This volume contains the ?nal proceedings of the 2004 Metainformatics Sym- sium (MIS 2004). The event was held during 15-18 September 2004 in Salzburg, Austria at Salzburg Research. MIS is an annual event focusing on ?nding common ground shared by - searchers and practitioners in many di?erent computer science areas who may use similar methods to achieve di?erent ends. The goal is to ?nd useful abstr- tions, notations, analytical frameworks, formalisms, and systems that improve ourunderstandingoftheunderlyingstructuresofvariousdisciplinesandfamilies of systems within computer science. Ideally these constructs should have usef- ness in conveying knowledge and understanding across disciplinary boundaries. The proceedings of previous MIS events were also published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series: LNCS 3002 (2003), LNCS 2641 (2002), LNCS 2266 (2001), and LNCS 1903 (2000). As with previous events in the MIS series, MIS 2004 attracted quality papers and brought together researchers from many di?erent ?elds within computer s- ence.WeexperiencedinterestingpresentationsandlivelydiscussionsinSalzburg. I hope that you will ?nd the papers contained in this volume as interesting as the other members of the Program Committee and I have. This volume would not have been possible without the help and assistance of many people. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the assistance of the Springereditors, AnnaKramerandChristineGun ] ther, andtheExecutiveEditor of the LNCS series, Alfred Hofmann.

We welcome you to the proceedings of IWQoS 2005 held at the University of Passau, in the beautiful state of Bavaria, Germany. We hope that all attendees enjoyed their time in that ancient and historic city. Quality of Service(QoS) continues to be an important area of research. T- ditionally very focused on the area of networking, it has grown to include mobile applications, wireless environments, 3G and 4G cellular networks, user expe- ence, overlay networks, large-scale systemsand other important areas ofappli- tion. Six full-paper sessions that comprised selected papers of very high quality were devoted to the above mentioned, cutting-edge topics in this volume. We had a fascinating cross-disciplinary program and hope to have seeded conn- tions between di?erent disciplines and between industry and academia. In addition to the reviewed paper sessions, we were pleased to present two inspiring keynote speakers in this year's program: Randy Katz, Universityof California, Berkeley, USA, and Michael Stal, SiemensAG, Munich, Germany. One speaker being from academia and one from industry, re?ected well the balanced view of this workshop. Both keynotes extended the scope of QoS and addressed pressing issues, such as "spam," and leading trends, such as "service orientation," and their relevance to QoS.

Das Buch ist eine praktische EinfA1/4hrung in das Hochleistungsrechnen auf Linux-Clustern. In vier Teilen (Grundlagen, Technik, Programmierung, Praxis) wird ausfA1/4hrlich erklArt, wie man einen Haufen (Cluster) preiswerter Standard-PCs in einen Parallelcomputer verwandelt und diesen dann zur LAsung rechenintensiver Probleme einsetzt. Insbesondere enthAlt das Buch eine fundierte EinfA1/4hrung in MPI, dem grundlegenden Programmiermodell fA1/4r Cluster-Computer. Dabei werden anhand konkreter Beispiele die wichtigsten Paradigmen paralleler Programmierung prAsentiert. Vorgestellt werden auAerdem Entwicklungswerkzeuge, die Fehlersuche in parallelen Programmen und nA1/4tzliche Bibliotheken.

Over the last few years Web Engineering has begun to gain mainstream acc- tance within the software engineering, IT and related disciplines. In particular, both researchers and practitioners are increasingly recognizing the unique c- racteristics of Web systems, and what these characteristicsimply in terms of the approaches we take to Web systems development and deployment in practice. A scan of the publications in related conference proceedings and journals highlights the diversity of the discipline areas which contribute to both the ri- ness and the complexity of Web Engineering. The 5th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE2005), held in Sydney, Australia, extends the traditions established by the earlier conferences in the series: ICWE2004 in Munich, Germany; ICWE2003 in Oviedo, Spain; ICWE2002 in Santa Fe, Argentina; and ICWE2001 in Caceres, Spain. Not only have these conferences helped disseminate cutting edge research within the ?eld of Web Engineering, but they have also helped de?ne and shape the discipline itself.TheprogramwehaveputtogetherforICWE2005continuesthisevolution. Indeed, we can now begin to see the maturing of the ?eld. For possibly the ?rst time, there was very little debate within the Program Committee about which papers were in and out of scope, and much more debate as to the each papers contributions to the ?eld."

From November 30 to December 2, 2005, INTETAIN 2005 was held in beautiful Madonna di Campiglio, on the majestic mountains of the Province of Trento, Italy.The ideato holdthe?rstinternationalconferencethat wouldhaveas topic Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment seemed to be timely. In thepreviouscoupleofyearstherehadbeenothermorespeci?c ormoregeneric events where some of the relevant themes had made it to the front stage. With INTETAIN we were aiming at establishing a conference where intelligent computational technologies are at the basis of any interactive application for entertainment. As intelligent computational technologies we mean adaptive media pres- tations, recommendation systems in media scalable crossmedia, a?ective user interfaces, intelligent speech interfaces, tele-presence in entertainment, colla- rative user models and group behavior, collaborative and virtual environments, crossdomain user models, animation and virtual characters, holographic int- faces, augmented, virtual and mixed reality, computer graphics and multimedia, pervasive multimedia, creative language environments, computational humor, and so on. We also believe that there is an important role for novel underlying inter- tive device technologies, for example, mobile devices, home entertainment c- ters, haptic devices, wallscreendisplays, holographicdisplays, distributed smart sensors, immersive screens and wearable devices. Interactive applications for entertainment include, but are certainly not l- ited to, intelligent interactive games, intelligent music systems, interactive c- ema, edutainment, interactive art, interactive museum guides, city and tourism explorer assistants, shopping assistants, interactive real TV, interactive social networks, interactive storytelling, personal diaries, websites and blogs, and c- prehensive assisting environments for special groups (challenged, children, the elderly)."

Expert Flash developer and author De Donatis reveals everything needed to master Flash components, revealing how the architecture works, how to create effective component-based applications, and how to create custom components from what's already provided.

The International Conference on Networking (ICN 2005) was the fourth conf- ence in its series aimed at stimulating technical exchange in the emerging and important ?eld of networking. On behalf of the International Advisory C- mittee, it is our great pleasure to welcome you to the proceedings of the 2005 event. Networking faces dramatic changes due to the customer-centric view, the venue of the next generation networks paradigm, the push from ubiquitous n- working, andthenewservicemodels.Despitelegacyproblems, whichresearchers and industry are still discovering and improving the state of the art, the ho- zon has revealed new challenges that some of the authors tackled through their submissions. InfactICN2005wasverywellperceivedbytheinternationalnetworkingc- munity. A total of 651 papers from more than 60 countries were submitted, from which 238 were accepted. Each paper was reviewed by several members of the Technical Program Committee. This year, the Advisory Committee revalidated various accepted papers after the reviews had been incorporated. We perceived a signi?cant improvement in the number of submissions and the quality of the submissions. TheICN2005programcoveredavarietyofresearchtopicsthatareofcurrent interest, startingwithGridnetworks, multicasting, TCPoptimizations, QoSand security, emergency services, and network resiliency. The Program Committee selected also three tutorials and invited speakers that addressed the latest - search results from the international industries and academia, and reports on ?ndings from mobile, satellite, and personal communications related to 3rd- and 4th-generation research projects and standardiz

This volume contains papers selected for presentation at the 7th Asia Pacific Conference on Web Technology (APWeb 2005), which was held in Shanghai, China during March 29 April 1, 2005. APWeb is an international conference series on WWW technologies and is the primary forum for researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry to exchange knowledge on WWW-related technologies and new advanced applications. APWeb 2005 received 420 submissions from 21 countries and regions worldwide, including China, Korea, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, France, UK, Canada, USA, India, Hong Kong, Brazil, Germany, Thailand, Singapore, Turkey, Spain, Greece, Belgium, New Zealand, and UAE. After a thorough review process for each submission by the Program Committee members and expert reviewers recommended by PC members, APWeb 2005 accepted 71 regular research papers (acceptance ratio 16.9%) and 22 short papers (acceptance ratio 5.2%). This volume also includes 6 keynote papers and 11 invited demo papers. The keynote lectures were given by six leading experts: Prof. Ah Chung Tsoi (Australia Research Council), Prof. Zhiyong Liu (National Nature Science Foundation of China), Prof. John Mylopoulos (University of Toronto), Prof. Ramamohanarao (Rao) Kotagiri (University of Melbourne), Prof. Calton Pu (Georgia Tech), and Prof. Zhiwei Xu (Chinese Academy of Sciences)."

Welcome to Santiago de Compostela! We are pleased to host the 27th Annual EuropeanConferenceonInformationRetrievalResearch(ECIR2005)onits?rst visit to Spain. These proceedings contain the refereed full papers and poster abstracts p- sented at ECIR 2005. This conference was initially established by the Infor- tion Retrieval Specialist Group of the British Computer Society (BCS-IRSG) under the name "Annual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research. " The colloquium was held in the United Kingdom each year until 1998, when the event was organized in Grenoble, France. Since then the conference venue has alternated between the United Kingdom and Continental Europe, re?ecting the growing European orientation of ECIR. For the same reason, in 2001 the event was renamed "European Conference on Information Retrieval Research. " In - cent years, ECIR has continued to grow and has become the major European forum for the discussion of research in the ?eld of information retrieval. ECIR 2005 was held at the Technical School of Engineering of the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. In terms of submissions, ECIR 2005 was a record-breaking success, since 124 full papers were submitted in response to the call for papers. This was a sharp increase from the 101 submissions received for ECIR 2003, which was the most successful ECIR in terms of submissions. ECIR 2005 established also a call for posters, and 41 posters where submitted. Paper and poster submissions were received from across Europe and further a?eld, including North America, South America, Asia and Australia, which is a clear indicationofthegrowingpopularityandreputationoftheconference.

The International Conference on Networking (ICN 2005) was the fourth conf- ence in its series aimed at stimulating technical exchange in the emerging and important ?eld of networking. On behalf of the International Advisory C- mittee, it is our great pleasure to welcome you to the proceedings of the 2005 event. Networking faces dramatic changes due to the customer-centric view, the venue of the next generation networks paradigm, the push from ubiquitous n- working, andthenewservicemodels.Despitelegacyproblems, whichresearchers and industry are still discovering and improving the state of the art, the ho- zon has revealed new challenges that some of the authors tackled through their submissions. InfactICN2005wasverywellperceivedbytheinternationalnetworkingc- munity. A total of 651 papers from more than 60 countries were submitted, from which 238 were accepted. Each paper was reviewed by several members of the Technical Program Committee. This year, the Advisory Committee revalidated various accepted papers after the reviews had been incorporated. We perceived a signi?cant improvement in the number of submissions and the quality of the submissions. TheICN2005programcoveredavarietyofresearchtopicsthatareofcurrent interest, startingwithGridnetworks, multicasting, TCPoptimizations, QoSand security, emergency services, and network resiliency. The Program Committee selected also three tutorials and invited speakers that addressed the latest - search results from the international industries and academia, and reports on ?ndings from mobile, satellite, and personal communications related to 3rd- and 4th-generation research projects and standardiz

This volume contains the ?nal proceedings for the 2004Computer Music Mod- ing and Retrieval Symposium (CMMR 2004). This event was held during 26-29 May 2004 in Esbjerg, Denmark on the joint campus area of Aalborg University Esbjerg and the University of Southern Denmark, Esbjerg. CMMR is an annual event focusing on important aspects of computer music. CMMR 2004 is the s- ond event in this series. CMMR 2003, which was held in Montpellier, France in May 2003, was a great success and attracted high-quality papers and prominent researchers from the ?eld of computer music. The CMMR 2003 postsymposium proceedingswaspublishedbySpringerintheLectureNotesinComputerScience series (LNCS 2771). CMMR 2004 was jointly organized by Aalborg University Esbjerg in Denmark and LMA, CNRS, Marseille in France (in cooperation with ACM SIGWEB). The use of computers in music is well established. CMMR 2004 provided a unique opportunity to meet and interact with peers concerned with the cro- in?uence of the technological and creative in computer music. The ?eld of c- putermusicisinterdisciplinarybynatureandcloselyrelatedtoanumberofc- puter science and engineering areas such as information retrieval, programming, human computer interaction,digital libraries,hypermedia, arti? cialintelligence, acoustics, signal processing, etc. The event gathered many interesting people (researchers, educators, composers, performers, and others). There were many high-qualitykeynoteandpaperpresentations,thatfosteredinspiringdiscussions. I hope that you ?nd the work presented in these proceedings as interesting and exciting as I have.

We are happy to present to you the proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Digital Watermarking, IWDW 2004. Since its modern reappearance in the academic community in the early 1990s, great progress has been made in understanding both the capabilities and the weaknesses of digital watermarking. On the theoretical side, we all are now well aware of the fact that digital watermarking is best viewed as a form of communication using side information. In the case of digital watermarking the side information in question is the document to be watermarked. This insight has led to a better understanding of the limits of the capacity and robustness of digital watermarking algorithms. It has also led to new and improved watermarking algorithms, both in terms of capacity and imperceptibility. Similarly, the role of human perception, and models thereof, has been greatly enhanced in the study and design of digital watermarking algorithms and systems. On the practical side, applications of watermarking are not yet abundant. The original euphoria on the role of digital watermarking in copy protection and copyright protection has not resulted in widespread use in practical systems. With hindsight, a number of reasons can be given for this lack of practical applications.

Focusing on the manipulation and representation of geometrical objects, this book explores the application of geometry to computer graphics and computer-aided design (CAD). Over 300 exercises are included, some new to this edition, and many of which encourage the reader to implement the techniques and algorithms discussed through the use of a computer package with graphing and computer algebra capabilities. A dedicated website also offers further resources and useful links.

We are delighted to welcome readers to the proceedings of the 6th Pacific-Rim Conference on Multimedia (PCM). The first PCM was held in Sydney, Australia, in 2000. Since then, it has been hosted successfully by Beijing, China, in 2001, Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 2002, Singapore in 2003, and Tokyo, Japan, in 2004, and finally Jeju, one of the most beautiful and fantastic islands in Korea. This year, we accepted 181 papers out of 570 submissions including regular and special session papers. The acceptance rate of 32% indicates our commitment to ensuring a very high-quality conference. This would not be possible without the full support of the excellent Technical Committee and anonymous reviewers that provided timely and insightful reviews. We would therefore like to thank the Program Committee and all reviewers. The program of this year reflects the current interests of the PCM s. The accepted papers cover a range of topics, including, all aspects of multimedia, both technical and artistic perspectives and both theoretical and practical issues. The PCM 2005 program covers tutorial sessions and plenary lectures as well as regular presentations in three tracks of oral sessions and a poster session in a single track. We have tried to expand the scope of PCM to the artistic papers which need not to be strictly technical."

The study reported in this paper is an ongoing effort. We reported a preliminary analysis of the data in the paper. The current experiments varied the subjects to c- duct online group learning activities by the communication media such as email and threaded discussion. Although, we could have easily learned the impact of mobile devices in learning if we divided the subjects to use different hardware such as p- sonal computers, personal digital assistant, or mobile phones, we believe our findings will still be able to provide useful insights on the difficulties that the mobile learners will face in solving problems as a group. Our analysis result will also provide ba- line information on whether the traits of the successful or failed online groups are applicable to the mobile learners. For example, we expect the SMS will be a better medium to overcome the major problem of instant communication or the rapid propagation of the information as the mobile phones have built-in mechanism to remind the users of the incoming new messages and also the mobile phone users are expected to be interrupted for the incoming messages. However, we need further investigation of other problems, which hinder the optimum online group work. For example, 'accuracy of the transferred information' was identified as one of the pr- lems of using emails as the communication medium. Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or SMS are more apt to deliver shorter messages than the typical emails.

It is an honor and great pleasure to write a preface for this postproceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Information Hiding. In the past 10 years, the field of data hiding has been maturing and expanding, gradually establishing its place as an active interdisciplinary research area uniquely combining information theory, cryptology, and signal processing. This year, the workshop was followed by the Privacy Enhancing Technologies workshop (PET) hosted at the same location. Delegates viewed this connection as fruitful as it gave both communities a convenient opportunity to interact. We would like to thank all authors who submitted their work for consideration. Out of the 70 submisions received by the program committee, 25 papers were accepted for publication based on their novelty, originality, and scientific merit. We strived to achieve a balanced exposition of papers that would represent many different aspects of information hiding. All papers were divided into eight sessions: digital media watermarking, steganalysis, digital forensics, steganography, software watermarking, security and privacy, anonymity, and data hiding in unusual content. This year, the workshop included a one-hour rump session that offered an opportunity to the delegates to share their work in progress and other brief but interesting contributions.

This volume collects the proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Multimedia Information Systems, MIS 2005, which was held during September 19 21, 2005 in the beautiful town of Sorrento, Italy. The MIS series of workshops started in 1995 with the aim of fostering - terdisciplinary discussions and research in all aspects of multimedia information systems, in all their diversity. Since then, in MIS workshops, issues ranging from fundamental multimedia information management research to advanced app- cations in multimedia systems related ?elds have been discussed, new systems have been reported, and the lessons learned have provided new insights into this dynamic and exciting area of computer science and engineering. As the program chairs of the MIS 2005 workshop, we note that while desi- ing an e?ective multimedia system, two complementary issues have to be taken into account: (a) the need to use appropriate technologies in acquiring, p- cessing, and delivering multimedia data which manifest themselves under very di?erent shapes; and (b) the need for modeling, indexing, querying, retrieving, mining, and visualizing data under di?erent system and device capabilities, for di?erent users. Therefore, besides the development of more traditional content management technologies, there are emerging needs to gather media from se- ing devices in the environmental context, for informedprocessingofmediabased on the current task and resources, and for making the results available to the user in the most suitable form based on the capabilities and preferences of the user."

First of all, we appreciate the hard work of all the authors who contributed to ICEC 2005 by submitting their papers. ICEC 2005 attracted 95 technical paper submissions, 8 poster submissions and 7 demo submissions, in total 110. This number is nearly equal to ICEC 2004. Based on a thorough review and selection process carried out by 76 international experts from academia and industry as members of the senior and international program committees, a high-quality program was compiled. The program committee consisted of experts from all over the world: 1 from Austria, 3 from Bulgaria, 2 from Canada, 4 from China, 1 from Finland, 4 from France, 10 from Germany, 1 from Greece, 1 from Ireland, 1 from Israel, 1 from Italy, 26 from Japan, 1 from Korea, 4 from The Netherlands, 1 from New Zealand, 1 from Norway, 1 from Singapore, 1 from Thailand, 4 from the UK, and 8 from the USA. In this number, reviewers are included. The final decision was made at the senior program committee meeting based on three reviewers' feedback, available online via the conference management tool. Through earnest and fair discussion at the meeting, 25 technical papers were accepted as long papers and 32 technical papers were accepted as short papers from 95 submitted technical papers. Moreover, 3 poster papers and 5 demo papers were accepted.

This volume comprises papers from the following ?ve workshops that were part of the complete program for the International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT) held in Heraklion, Greece, March 2004: * ICDE/EDBT Joint Ph. D. Workshop (PhD) * Database Technologies for Handling XML-information on the Web (DataX) * Pervasive Information Management (PIM) * Peer-to-Peer Computing and Databases (P2P&DB) * Clustering Information Over the Web (ClustWeb) Together, the ?ve workshops featured 61 high-quality papers selected from appr- imately 180 submissions. It was, therefore, dif?cult to decide on the papers that were to beacceptedforpresentation. Webelievethattheacceptedpaperssubstantiallycontribute to their particular ?elds of research. The workshops were an excellent basis for intense and highly fruitful discussions. The quality and quantity of papers show that the areas of interest for the workshops are highly active. A large number of excellent researchers are working on the aforementioned ?elds producing research output that is not only of interest for other researchers but also for industry. The organizers and participants of the workshops were highly satis?ed with the output. The high quality of the presenters and workshop participants contributed to the success of each workshop. The amazing environment of Heraklion and the location of the EDBT conference also contributed to the overall success. Last, but not least, our sincere thanks to the conference organizers - the organizing team was always willing to help and if there were things that did not work, assistance was quickly available.

Many animators and designers would like to supplement their Maya learning with a less-technical, more helpful book. This new self-study manual is both a general guide for understanding 3-D computer graphics and a specific guide for learning the fundamentals of Maya: workspace, modeling, animation, shading, lighting, and rendering.

This well-integrated and produced volume covers these fundamentals in each chapter so that readers gain increasingly detailed knowledge. After an initial 'concepts' section launches each chapter, hands-on tutorials are provided, as well as a chapter project that progressively adds newly learned material and culminates in the final animated short. This is the first book on Maya that teaches the subject using a sensible, proven methodology for both novices and intermediate users.

Topics and features: * Proven method that emphasizes preliminaries to every chapter * Integrates the "why" concepts of 3-D simultaneously with the "how-to" techniques * Skills reinforced with tutorials and chapter projects * Real-world experience distilled into helpful hints and step-by-step guides for common tasks * CD-ROM with practice animations, case studies and additional methods

The book, suitable for novices or intermediate users, presents all the basic 3-D animation concepts and Maya software background needed for learning animation techniques and creating sophisticated, state-of-the-art animations. It is an essential resource for animators, game developers, effects specialists, and computer graphic artists, as well as an ideal self-study guide for students or individuals pursuing interests in graphics or animation.

Welcome to the proceedings of the 5th Paci?c Rim Conference on Multimedia (PCM 2004) held in Tokyo Waterfront City, Japan, November 30-December 3, 2004. Following the success of the preceding conferences, PCM 2000 in Sydney, PCM 2001 in Beijing, PCM 2002 in Hsinchu, and PCM 2003 in Singapore, the ?fth PCM brought together the researchers, developers, practitioners, and educators in the ?eld of multimedia. Theoretical breakthroughs and practical systems were presented at this conference, thanks to the support of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, IEEE Region 10 and IEEE Japan Council, ACM SIGMM, IEICE and ITE. PCM2004featuredacomprehensiveprogramincludingkeynotetalks, regular paperpresentations, posters, demos, andspecialsessions.Wereceived385papers andthenumberofsubmissionswasthelargestamongrecentPCMs.Amongsuch a large number of submissions, we accepted only 94 oral presentations and 176 poster presentations. Seven special sessions were also organized by world-leading researchers. We kindly acknowledge the great support provided in the reviewing of submissions by the program committee members, as well as the additional reviewers who generously gave their time. The many useful comments provided by the reviewing process must have been very valuable for the authors' work. Thisconferencewouldneverhavehappenedwithoutthehelpofmanypeople. We greatly appreciate the support of our strong organizing committee chairs and advisory chairs. Among the chairs, special thanks go to Dr. Ichiro Ide and Dr. Takeshi Naemura who smoothly handled publication of the proceedings with Springer. Dr. Kazuya Kodama did a fabulous job as our Web master.

Following the previous four annual conferences, the 5th Chinese Conference on Biometrics Recognition (Sinobiometrics 2004) was held in Guangzhou, China in December 2004. The conference this year was aimed at promoting the international exchange of ideas and providing an opportunity for keeping abreast of the latest developments in biometric algorithms, systems, and applications. The 1st Biometrics Verification Competition (BVC) on face, iris, and fingerprint recognition was also conducted in conjunction with the conference. This book is composed of 74 papers presented at Sinobiometrics 2004, contributed by researchers and industrial practitioners from Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, France, UK, US, as well as China. Of these, 60 papers were selected from 140 submissions and 14 were invited. The papers not only presented recent technical advances, but also addressed issues in biometric system design, standardization, and applications. Included among the invited were four feature papers on the ideas and algorithms of the best-performing biometric engines, which were either competition winners at the Face Authentication Test (FAT) 2004 or the Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC) 2004, or they were the best-performing iris and palmprint recognition algorithms. The papers were complemented by five keynote lectures on biometrics, and face, fingerprint, and iris authentication and multimodal fusion by Arun Ross (West Virginia University) and Anil K. Jain (Michigan State University), Josef Kittler (University of Surrey), John Daugman (University of Cambridge), Raffaele Cappelli (University of Bologna), and Stan Z. Li (Chinese Academy of Sciences).

Welcome to the proceedings of the 5th Paci?c Rim Conference on Multimedia (PCM 2004) held in Tokyo Waterfront City, Japan, November 30 December 3, 2004. Following the success of the preceding conferences, PCM 2000 in Sydney, PCM 2001 in Beijing, PCM 2002 in Hsinchu, and PCM 2003 in Singapore, the ?fth PCM brought together the researchers, developers, practitioners, and educators in the ?eld of multimedia. Theoretical breakthroughs and practical systems were presented at this conference, thanks to the support of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, IEEE Region 10 and IEEE Japan Council, ACM SIGMM, IEICE and ITE. PCM2004featuredacomprehensiveprogramincludingkeynotetalks, regular paperpresentations, posters, demos, andspecialsessions.Wereceived385papers andthenumberofsubmissionswasthelargestamongrecentPCMs.Amongsuch a large number of submissions, we accepted only 94 oral presentations and 176 poster presentations. Seven special sessions were also organized by world-leading researchers. We kindly acknowledge the great support provided in the reviewing of submissions by the program committee members, as well as the additional reviewers who generously gave their time. The many useful comments provided by the reviewing process must have been very valuable for the authors work. Thisconferencewouldneverhavehappenedwithoutthehelpofmanypeople. We greatly appreciate the support of our strong organizing committee chairs and advisory chairs. Among the chairs, special thanks go to Dr. Ichiro Ide and Dr. Takeshi Naemura who smoothly handled publication of the proceedings with Springer. Dr. Kazuya Kodama did a fabulous job as our Web master."

A vivid look at China's shifting place in the global political economy of technology production How did China's mass manufacturing and "copycat" production become transformed, in the global tech imagination, from something holding the nation back to one of its key assets? Prototype Nation offers a rich transnational analysis of how the promise of democratized innovation and entrepreneurial life has shaped China's governance and global image. With historical precision and ethnographic detail, Silvia Lindtner reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007-8, shaped the rise of the global maker movement and the vision of China as a "new frontier" of innovation. Lindtner's investigations draw on more than a decade of research in experimental work spaces-makerspaces, coworking spaces, innovation hubs, hackathons, and startup weekends-in China, the United States, Africa, Europe, Taiwan, and Singapore, as well as in key sites of technology investment and industrial production-tech incubators, corporate offices, and factories. She examines how the ideals of the maker movement, to intervene in social and economic structures, served the technopolitical project of prototyping a "new" optimistic, assertive, and global China. In doing so, Lindtner demonstrates that entrepreneurial living influences governance, education, policy, investment, and urban redesign in ways that normalize the persistence of sexism, racism, colonialism, and labor exploitation. Prototype Nation shows that by attending to the bodies and sites that nurture entrepreneurial life, technology can be extricated from the seemingly endless cycle of promise and violence. Cover image: Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space and Spru th Magers