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.

Explores how social media defines consumer behaviour. Discovers how social media works to keep the user always on. Reviews why social media can shape a more extreme political and cultural ideology in users. Studies how social media algorithms can shape a predictable and homogeneous culture. Develops critical and multidisciplinary thinking about the impact of social media in shaping a predictable society.

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.

This all-inclusive, expertly structured contributed volume will serve as an indispensable guide for professionals or researchers working in areas like networking, communications, data compression, multimedia processing, streaming architectures, and computer graphics. Beginning with a concise overview of the fundamental principles and challenges of multimedia communication and networking, this book then branches off organically to tackle compression and networking next before moving on to systems, wireless multimedia and more advanced topics.
The Compression section advises on the best means and methodology to ensure multimedia signal (images, text, audio and data) integrity for transmissions on wireless and wired systems. The Networking section addresses channel protection and performance. In the Systems section the focus is on streaming media on demand, live broadcast and video and voice's role in real-time communication. Wireless multimedia transmission and Quality of Service issues are discussed in the Wireless Multimedia section. An Advanced Topics section concludes the book with an assortment of topics including Peer-to-Peer multimedia communication and multipath networks.
* Up-to-date coverage of existing standards for multimedia networking
* Synergistic tutorial approach reinforces knowledge gained in previous chapters
* Balanced treatment of audio and video with coverage of end-to-end systems

Because it makes the distribution and transmission of digital information much easier and more cost effective, multimedia has emerged as a top resource in the modern era. In spite of the opportunities that multimedia creates for businesses and companies, information sharing remains vulnerable to cyber attacks and hacking due to the open channels in which this data is being transmitted. Protecting the authenticity and confidentiality of information is a top priority for all professional fields that currently use multimedia practices for distributing digital data. The Handbook of Research on Multimedia Cyber Security provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of current security practices and techniques within multimedia information and assessing modern challenges. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as cryptographic protocols, feature extraction, and chaotic systems, this book is ideally designed for scientists, researchers, developers, security analysts, network administrators, scholars, IT professionals, educators, and students seeking current research on developing strategies in multimedia security.

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.

This book presents the latest technological advances and practical tools for discovering, verifying and visualizing social media video content, and managing related rights. The digital media revolution is bringing breaking news to online video platforms, and news organizations often rely on user-generated recordings of new and developing events shared in social media to illustrate the story. However, in video, there is also deception. In today's "fake news" era, access to increasingly sophisticated editing and content management tools and the ease with which fake information spreads in electronic networks, require the entire news and media industries to carefully verify third-party content before publishing it. As such, this book is of interest to computer scientists and researchers, news and media professionals, as well as policymakers and data-savvy media consumers.

A handy reference guide to advertising copy and layout that simplifies the design process by breaking down each step into accessible components. Appropriate for advertising, graphic design, marketing, business, or communication programs with a design or strategic campaign component, covering everything budding copywriters and designers need to succeed in their craft. Goes beyond the conceptual approach to design in order to outline, for even the most novice student, the basic steps necessary to go from concept to producing a finished product.

1. The book is the first comprehensive review of the 95-year development of Chinese animation. 2. All students and scholars of film studies, especially Chinese animation would benefit from this volume. 3. This book would be a useful reference to learn about the developmental trajectory of Chinese animation.

The second edition of Disney Stories: Getting to Digital will be of interest to lovers of Disney history and also to lovers of Hollywood history in general. The first edition was planned as a short history of the companies evolution from analog storytelling to a digital online presence that closed the chapter on early Disney films with the release of the groundbreaking Snow White. The purpose of the new edition is to bring to readers a more complete view of the analog-digital story by including three new chapters on film that cover key developments from the live-animation hybrids of the 1940s to CAPS and CGI in the 1990s and VR in the 2010s. It also includes in the discussion of cross-media storytelling the acquisition of the exceptional story property, Star Wars, and discusses how Disney has brought the epic into the Disney Master Narrative by creating Galaxy's Edge in its US theme parks. Krystina Madej's engaging portrayal of the long history of Disney's love affair with storytelling and technology brings to life the larger focus of innovation in creating characters and stories that captivate an audience, and together with Newton Lee's detailed experience of Disney during the crucial 1995-2005 era when digital innovation in online and games was at its height in the company, makes for a fast-paced captivating read. Disney Stories first edition explored the history of Disney, both analog and digital. It described in detail how Walt Disney used inventive and often ground-breaking approaches in the use of sound, color, depth, and the psychology of characters to move the animation genre from short visual gags to feature-length films with meaningful stories that engaged audience's hearts as well as tickled their funny bones. It showed Walt's comprehensive approach to engaging the public across all media as he built the Disney Master Narrative by using products, books, comics, public engagements, fan groups such as the Mickey Mouse club, TV, and, of course, Disneyland, his theme park. Finally it showed how, after his passing, the company continued to embrace Walt's enthusiasm for using new technology to engage audiences through their commitment to innovation in digital worlds. It describes in detail the innovative storybook CD-ROMs, their extensive online presence, the software they used and created for MMORGs such as Toontown, and the use of production methods such as agile methodology. This new edition provides insight on major developments in Disney films that moved them into the digital world.

Mashups are mostly lightweight Web applications that offer new functionalities by combining, aggregating and transforming resources and services available on the Web. Popular examples include a map in their main offer, for instance for real estate, hotel recommendations, or navigation tools. Mashups may contain and mix client-side and server-side activity. Obviously, understanding the incoming resources (services, statistical figures, text, videos, etc.) is a precondition for optimally combining them, so that there is always some undercover semantics being used. By using semantic annotations, neutral mashups permute into the branded type of semantic mashups. Further and deeper semantic processing such as reasoning is the next step. The chapters of this book reflect the diversity of real-life semantic mashups. Two overview chapters take the reader to the environments where mashups are at home and review the regulations (standards, guidelines etc.) mashups are based on and confronted with. Chapters focusing on DBpedia, search engines and the Web of Things inspect the main Web surroundings of mashups. While mashups upgrading search queries may be nearer to the everyday experience of readers, mashups using DBpedia input and sensor data from the real world lead to important new and therefore less known developments. Finally, the diversity of mashups is tracked through a few application areas: mathematical knowledge, speech, crisis and disaster management, recommendations (for games), inner-city information, and tourism. Participants of the AI Mashup Challenge wrote all the chapters of this book. The authors were writing for their current and future colleagues - researchers and developers all over the Web who integrate mashup functionalities into their thinking and possibly into their applications.

Exploring startup journalism and digital media platform trends in China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, this book offers a practical insight into how to launch and run successful news operations as digitisation spreads through the region. Drawing from a range of case studies of news and journalism startups, including Malaysiakini, Hong Kong Free Press, The News Lens of Taiwan, Thailand's The Standard, Ciwei Gongshe of China, Indonesia's IDN Media, Sabay of Cambodia and Frontier Myanmar, this book provides tips on how to launch a news media startup, how to find funding and how to sustain and scale the enterprise. Blending a theoretical approach with core business and newsgathering expertise, the author offers an engaging overview of contemporary entrepreneurial concepts and their vital relationship in finding new markets for journalism today. Entrepreneurial journalism in greater China and Southeast Asia is an invaluable resource for both students and professionals interested in new media, startups and the Asian media market.

Exploring startup journalism and digital media platform trends in China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, this book offers a practical insight into how to launch and run successful news operations as digitisation spreads through the region. Drawing from a range of case studies of news and journalism startups, including Malaysiakini, Hong Kong Free Press, The News Lens of Taiwan, Thailand's The Standard, Ciwei Gongshe of China, Indonesia's IDN Media, Sabay of Cambodia and Frontier Myanmar, this book provides tips on how to launch a news media startup, how to find funding and how to sustain and scale the enterprise. Blending a theoretical approach with core business and newsgathering expertise, the author offers an engaging overview of contemporary entrepreneurial concepts and their vital relationship in finding new markets for journalism today. Entrepreneurial journalism in greater China and Southeast Asia is an invaluable resource for both students and professionals interested in new media, startups and the Asian media market.

1. The book is the first comprehensive review of the 95-year development of Chinese animation. 2. All students and scholars of film studies, especially Chinese animation would benefit from this volume. 3. This book would be a useful reference to learn about the developmental trajectory of Chinese animation.

The latest edition provides a comprehensive foundation for image and video compression. It covers HEVC/H.265 and future video coding activities, in addition to Internet Video Coding. The book features updated chapters and content, along with several new chapters and sections. It adheres to the current international standards, including the JPEG standard.

This book introduces the reader to the notions, the techniques, and the theory of grammatical picture generation, a research field focusing on formal systems that describe sets of pictures by means of syntactic rules.

The book presents important types of picture generators, using a tree-based approach to stress their common algorithmic basis, the treatment influenced by the theory of computation, and the theory of formal languages in particular. It guides the reader through the basics of the tree-based approach on to dedicated chapters on line-drawing languages, collage grammars, iterated function systems, grid picture languages, languages of fractals, and languages of coloured collages, while presenting results about (un)decidable, NP-complete, or efficiently solvable problems, normal forms, hierarchies of language classes, and related phenomena.

In support, the book contains detailed exercises throughout, and the software on the enclosed CD allows the reader to experiment with the picture generators explained in the text. The book is of interest to researchers and graduate students in computer science and mathematics who are engaged with the theory and practice of picture-generating systems.

Content-Based Image And Video Retrieval addresses the basic concepts and techniques for designing content-based image and video retrieval systems. It also discusses a variety of design choices for the key components of these systems. This book gives a comprehensive survey of the content-based image retrieval systems, including several content-based video retrieval systems. The survey includes both research and commercial content-based retrieval systems. Content-Based Image And Video Retrieval includes pointers to two hundred representative bibliographic references on this field, ranging from survey papers to descriptions of recent work in the area, entire books and more than seventy websites. Finally, the book presents a detailed case study of designing MUSE a content-based image retrieval system developed at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida.

Comics have been an important locus of queer female identity, community, and politics for generations. Whether taking the form of newspaper strips, comic books, or graphic novels and memoirs, the medium has a long history of featuring female same-sex attraction, relationships, and identity. This book explores the past place, current presence, and possible future status of lesbianism in comics. What role has the medium played in the cultural construction, social (and literal) visibility, and political advocacy of same-sex female attraction and identity? Likewise, how have these features changed over time? How have nonheteronormative female characters been raced, classed, and gendered? What is the relationship between lesbian comics and queer comics? What role has the medium played in establishing the distinction between lesbian and queer female identity as well as blurring, reinforcing, or policing it? What roles have queer female comics, characters, and cartoonists played in the origins, history, and evolution of sequential art as a genre? The essays in this book inspire an engagement with these and other questions as well as provide an exploration of possible answers. They provide a compelling examination of a variety of important titles, characters, creators, topics, themes, and issues. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies.

This is the first book to present an aesthetics of virtual reality media. It situates virtual reality media in terms of the philosophy of the arts, comparing them to more familiar media such as painting, film and photography. When philosophers have approached virtual reality, they have almost always done so through the lens of metaphysics, asking questions about the reality of virtual items and worlds, about the value of such things, and indeed, about how they may reshape our understanding of the "real" world. Grant Tavinor finds that approach to be fundamentally mistaken, and that to really account for virtual reality, we must focus on the medium and its uses, and not the hypothetical and speculative instances that are typically the focus of earlier works. He also argues that much of the cultural and metaphysical hype around virtual reality is undeserved. But this does not mean that virtual reality is illusory or uninteresting; on the contrary, it is significant for the altogether different reason that it overturns much of our understanding of how representational media can function and what we can use them to achieve. The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of art, philosophy of technology, metaphysics, and game studies.

Dictation systems, read-aloud software for the blind, speech control of machinery, geographical information systems with speech input and output, and educational software with talking head' artificial tutorial agents are already on the market. The field is expanding rapidly, and new methods and applications emerge almost daily. But good sources of systematic information have not kept pace with the body of information needed for development and evaluation of these systems. Much of this information is widely scattered through speech and acoustic engineering, linguistics, phonetics, and experimental psychology.The Handbook of Multimodal and Spoken Dialogue Systems presents current and developing best practice in resource creation for speech input/output software and hardware. This volume brings experts in these fields together to give detailed how to' information and recommendations on planning spoken dialogue systems, designing and evaluating audiovisual and multimodal systems, and evaluating consumer off-the-shelf products.In addition to standard terminology in the field, the following topics are covered in depth: How to collect high quality data for designing, training, and evaluating multimodal and speech dialogue systems; How to evaluate real-life computer systems with speech input and output; How to describe and model human-computer dialogue precisely and in depth.Also included: A fully searchable CD-ROM containing a hypertext version of the book in HTML format for fast look-up of specific points, convenient desktop use, and lightweight mobile reference; and The first systematic medium-scale compendium of terminology with definitions.This handbook has been especially designed for theneeds of development engineers, decision-makers, researchers, and advanced level students in the fields of speech technology, multimodal interfaces, multimedia, computational linguistics, and phonetics.

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.

The Multiplayer Classroom: Game Plans is a companion to The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game, now in its second edition from CRC Press. This book covers four multiplayer classroom projects played in the real world in real time to teach and entertain. They were funded by grants or institutions, collaborations between Lee Sheldon, as writer/designer, and subject matter experts in various fields. They are written to be accessible to anyone--designer, educator, or layperson--interested in game-based learning. The subjects are increasingly relevant in this day and age: physical fitness, Mandarin, cybersecurity, and especially an online class exploring culture and identity on the internet that is unlike any online class you have ever seen. Read the annotated, often-suspenseful stories of how each game, with its unique challenges, thrills, and spills, was built. Lee Sheldon began his writing career in television as a writer-producer, eventually writing more than 200 shows ranging from Charlie's Angels (writer) to Edge of Night (head writer) to Star Trek: The Next Generation (writer-producer). Having written and designed more than forty commercial and applied video games, Lee spearheaded the first full writing for games concentration in North America at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the second writing concentration at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is a regular lecturer and consultant on game design and writing in the United States and abroad. His most recent commercial game, the award-winning The Lion's Song, is currently on Steam. For the past two years he consulted on an "escape room in a box," funded by NASA, that gives visitors to hundreds of science museums and planetariums the opportunity to play colonizers on the moon. He is currently writing his second mystery novel.