The explosive growth of e-commerce and online environments has made the issue of information search and selection increasingly serious; users are overloaded by options to consider and they may not have the time or knowledge to personally evaluate these options. Recommender systems have proven to be a valuable way for online users to cope with...

For nearly four decades, video games have captured the imaginations and drawn the ire of people around the world. Actors play them. Rappers promote them. Politicians want to control them. Even baseball legends make them. Video games are a cultural crossroads where business, entertainment, and technology converge.

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This book and its companion volume, LNCS vols. 6145 and 6146, constitute the proceedings of the International Conference on Swarm Intelligence (ICSI 2010) held in Beijing, the capital of China, during June 12-15, 2010. ICSI 2010 was the first gathering in the world for researchers working on all aspects of swarm intelligence, and...

In the emerging era of Web 3.0, securing cyberspace has gradually evolved into a critical organizational and national research agenda inviting interest from a multidisciplinary scientific workforce. There are many avenues into this area, and, in recent research, machine-learning and data-mining techniques have been applied to design,...

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) was carried out between 2001 and 2005 to assess the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and to establish the basis for actions needed to enhance the conservation and sustainable use of ecosystems and their contributions to human well-being. The MA was originally conceived as a...