In the fields of computer graphics and computer game development, the word gem has been established as a term for describing a short article that focuses on a particular technique, a clever trick, or practical advice that a person working in these fields would find interesting and useful....

Every business has a reams of business data locked away in databases, business systems, and spreadsheets. While you may be able to build some reports by pulling a few of these repositories together, actually performing any kind of analysis on the data that runs your business can range from problematic to impossible. Pro SQL Server 2008...

More than simply a portal, SharePoint is Microsoft's popular content management solution for building intranets and Web sites or hosting wikis and blogs. Offering broad coverage on all aspects of development for the...

The book is divided into a few major areas: theory and background, major genre divisions, AI techniques with code, and AI engine development concerns. Readers of the book should note that there might be some confusion if read from start to finish, since the genre chapters make mention of some of the AI techniques discussed later in the book....

In June 1994 the United States went to the brink of war with North Korea. With economic sanctions impending, President Bill Clinton approved the dispatch of substantial reinforcements to Korea, and plans were prepared for attacking the North's nuclear weapons complex. The turning point came in an extraordinary private diplomatic...

Although JasperReports is the world's most popular open source Java reporting library, it has always lacked one thing: It doesn't provide a tool to visually design reports. iReport is a visual report designer built on JasperReports that fills that lack. It is an intuitive and easy-to-use visual report builder/designer for...

Designing Autonomous Mobile Robots introduces the reader to the fundamental concepts of this complex field. The author addresses all the pertinent topics of the electronic hardware and software of mobile robot design, with particular emphasis on the more difficult problems of control, navigation, and sensor interfacing.

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Multimedia data are used more and more widely in human being's life, e.g., videoconferencing, visual telephone, IPTV, etc. Nearly most of the applications need multimedia transmission techniques that send multimedia data from one side to another side and keep the properties of efficiency, robustness and security. Here, the efficiency...

Semantics in Adaptive and Personalised Services, initially strikes one as a specific and perhaps narrow domain. Yet, a closer examination of the term reveals much more. On one hand there is the issue of semantics. Nowadays, this most often refers to the use of OWL, RDF or some other XML based ontology description language in order to...

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of eight international workshops held in Ulm, Germany, in conjunction with the 7th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2009, in September 2009. The eight workshops were on Empirical Research in Business Process Management (ER-BPM 2009), Reference...

After giving a general introduction to AI...