This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conferences on Security Technology, SecTech 2012, on Control and Automation, CA 2012, and CES-CUBE 2012, the International Conference on Circuits, Control, Communication, Electricity, Electronics, Energy, System, Signal and Simulation; all held in conjunction with GST 2012 on Jeju Island, Korea, in November/December 2012. The papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions and focus on the various aspects of security technology, and control and automation, and circuits, control, communication, electricity, electronics, energy, system, signal and simulation.

As future generation information technology (FGIT) becomes specialized and fr- mented, it is easy to lose sight that many topics in FGIT have common threads and, because of this, advances in one discipline may be transmitted to others. Presentation of recent results obtained in different disciplines encourages this interchange for the advancement of FGIT as a whole. Of particular interest are hybrid solutions that c- bine ideas taken from multiple disciplines in order to achieve something more signi- cant than the sum of the individual parts. Through such hybrid philosophy, a new principle can be discovered, which has the propensity to propagate throughout mul- faceted disciplines. FGIT 2009 was the first mega-conference that attempted to follow the above idea of hybridization in FGIT in a form of multiple events related to particular disciplines of IT, conducted by separate scientific committees, but coordinated in order to expose the most important contributions. It included the following international conferences: Advanced Software Engineering and Its Applications (ASEA), Bio-Science and Bio-Technology (BSBT), Control and Automation (CA), Database Theory and Application (DTA), D- aster Recovery and Business Continuity (DRBC; published independently), Future G- eration Communication and Networking (FGCN) that was combined with Advanced Communication and Networking (ACN), Grid and Distributed Computing (GDC), M- timedia, Computer Graphics and Broadcasting (MulGraB), Security Technology (SecTech), Signal Processing, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition (SIP), and- and e-Service, Science and Technology (UNESST).

Security-enriched urban computing and smart grids are areas that attracted many a- demic and industry professionals to research and develop. The goal of this conference was to bring together researchers from academia and industry as well as practitioners to share ideas, problems and solutions relating to the multifaceted aspects of urban computing and the smart grid. This conference includes the following special sessions: Signal Processing, Image Processing, Pattern Recognition and Communications (SIPC 2010), Networking, Fault-tolerance and Security For Distributed Computing Systems (NFSDCS 2010), Security Technology Application (STA 2010), Electric Transportation (ElecTrans 2010), Techniques of Bi-directional Power Computing in High Voltage Power Supply (TBPC 2010), Low Power IT and Applications (LPITA 2010), Computational Intel- gence and Soft Computing (CISC 2010), Distributed Computing and Sensor Networks (DCSN 2010), Advanced Fusion IT (AFIT 2010), Social Media and Social Netwo- ing (SMSN 2010), Software Engineering and Medical Information Engineering (SEMIE 2010), Human-Centered Advanced Research/Education (HuCARE 2010), Database Integrity and Security (DIS 2010), Ubiquitous IT Application (UITA 2010) and Smart Grid Applications (SGA 2010). We would like to express our gratitude to all of the authors of the submitted papers and to all attendees, for their contributions and participation. We believe in the need for continuing this undertaking in the future.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Who ponders the sock? This common object is something people tug on and take off daily with hardly a thought. Unraveling the garment's history, construction, and use, Kim Adrian's Sock reintroduces us to our own bodies- vulnerable, bipedal, and flawed. Sock reminds us that extraordinary secrets live in mundane material realities, and shows how this floppy, often smelly, sometimes holey piece of clothing, whether machine-made or hand-knit, can also serve as an anatomy lesson, a physics primer, a love letter, a weapon, a fetish, and a fashion statement. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Within the recent explosion of creative nonfiction, a new type of form is quietly emerging, what Brenda Miller calls “hermit crab essays.� The Shell Game is an anthology of these intriguing essays that borrow their structures from ordinary, everyday sources: a recipe, a crossword puzzle, a Craig’s List ad. Like their zoological namesake, these essays do not simply wear their borrowed “shells� but inhabit them so perfectly that the borrowed structures are wholly integral rather than contrived, both shaping the work and illuminating and exemplifying its subject. The Shell Game contains a carefully chosen selection of beautifully written, thought-provoking hybrid essays tackling a broad range of subjects, including the secrets of the human genome, the intractable pain of growing up black in America, and the gorgeous glow residing at the edges of the autism spectrum. Surprising, delightful, and lyric, these essays are destined to become classics of this new and increasingly popular hybrid form.