When Harley ruins the Riddler’s carefully constructed scheme to capture Batman, she’s determined to show the calculating crook that she’s no bad-luck jinx. She’ll use her brilliantly bonkers mind to write confounding rhymes of her own! In this battle of wits, can the jolly jester prove there’s a method to her madness? Find out in this action-packed chapter book for DC Super Hero and Super-Villain fans!

When Harley springs Poison Ivy from Arkham Asylum, the jaunty jester expects a little payback. After all, there's no limit to the criminal empire she could grow with the Queen of Green's help. But will Harley bloom into the big boss she's always wanted to become, or will her villainous dreams wilt on the vine? Find out in this action-packed chapter book for DC Super Hero and Super-Villain fans!

When Harley's hyenas are taken hostage, it's no laughing matter! The culprit is the Clown Prince of Crime, and landing a punch line on her part-time partner won't be easy. Can Harley find a way to crash the Joker's hideout, free her beloved pets, and prove, once and for all, that the joke is really on him? Find out in this action-packed chapter book for DC Super Hero and Super-Villain fans!

When Gotham City’s biggest baddies gather to plan a heist, they tell Harley to go wait with the goons! What?! But the joke is on them after Batman busts in and she sneaks out holding blueprints that show the way to the crooked payday. Can the jilted jester pull off a solo steal while dodging the criminal bosses on her tail? Find out in this action-packed chapter book for DC Super Hero and Super-Villain fans!

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is an integrating technology for supporting a pervasive and transparent infrastructure for implementing smart environments. Such technology is used to enable environments for detecting events and behaviors of people and for responding in a contextually relevant fashion. AmI proposes a multi-disciplinary approach for enhancing human machine interaction.

Ambient Intelligence: A Novel Paradigm is a compilation of edited chapters describing current state-of-the-art and new research techniques including those related to intelligent visual monitoring, face and speech recognition, innovative education methods, as well as smart and cognitive environments.

The authors start with a description of the iDorm as an example of a smart environment conforming to the AmI paradigm, and introduces computer vision as an important component of the system. Other computer vision examples describe visual monitoring for the elderly, classic and novel surveillance techniques using clusters of cameras installed in indoor and outdoor application domains, and the monitoring of public spaces. Face and speech recognition systems are also covered as well as enhanced LEGO blocks for novel educational purposes. The book closes with a provocative chapter on how a cybernetic system can be designed as the backbone of a human machine interaction.

Monitoring of public and private sites is increasingly becoming a very important and critical issue, especially after the recent flurry of terrorist attacks including the one on the Word Trade Center in September 2001. It is, therefore, imperative that effective multisensor surveillance systems be developed to protect the society from similar attacks in the future. The new generation of surveillance systems to be developed have a specific requirement: they must be able to automatically identify criminal and terrorist activity without sacrificing individual privacy to the extent possible. Privacy laws concerning monitoring and surveillance systems vary from country to country but, in general, they try to protect the privacy of their citizens. Monitoring and visual surveillance has numerous other applications. It can be employed to help invalids or handicapped and to monitor the activities of elderly people. It can be used to monitor large events such as sporting events, as well. Nowadays, monitoring is employ d in several different contexts including transport applications, such as monitoring of railway stations and airports, dangerous environments like nuclear facilities or traffic flows on roads and bridges. The latest generation of surveillance systems mainly rely on hybrid analog-digital, or completely digital video communications and processing methods and take advantage of the greater of flexibility offered by video processing algorithms that are capable focusing a human operator's attention on a set of interesting situations.

Privacy requirements have an increasing impact on the realization of modern applications. Commercial and legal regulations demand that privacy guarantees be provided whenever sensitive information is stored, processed, or communicated to external parties. Current approaches encrypt sensitive data, thus reducing query execution efficiency and preventing selective information release.

Preserving Privacy in Data Outsourcing presents a comprehensive approach for protecting highly sensitive information when it is stored on systems that are not under the data owner's control. The approach illustrated combines access control and encryption, enforcing access control via structured encryption. This solution, coupled with efficient algorithms for key derivation and distribution, provides efficient and secure authorization management on outsourced data, allowing the data owner to outsource not only the data but the security policy itself. To reduce the amount of data to be encrypted the book also investigates data fragmentation as a possible way to protect privacy of data associations and provide fragmentation as a complementary means for protecting privacy: associations broken by fragmentation will be visible only to users authorized (by knowing the proper key) to join fragments. The book finally investigates the problem of executing queries over possible data distributed at different servers and which must be controlled to ensure sensitive information and sensitive associations be visible only to parties authorized for that. Case Studies are provided throughout the book.

Privacy, data mining, data protection, data outsourcing, electronic commerce, machine learning professionals and others working in these related fields will find this book a valuable asset, as well as primary associations such as ACM, IEEE and Management Science. This book is also suitable for advanced level students and researchers concentrating on computer science as a secondary text or reference book.

Multimedia surveillance systems is an emerging field that includes signal and image processing, communications, and computer vision. Multimedia Video-Based Surveillance Systems: Requirements, Issues and Solutions, combines the most recent research results from these areas for use by engineers and end-users involved in the design of surveillance systems in the fields of transportation and services. The book covers emerging surveillance requirements, including new digital sensors for real-time acquisition of surveillance data, low-level image processing algorithms, and event detection methods. It also discusses problems related to knowledge representation in surveillance systems, wireless and wired multimedia networks, and a new generation of surveillance communication tools. Timely information is presented on digital watermarking, broadband multimedia transmission, legal use of surveillance systems, performance evaluation criteria, and other new and emerging topics, along with applications for transports and pedestrian monitoring. The information contained in Multimedia Video-Based Surveillance Systems: Requirements, Issues and Solutions, bridges the distance between present practice and research findings, and the book is an indispensable reference tool for professional engineers.

The Russian Revolution in Asia: From Baku to Batavia presents a unique and timely global history intervention into the historiography of the Russian Revolution of 1917, marking the centenary of one of the most significant modern revolutions. It explores the legacies of the Revolution across the Asian continent and maritime Southeast Asia, with a broad geographic sweep including Iran, the Caucasus, Central Asia, China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India. It analyses how revolutionary communism intersected with a variety of Asian contexts, from the anti-colonial movement and ethnic tensions, to indigenous cultural frameworks and power structures. In so doing, this volume privileges Asian actors and perspectives, examining how Asian communities reinterpreted the Revolution to serve unexpected ends, including national liberation, regional autonomy, conflict with Russian imperial hegemony, Islamic practice and cultural nostalgia. Methodologically, this volume breaks new ground by incorporating research from a wide range of sources across multiple languages, many analysed for the first time in English-language scholarship. This book will be of use to historians of the Russian Revolution, especially those interested in understanding transnational and transregional perspectives of its impact in Central Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as historians of Asia more broadly. It will also appeal to those interested in the history of Islam.

The Russian Revolution in Asia: From Baku to Batavia presents a unique and timely global history intervention into the historiography of the Russian Revolution of 1917, marking the centenary of one of the most significant modern revolutions. It explores the legacies of the Revolution across the Asian continent and maritime Southeast Asia, with a broad geographic sweep including Iran, the Caucasus, Central Asia, China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India. It analyses how revolutionary communism intersected with a variety of Asian contexts, from the anti-colonial movement and ethnic tensions, to indigenous cultural frameworks and power structures. In so doing, this volume privileges Asian actors and perspectives, examining how Asian communities reinterpreted the Revolution to serve unexpected ends, including national liberation, regional autonomy, conflict with Russian imperial hegemony, Islamic practice and cultural nostalgia. Methodologically, this volume breaks new ground by incorporating research from a wide range of sources across multiple languages, many analysed for the first time in English-language scholarship. This book will be of use to historians of the Russian Revolution, especially those interested in understanding transnational and transregional perspectives of its impact in Central Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as historians of Asia more broadly. It will also appeal to those interested in the history of Islam.