These words may contradict each other, but they express the roller coaster of sentiments felt by real-time strategy games players like me. I remember spending countless hours playing brilliant games such as EA/Maxis’s SimCity and SimCity 2000,...

Welcome to the proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management held in Portland, Oregon, where it celebrated its 30th birthday. The first incarnation of SSDBM (then called the Workshop on Statistical Database Management) took place in Menlo Park, California, in December 1981. Since...

Real time 3D games have been around for well over ten years now. We’ve played them, created assets in the style of our favorites, and maybe even “mod”ed a few of them. But until recently, the cost of licensing one of the premier game engines has ranged from several hundred thousand to several million dollars per title...

When organizations try to connect with their customers online, one of the first things they always want to know is “how can we get our users to do...

IN TRADITIONAL COMPUTER GRAPHICS, 3D objects are created using highlevel surface representations such as polygonal meshes, NURBS (nonuniform rational B-spline) patches, or subdivision surfaces. Using this modeling paradigm, visual properties of surfaces, such as color, roughness, and reflectance, are described by means of a shading...

This book exclusively surveys the active on-going research of the current maturity of fuzzy logic over the last four decades. Many world leaders of fuzzy logic have enthusiastically contributed their best research results into five theoretical, philosophical and fundamental sub areas and nine distinctive applications, including two PhD...

In 2007, Microsoft released the fi rst Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Parallel Extensions for the .NET Framework. The old .NET Framework multithreading programming model was too complex and heavyweight for the forthcoming multicore and manycore CPUs. I had been researching parallel programming, multiprocessor, and multicore since 1997,...

The OECD Information Technology Outlook 2010 has been prepared by the OECD under the guidance of the OECD Committee for Information, Computer and Communications Policy (ICCP), and in particular the Working Party on the Information Economy. This edition is the tenth in a biennial series designed to provide members with a broad overview of...

Designing for the web is di!erent than designing for any other medium. The breadth of skills required is sometimes daunting. The depth of experience required, seemingly unobtainable. Yet, the medium attracts designers from all spheres of design practice: from engineering and architecture, to product and graphic design. This chapter aims to...

Our world faces an unprecedented energy crisis. Fuel shortages, skyrocketing energy prices, climate change, nuclear contamination, catastrophic oil spills and energy wars define the global scenario. The nonrenewable energy path of oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear is headed for a dead-end at an accelerated speed. In our race for survival we...

This book is a peer-reviewed collection of papers, modified and extended for the purpose of this publication, but originally presented at the International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering 2008 and 2009 (ENASE 2008 / 2009). The book’s content is placed within the entire framework of software...

As the incidence of childhood obesity continues to dramatically increase, the emergence of type 2 and the increasing incidence of type 1 diabetes in young people demonstrate that childhood diabetes, like adult onset diabetes, is a complex and heterogeneous condition presenting new obstacles to the practicing clinician. Epidemiology of...