Multimedia has two fundamental characteristics that can be expressed by the following formula: Multimedia = Multiple Media + Hypermedia. How can software engineering take advantage of these two characteristics? Will these two characteristics pose problems in multimedia systems design? These are some of the issues to be explored in this book. The first two chapters will be of interest to managers, software engineers, programmers, and people interested in gaining an overall understanding of multimedia software engineering. The next six chapters present multimedia software engineering according to the conceptual framework introduced in Chapter One. This is of particular use to practitioners, system developers, multimedia application designers, programmers, and people interested in prototyping multimedia applications. The next three chapters are more research-oriented and are mainly intended for researchers working on the specification, modeling, and analysis of distributed multimedia systems, but will also be relevant to scientists, researchers, and software engineers interested in the systems and theoretical aspects of multimedia software engineering. Multimedia Software Engineering can be used as a textbook in a graduate course on multimedia software engineering or in an undergraduate course on software design where the emphasis is on multimedia applications. It is especially suitable for a project-oriented course.

Digital fiction has long been perceived as an experimental niche of electronic literature. Yet born-digital narratives thrive in mainstream culture, as communities of practice create and share digital fiction, filling in the gaps between the media they are given and the stories they seek. Neverending Stories explores the influences of literature and computing on digital fiction and how the practices and cultures of each have impacted who makes and plays digital fiction. Popular creativity emerges from subordinated groups often excluded from producing cultural resources, accepting the materials of capitalism and inverting them for their own carnivalesque uses. Popular digital fiction goes by many different names: webnovels, adventure games, visual novels, Twitter fiction, webcomics, Twine games, walking sims, alternate reality games, virtual reality films, interactive movies, enhanced books, transmedia universes, and many more. The book establishes digital fiction in a foundation of innovation, tracing its emergence in various guises around the world. It examines Infocom, whose commercial success with interactive fiction crumbled, in no small part, because of its failure to consider women as creators or consumers. It takes note of the brief flourish of commercial book apps and literary games. It connects practices of cognitive and conceptual interactivity, and textual multiplicity-dating to the origins of the print novel-to the feminine. It pushes into the technological future of narrative in immersive and mixed realities. It posits the transmedia franchises and the practices of fanfiction as examples of digital fiction that will continue indefinitely, regardless of academic notice or approval.

In recent decades Multimedia processing has emerged as an important technology to generate content based on images, video, audio, graphics, and text. This book is a compilation of the latest trends and developments in the field of computational intelligence in multimedia processing. The edited book presents a large number of interesting applications to intelligent multimedia processing of various Computational Intelligence techniques including neural networks and fuzzy logic.

Exploring Digital Design takes a multi-disciplinary look at digital design research where digital design is embedded in a larger socio-cultural context. Working from socio-technical research areas such as Participatory Design (PD), Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), the book explores how humanities offer new insights into digital design, and discusses a variety of digital design research practices, methods, and theoretical approaches spanning established disciplinary borders. The aim of the book is to explore the diversity of contemporary digital design practices in which commonly shared aspects are interpreted and integrated into different disciplinary and interdisciplinary conversations. It is the conversations and explorations with humanities that further distinguish this book within digital design research. Illustrated with real examples from digital design research practices from a variety of research projects and from a broad range of contexts Exploring Digital Design offers a basis for understanding the disciplinary roots as well as the interdisciplinary dialogues in digital design research, providing theoretical, empirical, and methodological sources for understanding digital design research. The first half of the book Exploring Digital Design is authored as a multi-disciplinary approach to digital design research, and represents novel perspectives and analyses in this research. The contributors are Gunnar Liestol, Andrew Morrison and Christina Moertberg in addition to the editors. Although primarily written for researchers and graduate students, digital design practioners will also find the book useful. Overall, Exploring Digital Design provides an excellent introduction to, and resource for, research into digital design.

This book: takes media and critical studies approach to the museum and raises questions about the role of privately-owned search engines in facilitating museum experiences. It questions who collects what, for whom objects are collected and what purpose these objects and collections serve. brings attention to an emerging new model of digital ownership and moderation by connecting fieldwork undertaken in Australia and New Zealand with the global practices of technology companies. will be of interest to academics and students working in the fields of museum studies, art, culture, media studies and digital humanities and for practitioners working in museums and galleries around the world.

Video segmentation is the most fundamental process for appropriate index ing and retrieval of video intervals. In general, video streams are composed 1 of shots delimited by physical shot boundaries. Substantial work has been done on how to detect such shot boundaries automatically (Arman et aI. , 1993) (Zhang et aI. , 1993) (Zhang et aI. , 1995) (Kobla et aI. , 1997). Through the inte gration of technologies such as image processing, speech/character recognition and natural language understanding, keywords can be extracted and associated with these shots for indexing (Wactlar et aI. , 1996). A single shot, however, rarely carries enough amount of information to be meaningful by itself. Usu ally, it is a semantically meaningful interval that most users are interested in re trieving. Generally, such meaningful intervals span several consecutive shots. There hardly exists any efficient and reliable technique, either automatic or manual, to identify all semantically meaningful intervals within a video stream. Works by (Smith and Davenport, 1992) (Oomoto and Tanaka, 1993) (Weiss et aI. , 1995) (Hjelsvold et aI. , 1996) suggest manually defining all such inter vals in the database in advance. However, even an hour long video may have an indefinite number of meaningful intervals. Moreover, video data is multi interpretative. Therefore, given a query, what is a meaningful interval to an annotator may not be meaningful to the user who issues the query. In practice, manual indexing of meaningful intervals is labour intensive and inadequate.

Despite the spectacular breakthroughs of the semiconductor industry, the ability to design integrated circuits under stringent time-to-market requirements is lagging behind integration capacity, so far keeping pace with still valid Moorea (TM)s Law. The resulting gap is threatening with slowing down such a phenomenal growth. The design community believes that it is only by means of powerful CAD tools, design methodologies and even a design paradigm shift, that this design gap can be bridged. In this sense, reuse-based design is seen as a promising solution, and concepts such as IP Block, Virtual Component, and Design Reuse have become commonplace thanks to the significant advances in the digital arena. Unfortunately, the very nature of analog and mixed-signal (AMS) design a "more subtle, hierarchically loose, and handicraft-demandinga" has hindered a similar level of consensus and development.

Aiming at the core of the problem, Reuse Based Methodologies and Tools in the Design of Analog and Mixed-Signal Integrated Circuits presents a framework for the reuse-based design of AMS circuits. The framework is founded on three key elements: (1) a CAD-supported hierarchical design flow that facilitates the incorporation of AMS reusable blocks, reduces the overall design time, and expedites the management of increasing AMS design complexity; (2) a complete, clear definition of the AMS reusable block, structured into three separate facets or views: the behavioral, structural, and layout facets, the first two for top-down electrical synthesis and bottom-up verification, the latter used during bottom-up physical synthesis; (3) the design for reusability set of tools, methods, andguidelines that, relying on intensive parameterization as well as on design knowledge capture and encapsulation, allows to produce fully reusable AMS blocks.

Reuse Based Methodologies and Tools in the Design of Analog and Mixed-Signal Integrated Circuits features a very detailed, tutorial, and in-depth coverage of all issues and must-have properties of reusable AMS blocks, as well as a thorough description of the methods and tools necessary to implement them. For the first time, this has been done hierarchically, covering one by one the different stages of the design flow, allowing us to examine how the reusable block yields its benefits, both in design time and correct performance.

The PC Graphics Handbook serves advanced C++ programmers dealing with the specifics of PC graphics hardware and software.

Discussions address:

o 2D and 3D graphics programming for Windows and DOS
o Device-independent graphics
o Mathematics for computer graphics
o Graphics algorithms and procedural operations
o PC video systems architecture, including its history and development
o High-end graphics systems and coprocessors
o Artificial life
o Virtual reality
o Animation techniques for simulations and video games
o VGA, SuperVGA, and VESA
o Device drivers
o Graphics and animation primitives

The authors cover the spectrum of PC graphics programming, including theoretical and practical topics - creating a singularly comprehensive resource for programmers.

It demonstrates how features such as animation and audio can be employed to ensure web sites are used to their full potential and therefore helps to create professional products that will secure a positive image of the company or product they are promoting. It is accessible and simplifies the authoring experience so that even those with little or no previous knowledge of creating web pages can develop and innovate stimulating and interactive features to enhance their content.

The constantly evolving technological infrastructure of the modem world presents a great challenge of developing software systems with increasing size, complexity, and functionality. The software engineering field has seen changes and innovations to meet these and other continuously growing challenges by developing and implementing useful software engineering methodologies. Among the more recent advances are those made in the context of software portability, formal verification. techniques, software measurement, and software reuse. However, despite the introduction of some important and useful paradigms in the software engineering discipline, their technological transfer on a larger scale has been extremely gradual and limited. For example, many software development organizations may not have a well-defined software assurance team, which can be considered as a key ingredient in the development of a high-quality and dependable software product. Recently, the software engineering field has observed an increased integration or fusion with the computational intelligence (Cl) field, which is comprised of primarily the mature technologies of fuzzy logic, neural networks, genetic algorithms, genetic programming, and rough sets. Hybrid systems that combine two or more of these individual technologies are also categorized under the Cl umbrella. Software engineering is unlike the other well-founded engineering disciplines, primarily due to its human component (designers, developers, testers, etc. ) factor. The highly non-mechanical and intuitive nature of the human factor characterizes many of the problems associated with software engineering, including those observed in development effort estimation, software quality and reliability prediction, software design, and software testing."

This open access book tackles the design of 3D spatial interactions in an audio-centered and audio-first perspective, providing the fundamental notions related to the creation and evaluation of immersive sonic experiences. The key elements that enhance the sensation of place in a virtual environment (VE) are: Immersive audio: the computational aspects of the acoustical-space properties of Virutal Reality (VR) technologies Sonic interaction: the human-computer interplay through auditory feedback in VE VR systems: naturally support multimodal integration, impacting different application domains Sonic Interactions in Virtual Environments will feature state-of-the-art research on real-time auralization, sonic interaction design in VR, quality of the experience in multimodal scenarios, and applications. Contributors and editors include interdisciplinary experts from the fields of computer science, engineering, acoustics, psychology, design, humanities, and beyond. Their mission is to shape an emerging new field of study at the intersection of sonic interaction design and immersive media, embracing an archipelago of existing research spread in different audio communities and to increase among the VR communities, researchers, and practitioners, the awareness of the importance of sonic elements when designing immersive environments.

About PowerPoint 2000 Traditionally, presenters have had to travel to reach audiences in different parts of the world. With today's technologies, this is no longer necessary. Using Microsoft PowerPoint (R) 2000, presenters can now easily and inexpensively collaborate on presentations and show them to remote audiences without leaving their offices. PowerPoint 2000 offers new ease-of-use features that speed users through presentation development and help users deliver Web-based presentations to remote audiences. Let this NEW Made Simple book guide you through the new features of PowerPoint 2000 and help you make the most of the product.

With the ever-increasing volume of data, proper management of data is a challenging proposition to scientists and researchers, and given the vast storage space required, multimedia data is no exception in this regard. Scientists and researchers are investing great effort to discover new space-efficient methods for storage and archiving of this data. Intelligent Innovations in Multimedia Data Engineering and Management provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of storage systems and computing methods for large forms of data. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as binary image, fuzzy logic, and metaheuristic algorithms, this book is ideally designed for computer engineers, IT professionals, technology developers, academicians, and researchers seeking current research on advancing strategies and computing techniques for various types of data.

KES International (KES) is a worldwide organisation that provides a professional community and association for researchers, originally in the discipline of Kno- edge Based and Intelligent Engineering Systems, but now extending into other related areas. Through this, KES provides its members with opportunities for publication and beneficial interaction. The focus of KES is research and technology transfer in the area of Intelligent Systems, i.e. computer-based software systems that operate in a manner analogous to the human brain, in order to perform advanced tasks. Recently KES has started to extend its area of interest to encompass the contribution that intelligent systems can make to sustainability and renewable energy, and also the knowledge transfer, innovation and enterprise agenda. Involving several thousand researchers, managers and engineers drawn from universities and companies world-wide, KES is in an excellent position to faci- tate international research co-operation and generate synergy in the area of arti- cial intelligence applied to real-world 'Smart' systems and the underlying related theory. The KES annual conference covers a broad spectrum of intelligent systems t- ics and attracts several hundred delegates from a range of countries round the world. KES also organises symposia on specific technical topics, for example, Agent and Multi Agent Systems, Intelligent Decision Technologies, Intelligent Interactive Multimedia Systems and Services, Sustainability in Energy and Bui- ings and Innovations through Knowledge Transfer. KES is responsible for two peer-reviewed journals, the International Journal of Knowledge based and Intel- gent Engineering Systems, and Intelligent Decision Technologies: an International Journal.

This is a guide to the wide range of uses of multimedia. Multimedia has moved from a technology looking for an application to widespread implementation in many fields such as sales presentations, education, training, business, museums and art galleries, medical systems and scientific applications, with numerous uses in the fields of entertainment and leisure. The author details the huge array of authoring software which is now available, as well as the distribution of multimedia data by telephone, cable, satellite or radio communications. The first part of the book introduces the technology for the non-specialist, while part two covers multimedia applications and markets.

Hypermedia and multimedia have penetrated the world of computer games, Internet, and CD-ROM based reference manuals. However, the fields of education, schooling, and training ask more specific benefits from them. This book provides practical approaches to transform these media into learning tools. Crucial helping steps include the migration from expository to exploratory learning strategies, the integration of collaborative learning practices in plenary and individualistic teaching styles, and the evolution from test-driven to experience-oriented training.
This volume has three goals:
* to discuss the concepts of hypermedia, multimedia, and hypertext and review pertinent research lines;
* to provide guidelines and suggestions for developing multimedia applications; and
* to place technology within a broader context of education and training through a discussion of rich environments for active learning (REALs).
The book takes a developmental focus to helpf readers set up and manage the process of developing a multimedia application. It is not a technical or a how-to manual on working with video, sound, digitized graphics, or computer code. The text takes a unique approach to the idea of media-- viewing media as delivery systems: if video is called for, use it; if sound will help in an application, use it. The fundamental guidelines presented here are usually "not" media specific. Media works only within the strategies with which they are used.
Aimed at practitioners--people who teach about or develop multimedia and hypermedia applications--this volume carefully examines the main components and issues in developing applications. It provides suggestions and heuristics for sound, fundamental design processes.

Hypermedia and multimedia have penetrated the world of computer games, Internet, and CD-ROM based reference manuals. However, the fields of education, schooling, and training ask more specific benefits from them. This book provides practical approaches to transform these media into learning tools. Crucial helping steps include the migration from expository to exploratory learning strategies, the integration of collaborative learning practices in plenary and individualistic teaching styles, and the evolution from test-driven to experience-oriented training.
This volume has three goals:
* to discuss the concepts of hypermedia, multimedia, and hypertext and review pertinent research lines;
* to provide guidelines and suggestions for developing multimedia applications; and
* to place technology within a broader context of education and training through a discussion of rich environments for active learning (REALs).
The book takes a developmental focus to helpf readers set up and manage the process of developing a multimedia application. It is not a technical or a how-to manual on working with video, sound, digitized graphics, or computer code. The text takes a unique approach to the idea of media-- viewing media as delivery systems: if video is called for, use it; if sound will help in an application, use it. The fundamental guidelines presented here are usually "not" media specific. Media works only within the strategies with which they are used.
Aimed at practitioners--people who teach about or develop multimedia and hypermedia applications--this volume carefully examines the main components and issues in developing applications. It provides suggestions and heuristics for sound, fundamental design processes.

This book is proceedings of the 7th FTRA International Conference on Future Information Technology (FutureTech 2012). The topics of FutureTech 2012 cover the current hot topics satisfying the world-wide ever-changing needs. The FutureTech 2012 is intended to foster the dissemination of state-of-the-art research in all future IT areas, including their models, services, and novel applications associated with their utilization. The FutureTech 2012 will provide an opportunity for academic and industry professionals to discuss the latest issues and progress in this area. In addition, the conference will publish high quality papers which are closely related to the various theories, modeling, and practical applications in many types of future technology. The main scope of FutureTech 2012 is as follows. Hybrid Information Technology Cloud and Cluster Computing Ubiquitous Networks and Wireless Communications Multimedia Convergence Intelligent and Pervasive Applications Security and Trust Computing IT Management and Service Bioinformatics and Bio-Inspired Computing Database and Data Mining Knowledge System and Intelligent Agent Human-centric Computing and Social Networks The FutureTech is a major forum for scientists, engineers, and practitioners throughout the world to present the latest research, results, ideas, developments and applications in all areas of future technologies.