Student engagement with digital learning resources and online social networking are strong forces in education today. How can these resources best be utilized by educators and course designers in higher education? This book aims to provide the reader with enough background information to appreciate the value of social networking, especially...

As a Rails developer, you care about user experience and performance, but you also want simple and maintainable code. Achieve all that by embracing the full stack of web development, from styling with Bootstrap, building an interactive user interface with AngularJS, to storing data quickly and reliably in PostgreSQL. Take a holistic view of...

A major challenge in constraint programming is to develop efficient generic approaches to solve instances of the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). With this aim in mind, this book provides an accessible synthesis of the author's research and work in this area, divided into four main topics: representation, inference, search, and...

Physical layer security has recently become an emerging technique to complement and significantly improve the communication security of wireless networks. Compared to cryptographic approaches, physical layer security is a fundamentally different paradigm where secrecy is achieved by exploiting the physical layer properties of the...

Nowadays, highly-detailed animations of live-actor performances are increasingly easier to acquire and 3D Video has reached considerable attentions in visual media production. In this book, we address the problem of extracting or acquiring and then reusing non-rigid parametrization for video-based animations. At first sight, a crucial...

Autonomous robots must carry out useful tasks all by themselves relying entirely on their own perceptions of their environment. The cognitive abilities required for autonomous action are largely independent of robot size, which makes mini robots attractive as artefacts for research, education and entertainment. Autonomous mini robots must be...

• Detect an intruder on camera and set off an alarm
• Listen in or record conversations from a distance
• Find out what the other computers on your network are up to
...

This book presents a unified view of image motion analysis under the variational framework. Variational methods, rooted in physics and mechanics, but appearing in many other domains, such as statistics, control, and computer vision, address a problem from an optimization standpoint, i.e., they formulate it as the optimization of an objective...

The field of structured P2P systems has seen fast growth upon the introduction of Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) in the early 2000s. The first proposals, including Chord, Pastry, Tapestry, were gradually improved to cope with scalability, locality and security issues. By utilizing the processing and bandwidth resources  of end users, the...

Mobile Authentication: Problems and Solutions looks at human-to-machine authentication, with a keen focus on the mobile scenario. Human-to-machine authentication is a startlingly complex issue. In the old days of computer security-before 2000, the human component was all but disregarded. It was either assumed that people should and...