Communities have built collections of information in a collaborative manner for centuries. Around 250 years ago, more than 140 people wrote l’Encyclopedie in 28 volumes with 70,000 articles. More recently, Wikipedia has demonstrated how collaborative efforts can be a powerful method of building a massive data storage. It is...

The term photorealistic is thrown around a lot and is often undefined. Although it seems obvious—photorealistic means something looks like a photo—the word requires a greater explanation. There are many facets to photorealism. This is true because as a CG artist, you have control over everything. Achieving 100 percent realism...

The evidence continues to mount: melting ice caps, rising temperatures, increasingly frequent natural disasters. As the devastating effects of global warming come into sharper focus, societies must work to both mitigate greenhouse gas...

PowerShell is becoming the de facto administration tool for Microsoft Server products. The ability to script out reusable steps and code makes life easier for administrators, developers, and managers alike. With the latest release of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, PowerShell is the recommended administration...

As it turns out Bennis underestimated the impact that bad leadership can have. A combination of greed, hubris, flawed judgment, and miscalculation has made the Enron debacle seem almost quaint by comparison to the global financial crisis that we now face. Although numerous pundits and scholars have advanced many reasons for the...

Automatic speech recognition suffers from a lack of robustness with respect to noise, reverberation and interfering speech. The growing field of speech recognition in the presence of missing or uncertain input data seeks to ameliorate those problems by using not only a preprocessed speech signal but also an estimate of its...

This book is based in part on my earlier work. Pattern Recognition: Applications to Large Data-Set Problems, published by Marcel Dekker_: Inc. in 1984. It was originally intended that this volume be a second editon of that work. However, due to the tremendous amount of material added it seemed that a new title. Pattern Recognition...

We would like to welcome you to the proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Security Technology (SecTech 2009), which was organized as part of the 2009 International Mega-Conference on Future Generation Information Technology (FGIT 2009), held during December 10–12, 2009, at the International Convention Center Jeju,...

An open source content management system (CMS) like Drupal can be a great resource for anyone who would like to develop and maintain a website. In the past, in order to make a website, you had to manually assemble all the files and develop a fair amount of technical expertise; however, a CMS can automate and significantly simplify...

This book is the revised and extended version of a Pfr.D. dissertation submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California at Berkeley. Many of the ideas presented in this book have their roots in discussions with Eugene Wong, my mentor and thesis advisor. I would like to thank Gene...

TO THOSE OF US WHO PAY ATTENTION to such things, the world of software development has changed a lot in the last few years. In the .NET world, Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 is undoubtedly the most successful development environment. Since the release of the fi rst .NET version in February 2002, this product has undergone dramatic...

We wrote this book because we love games. We also love sound and music, and we love what they can bring to games to make them thrilling, involving, and moving. We want you to be able to try out your sound and your music in a real game. For a book whose examples are based exclusively around one piece of software, it may appear...