This has been a very long journey. We found that writing this book was a challenging task, a much harder one than we had anticipated, but there were also moments of joy and discovery along the way! The idea for the book first came to us 18 months ago, and many days and nights have come and gone between the first sentence we wrote and...

Computer vision seeks a process that starts with a noisy, ambiguous signal from a TV camera and ends with a high-level description of discrete objects located in 3-dimensional space and identified in a human classification. In this book we address this process at several levels. We first treat the low-level image-processing issues of...

If you’re reading this book, chances are you’ve already downloaded the free Instagram app for your iPhone, have snapped a few photos on your own, and probably posted a handful as well. Maybe you have some followers, maybe you don’t... perhaps you’ve found a few interesting Instagram photographers to follow and have...

The availability of geographic and geo-spatial information and services, especially on the openWeb, has become abundant in the last several yearswith the proliferation of online maps, geo-coding services, geospatial Web services and geospatially enabled applications. Concurrently, the need for geo-spatial reasoning has significantly...

The International Symposium on Smart Graphics serves as a scientific forum that attracts researchers and practitioners from the fields of computer graphics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, human–computer interaction, interface design, and information visualization. Initiated by Andreas Butz, Antonio Kr¨uger, and...

concerned with the study of the development and use of advanced information technologies and systems for national, international, and societal security-related applications. In the past few years,we have witnessed that ISI experienced tremendous growth and attracted significant interest involving academic researchers in related fields...

A number of forces are driving this explosion. The first is internationalization encompassing a dramatic growth in...

Having your own blog isn’t just for the nerdy anymore. Today, it seems everyone—from multinational corporations to a neighbor up the street—has a blog. They all have one, in part, because the folks at WordPress make it easy to have one. But to actually build a good blog—to create a blog people want to read—takes...

The Information Systems Examination Board (ISEB) of BCS (www.bcs.org.uk/iseb) instigated the Foundation Certificate in Software Testing in 1998; since then over 40,000 Foundation Certificates have been awarded. An intermediate level qualification was introduced in 2007 as a step towards the more advanced Practitioner...

Acomputing cloudis more thana collection of computer resources, because it provides mechanisms to manage those resources. In a cloud computing platform, software is migrating from the desktop to the "clouds," promising users, at any time and anywhere, access to their...