This book constitutes the proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment, INTETAIN 2013. The 23 full papers presented were carefully selected from numerous submissions. The conference aims at enhancing the understanding of recent and anticipated advances in interactive technologies, and their applications to entertainment, education, culture, and the arts. The papers are grouped in topical sections on linked media, gaming technologies, and technologies for live entertainment.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Interactive Storytelling, ICIDS 2014, Singapore, Singapore, November 2014. The 20 revised full papers presented together with 8 short papers 7 posters, and 5 demonstration papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 67 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on story generation, authoring, evaluation and analysis, theory, retrospectives, and user experience.

This second volume of the "Handbook of Digital Homecare" reviews the attempts to develop new ICT services for digital homecare, i.e. services to deliver, maintain and improve care in the home environment using the latest ICT technology and devices. The book highlights the successful projects as well as failures of Digital homecare and provides several "lessons learned" to the wide audience of Health and ICT professionals.

Soft computing, as opposed to conventional "hard" computing, tolerates imprecision and uncertainty, in a way very much similar to the human mind. Soft computing techniques include neural networks, evolutionary computation, fuzzy logic, and chaos. The recent years have witnessed tremendous success of these powerful methods in virtually all areas of science and technology, as evidenced by the large numbers of research results published in a variety of journals, conferences, as weil as many excellent books in this book series on Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing. This volume is dedicated to recent novel applications of soft computing in communications. The book is organized in four Parts, i.e., (1) neural networks, (2) evolutionary computation, (3) fuzzy logic and neurofuzzy systems, and (4) kernel methods. Artificial neural networks consist of simple processing elements called neurons, which are connected by weights that may be adjusted during learning. Part 1 of the book has seven chapters, demonstrating some of the capabilities of two major types of neural networks, i.e., multiplayer perceptron (MLP) neural networks and Hopfield-type neural networks.

Usability Professionals Workshop deals with the practical applications of human-machine interaction research. It is organized by the German ACM specialty section of the UPA (Usability Professionals Association). The volume presents the latest research findings through case studies and practice reports along with in-depth discussions.

The Workshop Volume from the Humans and Computers Conference documents the advanced tutorials that were presented to deepen the understanding gained from the conference lectures. It presents case studies along with accompanying exercises.

These conference proceedings include the specialized academic lecture and brief contributions presented at the Humans and Computers 2015 conference in Stuttgart. It provides multiple perspectives from research that collectively provide a kaleidoscope of ideas, theories, and methodologies. The conference bridges the gap between theory and practical implementation with numerous application-oriented essays.

The newest communication technologies are profoundly changing the world's politics, economies, and cultures, but the specific implications of online game worlds remain mysterious. "The Virtual Future" employs theories and methods from social science to explore nine very different virtual futures: "The Matrix Online," "Tabula Rasa," "Anarchy Online," "Entropia Universe," "Star Trek Online," "EVE Online, Star Wars Galaxies," "World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade," and "The Chronicles of Riddick."

Each presents a different picture of how technology and society could evolve in coming centuries, but one theme runs through all of them, the attempt to escape the Earth and seek new destinies among the stars. Four decades after the last trip to the moon, a new conception of spaceflight is emerging. Rather than rockets shooting humans across vast physical distances to sterile rocks that lack the resources to sustain life, perhaps robot space probes and orbiting telescopes will glean information about the universe, that humans can then experience inside computer-generated environments much closer to home.

All nine of these fantastically rich multiplayer masterpieces have shown myriads of people that really radical alternatives to contemporary society could exist, and has served as a laboratory for examining the consequences. Each is a prototype of new social forms, a utopian subculture, and a simulation of technologies that have yet to be invented. They draw upon several different traditions of science fiction and academic philosophy, and they were created in several nations. By comparing these nine role-playing fantasies, we can better consider what kind of world we want to inhabit in the real future."

This volume constitutes the refereed post-workshop proceedings of two IFIP WG 13.7 workshops on Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization: the 7th HCIV Workshop on Non-formal Modelling for Interaction Design, held at the 29th European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics, ECCE 2011, in Rostock, Germany, in August 2011 and the 8th HCIV Workshop on HCI and Visualization, held at the 13th IFIP TC 13 Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, INTERACT 2011, in Lisbon, Portugal, in September 2011. The 15 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. They cover a wide range of topics in the fields of non-formal modeling, visualization and HCI and provide visions from researchers working at or across the borders between these domains that may help develop a holistic cross-discipline.

This volume presents the proceedings of ECSCW 2011, the 12th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Each conference offers an occasion to critically review our research field, which has been multidisciplinary and committed to high scientific standards, both theoretical and methodological, from its beginning. The papers this year focus on work and the enterprise as well as on the challenges of involving citizens, patients, etc. into collaborative settings. The papers embrace new theories, and discuss known ones. They contribute to the discussions on the blurring boundaries between home and work and on the ways we think about and study work. They introduce recent and emergent technologies, and study known social and collaborative technologies, such as wikis and video messages. Classical settings in computer supported cooperative work, e.g. meetings and standardization are also looked upon anew. With contributions from all over the world, the papers in interesting ways help focus on the European perspective in our community. The 22 papers selected for this conference deal with and reflect the lively debate currently ongoing in our field of research.

This book is an extensive treatise on the most up-to-date advances in computer graphics technology and its applications. Both in business and industrial areas as well as in research and development, you will see in this book an incredible devel opment of new methods and tools for computer graphics. They play essential roles in enhancing the productivity and quality of human work through computer graph ics and applications. Extensive coverage of the diverse world of computer graphics is the privilege of this book, which is the Proceedings of InterGraphics '83. This was a truly interna tional computer graphics conference and exhibit, held in Tokyo, April 11-14, 1983, sponsored by the World Computer Grpphics Association (WCGA) and organized by the Japan Management Association (JMA) in coopera'tion' with *~CM-SIGGRAPH. InterGraphics has over 15 thousands participants. This book consists of seven Chapters. The first two chapters are on the basics of computer graphics, and the remaining five chapters are dedicated to typical appli cation areas of computer graphics. Chapter 1 contains four papers on "graphics techniques". Techniques to generate jag free images, to simulate digital logic, to display free surfaces and to interact with 3 dimensional (3D) shaded graphics are presented. Chapter 2 covers "graphics standards and 3D models" in five papers. Two papers discuss the CORE standard and the GKS standard. Three papers de scribe various 3D models and their evaluations.

Variational Methods in Image Processing presents the principles, techniques, and applications of variational image processing. The text focuses on variational models, their corresponding Euler-Lagrange equations, and numerical implementations for image processing. It balances traditional computational models with more modern techniques that solve the latest challenges introduced by new image acquisition devices. The book addresses the most important problems in image processing along with other related problems and applications. Each chapter presents the problem, discusses its mathematical formulation as a minimization problem, analyzes its mathematical well-posedness, derives the associated Euler-Lagrange equations, describes the numerical approximations and algorithms, explains several numerical results, and includes a list of exercises. MATLAB (R) codes are available online. Filled with tables, illustrations, and algorithms, this self-contained textbook is primarily for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in applied mathematics, scientific computing, medical imaging, computer vision, computer science, and engineering. It also offers a detailed overview of the relevant variational models for engineers, professionals from academia, and those in the image processing industry.

This book constitutes the outcome of the Workshop on Measurement and Measurement Tools which was held as part of the Future Internet Research Experimentation (FIRE) initiative during the Future Internet Assembly conference (FIA) in May 2012. The 10 contributions included in this volume are invited extended versions of the presentations at the workshop. The book closes with a summary and conclusions of the findings in these papers.

This book on multimedia tools for communicating mathematics arose from presentations at an international workshop organized by the Centro de Matematica e Aplicacoes Fundamentais at the University of Lisbon, in November 2000, with the collaboration of the Sonderforschungsbereich 288 at the University of Technology in Berlin, and of the Centre for Experimental and Constructive Mathematics at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. The MTCM2000 meeting aimed at the scientific methods and algorithms at work inside multimedia tools, and it provided an overview of the range of present multimedia projects, of their limitations and the underlying mathematical problems.
This book presents some of the tools and algorithms currently being used to create new ways of making enhanced interactive presentations and multimedia courses. It is an invaluable and up-to-date reference book on multimedia tools presently available for mathematics and related subjects."

This State-of-the-Art Survey constitutes the Final Publication of the COST Action IC1002 on Multilingual and Multifaceted Interactive Information Access, MUMIA. It contains outstanding research, recent developments and new directions in all related aspects of multifaceted and interactive information access with a focus on professional and enterprise search. The contributions are grouped in the following three parts: frameworks, models and theory; tools, applications and practice; and patent search. The Intellectual Property (IP) domain is used through the book as a primary case study. The book aims to bring together material which has been published in a fragmentary way in journals and conference papers into a coherent whole but also present novel, unpublished work where appropriate.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Entertainment Computing, ICEC 2014, held in Sydney, Australia, in October 2013. The 20 full papers, 6 short papers and 8 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 submissions. In addition to these papers, the program featured 3 demonstration papers, and 2 workshops. The papers cover various aspects of entertainment computing including authoring, development, use and evaluation of digital entertainment artefacts and processes.

COOP 2010 is the 9th edition of the International Conference on Designing Cooperative Systems, being the second European conference in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work after ECSCW. The conference brings together researchers who contribute to the analysis and design of cooperative systems and their integration in organizational community, public and other settings, and their implications for policy and decision making. Cooperative systems design requires a deep understanding of collective activities, involving both artifacts and social practices. Contributions are solicited from a wide range of domains contributing to the fields of cooperative systems design and evaluation: CSCW, HCI, Information Systems, Knowledge Engineering, Multi-agents, organizational and management sciences, sociology, psychology, anthropology, ergonomics, linguistics.

Distributed applications are a necessity in most central application sectors of the contemporary information society, including e-commerce, e-banking, e-learning, e-health, telecommunication and transportation. This results from a tremendous growth of the role that the Internet plays in business, administration and our everyday activities. This trend is going to be even further expanded in the context of advances in broadband wireless communication. New Developments in Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems focuses on the techniques available or under development with the goal to ease the burden of constructing reliable and maintainable interoperable information systems providing services in the global communicating environment. The topics covered in this book include: * Context-aware applications; * Integration and interoperability of distributed systems; * Software architectures and services for open distributed systems; * Management, security and quality of service issues in distributed systems; * Software agents and mobility; * Internet and other related problem areas.The book contains the proceedings of the Third International Working Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS'2001), which was held in September 2001 in Krakow, Poland, and sponsored by the International Federation on Information Processing (IFIP). The conference program presents the state of the art in research concerning distributed and interoperable systems. This is a topical research area where much activity is currently in progress. Interesting new aspects and innovative contributions are still arising regularly. The DAIS series of conferences is one of the main international forums where these important findings are reported.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment, INTETAIN 2014. The 8 full papers presented together with 4 special session papers, 4 panels and 6 extended abstracts were carefully selected from 26 submissions. The papers present interdisciplinary research, covering topics such as creativity applied to technology, AI, cognition and models of engagement and play. The special session papers address the topic of humor in intelligent environments.

This is the first of a two-volume set (CCIS 434 and CCIS 435) that constitutes the extended abstracts of the posters presented during the 16th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2014, held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece in June 2014, and consisting of 14 thematic conferences. The total of 1476 papers and 220 posters presented at the HCII 2014 conferences were carefully reviewed and selected from 4766 submissions. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of Human-Computer Interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas. The extended abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this two-volume set. This volume contains posters extended abstracts addressing the following major topics: design methods, techniques and knowledge; the design of everyday things; interacting with information and knowledge; cognitive, perceptual and emotional issues in HCI; multimodal and natural interaction; algorithms and machine learning methods in HCI; virtual and augmented environments."

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

The term "haptics" refers to the science of sensing and manipulation through touch. Multiple disciplines such as biomechanics, psychophysics, robotics, neuroscience, and software engineering converge to support haptics, and generally, haptic research is done by three communities: the robotics community, the human computer interface community, and the virtual reality community.

This book is different from any other book that has looked at haptics. The authors treat haptics as a new medium rather than just a domain within one of the above areas. They describe human haptic perception and interfaces and present fundamentals in haptic rendering and modeling in virtual environments. Diverse software architectures for standalone and networked haptic systems are explained, and the authors demonstrate the vast application spectrum of this emerging technology along with its accompanying trends. The primary objective is to provide a comprehensive overview and a practical understanding of haptic technologies. An appreciation of the close relationship between the wide range of disciplines that constitute a haptic system is a key principle towards being able to build successful collaborative haptic environments.

Structured as a reference to allow for fast accommodation of the issues concerned, this book is intended for researchers interested in studying touch and force feedback for use in technological multimedia systems in computer science, electrical engineering, or other related disciplines. With its novel approach, it paves the way for exploring research trends and challenges in such fields as interpersonal communication, games, or military applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computer-Aided Architectural Design Futures, CAAD Futures 2013, held in Shanghai, China, in July 2013. The 35 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 78 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on digital aids to design creativity, concepts, and strategies; digital fabrication and local materialization; human-computer interaction, user participation, and collaborative design; modeling and simulation; shape and form studies.

Great advances have been made in the database field. Relational and object- oriented databases, distributed and client/server databases, and large-scale data warehousing are among the more notable. However, none of these advances promises to have as great and direct an effect on the daily lives of ordinary citizens as video databases. Video databases will provide a quantum jump in our ability to deal with visual data, and in allowing people to access and manipulate visual information in ways hitherto thought impossible. Video Database Systems: Issues, Products and Applications gives practical information on academic research issues, commercial products that have already been developed, and the applications of the future driving this research and development. This book can also be considered a reference text for those entering the field of video or multimedia databases, as well as a reference for practitioners who want to identify the kinds of products needed in order to utilize video databases. Video Database Systems: Issues, Products and Applications covers concepts, products and applications. It is written at a level which is less detailed than that normally found in textbooks but more in-depth than that normally written in trade press or professional reference books. Thus, it seeks to serve both an academic and industrial audience by providing a single source of information about the research issues in the field, and the state-of-the-art of practice.

Palmprint Authentication is the first book to provide a comprehensive introduction to palmprint technologies. It reveals automatic biometric techniques for personal identification using palmprint, from the approach based on offline palmprint images, to the current state-of-the-art algorithm using online palmprint images. Palmprint Authentication provides the reader with a basic concept of Palmprint Authentication. It also includes an in-depth discussion of Palmprint Authentication technologies, a detailed description of Palmprint Authentication systems, and an up-to-date coverage of how these issues are developed. This book is suitable for different levels of readers: those who want to learn more about palmprint technology, and those who wish to understand, participate, and/or develop a palmprint authentication system. Palmprint Authentication is effectively a handbook for biometric research and development. Graduate students and researchers in computer science, electrical engineering, systems science, and information technology will all find it uniquely useful, not only as a reference book, but also as a text book. Researchers and practitioners in industry, and R&D laboratories working in the fields of security system design, biometrics, immigration, law enforcement, control, and pattern recognition will also benefit from this volume.