This book covers the new topic of GPU computing with many applications involved, taken from diverse fields such as networking, seismology, fluid mechanics, nano-materials, data-mining , earthquakes ,mantle convection, visualization. It will show the public why GPU computing is important and easy to use. It will offer a reason why GPU computing is useful and how to implement codes in an everyday situation.

*Encourages students into the profession of media production for sports, drawing on case studies and interviews with practitioners and providing careers advice for students looking to break into the industry. *This is the first book to address motion graphics in sports production and presentation so fills a niche gap in the market which sits between media production, graphic design and advertising/sports marketing. *Combines research and practice to give a holistic overview of the area and where it is going/how students can shape it.

Images and video play a crucial role in visual information systems and multimedia. There is an extraordinary number of applications of such systems in entertainment, business, art, engineering, and science. Such applications often involved large image and video collections, and therefore, searching for images and video in large collections is becoming an important operation. Because of the size of such databases, efficiency is crucial. We strongly believe that image and video retrieval need an integrated approach from fields such as image processing, shape processing, perception, database indexing, visualization, and querying, etc. This book contains a selection of results that was presented at the Dagstuhl Seminar on Content-Based Image and Video Retrieval, in December 1999. The purpose of this seminar was to bring together people from the various fields, in order to promote information exchange and interaction among researchers who are interested in various aspects of accessing the content of image and video data. The book provides an overview of the state of the art in content-based image and video retrieval. The topics covered by the chapters are integrated system aspects, as well as techniques from image processing, computer vision, multimedia, databases, graphics, signal processing, and information theory. The book will be of interest to researchers and professionals in the fields of multimedia, visual information (database) systems, computer vision, and information retrieval.

This book explores the historical and cultural significance of comics in languages other than English, examining the geographic and linguistic spheres which these comics inhabit and their contributions to comic studies and academia. The volume brings together texts across a wide range of genres, styles and geographic locations including the Netherlands, Latin America, Greece, Sweden, Poland, Finland, Portugal, Ireland, the Czech Republic, among others. These works have remained out of reach for speakers of languages other than the original and do not receive the scholarly attention they deserve due to their lack of English translations. This book highlights the richness and diversity these works add to the corpus of comic art and comic studies that Anglophone comics scholars can access to broaden the collective perspective of the field and forge links across regions, genres and comic traditions. Part of the Global Perspectives in Comics Studies series, this volume spans many continents and languages. It will be of interest to researchers and students of comics studies, literature, cultural studies, popular culture, art and design, illustration, history, film studies and sociology.

This textbook provides an introduction to digital forensics, a rapidly evolving field for solving crimes. Beginning with the basic concepts of computer forensics, each of the book's 21 chapters focuses on a particular forensic topic composed of two parts: background knowledge and hands-on experience through practice exercises. Each theoretical or background section concludes with a series of review questions, which are prepared to test students' understanding of the materials, while the practice exercises are intended to afford students the opportunity to apply the concepts introduced in the section on background knowledge. This experience-oriented textbook is meant to assist students in gaining a better understanding of digital forensics through hands-on practice in collecting and preserving digital evidence by completing various exercises. With 20 student-directed, inquiry-based practice exercises, students will better understand digital forensic concepts and learn digital forensic investigation techniques. This textbook is intended for upper undergraduate and graduate-level students who are taking digital-forensic related courses or working in digital forensics research. It can also be used by digital forensics practitioners, IT security analysts, and security engineers working in the IT security industry, particular IT professionals responsible for digital investigation and incident handling or researchers working in these related fields as a reference book.

Extensive research conducted by the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Program at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, USA, and the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, has yielded valuable insights on why and how design thinking works. Researchers have identified metrics, developed models, and conducted studies, which are featured in this book, and in the previous volumes of this series. Offering readers a closer look at design thinking, and its innovation processes and methods, this volume covers topics ranging from understanding success factors of design thinking to exploring the potential that lies in the use of digital technologies. Furthermore, readers learn how special-purpose design thinking can be used to solve thorny problems in complex fields, such as the health sector or software development. Thinking and devising innovations are inherently human activities - so is design thinking. Accordingly, design thinking is not merely the result of special courses or of being gifted or trained: it is a way of dealing with our environment and improving techniques, technologies and life. As such, the research outcomes compiled in this book should increase knowledge and provide inspiration to all seeking to drive innovation - be they experienced design thinkers or newcomers.

This book presents the outcomes of recent endeavors that will contribute to significant advances in the areas of communication design, fashion design, interior design and product design, music and musicology, as well as overlapping areas. Gathering the proceedings of the 7th EIMAD conference, held on May 14-15, 2020, and organized by the School of Applied Arts, Campus da Talagueira, in Castelo Branco, Portugal, it proposes new theoretical perspectives and practical research directions in design and music, while also discussing teaching practices and some areas of intersection. It addresses strategies for communication and culture in a global, digital world, that take into account key individual and societal needs.

PREVIOUS EDITIONThis textbook introduces the "Fundamentals of Multimedia", addressing real issues commonly faced in the workplace. The essential concepts are explained in a practical way to enable students to apply their existing skills to address problems in multimedia. Fully revised and updated, this new edition now includes coverage of such topics as 3D TV, social networks, high-efficiency video compression and conferencing, wireless and mobile networks, and their attendant technologies. Features: presents an overview of the key concepts in multimedia, including color science; reviews lossless and lossy compression methods for image, video and audio data; examines the demands placed by multimedia communications on wired and wireless networks; discusses the impact of social media and cloud computing on information sharing and on multimedia content search and retrieval; includes study exercises at the end of each chapter; provides supplementary resources for both students and instructors at an associated website.

Proceedings of the International Conference on Human-centric Computing and Embedded and Multimedia Computing (HumanCom & EMC 2011) will cover topics of HumanCom and EMC, the current hot topics satisfying the world-wide ever-changing needs. Human-centric computing is to create novel solutions so that the humans are always connected, portable, and available. As with pervasive-computing, human-centric computing requires a variety of devices; however, such devices exist simply to obtain inputs from the human and are embedded in objects that humans interact with on a daily basis. Moreover, during the past couple of decades, Information Science technologies influenced and changed every aspect of our lives and our cultures. Without various Information Science technology-based applications, it would be difficult to keep information stored securely, to process information efficiently, and to communicate conveniently. Embedded computing ranges from portable devices such as digital watches and MP3 players, to large stationary installations like traffic lights, factory controllers, or the systems controlling nuclear power plants. Complexity varies from low, with a single microcontroller chip, to very high with multiple units, peripherals and networks mounted inside a large chassis or enclosure. Multimedia computing covers multimedia I/O devices, OS, storage systems, streaming media middleware, continuous media representations, media coding, media processing, etc., and also includes multimedia communications; real-time protocols, end-to-end streaming media, resource allocation, multicast protocols, and multimedia applications; databases, distributed collaboration, video conferencing, 3D virtual environments.

In order to establish technical prerequisites for efficient electronic business and education on the Internet, appropriate system support is needed as a vital condition for maximization of both short-term and long-term profits. Electronic Business and Education: Recent Advances in Internet Infrastructures discusses current research topics in the domain of system support for e-business and e-education on the Internet, and stresses the synergistic interaction of these two components. Attention is given to both scientific and engineering issues. Electronic Business and Education: Recent Advances in Internet Infrastructures is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry, particularly in the area of e-business and e-education on the Internet. There is no longer any question that the Internet and electronic communication are the major new tools for collaborative advances in the creation of new knowledge and in future learning.' Excerpt from Foreword by Robert C. Richardson, Nobel Laureate 1996, Cornell University, USA

Game AI Pro2: Collected Wisdom of Game AI Professionals presents cutting-edge tips, tricks, and techniques for artificial intelligence (AI) in games, drawn from developers of shipped commercial games as well as some of the best-known academics in the field. It contains knowledge, advice, hard-earned wisdom, and insights gathered from across the community of developers and researchers who have devoted themselves to game AI. In this book, 47 expert developers and researchers have come together to bring you their newest advances in game AI, along with twists on proven techniques that have shipped in some of the most successful commercial games of the last few years. The book provides a toolbox of proven techniques that can be applied to many common and not-so-common situations. It is written to be accessible to a broad range of readers. Beginners will find good general coverage of game AI techniques and a number of comprehensive overviews, while intermediate to expert professional game developers will find focused, deeply technical chapters on specific topics of interest to them. Covers a wide range of AI in games, with topics applicable to almost any game Touches on most, if not all, of the topics necessary to get started in game AI Provides real-life case studies of game AI in published commercial games Gives in-depth, technical solutions from some of the industry's best-known games Includes downloadable demos and/or source code, available at http://www.gameaipro.com

The book is designed to serve as a textbook for courses offered to undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in Electrical Engineering. The first edition of this book was published in 2014. As there is a demand for the next edition, it is quite natural to take note of the several advances that have occurred in the subject over the past five years. This is the prime motivation for bringing out a revised second edition with a thorough revision of all the chapters. The book presents a clear and comprehensive introduction to signals and systems. For easier comprehension, the course contents of all the chapters are in sequential order. Analysis of continuous-time and discrete-time signals and systems are done separately for easy understanding of the subjects. The chapters contain over seven hundred numerical examples to understand various theoretical concepts. This textbook also includes numerical examples that were appeared in recent examinations and presented in a graded manner. The topics such as the representation of signals, convolution, Fourier Series and Fourier Transform, Laplace transform, Z-transform, and state-space analysis are explained with a large number of numerical examples in the book. The detailed coverage and pedagogical tools make this an ideal textbook for students and researchers enrolled in electrical engineering and related courses.

Infertility Comics and Graphic Medicine examines women's graphic memoirs on infertility, foregrounding the complex interrelationship between women's life writing, infertility studies, and graphic medicine. Through a scholarly examination of the artists' use of visual-verbal codes of the comics medium in narrating their physical ordeals and affective challenges occasioned by infertility, the book seeks to foreground the intricacies of gender identity, embodiment, subjectivity, and illness experience. Providing long-overdue scholarly attention on the perspectives of autobiographical and comics studies, the authors examine the gendered nature of the infertility experience and the notion of motherhood as an ideological force which interpolates socio-cultural discourses, accentuating the potential of graphic medicine as a creative space for the infertile women to voice their hitherto silenced perspectives on childlessness with force and urgency. This interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to scholars and students in comics studies, the health humanities, literature, and women's and gender studies, and will also be suitable for readers in visual studies and narrative medicine.

This book provides an introduction and overview of the rapidly evolving topic of game narratives, presenting the new perspectives employed by researchers and the industry, highlighting the recent empirical findings that illustrate the nature of it. The first section deals with narrative design and theory, the second section includes social and cultural studies on game narrative, the third section focuses on new technologies and approaches for the topic, the fourth section presents practices and case studies, and the final section provides industry cases from professionals.

"Soft matter" is nowadays used to describe an increasingly important class of - terials that encompasses polymers, liquid crystals, molecular assemblies building hierarchical structures, organic-inorganic hybrids, and the whole area of colloidal science. Common to all is that ?uctuations, and thus the thermal energy k T and B entropy, play an important role. "Soft" then means that these materials are in a state of matter that is neither a simple liquid nor a hard solid of the type studied in hard condensed matter, hence sometimes many types of soft matter are also named "c- plex ?uids. " Soft matter, either of synthetic or biological origin, has been a subject of physical and chemical research since the early ?nding of Staudinger that long chain mo- cules exist. From then on, synthetic chemistry as well as physical characterization underwent an enormous development. One of the outcomes is the abundant pr- ence of polymeric materials in our everyday life. Nowadays, methods developed for synthetic polymers are being more and more applied to biological soft matter. The link between modern biophysics and soft matter physics is quite close in many respects. This also means that the focus of research has moved from simple - mopolymers to more complex structures, such as branched objects, heteropolymers (random copolymers, proteins), polyelectrolytes, amphiphiles and so on.

Multimedia information retrieval focuses on the tools of processing and searching that are applicable to the content-based management of new multimedia documents. It has recently expanded to encompass newly devised techniques that will further its performance and growing importance. Image Retrieval and Analysis Using Text and Fuzzy Shape Features: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a critical scholarly resource that explores methods and strategies related to multimedia information retrieval systems. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics including content-based image retrieval, text-based image retrieval, fuzzy object shape features, encoding, and indexing, this book is geared towards library science specialists, information technology specialists, and researchers seeking current information on the integration of new information retrieval technologies.

This volume brings together contributions representing the state-of-the-art in new multimedia and future technology information research, currently a major topic in computer science and electronic engineering. Researchers aim to interoperate multimedia frameworks, transforming the way people work and interact with multimedia data. This book covers future information technology topics including digital and multimedia convergence, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, intelligent computing and applications, embedded systems, mobile and wireless communications, bio-inspired computing, grid and cloud computing, semantic web, human-centric computing and social networks, adaptive and context-aware computing, security and trust computing and related areas. Representing the combined proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Multimedia and Ubiquitous Engineering (MUE-15) and the 10th International Conference on Future Information Technology (Future Tech 2015), this book aims to provide a complete coverage of the areas outlined and to bring together researchers from academic and industry and other practitioners to share their research ideas, challenges and solutions.

This book offers an accessible guide to ubiquitous computing, with an emphasis on pervasive networking. It addresses various technical obstacles, such as connectivity, levels of service, performance, reliability and fairness. The focus is on describing currently available off-the-shelf technologies, novel algorithms and techniques in areas such as: underwater sensor networks, ant colony based routing, heterogeneous networks, agent based distributed networks, cognitive radio networks, real-time WSN applications, machine translation, intelligent computing and ontology based bit masking. By introducing the core topics and exploring assistive pervasive systems that draw on pervasive networking, the book provides readers with a robust foundation of knowledge on this growing field of research. Written in a straightforward style, the book is also accessible to a broad audience of researchers and designers who are interested in exploring pervasive computing further.

Motivated by a variational model concerning the depth of the objects in a picture and the problem of hidden and illusory contours, this book investigates one of the central problems of computer vision: the topological and algorithmic reconstruction of a smooth three dimensional scene starting from the visible part of an apparent contour. The authors focus their attention on the manipulation of apparent contours using a finite set of elementary moves, which correspond to diffeomorphic deformations of three dimensional scenes. A large part of the book is devoted to the algorithmic part, with implementations, experiments, and computed examples. The book is intended also as a user's guide to the software code appcontour, written for the manipulation of apparent contours and their invariants. This book is addressed to theoretical and applied scientists working in the field of mathematical models of image segmentation.

This book summarizes the results of Design Thinking Research carried out at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, USA, and Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany.

The authors offer readers a closer look at Design Thinking with its processes of innovations and methods. The contents of the articles range from how to design ideas, methods, and technologies via creativity experiments and wicked problem solutions, to creative collaboration in the real world and the connectivity of designers and engineers. But the topics go beyond this in their detailed exploration of design thinking and its use in IT systems engineering fields and even from a management perspective.

The authors show how these methods and strategies work in companies, introduce new technologies and their functions and demonstrate how Design Thinking can influence as diverse a topic area as marriage. Furthermore, we see how special design thinking use functions in solving wicked problems in complex fields.

Thinking and creating innovations are basically and inherently human - so is Design Thinking. Due to this, Design Thinking is not only a factual matter or a result of special courses nor of being gifted or trained: it's a way of dealing with our environment and improving techniques, technologies and life.

Learn how to program JavaScript while creating interactive audio applications with JavaScript for Sound Artists: Learn to Code With the Web Audio API! William Turner and Steve Leonard showcase the basics of JavaScript language programing so that readers can learn how to build browser based audio applications, such as music synthesizers and drum machines. The companion website offers further opportunity for growth. Web Audio API instruction includes oscillators, audio file loading and playback, basic audio manipulation, panning and time. This book encompasses all of the basic features of JavaScript with aspects of the Web Audio API to heighten the capability of any browser. Key Features Uses the readers existing knowledge of audio technology to facilitate learning how to program using JavaScript. The teaching will be done through a series of annotated examples and explanations. Downloadable code examples and links to additional reference material included on the books companion website. This book makes learning programming more approachable to nonprofessional programmers The context of teaching JavaScript for the creative audio community in this manner does not exist anywhere else in the market and uses example-based teaching

This book offers the first comprehensive study of the many interfaces shaping the relationship between comics and videogames. It combines in-depth conceptual reflection with a rich selection of paradigmatic case studies from contemporary media culture. The editors have gathered a distinguished group of international scholars working at the interstices of comics studies and game studies to explore two interrelated areas of inquiry: The first part of the book focuses on hybrid medialities and experimental aesthetics "between" comics and videogames; the second part zooms in on how comics and videogames function as transmedia expansions within an increasingly convergent and participatory media culture. The individual chapters address synergies and intersections between comics and videogames via a diverse set of case studies ranging from independent and experimental projects via popular franchises from the corporate worlds of DC and Marvel to the more playful forms of media mix prominent in Japan. Offering an innovative intervention into a number of salient issues in current media culture, Comics and Videogames will be of interest to scholars and students of comics studies, game studies, popular culture studies, transmedia studies, and visual culture studies.