This book describes the main ideas, methods, results and resources relevant to the study of bionanosensor networks. Its primary goal is to spark application-oriented studies of molecular communication; that is, to investigate how collections of bionanosensors, referred to here as bionanosensor networks, can be used for practical purposes such as nanomedical sensing. In particular, the book focuses on two key functionalities for nanomedical applications: target detection and target tracking. Bionanosensor networks represent a new interdisciplinary research area that expands the traditional area of network engineering by incorporating the latest advances in bionanotechnology. These networks consist of spatially distributed bionanosensors that are engineered with the help of bionanotechnology. As a research area, bionanosensor networks are aimed at designing robust networks on the basis of spatially distributed bionanosensors, as well as at developing innovative applications of those networks.

This volume is the Proceedings of the First International Conference on Advanced Multimedia Content Processing (AMCP 98). With the remarkable advances made in computer and communication hardware/software system technologies, we can now easily obtain large volumes of multimedia data through advanced computer networks and store and handle them in our own personal hardware. Sophisticated and integrated multimedia content processing technologies, which are essential to building a highly advanced information based society, are attracting ever increasing attention in various service areas, including broadcasting, publishing, medical treatment, entertainment, and communications. The prime concerns of these technologies are how to acquire multimedia content data from the real world, how to automatically organize and store these obtained data in databases for sharing and reuse, and how to generate and create new, attractive multimedia content using the stored data. This conference brings together researchers and practitioners from academia, in dustry, and public agencies to present and discuss recent advances in the acquisition, management, retrieval, creation, and utilization of large amounts of multimedia con tent. Artistic and innovative applications through the active use of multimedia con tent are also subjects of interest. The conference aims at covering the following par ticular areas: (1) Dynamic multimedia data modeling and intelligent structuring of content based on active, bottom up, and self organized strategies. (2) Access archi tecture, querying facilities, and distribution mechanisms for multimedia content."

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the First International Symposiumorganized by the Japan Society for Software Science and Technology. The symposium was held in Kanazawa, Japan, November 4-6, 1993 and attracted many researchers from academia and industry as well as ambitioned practitioners. Object technologies, in particular object-oriented programming, object-oriented databases, and software object bases, currently attract much attention and hold a great promise of future research and development in diverse areas of advanced software. The volume contains besides 6 invited presentations by renown researchers and 25 contributed papers carefully selected by an internationalprogram committee from a total of 92 submissions.