Welcome to the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Contemporary Computing, which was held in Noida (outskirts of New Delhi), India. Computing is an exciting and evolving area. This conference, which was jointly organized by the Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida, India and the University of Fl- ida, Gainesville, USA, focused on topics that are of contemporary interest to computer and computational scientists and engineers. The conference had an exciting technical program of 79 papers submitted by - searchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to advance the algorithmic, systems, applications, and educational aspects of contemporary comp- ing. These papers were selected from 350 submissions (with an overall acceptance rate of around 23%). The technical program was put together by a distinguished int- national Program Committee consisting of more than 150 members. The Program Committee was led by the following Track Chairs: Arunava Banerjee, Kanad Kishore Biswas, Summet Dua, Prabhat Mishra, Rajat Moona, Sheung-Hung Poon, and Cho-Li Wang. I would like to thank the Program Committee and the Track Chairs for their tremendous effort. I would like to thank the General Chairs, Prof. Sartaj Sahni and Prof. Sanjay Goel, for giving me the opportunity to lead the technical program. Sanjay Ranka

This textbook presents mathematical models in bioinformatics and describes biological problems that inspire the computer science tools used to manage the enormous data sets involved. The first part of the book covers mathematical and computational methods, with practical applications presented in the second part. The mathematical presentation avoids unnecessary formalism, while remaining clear and precise. The book closes with a thorough bibliography, reaching from classic research results to very recent findings. This volume is suited for a senior undergraduate or graduate course on bioinformatics, with a strong focus on mathematical and computer science background.

This volume contains the papers presented at the 23rd Canadian Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (AI 2010). The conference was held in Ottawa, Ontario, fromMay31toJune2,2010,andwascollocatedwiththe36thGraphicsInterface Conference(GI2010),andthe7thCanadianConferenceonComputerandRobot Vision (CRV 2010). The Program Committee received 90 submissions for the main conference, AI2010,fromacrossCanadaandaroundtheworld.Eachsubmissionwasreviewed byuptofourreviewers.Forthe?nalconferenceprogramandforinclusioninthese proceedings, 22 regular papers, with allocation of 12 pages each, were selected. Additionally,26 shortpapers,with allocationof 4 pageseach,wereaccepted. The papers from the Graduate Student Symposium are also included in the proceedings:sixoral(fourpages)andsixposter(twopages)presentationpapers. The conference programfeatured three keynote presentations by Dekang Lin (Google Inc.), Guy Lapalme (Universit'edeMontr' eal), and Evangelos Milios (Dalhousie University). The one-page abstracts of their talks are also included in the proceedings. Two pre-conference workshops, each with their own proceedings, were held on May 30, 2010. The Workshop on Intelligent Methods for Protecting Privacy and Con?dentiality in Data was organized by Khaled El Emam and Marina Sokolova. The workshop on Teaching AI in Computing and Information Te- nology (AI-CIT 2010) was organized by Danny Silver, Leila Kosseim, and Sajid Hussain. This conference wouldnot havebeen possible without the hardworkofmany people.WewouldliketothankallProgramCommitteemembersandexternal- viewers for their e?ort in providing high-quality reviews in a timely manner. We thank all the authors of submitted papers for submitting their work,and the - thors of selected papers for their collaboration in preparation of the ?nal copy. ManythankstoEbrahimBagheriandMarinaSokolovafororganizingtheGra- ateStudentSymposium,andchairingtheProgramCommitteeofthesymposium. We are in debt to Andrei Voronkov for developing the EasyChair conference managementsystemandmakingitfreelyavailabletotheacademicworld.Itisan amazinglyelegantand functionalWeb-basedsystem,whichsavedus muchtime.

This book and its sister volume collect refereed papers presented at the 7th Inter- tional Symposium on Neural Networks (ISNN 2010), held in Shanghai, China, June 6-9, 2010. Building on the success of the previous six successive ISNN symposiums, ISNN has become a well-established series of popular and high-quality conferences on neural computation and its applications. ISNN aims at providing a platform for scientists, researchers, engineers, as well as students to gather together to present and discuss the latest progresses in neural networks, and applications in diverse areas. Nowadays, the field of neural networks has been fostered far beyond the traditional artificial neural networks. This year, ISNN 2010 received 591 submissions from more than 40 countries and regions. Based on rigorous reviews, 170 papers were selected for publication in the proceedings. The papers collected in the proceedings cover a broad spectrum of fields, ranging from neurophysiological experiments, neural modeling to extensions and applications of neural networks. We have organized the papers into two volumes based on their topics. The first volume, entitled "Advances in Neural Networks- ISNN 2010, Part 1," covers the following topics: neurophysiological foundation, theory and models, learning and inference, neurodynamics. The second volume en- tled "Advance in Neural Networks ISNN 2010, Part 2" covers the following five topics: SVM and kernel methods, vision and image, data mining and text analysis, BCI and brain imaging, and applications.

This book and its sister volume collect refereed papers presented at the 7th Inter- tional Symposium on Neural Networks (ISNN 2010), held in Shanghai, China, June 6-9, 2010. Building on the success of the previous six successive ISNN symposiums, ISNN has become a well-established series of popular and high-quality conferences on neural computation and its applications. ISNN aims at providing a platform for scientists, researchers, engineers, as well as students to gather together to present and discuss the latest progresses in neural networks, and applications in diverse areas. Nowadays, the field of neural networks has been fostered far beyond the traditional artificial neural networks. This year, ISNN 2010 received 591 submissions from more than 40 countries and regions. Based on rigorous reviews, 170 papers were selected for publication in the proceedings. The papers collected in the proceedings cover a broad spectrum of fields, ranging from neurophysiological experiments, neural modeling to extensions and applications of neural networks. We have organized the papers into two volumes based on their topics. The first volume, entitled "Advances in Neural Networks- ISNN 2010, Part 1," covers the following topics: neurophysiological foundation, theory and models, learning and inference, neurodynamics. The second volume en- tled "Advance in Neural Networks ISNN 2010, Part 2" covers the following five topics: SVM and kernel methods, vision and image, data mining and text analysis, BCI and brain imaging, and applications.

In den letzten Jahren hat sich der Workshop Bildverarbeitung fur die Medizin durch erfolgreiche Veranstaltungen etabliert. Ziel ist auch 2009 wieder die Darstellung aktueller Forschungsergebnisse und die Vertiefung der Gesprache zwischen Wissenschaftlern, Industrie und Anwendern. Die Beitrage dieses Bandes - einige in englischer Sprache - behandeln alle Bereiche der medizinischen Bildverarbeitung, insbesondere Bildgebung, CAD, Segmentierung, Bildanalyse, Visualisierung und Animation, Roboter und Manipulatoren, Chirurgische Simulatoren, Diagnose, Therapieplanung sowie deren klinische Anwendungen."

This volume contains extended papers from Sensor-KDD 2008, the Second - ternational Workshop on Knowledge Discovery from Sensor Data. The second Sensor-KDDworkshopwasheldinLasVegasonAugust24,2008, inconjunction with the 14th ACM SIGKDD InternationalConference on KnowledgeDiscovery and Data Mining. Wide-area sensor infrastructures, remote sensors, and wireless sensor n- works, RFIDs, yield massive volumes of disparate, dynamic, and geographically distributeddata.Assuchsensorsarebecomingubiquitous, asetofbroadrequi- ments is beginning to emerge across high-priority applications including dis- ter preparedness and management, adaptability to climate change, national or homelandsecurity, andthe managementofcriticalinfrastructures.Therawdata from sensors need to be e?ciently managed and transformed to usable infor- tion through data fusion, which in turn must be converted to predictive insights via knowledge discovery, ultimately facilitating automated or human-induced tactical decisions or strategic policy based on decision sciences and decision s- port systems. The expected ubiquity of sensors in the near future, combined with the cr- ical roles they are expected to play in high-priority application solutions, points to an era of unprecedented growth and opportunities. The main motivation for the Sensor-KDD series of workshops stems from the increasing need for a forum to exchange ideas and recent research results, and to facilitate coll- oration and dialog between academia, government, and industrial stakeho- ers. This is clearly re?ected in the successful organization of the ?rst workshop (http: //www.ornl.gov/sci/knowledgediscovery/SensorKDD-2007/)alongwiththe ACMKDD-2007conference, whichwasattendedbymorethanseventyregistered participants, and resulted in an edited book (CRC Press, ISBN-9781420082326, 2008), and a special issue in the Intelligent Data Analysis journal (Volume 13, Number 3, 2

The 4th IAPR TC3 Workshop on Arti?cial Neural Networks in Pattern Rec- nition, ANNPR 2010, was held at Nile University (Egypt), April 11-13, 2010. The workshop was organized by the Technical Committee on Neural Networks and Computational Intelligence (TC3) that is one of the 20 technical comm- tees (TC) of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). The scope of TC3 includes computational intelligence approaches, such as fuzzy s- tems, evolutionary computing and arti?cial neural networks and their use in various pattern recognition applications. The major topics of ANNPR are supervised and unsupervised learning, f- ture selection, pattern recognition in signal and image processing, and appli- tions in data mining or bioinformatics. High quality across such a diverse ?eld of research is achieved through a rigorous and selective review process. For this workshop, 42 papers were submitted and 23 of them were selected for inc- sion in the proceedings. The workshop was enriched by three invited talks given by Barbara Hammer, University of Bielefeld, Germany, Amir F. Atiya, Cairo University, Egypt, and Mohamed Kamel, University of Waterloo, Canada. We would like to thank all authors for the e?ort they put into their subm- sions, and the Scienti?c Committee for taking the time to provide high-quality reviews and selecting the best contributions for the ?nal workshop program. Special thanks are due to the members of the Nile University Organizing C- mittee,AhmedSalah,AmiraElBaroudy,EsraaAly,HebaEzzat,NesrineSameh, Rana Salah and Mohamed Zahhar for their indispensable contributions to the registration management and local organization.

The International Gesture Workshop is an interdisciplinary event where researchers working on human gesture-based communication present advanced research currently inprogressandexchangeideasongestureacrossmultidisciplinaryscienti?cdisciplines. This workshop encompasses all fundamental aspects of gestural studies in the ?eld of human-computer interaction and simulation, including all multifaceted issues of m- elling, analysis and synthesis of human gesture, encompassing hand and body gestures andfacial expressions. A focusof these eventsis a sharedinterest in usinggesturein the contextofsign languageanalysis, understandingandsynthesis. Anotherstreamof int- est is the user-centric approach of considering gesture in multimodal human-computer interaction, in the framework of the integration of such interaction into the natural - vironment of users. In addition to welcoming submission of work by established - searchers, it is the tradition of the GW series of workshops to encourage submission of student work at various stages of completion, enabling a broader dissemination of ?nished or on-going novel work and the exchangeof experiences in a multidisciplinary environment. Gesture Workshop 2007 (GW 2007) was the 7th European Gesture Workshop in the GW series initiated in 1996. Since that date, the Gesture Workshops have been held roughly every second year, with fully reviewed proceedings typically published by Springer. GW 2007 was organized by ADETTI at ISCTE-Lisbon University - stitute, during May 23-25, 2007. In GW 2007, from the 53 contributions that were received, 15 high-quality full papers were accepted, along with 16 short papers and 10 posters and demos, showing on-going promising gesture research. Two brilliant keynote speakers honored the event with their presentations.

It is indeed a great pleasure to welcome you to the proceedings of the Inter- tional Symposium "Computational Modeling of Objects Represented in Images. Fundamentals,MethodsandApplications"(CompIMAGE2010)heldinBu?alo, NY, May 5-7, 2010. This was the second issue of CompIMAGE symposia, the ?rst one being held in Coimbra, Portugal. The purpose of CompIMAGE 2010 was to provide a common forum for - searchers, scientists, engineers, and practitioners around the world to present their latest research ?ndings, ideas, developments, and applications in the area of computational modeling of objects represented in images. In particular, the symposium aimed to attract scientists who use various approaches - such as ?nite element method, optimization methods, modal analysis, stochastic me- ods, principal components analysis, independent components analysis, distri- tion models, geometrical modeling, digital geometry, grammars,fuzzy logic, and others - to solve problems that appear in a wide range of areas as diverse as medicine, robotics, defense, security, astronomy,materialscience, and manuf- turing. CompIMAGE 2010 was highly international. Its Program Committee m- bersarerenownedexpertscomingfrom25di?erentcountries.Submissionstothe symposium came from 22 countries from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America. Overall, representatives of 32 countries contributed to the symposium in di?erent capacities.

This book includes selected papers from VISIGRAPP 2007, the Joint Conference on Computer Vision and Computer Graphics, comprising two component conferences, namely, the International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications (VISAPP) and the International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and App- cations (GRAPP), held in Barcelona, Spain, during March 8-11, 2007. We received quite a high number of paper submissions: 382 in total for both conf- ences. We had contributions from more than 50 countries in all five continents. This confirms the success and global dimension of these jointly organized conferences. After a rigorous double-blind evaluation method, a total of 78 submissions were accepted as full papers. From those, 18 got selected for inclusion in this book. To ensure the sci- tific quality of the contributions, these were selected from papers that were evaluated with the highest scores by the VISIGRAPP Program Committee members and then they were extended and revised by the authors. Special thanks go to all contributors and re- rees, without whom this book would not have been possible. VISIGRAPP 2007 included four invited keynote lectures, presented by internati- ally recognized researchers. The presentations represented an important contribution to increasing the overall quality of the conference. We would like to express our - preciation to all invited keynote speakers, in alphabetical order: Jake K. Aggarwal (The University of Texas at Austin/USA), Andre Gagalowicz (INRIA/France), Wo- gang Heidrich (University of British Columbia/Canada), Mel Slater (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya/Spain)."

We are pleased to present this set of peer-reviewed papers from the ?rst MICCAI Workshop on Medical Content-Based Retrieval for Clinical Decision Support. The MICCAI conference has been the ?agship conference for the m- ical imaging community re?ecting the state of the art in techniques of segm- tation, registration, and robotic surgery. Yet, the transfer of these techniques to clinical practice is rarely discussed in the MICCAI conference. To address this gap, we proposed to hold this workshop with MICCAI in London in September 2009. The goal of the workshop was to show the application of content-based retrieval in clinical decision support. With advances in electronic patient record systems, a large number of pre-diagnosed patient data sets are now bec- ing available. These data sets are often multimodal consisting of images (x-ray, CT, MRI), videos and other time series, and textual data (free text reports and structuredclinicaldata). Analyzing thesemultimodalsourcesfordisease-speci?c information across patients can reveal important similarities between patients and hence their underlying diseases and potential treatments. Researchers are now beginning to use techniques of content-based retrieval to search for disea- speci?c information in modalities to ?nd supporting evidence for a disease or to automatically learn associations of symptoms and diseases. Benchmarking frameworks such as ImageCLEF (Image retrieval track in the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum) have expanded over the past ?ve years to include large m- ical image collections for testing various algorithms for medical image retrieval and classi?cation.

This volume in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series contains 98 papers presented at the S+SSPR 2008 workshops. S+SSPR 2008 was the sixth time that the SPR and SSPR workshops organized by Technical Committees, TC1 and TC2, of the International Association for Pattern Rec- nition (IAPR) wereheld as joint workshops. S+SSPR 2008was held in Orlando, Florida, the family entertainment capital of the world, on the beautiful campus of the University of Central Florida, one of the up and coming metropolitan universities in the USA. S+SSPR 2008 was held during December 4-6, 2008 only a few days before the 19th International Conference on Pattern Recog- tion(ICPR2008), whichwasheldin Tampa, onlytwo hoursawayfromOrlando, thus giving the opportunity of both conferences to attendees to enjoy the many attractions o?ered by two neighboring cities in the state of Florida. SPR 2008 and SSPR 2008 received a total of 175 paper submissions from many di?erent countries around the world, thus giving the workshop an int- national clout, as was the case for past workshops. This volume contains 98 accepted papers: 56 for oral presentations and 42 for poster presentations. In addition to parallel oral sessions for SPR and SSPR, there was also one joint oral session with papers of interest to both the SPR and SSPR communities. A recent trend that has emerged in the pattern recognition and machine lea- ing research communities is the study of graph-based methods that integrate statistical andstructural approache

In its lucky 12+1 edition, during April 7-9, 2010, the European Conference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP) travelled to its most easterly location so far, theEuropeanCityof Culture2010,Istanbul,Turkey.EuroGPisthe onlyconf- enceworldwideexclusivelydevotedtogeneticprogrammingandtheevolutionary generation of computer programs. For over a decade, genetic programming (GP) has been considered the new form of evolutionary computation. With nearly 7,000 articles in the online GP bibliography maintained by William B. Langdon, we can say that it is now a mature ?eld. EuroGP has contributed to the success of the ?eld substantially, by being a unique forum for expressing new ideas, meeting, and starting up collaborations. The wide rangeoftopics in this volume re?ectthecurrentstateof researchin the ?eld, including representations, theory, operators and analysis, novel m- els, performance enhancements, extensions of genetic programming,and various applications. The volume contains contributions in the following areas: - Understanding GP behavior andGP analysis include articles on cro- over operators and a new way of analyzing results. -GPperformance presents work on performance enhancements through phenotypic diversity, simpli?cation, ?tness and parallelism. - Novel models and their application present innovative approaches with arti?cial biochemical networks, genetic regulatory networks and geometric di?erential evolution. - Grammatical evolution introduces advances in crossover, mutation and phenotype-genotype maps in this relatively new area. - Machine learning and data mining include articles that present data miningormachinelearningsolutionsusingGPandalsocombinedatamining and machine learning with GP. - Applications rangefromsolvingdi?erentialequations,routingproblems to ?le type detection, object-oriented testing, agents. This year we received 48 submissions, of which 47 were sent to the reviewers.

Metaheuristicscontinuetodemonstratetheire?ectivenessforanever-broadening range of di?cult combinatorial optimization problems appearing in a wide - riety of industrial, economic, and scienti?c domains. Prominent examples of metaheuristics are evolutionary algorithms, tabu search, simulated annealing, scatter search, memetic algorithms, variable neighborhood search, iterated local search, greedy randomized adaptive search procedures, ant colony optimization and estimation of distribution algorithms. Problems solved successfully include scheduling,timetabling,networkdesign,transportationanddistribution,vehicle routing, the travelling salesman problem, packing and cutting, satis?ability and general mixed integer programming. EvoCOP began in 2001 and has been held annually since then. It is the ?rst event speci?cally dedicated to the application of evolutionary computation and related methods to combinatorial optimization problems. Originally held as a workshop,EvoCOPbecameaconferencein2004.Theeventsgaveresearchersan excellent opportunity to present their latest research and to discuss current - velopments and applications. Following the general trend of hybrid metaheur- tics and diminishing boundaries between the di?erent classes of metaheuristics, EvoCOPhas broadenedits scope in recent years and invited submissions on any kind of metaheuristic for combinatorial optimization.

The First International Conference on Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime (ICDF2C) was held in Albany from September 30 to October 2, 2009. The field of digital for- sics is growing rapidly with implications for several fields including law enforcement, network security, disaster recovery and accounting. This is a multidisciplinary area that requires expertise in several areas including, law, computer science, finance, networking, data mining, and criminal justice. This conference brought together pr- titioners and researchers from diverse fields providing opportunities for business and intellectual engagement among attendees. All the conference sessions were very well attended with vigorous discussions and strong audience interest. The conference featured an excellent program comprising high-quality paper pr- entations and invited speakers from all around the world. The first day featured a plenary session including George Philip, President of University at Albany, Harry Corbit, Suprintendent of New York State Police, and William Pelgrin, Director of New York State Office of Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructure Coordination. An outstanding keynote was provided by Miklos Vasarhelyi on continuous auditing. This was followed by two parallel sessions on accounting fraud /financial crime, and m- timedia and handheld forensics. The second day of the conference featured a mesm- izing keynote talk by Nitesh Dhanjani from Ernst and Young that focused on psyc- logical profiling based on open source intelligence from social network analysis. The third day of the conference featured both basic and advanced tutorials on open source forensics.

The 8th edition of the International Symposium on Web and Wireless Geograp- cal Information Systems (W2GIS 2008) was held in December 2008, in the vibrant city of Shanghai, China. This annual symposium aims at providing a forum for discussing advances on recent developments and research results in the ?eld of Web and wireless geographical information systems. Promoted from workshop to s- posium in 2005, W2GIS now represents a prestigious event within this dynamic research community. These proceedings contain the papers selected for presen- tion at this international event. For the 2008 edition, we received 38 submissions from 16 countries. All subm- ted papers were related to topics of interest to the symposium. Each paper received three reviews. Based on these reviews, 14 papers were selected for presentation and inclusion in the proceedings. The accepted papers are all of excellent quality and cover topics that range from mobile networks and location-based services, to contextual representation and mapping, to geospatial Web techniques, to object tracking in Web and mobile environments. We wish to thank all authors that contributed to this symposium for the high quality of their papers and presentations. Our sincere thanks go to Springer's LNCS team. We would also like to acknowledge and thank the Program C- mittee members for the quality and timeliness of their reviews. Finally, many thanks to the Steering Committee members for providing continuous support and advice.

Juval Portugali The notion of complex artificial environments (CAE) refers to theories of c- plexity and self-organization, as well as to artifacts in general, and to artificial - vironments, such as cities, in particular. The link between the two, however, is not trivial. For one thing, the theories of complexity and self-organization originated in the "hard" science and by reference to natural phenomena in physics and bi- ogy. The study of artifacts, per contra, has traditionally been the business of the "soft" disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The notion of "complex artificial environments" thus implies the supposition that the theories of compl- ity and self-organization, together with the mathematical formalisms and meth- ologies developed for their study, apply beyond the domain of nature. Such a s- st position raises a whole set of questions relating to the nature of 21 century cities and urbanism, to philosophical issues regarding the natural versus the artificial, to the methodological legitimacy of interdisciplinary transfer of theories and me- odologies and to the implications that entail the use of sophisticated, state-of-t- art artifacts such as virtual reality (VR) cities and environments. The three-day workshop on the study of complex artificial environments that took place on the island of San Servolo, Venice, during April 1-3, 2004, was a gathering of scholars engaged in the study of the various aspects of CAE.

This volume brings together the peer-reviewed contributions of the participants at the COST 2102 International Conference on "Cross-Modal Analysis of Speech, Gestures, Gaze and Facial Expressions" held in Prague, Czech Republic, October 15-18, 2008. The conference was sponsored by COST (European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research, www. cost. esf. org/domains_actions/ict) in the - main of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for disseminating the research advances developed within COST Action 2102: "Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication" http://cost2102. cs. stir. ac. uk. COST 2102 research networking has contributed to modifying the conventional theoretical approach to the cross-modal analysis of verbal and nonverbal communi- tion changing the concept of face to face communication with that of body to body communication as well as developing the idea of embodied information. Information is no longer the result of a difference in perception and is no longer measured in terms of quantity of stimuli, since the research developed in COST 2102 has proved that human information processing is a nonlinear process that cannot be seen as the sum of the numerous pieces of information available. Considering simply the pieces of inf- mation available, results in a model of the receiver as a mere decoder, and produces a huge simplification of the communication process.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Combinatorial Image Analysis, IWCIA 2009, held in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, in November 2009.

The 32 revised full papers and one invited paper presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 70 initial submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on digital geometry: curves, straightness, convexity, geometric transformations, metrics, distance transforms and skeletons, segmentation, thinning, skeletonization, image representation, processing, analysis, reconstruction and recognition, digital tomography, image models based on geometry, combinatorics, arithmetics, algebra, mathematical morphology, topology and grammars, as well as digital topology and its applications to image modeling and analysis.

INSTICC organized the third edition of VISIGRAPP that took place in Funchal- Madeira, Portugal in January 2008 after successful previous editions. This book - cludes selected papers from VISIGRAPP 2008, the Joint Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications (VISAPP) and Computer Graphics Theory and - plications (GRAPP). The conference was intended to stimulate the exchange of ideas on the topics of c- puter vision and computer graphics. We received a high number of paper submissions: 374 in total for both conferences. We had contributions from more than 50 countries in all continents. This confirms the success and global dimension of these jointly organized conferences. After a rigorous double-blind evaluation method, 78 submissions were accepted as full papers. From those, 20 were selected for this book. To ensure the sci- tific quality of the contributions, these were selected from the ones that were evaluated with the highest scores by the VISIGRAPP Program Committee Members and then they were extended and revised by the authors. Special thanks go to all contributors and re- rees, without whom this book would not have been possible. VISIGRAPP 2008 also featured the comments of keynote speakers, in alphabetical order, Adrian Hilton (University of Surrey, UK), Genevieve Lucet (Computer S- vices for Research at the UNAM, Mexico), Peter Sturm (INRIA Rhone-Alpes, France) and Sharathchandra Pankanti (IBM - Exploratory Computer Vision Group, USA), who are internationally recognized researchers. The presentations represented an - portant contribution to the overall quality of the conference.

Welcome to the 2008EuropeanConference onComputer Vision. These proce- ings are the result of a great deal of hard work by many people. To produce them, a total of 871 papers were reviewed. Forty were selected for oral pres- tation and 203 were selected for poster presentation, yielding acceptance rates of 4.6% for oral, 23.3% for poster, and 27.9% in total. Weappliedthreeprinciples.First, sincewehadastronggroupofAreaChairs, the ?nal decisions to accept or reject a paper rested with the Area Chair, who wouldbeinformedbyreviewsandcouldactonlyinconsensuswithanotherArea Chair. Second, we felt that authors were entitled to a summary that explained how the Area Chair reached a decision for a paper. Third, we were very careful to avoid con?icts of interest. Each paper was assigned to an Area Chair by the Program Chairs, and each Area Chair received a pool of about 25 papers. The Area Chairs then identi?ed and rankedappropriatereviewersfor eachpaper in their pool, and a constrained optimization allocated three reviewers to each paper. We are very proud that every paper received at least three reviews. At this point, authors wereable to respond to reviews. The Area Chairs then needed to reach a decision. We used a series of procedures to ensure careful review and to avoid con?icts of interest. ProgramChairs did not submit papers. The Area Chairs were divided into three groups so that no Area Chair in the group was in con?ict with any paper assigned to any Area Chair in the group

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition, CIARP 2008, held in Havana, Cuba, in September 2008.

The 93 revised full papers presented together with 3 keynote articles were carefully reviewed and selected from 182 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on signal analysis for characterization and filtering, analysis of shape and texture, analysis of speech and language, data mining, clustering of images and documents, statistical pattern recognition, classification and description of objects, classification and edition, geometric image analysis, neural networks, computer vision, image coding, associative memories and neural networks, interpolation and video tracking, images analysis, music and speech analysis, as well as classifier combination and document filtering.

Following the very successful Motion in Games event in June 2008, we or- nized the Second International Workshop on Motion in Games (MIG) during November 21-24, 2009 in Zeist, The Netherlands. Games have become a very important medium for both education and - tertainment. Motion plays a crucial role in computer games. Characters move around, objects are manipulated or move due to physical constraints, entities are animated, and the camera moves through the scene. Even the motion of the player nowadays is used as input to games. Motion is currently studied in many di?erent areas of research, including graphics and animation, game technology, robotics, simulation, computer vision, and also physics, psychology, and urban studies. Cross-fertilizationbetween these communities can considerably advance the state of the art in this area. The goal of the workshop Motion in Games is to bring together researchers from this variety of ?elds to present the most recent results and to initiate collaboration. The workshop is organized by the Dutch research project GATE. In total, the workshop this year consisted of 27 high-quality presentations by a selection of internationally renownedspeakers in the ?eld of games and simulations. We were extremely pleased with the quality of the contributions to the MIG workshop and we look forward to organizing a follow-up MIG event.

The Second International Conference on Forensic Applications and Techniques in Telecommunications, Information and Multimedia (e-Forensics 2009) took place in Adelaide, South Australia during January 19-21, 2009, at the Australian National Wine Centre, University of Adelaide. In addition to the peer-reviewed academic papers presented in this volume, the c- ference featured a significant number of plenary contributions from recognized - tional and international leaders in digital forensic investigation. Keynote speaker Andy Jones, head of security research at British Telecom, outlined the emerging challenges of investigation as new devices enter the market. These - clude the impact of solid-state memory, ultra-portable devices, and distributed storage - also known as cloud computing. The plenary session on Digital Forensics Practice included Troy O'Malley, Que- sland Police Service, who outlined the paperless case file system now in use in Que- sland, noting that efficiency and efficacy gains in using the system have now meant that police can arrive at a suspect's home before the suspect! Joseph Razik, represe- ing Patrick Perrot of the Institut de Recherche Criminelle de la Gendarmerie Nati- ale, France, summarized research activities in speech, image, video and multimedia at the IRCGN. The plenary session on The Interaction Between Technology and Law brought a legal perspective to the technological challenges of digital forensic investigation.