The papers in this volume were presented at the Second Annual Work shop on Active Middleware Services and were selected for inclusion here by the Editors. The AMS workshop was organized with support from both the National Science Foundation and the CAT center at the Uni versity of Arizona, and was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on August 1, 2000, in conjunction with the 9th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC-9). The explosive growth of Internet-based applications and the prolifer ation of networking technologies has been transforming most areas of computer science and engineering as well as computational science and commercial application areas. This opens an outstanding opportunity to explore new, Internet-oriented software technologies that will open new research and application opportunities not only for the multimedia and commercial world, but also for the scientific and high-performance computing applications community. Two emerging technologies - agents and active networks - allow increased programmability to enable bring ing new services to Internet based applications. The AMS workshop presented research results and working papers in the areas of active net works, mobile and intelligent agents, software tools for high performance distributed computing, network operating systems, and application pro gramming models and environments. The success of an endeavor such as this depends on the contributions of many individuals. We would like to thank Dr. Frederica Darema and the NSF for sponsoring the workshop.

Contains everything that a project team needs to know about the development and deployment of Web services with the IBM WebSphere product family. Included will be examples for all development artifacts in a format that can be reused in the reader s project. It combines the authors own practical experiences with consolidated information on the latest product capabilities in a unique approach that allows the book to be easily accessible to a broad spectrum of readers. Finding a balance between a euphoric/optimistic and down-to earth/realistic view on the subject, this book will be an essential part of every Web service developer s bookshelf.

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Wireless systems for mobile communication is one of the most rapidly expanding fields in digital telecommunications. Such hot topics as wireless Internet, mobile access to multimedia services and wireless convergence systems are likely to affect the whole of the information society and will pose intellectual challenges to researchers in the foreseeable future. Transmission techniques like WCDMA, user-oriented protocols like WAP and communication structures like LEO are just a few tools that seem to usher in the era of unlimited resource availability. Personal Wireless Communications addresses these issues, with 17 regular papers and 4 invited papers by leading researchers in the area of wireless communications. The volume comprises the proceedings of the Working Conference on Personal Wireless Communications (PWC'2000), which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Gdansk, Poland in September 2000.The contributions cover a wide range of topics, from 3G cellular systems to wireless Internet and WAP design to wireless LAN and ATM; from speech coding and antenna design to teletraffic modelling and protocol evaluation. The book is thus essential reading for theoreticians and engineers interested in the current progress in wireless systems, as well as for IT students and researchers.

Intelligence in Networks is a concept, the meaning of which is highly related to the time-period when it is used. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, it was mainly related to the teleservice repertoire 'an sich'. In the 1990s, it is more related to efficient flexibility in the introduction of new teleservices and teleservice repertoire. This state-of-the-art text sets out to identify and study issues related to solutions for increasing intelligence in networks. As examples, intelligence networks (IN), telecommunication information networking architecture (TINA) and mobile agents and active networks are different solutions for improving the grade of network intelligence. The areas under discussion include research and development within various closely related fields such as: * Teleservices, service architecture and service creation; * Middleware and specification languages; * Mobile agents, active networks, plug-and-play issues; and * Quality of service and performance.GBP/LISTGBP Intelligence in Networks contains the proceedings of SMARTNET'99, the fifth in a series of conferences on intelligence in networks sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), at the Asian Institute of Technology, Pathumthani, Thailand in November 1999.

Machine learning builds models of the world using training data from the application domain and prior knowledge about the problem. The models are later applied to future data in order to estimate the current state of the world. An implied assumption is that the future is stochastically similar to the past. The approach fails when the system encounters situations that are not anticipated from the past experience. In contrast, successful natural organisms identify new unanticipated stimuli and situations and frequently generate appropriate responses.

The observation described above lead to the initiation of the DIRAC EC project in 2006. In 2010 a workshop was held, aimed to bring together researchers and students from different disciplines in order to present and discuss new approaches for identifying and reacting to unexpected events in information-rich environments. This book includes a summary of the achievements of the DIRAC project in chapter 1, and a collection of the papers presented in this workshop in the remaining parts."

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Sino-foreign-interchange Workshop on Intelligence Science and Intelligent Data Engineering, IScIDE 2011, held in Xi'an, China, in October 2011. The 97 papers presented were carefully peer-reviewed and selected from 389 submissions. The IScIDE papers in this volume are organized in topical sections on machine learning and computational intelligence; pattern recognition; computer vision and image processing; graphics and computer visualization; knowledge discovering, data mining, web mining; multimedia processing and application.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, TPDL 2012 - the successor of the ECDL (European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries) - held in Paphos, Cyprus, in September 2012. The 23 full papers, 19 short papers, 15 posters and 8 demonstrations presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 139 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on user behavior, mobiles and place, heritage and sustainability, preservation, linked data, analysing and enriching documents, content and metadata quality, folksonomy and ontology, information retrieval, organising collections, as well as extracting and indexing.

In the early 1990s, the establishment of the Internet brought forth a revolutionary viewpoint of information storage, distribution, and processing: the World Wide Web is becoming an enormous and expanding distributed digital library. Along with the development of the Web, image indexing and retrieval have grown into research areas sharing a vision of intelligent agents. Far beyond Web searching, image indexing and retrieval can potentially be applied to many other areas, including biomedicine, space science, biometric identification, digital libraries, the military, education, commerce, culture and entertainment. Machine Learning and Statistical Modeling Approaches to Image Retrieval describes several approaches of integrating machine learning and statistical modeling into an image retrieval and indexing system that demonstrates promising results. The topics of this book reflect authors' experiences of machine learning and statistical modeling based image indexing and retrieval. This book contains detailed references for further reading and research in this field as well.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Entertainment Computing, ICEC 2013, held in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in October 2013. The 13 full papers, 6 short papers, 11 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 75 submissions. In addition to these papers, the program featured 2 demos, 3 workshops, 3 tutorials and 3 art installations, also summarized in this book. The papers cover various topics in the multi-disciplinary field of entertainment computing.

Just a few years ago, virtual reality was regarded as more a toy than a tool. Today, however, it is becoming the enabling technology for man-machine communications. The rapid development of graphics hardware and soft ware makes its application possible. Besides building walkthroughs and landscape fly-overs with very realistic visual effects, we can recognize the trend toward industrial applications. This is because of the emerging need for tools for rapid product development. Especially in the aeronautical and automotive industries, companies have began to investigate and develop virtual reality tools for their own needs in co-operation with research or ganizations. In co-operation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics (IGD), the Computer Graphics Center (ZGDV) in Darmstadt established the German working group on virtual reality in 1993 as a forum for infor mation exchange between industry and research. German researchers, system developers, and industrial users have met several times in Darm stadt at the Computer Graphics Center. In these meetings they discussed the essential issues inherent in applying virtual reality to industrial appli cations and exchanged their latest research results and experiences.

This SpringerBriefs is an overview of the emerging field of wireless access and mobile network virtualization. It provides a clear and relevant picture of the current virtualization trends in wireless technologies by summarizing and comparing different architectures, techniques and technologies applicable to a future virtualized wireless network infrastructure. The readers are exposed to a short walkthrough of the future Internet initiative and network virtualization technologies in order to understand the potential role of wireless virtualization in the broader context of next-generation ubiquitous networks. Three main wireless virtualization perspectives are explored, along with the potential challenges and requirements of a sustainable wireless virtualization framework. Finally, it presents an example of a multi-perspective wireless virtualization framework. The readers learn the latest concepts in the application of wireless virtualization as well as its relationship with cutting-edge wireless technologies such as software-defined radio (SDR) and cognitive radio.

This book is a collection of invited papers that were presented at the Ninth IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications, September 5-8, 1998, Boston, MA. These papers are meant to provide a global view of the emerging third-generation wireless networks in the wake of the third millennium. Following the tradition of the PIMRC conferences, the papers are selected to strike a balance between the diverse interests of academia and industry by addressing issues of interest to the designers, manufacturers, and service providers involved in the wireless networking industry. The tradition of publishing a collection of the invited papers presented at the PIMRC started in PIMRC'97, Helsinki, Finland. There are two benefits to this tradition (1) it provides a shorter version of the proceedings of the conference that is more focused on a specific theme (2) the papers are comprehensive and are subject of a more careful review process to improve the contents as well as the presentation of the material, making it more appealing for archival as a reference book. The production costs of the book is subsidized by the conference and the editors have donated the royalty income of the book to the conference.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Haptic and Audio Interaction Design, HAID 2012, held in Lund, Sweden, in August 2012. The 15 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on haptics and audio in navigation, supporting experiences and activities, object and interface, test and evaluation.

The advances in the generation and processing of multimedia data (e. g. documents, images, video, audio, animations, etc. ) have had an immense impact on multimedia applications and, as a result, multimedia has permeated almost every aspect of our daily lives. This development has also brought with it a whole host of issues and ch- lenges which were either not as apparent before or were non-existent. Today, digital media is relied upon as primary news and information resource, as evidence in a court of law, as part of medical records or as financial documents. However, there is still lack of authoritative mechanisms to verify the origin and veracity of media data. - deed, multimedia content has become an extremely valuable asset, and it is being both disseminated and consumed on a larger scale than ever before, but the issues conce- ing how the content owners and publishers should control the distribution of and - cess to their content have not been satisfactorily resolved yet. There are various other issues related to use of multimedia that require further analysis and research. For example, it is a known fact that some criminal organi- tions communicate with its members by posting information embedded media to p- lic forums and web-sites to evade surveillance by law enforcement. Conventional multimedia processing approaches do not provide sufficiently effective means for - fending against such communication.

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

Database Semantics: Semantic Issues in Multimedia Systems reflects the state of the art of emerging research on the meaning of multimedia information, as presented during IFIP's Eighth Data Semantics Working Conference (DS-8), organized by its Working Group 2.6 on Databases, and held at Rotorua, New Zealand, in January 1999. DS-8 was planned as an active forum for researchers and practitioners focusing on those issues that involve the semantics of the information represented, stored, and manipulated by multimedia systems. Depending on the topic and state of research, issues may be covered either deeply theoretically or quite practically, or even both. These proceedings contain twenty-one papers carefully selected by an International Programme Committee and organized in six thematic areas: * Video Data Modelling and Use; * Image Databases; * Applications of Multimedia Systems; * Multimedia Modeling in General; * Multimedia Information Retrieval; * Semantics and Metadata.For almost every area, important topics and issues include: * data modeling and query languages for media such as audio, video, and images; * methodological aspects of multimedia database design; * intelligent multimedia information retrieval; * knowledge discovery and data mining in multimedia information; * multimedia user interfaces. Three visionary keynote addresses, by famous experts Ramesh Jain, Hermann Maurer and Masao Sakauchi, set the stage for discussion and future directions for the field. The collection of papers that resulted now offers a glimpse of the excitement and enthusiasm from DS-8. Database Semantics: Semantic Issues in Multimedia Systems is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate-level course on database systems, multimedia systems, or information retrieval systems and as a reference for practitioners and researchers in industry.

Information and communication technologies can provide new paradigms in healthcare provision. In particular, new Pervasive Healthcare technologies can revolutionise the dynamics of healthcare, enabling people to remain at home for longer, at lower costs to health and welfare organisations.

This book reveals how pervasive healthcare technologies can be designed in conjunction with users and carers, as well as exploring the application of novel methods and technologies.

Advanced Signal Processing for Communication Systems consists of 20 contributions from researchers and experts. The first group of chapters deals with the audio and video processing for communications applications, including topics ranging from multimedia content delivery over the Internet, through the speech processing and recognition to recognition of non-speech sounds that can be attributed to the surrounding environment. The book also includes sections on applications of error control coding, information theory, and digital signal processing for communication systems like modulation, software-defined radio, and channel estimation. Advanced Signal Processing for Communication Systems is written for researchers working on communication systems and signal processing, as well as telecommunications industry professionals.

This book provides a theoretical and practical explanation of the latest advancements in information retrieval and their application to existing systems. It takes a system approach, discussing all aspects of an Information Retrieval System. The major difference between this book and the first edition is the addition to this text of descriptions of the automated indexing of multimedia documents, as items in information retrieval are now considered to be a combination of text along with graphics, audio, image and video data types. The growth of the Internet and the availability of enormous volumes of data in digital form have necessitated intense interest in techniques to assist the user in locating data. The importance of the Internet and its associated hypertext linked structure are put into perspective as a new type of information retrieval data structure. The total system approach also includes discussion of the human interface and the importance of information visualization for identification of relevant information.With the availability of large quantities of multi-media on the Internet (audio, video, images), Information Retrieval Systems need to address multi-modal retrieval. The primary use of this book is as a college text on Information Retrieval Systems. But in addition to the theoretical aspects, the book maintains a theme of practicality that puts into perspective the importance and utilization of the theory in systems that are being used by anyone on the Internet. The student will gain an understanding of what is achievable using existing technologies and deficient areas that warrant additional research. The text provides coverage of all of the major aspects of information retrieval and has sufficient detail to allow students to implement a simple Information Retrieval System.

Semantic Models for Multimedia Database Searching and Browsing begins with the introduction of multimedia information applications, the need for the development of the multimedia database management systems (MDBMSs), and the important issues and challenges of multimedia systems. The temporal relations, the spatial relations, the spatio-temporal relations, and several semantic models for multimedia information systems are also introduced. In addition, this book discusses recent advances in multimedia database searching and multimedia database browsing. More specifically, issues such as image/video segmentation, motion detection, object tracking, object recognition, knowledge-based event modeling, content-based retrieval, and key frame selections are presented for the first time in a single book. Two case studies consisting of two semantic models are included in the book to illustrate how to use semantic models to design multimedia information systems. Semantic Models for Multimedia Database Searching and Browsing is an excellent reference and can be used in advanced level courses for researchers, scientists, industry professionals, software engineers, students, and general readers who are interested in the issues, challenges, and ideas underlying the current practice of multimedia presentation, multimedia database searching, and multimedia browsing in multimedia information systems.

Exploration of Visual Data presents latest research efforts in the area of content-based exploration of image and video data. The main objective is to bridge the semantic gap between high-level concepts in the human mind and low-level features extractable by the machines. The two key issues emphasized are "content-awareness" and "user-in-the-loop". The authors provide a comprehensive review on algorithms for visual feature extraction based on color, texture, shape, and structure, and techniques for incorporating such information to aid browsing, exploration, search, and streaming of image and video data. They also discuss issues related to the mixed use of textual and low-level visual features to facilitate more effective access of multimedia data. Exploration of Visual Data provides state-of-the-art materials on the topics of content-based description of visual data, content-based low-bitrate video streaming, and latest asymmetric and nonlinear relevance feedback algorithms, which to date are unpublished.

The research in content-based indexing and retrieval of visual information such as images and video has become one of the most populated directions in the vast area of information technologies. Social networks such as YouTube, Facebook, FileMobile, and DailyMotion host and supply facilities for accessing a tremendous amount of professional and user generated data. The areas of societal activity, such as, video protection and security, also generate thousands and thousands of terabytes of visual content. This book presents the most recent results and important trends in visual information indexing and retrieval. It is intended for young researchers, as well as, professionals looking for an algorithmic solution to a problem.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment (INTETAIN 11). The 20 full papers, 3 posters, 10 demos and 4 workshops presented were carefully selected from numerous submissions. The conference aims enhancing the understanding of recent and anticipated advances in interactive technologies, and their applications to entertainment, education, culture, and the arts. Interaction technologies are having relevant changes in the last years, and will influence the way users consume and interact with the media and applications, both locally and over the Internet. The explosion of natural, multimodal, and touch based interfaces, and their access to the general public, has made new interaction paradigms a reality.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 34th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2012, held in Barcelona, Spain, in April 2012. The 37 full papers, 28 poster papers and 7 demonstrations presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 167 submissions. The contributions are organized in sections named: query representation; blogs and online-community search; semi-structured retrieval; evaluation; applications; retrieval models; image and video retrieval; text and content classification, categorisation, clustering; systems efficiency; industry track; and posters.