/ADG2000/). Some of the most recent and signi?cant research developments on geometric deduction were - ported and reviewed, and the workshop was well focused at a high scienti?c level. Fifteen contributions (out of the 18 regular presentations selected by the program committee from 31 submissions) and 2 invited papers were chosen for publication in these proceedings. These papers were all formally refereed and most of them underwent a double review-revision process. We hope that this volume meets the usual standard of international conference proceedings, rep- sentsthecurrentstateoftheartofADG, andwillbecomeavaluablereferencefor researchers, practitioners, software engineers, educators, and students in many ADG-related areas from mathematics to CAGD and geometric modeling. ADG2000washostedbytheDepartmentofComputerScience, ETHZurich."

Multimedia technologies are rapidly attracting more and more interest every day. The Internet as seen from the end user is one of the reasons for this phenomenon, but not the only one. Video on Demand is one of the buzzwords today, but its real availability to the general public is yet to come. Content providers - such as publishers, broadcasting companies, and audio/video production ?rms - must be able to archive and index their productions for later retrieval. This is a formidable task, even more so when the material to be sorted encompasses many di?erent types of several media and covers a time span of several years. In order for such a vast amount of data to be easily available, existing database design models and indexing methodologies have to be improved and re?ned. In addition, new techniques especially tailored to the various types of multimedia must be devised and evaluated. For archiving and trasmission, data compression is another issue that needs to be addressed. In many cases, it has been found that compression and indexing can be successfully integrated, since compressing the data by ?ltering out irrelevancy implies some degree of und- standing of the content structure.

The wait for the year 2000 was marked by the fear of possible bugs that might have arisen at its beginning. One additional fear we had during this wait was whether - ganising this event would have generated a boon or another bug. The reasons for this fear originated in the awareness that the design of interactive systems is a fast moving area. The type of research work presented at this unique event has received limited support from funding agencies and industries making it more difficult to keep up with the rapid technological changes occurring in interaction technology. However, despite our fear, the workshop was successful because of the high-quality level of participation and discussion. Before discussing such results, let us step back and look at the evolution of DSV-IS (Design, Specification and Verification of Interactive Systems), an international wo- shop that has been organised every year since 1994. The first books that addressed this issue in a complete and thorough manner were the collection of contributions edited by Harrison and Thimbleby and the book written by Alan Dix, which focused on abstractions useful to highlight important concepts in the design of interactive systems. Since then, this area has attracted the interest of a wider number of research groups, and some workshops on related topics started to be organised. DSV-IS had its origins in this spreading and growing interest. The first workshop was held in a monastery located in the hills above Bocca di Magra (Italy).

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Open Hypermedia Systems, OHS-6, and the 2nd International Workshop on Structural Computing, SC-2, held at the 11th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia in San Antonio, Texas, USA in May/June 2000.
The 19 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. All current issues on open hypertext systems and structural computing are addressed.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the International Workshop on Vision Algorithms held in Corfu, Greece in September 1999 in conjunction with ICCV'99.
The 15 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions; each paper is complemented by a brief transcription of the discussion that followed its presentation. Also included are two invited contributions and two expert reviews as well as a panel discussion. The volume spans the whole range of algorithms for geometric vision. The authors and volume editors succeeded in providing added value beyond a mere collection of papers and made the volume a state-of-the-art survey of their field.

The AMDO 2000 workshop took place at the Universitat de les Illes Balears (UIB) on 7-9 September 2000, sponsored by the International Association for Pattern Recognition Technical Committee, the European Commission by - man Potential Program:High Level Scienti?c Conferences and the Mathematics andComputer Science DepartmentofUIB. Thesubject ofthe workshopwas- goingresearchinarticulatedmotiononthesequenceofimagesandsophisticated models for deformable objects. The goals of these areas are to understand and interpret object motion around complex objects that we can ?nd in sequences of images in the real world. These topics (geometry and physics of deformable models, motion analysis, articulated models and animation, visualization of - formable models, 3D recovery from motion, single or multiple human motion analysis and synthesis, applications of deformable models and motion analysis, etc. ) are interesting examples of how research can be used to solve more general problems. Another objective of this workshop was to relate ?elds using c- puter graphics, computer animation or applications in several disciplines c- bining synthetic and analytical images. In this regard it is of particular interest to encouragelinksbetweenresearchersinareasofcomputervisionandcomputer graphics who have common problems and frequently use similar techniques. The workshop included four sessions of presented papers and two tutorials. Invited speakers treating various aspects of the topics were: Y. Aloimonos from the Computer Vision Laboratory, Center for Automation Research, University of Maryland, USA, G. Medioni from the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent S- tems,UniversityofSouthernCalifornia,USA,andR. Boulic,Adjointscienti?que from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland. September 2000 H. -H. Nagel and F. J.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms, ESA 2000, held in Saarbrücken, Germany in September 2000. The 39 revised full papers presented together with two invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. Among the topics addressed are parallelism, distributed systems, approximation, combinatorial optimization, computational biology, computational geometry, external-memory algorithms, graph algorithms, network algorithms, online algorithms, data compression, symbolic computation, pattern matching, and randomized algorithms.