Explorations in Art and Technology is about the creative process in action through the eyes of practitioners and researchers. The book explores the fascinating relationship between artist and technologist through studies of innovative projects that push the boundaries of digital art. The research sheds new light on the nature of interaction between people and computers and provides insight into the characteristics of environments in which creativity can be enhanced. In doing so, it presents a case for organisations to develop strategies for offering environments in which collaborative, sustainable partnerships can thrive. What emerges is a compelling story of new visions and new forms in a field that is set to transform traditional norms in both art and technology as we move through the 21st Century. Additional information and links are available at: http://www.creativityandcognition.com

Deformable avatars are virtual humans that deform themselves during motion. This implies facial deformations, body deformations at joints, and global deformations. Simulating deformable avatars ensures a more realistic simulation of virtual humans. The research requires models for capturing of geometrie and kinematic data, the synthesis of the realistic human shape and motion, the parametrisation and motion retargeting, and several appropriate deformation models. Once a deformable avatar has been created and animated, the researcher must model high-level behavior and introduce agent technology. The book can be divided into 5 subtopics: 1. Motion capture and 3D reconstruction 2. Parametrie motion and retargeting 3. Musc1es and deformation models 4. Facial animation and communication 5. High-level behaviors and autonomous agents Most of the papers were presented during the IFIP workshop "DEFORM '2000" that was held at the University of Geneva in December 2000, followed by "A V AT ARS 2000" held at EPFL, Lausanne. The two workshops were sponsored by the "Troisu me Cycle Romand d'Informatique" and allowed participants to discuss the state of research in these important areas. x Preface We would like to thank IFIP for its support and Yana Lambert from Kluwer Academic Publishers for her advice. Finally, we are very grateful to Zerrin Celebi, who has prepared the edited version of this book and Dr. Laurent Moccozet for his collaboration."

Proceedings of the FISITA 2012 World Automotive Congress are selected from nearly 2,000 papers submitted to the 34th FISITA World Automotive Congress, which is held by Society of Automotive Engineers of China (SAE-China ) and the International Federation of Automotive Engineering Societies (FISITA). This proceedings focus on solutions for sustainable mobility in all areas of passenger car, truck and bus transportation. Volume 6: Vehicle Electronics focuses on: *Engine/Chassis/Body Electronic Control *Electrical and Electronic System *Software and Hardware Development *Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) *Vehicle Sensor and Actuator *In-Vehicle Network *Multi-Media/Infotainment System Above all researchers, professional engineers and graduates in fields of automotive engineering, mechanical engineering and electronic engineering will benefit from this book. SAE-China is a national academic organization composed of enterprises and professionals who focus on research, design and education in the fields of automotive and related industries. FISITA is the umbrella organization for the national automotive societies in 37 countries around the world. It was founded in Paris in 1948 with the purpose of bringing engineers from around the world together in a spirit of cooperation to share ideas and advance the technological development of the automobile.

"Elsevier's Dictionary of Computer Graphics" contains 10,540 terms with more than 2,600 cross-references that are commonly used in the theory and practice of computer graphics. Included are terms from all areas related to a) the theory of computer graphics - descriptive geometry, projective geometry, topology, fractal geometry, color science; and b) the practice of computer graphics - computer-aided design (CAD) systems, technical drawing, computer art, computer animation, business graphics, scientific visualization, virtual reality, graphical programming, image processing, graphical computer devices.

As well as the commonly used terms in the above-mentioned areas, the dictionary also includes terms that are currently coming into use, especially in the areas of computer-aided design systems, computer art, computer animation, virtual reality and graphical programming.

Elsevier's Dictionary of Computer Graphics will be a valuable tool for engineers, scientists, artists, students and for everyone who takes an interest in computer graphics.

This volume provides an overview of multimedia data mining and knowledge discovery and discusses the variety of hot topics in multimedia data mining research. It describes the objectives and current tendencies in multimedia data mining research and their applications. Each part contains an overview of its chapters and leads the reader with a structured approach through the diverse subjects in the field.

Video on Demand Systems brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast moving area. Video on Demand Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.

Multimedia data comprising of images, audio and video is becoming increasingly common. The decreasing costs of consumer electronic devices such as digital cameras and digital camcorders, along with the ease of transportation facilitated by the Internet, has lead to a phenomenal rise in the amount of multimedia data generated and distributed. Given that this trend of increased use of multimedia data is likely to accelerate, there is an urgent need for providing a clear means of capturing, storing, indexing, retrieving, analyzing and summarizing such data. Content-based access to multimedia data is of primary importance since it is the natural way by which human beings interact with such information. To facilitate the content-based access of multimedia information, the first step is to derive feature measures from these data so that a feature space representation of the data content can be formed. This can subsequently allow for mapping the feature space to the symbol space (semantics) either automatically or through human intervention. Thus, signal to symbol mapping, useful for any practical system, can be successfully achieved. Perspectives on Content-Based Multimedia Systems provides a comprehensive set of techniques to tackle these important issues. This book offers detailed solutions to a wide range of practical problems in building real systems by providing specifics of three systems built by the authors. While providing a systems focus, it also equips the reader with a keen understanding of the fundamental issues, including a formalism for content-based multimedia database systems, multimedia feature extraction, object-based techniques, signature-based techniques and fuzzy retrieval techniques. The performance evaluation issues of practical systems is also explained. This book brings together essential elements of building a content-based multimedia database system in a way that makes them accessible to practitioners in computer science and electrical engineering. It can also serve as a textbook for graduate-level courses.

Continued progress in Speech Technology in the face of ever-increasing demands on the performance levels of applications is a challenge to the whole speech and language science community. Robust recognition and understanding of spontaneous speech in varied environments, good comprehensibility and naturalness of expressive speech synthesis are goals that cannot be achieved without a change of paradigm. This book argues for interdisciplinary communication and cooperation in problem-solving in general, and discusses the interaction between speech and language engineering and phonetics in particular. With a number of reports on innovative speech technology research as well as more theoretical discussions, it addresses the practical, scientific and sometimes the philosophical problems that stand in the way of cross-disciplinary collaboration and illuminates some of the many possible ways forward.

Audience: Researchers and professionals in speech technology and computational linguists.

The Programmer's Hierarchical Interactive Graphics System (PHIGS) is a computer-graphics standard defining an interface between an application program and a computer-graphics system. PHIGS has been actively under development since 1980. Much of this development has been performed by Technical Committee X3H3 under the American National Standard Institute (ANSI) procedures. PHIGS is also an international standard sponsored by the United States and developed by the international computer-graphics committee, ISO TC97/SC21/WG2. In addition, PHIGS has been selected as the graphics extension to the X-window standard and as part of the Intel i860 P.A.X. standard. The PHIGS standard has received wide acceptance throughout the computer graphics industry. PHIGS libraries are available on most of the high performance three-dimensional graphics platforms. These include IBM, DEC, HP, Sun, Alliant, Stardent, and Silicon Graphics. Despite this acceptance, there are few texts that provide the software engineer with an overview of the standard. The only currently available PHIGS references are in the form of the ANSI functional description, technical papers, and device-specific PHIGS to the novice PHIGS programmer."

Resource Management for Distributed Multimedia Systems addresses the problems and challenges of handling several continuous- media data streams in networked multimedia environments. The work demonstrates how resource management mechanisms can be integrated into a stream handling system. The resulting system includes functions for Quality of Service (QoS) calculations, scheduling, determination of resource requirements, and methods to reduce resource requirements. The work explains the following: a suitable system architecture and resource management scheme that allows for the provision and enforcement of QoS guarantee, resource scheduling mechanisms for CPU and buffer space, mechanisms to measure and collect resource requirements, methods to extend resource management to future scenarios by allowing the reservation of resources in advance and offering sealing mechanisms. . Resource Management for Distributed Multimedia Systems is a comprehensive view of resource management for a broad technical audience that includes computer scientists and engineers involved in developing multimedia applications.

The widespread use of high-speed networks has made the global distribution of digital media contents readily available in an instant. As a result, data hiding was created in an attempt to control the distribution of these copies by verifying or tracking the media signals picked up from copyright information, such as the author or distributor ID. Multimedia Information Hiding Technologies and Methodologies for Controlling Data presents the latest methods and research results in the emerging field of Multimedia Information Hiding (MIH). This comprehensive collection is beneficial to all researchers and engineers working globally in this field and aims to inspire new graduate-level students as they explore this promising field.

Continued progress in Speech Technology in the face of ever-increasing demands on the performance levels of applications is a challenge to the whole speech and language science community. Robust recognition and understanding of spontaneous speech in varied environments, good comprehensibility and naturalness of expressive speech synthesis are goals that cannot be achieved without a change of paradigm. This book argues for interdisciplinary communication and cooperation in problem-solving in general, and discusses the interaction between speech and language engineering and phonetics in particular. With a number of reports on innovative speech technology research as well as more theoretical discussions, it addresses the practical, scientific and sometimes the philosophical problems that stand in the way of cross-disciplinary collaboration and illuminates some of the many possible ways forward.

Audience: Researchers and professionals in speech technology and computational linguists.

Photorealistic rendering strives to generate images from computer modeled scenes with an image quality as close to real life as possible. A major issue in rendering is simulation of local and global light reflection in a scene. Both ray tracing and radiosity algorithms capture only some of the possible light reflection phenomena. Recently developed two-pass algorithms combine the ray tracing and radiosity approaches and are able to capture the whole range of light reflection. This book is a collection of papers discussing the latest developments, including a new range of improvements, in stochastic sampling strategies, radiosity form factor calculation, and parallel processing for ray tracing and radiosity. A number of papers on rendering applications in interior design, lighting design, and remote sensing conclude the volume. The contributions are revised versions of papers originally presented at the Second Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, held in Barcelona, Spain, in May 1991. The book fully reflects the state of the art in rendering and presentsa wide variety of novel techniques. It will interest researchers and students in computer graphics, as well as designers who want to apply rendering techniques for realistic simulation in lighting design, interior design, and architecture.

Document imaging is a new discipline in applied computer science. It is building bridges between computer graphics, the world of prepress and press, and the areas of color vision and color reproduction. The focus of this book is of special relevance to people learning how to utilize and integrate such available technology as digital printing or short run color, how to make use of CIM techniques for print products, and how to evaluate related technologies that will become relevant in the next few years. This book is the first to give a comprehensive overview of document imaging, the areas involved, and how they relate. For readers with a background in computer graphics it gives insight into all problems related to putting information in print, a field only very thinly covered in textbooks on computer graphics.

The recent rapid advances in wireless technologies have created a demand for high quality multimedia applications and services. These advanced multimedia applications give rise to a new set of challenges in providing Quality of Service (QoS) when delivering these services over wireless networks. The Handbook of Research on Wireless Multimedia: Quality of Service and Solutions highlights and discusses the underlying QoS issues that arise in the delivery of real-time multimedia services over wireless networks. This cutting-edge book presents state-of-the-art solutions from leading researchers active in the field to address the QoS issues for different wireless multimedia applications.

This book stages a dialogue between international researchers from the broad fields of complexity science and narrative studies. It presents an edited collection of chapters on aspects of how narrative theory from the humanities may be exploited to understand, explain, describe, and communicate aspects of complex systems, such as their emergent properties, feedbacks, and downwards causation; and how ideas from complexity science can inform narrative theory, and help explain, understand, and construct new, more complex models of narrative as a cognitive faculty and as a pervasive cultural form in new and old media. The book is suitable for academics, practitioners, and professionals, and postgraduates in complex systems, narrative theory, literary and film studies, new media and game studies, and science communication.

Geometry is the cornerstone of computer graphics and computer animation, and provides the framework and tools for solving problems in two and three dimensions. This may be in the form of describing simple shapes such as a circle, ellipse, or parabola, or complex problems such as rotating 3D objects about an arbitrary axis.

Geometry for Computer Graphics draws together a wide variety of geometric information that will provide a sourcebook of facts, examples, and proofs for students, academics, researchers, and professional practitioners.

The book is divided into 4 sections: the first summarizes hundreds of formulae used to solve 2D and 3D geometric problems. The second section places these formulae in context in the form of worked examples. The third provides the origin and proofs of these formulae, and communicates mathematical strategies for solving geometric problems. The last section is a glossary of terms used in geometry.

What the book is about This book is about the theory and practice of the use of multimedia, multimodal interfaces for leaming. Yet it is not about technology as such, at least in the sense that the authors do not subscribe to the idea that one should do something just because it is technologically possible. 'Multimedia' has been adopted in some commercial quarters to mean little more than a computer with some form of audio ar (more usually) video attachment. This is a trend which ought to be resisted, as exemplified by the material in this book. Rather than merely using a new technology 'because it is there', there is a need to examine how people leam and eommunicate, and to study diverse ways in which computers ean harness text, sounds, speech, images, moving pietures, gestures, touch, etc. , to promote effective human leaming. We need to identify which media, in whieh combinations, using what mappings of domain to representation, are appropriate far which educational purposes . . The word 'multimodal ' in the title underlies this perspective. The intention is to focus attention less on the technology and more on how to strueture different kinds of information via different sensory channels in order to yield the best possible quality of communication and educational interaction. (Though the reader should refer to Chapter 1 for a discussion of the use of the word 'multimodal' . ) Historically there was little problem.

In the third paper in this chapter, Mike Pratt provides an historical intro duction to solid modeling. He presents the development of the three most freqently used techniques: cellular subdivision, constructive solid modeling and boundary representation. Although each of these techniques devel oped more or less independently, today the designer's needs dictate that a successful system allows access to all of these methods. For example, sculptured surfaces are generally represented using a boundary represen tation. However, the design of a complex vehicle generally dictates that a sculptured surface representation is most efficient for the 'skin' while constructive solid geometry representation is most efficent for the inter nal mechanism. Pratt also discusses the emerging concept of design by 'feature line'. Finally, he addresses the very important problem of data exchange between solid modeling systems and the progress that is being made towards developing an international standard. With the advent of reasonably low cost scientific workstations with rea sonable to outstanding graphics capabilities, scientists and engineers are increasingly turning to computer analysis for answers to fundamental ques tions and to computer graphics for present~tion of those answers. Although the current crop of workstations exhibit quite impressive computational ca pability, they are still not capable of solving many problems in a reasonable time frame, e. g. , executing computational fluid dynamics and finite element codes or generating complex ray traced or radiosity based images. In the sixth chapter Mike Muuss of the U. S.

In recent years rapid Internet growth has pushed the development of new multimedia applications in all aspects of life such as entertainment, communication, collaborative work and electronic commerce. Future applications will make use of different technologies like voice, data and video, but in order to make such a wide variety of multimedia applications successful, a number of technology and management issues must be addressed. Multimedia Networking: Technology, Management and Applications addresses the dynamic and efficient uses of resources a fundamental aspect of multimedia networks. Geared toward professionals, educators and students alike, this exciting new book will detail current research and the future direction of multimedia networking.

This book is based on contributions to the Seventh European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication that was held at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden, in July of 1999 under the auspices of the European Language and Speech Network (ELSNET). The topic of the summer school was "Multimodality in Language and Speech Systems" (MiLaSS). The issue of multimodality in interpersonal, face-to-face communication has been an important research topic for a number of years. With the increasing sophistication of computer-based interactive systems using language and speech, the topic of multimodal interaction has received renewed interest both in terms of human-human interaction and human-machine interaction. Nine lecturers contri buted to the summer school with courses on specialized topics ranging from the technology and science of creating talking faces to human-human communication, which is mediated by computer for the handicapped. Eight of the nine lecturers are represented in this book. The summer school attracted more than 60 participants from Europe, Asia and North America representing not only graduate students but also senior researchers from both academia and industry."