It is a pleasure and an honour both to organize ICB 2009, the 3rd IAPR/IEEE International Conference on Biometrics. This will be held 2–5 June in Alghero, Italy, hosted by the Computer Vision Laboratory, University of Sassari. The conference series is the premier forum for presenting research in biometrics and its allied technologies:...

Beginning Android Games offers everything you need to join the ranks of successful Android game developers. You'll start with game design fundamentals and programming basics, and then progress towards creating your own basic game engine and playable games. This will give you everything you need to branch out and write your own...

Pattern recognition is a central topic in contemporary computer sciences, with continuously evolving topics, challenges, and methods, including machine learning, content-based image retrieval, and model- and knowledge-based approaches, just to name a few. The Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition (CIARP) has become established as a...

Adaptive Hypermedia has emerged as an important area of both academic and deployed research. It encompasses a broad range of research that will enable personalized, adaptive hypermedia systems to play an even more effective role in people’s lives. The Web has enabled the widespread use of many personalized systems, such as recommenders,...

Data replication is an important part of any database system that is growing due to today's demand for real-time reporting and regulatory requirements. GoldenGate has recently become Oracle's strategic real-time data replication solution. Until now, very little has been written about how to implement GoldenGate in a production...

Producing on-line, digitized information is no longer a problem. Ever more of our...

If you’re already on Facebook, you’ve probably received dozens of invitations to play FarmVille from some of the game’s more than 50 million active players, complete with cryptic messages about sharing carrots; adopting lost, lonely animals; and hatching golden Mystery Eggs. Even if you aren’t on Facebook,...

Yet some companies and organizations do ship great software. They deliver products that their customers love. They do it on time and on budget. They deliver solutions...

One of the consequences of the information revolution is the ever-growing amount of
information we are surrounded with and the need to process this information
efficiently and extract meaningful knowledge. This phenomenon was termed “digital
obesity” or “information obesity” by Toshiba Ltd. One...

What is "Fractal Image Compression" anyway? You will have to read (he book to find out everything about it, and if you read the book, you really will find out almost everything that is currently known about it. In a sentence or two: fractal image compression is a method, or class of methods, that allows images to be stored on...

Optimization is a subject that is widely and increasingly used in science, engineering, economics, management, industry, and other areas. It deals with selecting the best of many possible decisions in real-life environment, constructing computational methods to find optimal solutions, exploring the theoretical properties, and studying...

If you want to become a resourceful creative artist then look no further! This quick reference to After Effects will show you how to open, install and get up-and-running to a professional level with Adobe's motion graphics and visual effects software package. Curtis Sponsler guides you through some of the common stumbling blocks that...