The two-volume set LNCS 4477 and 4478 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis, IbPRIA 2007, held in Girona, Spain in June 2007. The 48 revised full papers and 108 revised poster papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 328 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on pattern recognition, human language technology, special architectures and industrial applications, motion analysis, image analysis, biomedical applications, shape and texture analysis, 3D, as well as image coding and processing.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the two International Workshops on Agent Communication, AC 2005 and AC 2006, held in Utrecht, Netherlands in July 2005, and in Hakodate, Japan in May 2006 as associated events of AAMAS 2005/2006, the main international conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The 20 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected - they represent the best papers from the Agent Communication workshops of 2005 and 2006, enriched with a few revised agent communication papers from the AAMAS conference. The papers are organized in topical sections on semantics of agent communication, commitments in agent communication, protocols and strategies, as well as reliability and overhearing.

This book constitutes the joint refereed proceedings of three workshops held in conjunction with the 9th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, WISE 2008 in Auckland, New Zealand, September, 2008. The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions for presentation in the following workshops: The First International Workshop on Web Information Systems Engineering for Electronic Businesses and Governments (E-BAG 2008), The Second International Workshop on Web Usability and Accessibility (IWWUA 2008), and The First International Workshop on Mashups, Enterprise Mashups and Lightweight Composition on theWeb (MEM and LCW 2008).

The two-volume set LNCS 4477 and 4478 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis, IbPRIA 2007, held in Girona, Spain in June 2007. The 48 revised full papers and 108 revised poster papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 328 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on pattern recognition, human language technology, special architectures and industrial applications, motion analysis, image analysis, biomedical applications, shape and texture analysis, 3D, as well as image coding and processing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Artificial Immune Systems, ICARIS 2008, held in Phuket, Thailand, in August 2008.
The 40 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 67 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on computational immunology, applied AIS, and theoretical AIS. Position papers and conceptual papers are also included.

This volume contains the best papers presented at the 12th East-European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS 2008) held during September 5–9, 2008, in Pori, Finland. The series of ADBIS conferences is the successor of the annual international workshops with the same title that during 1993-1996 were organized in Russia by the Moscow ACM SIGMOD Chapter. ADBIS 2008 continues the series of ADBIS conferences held in St. Petersburg, Russia (1997), Poznan, Poland (1998), Maribor, Slovenia (1999), Prague, Czech Republic (2000), Vilnius, Lithuania (2001), Bratislava, Slovakia (2002), Dresden, Germany (2003), Budapest, Hungary (2004), Tallinn, Estonia (2005), Thessaloniki, Greece (2006), and Varna, Bulgaria (2007). The conferences are initiated and supervised by an international Steering Committee chaired by professor Leonid Kalinichenko.

This book presents the research results on landslide disaster mitigation in Three Gorges Reservoir, China. It consists of three parts. (1) Regional properties of landslides in this area, (2) Case studies about some typical landslides, and (3) New methodologies applied in this area. It provides useful information to academics, practitioners, and university students working on landslide disaster mitigation, especially for large engineering projects. This book can also be used as an information source for geo-hazards in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area.

The complexity of current computer control systems arises from the engineering requirement to integrate computers, actuators and sensors for control, signal processing and data networks, visualisation and display with the technology of the application domain. Further, real-time control systems, employing embedded and distributed computing, as compared with central supervisory computers, have the added difficulty of correct task computation to time deadlines and associated reliability specifications. The breadth of the technologies involved, combined with the range of applications which encompasses aerospace, manufacturing, robotics, environmental, chemical production, electric power generation and economic systems, for example, presents difficulties in presenting the latest research developments. For this reason it has been decided to initiate a series of Special Issues in relevant journals, one of which appeared recently [ 1 ]. The four papers in this Special Issue are all concerned with the common theme of complex, real-time computer control.

Systematic Design for Optimisation of Pipelined ADCs proposes and develops new strategies, methodologies and tools for designing low-power and low-area CMOS pipelined A/D converters. The task is tackled by following a scientifically-consistent approach. First of all, the state of the art in pipeline A/D converters is analysed with a double purpose: a) to identify the best suited among different strategies reported in literature and taking into account the objectives pursued; b) to identify the drawbacks of these strategies as a basic first step to improve them. Then, the book proposes a top-down design approach for implementing high-performance low-power and low-area CMOS pipelined A/D converters through

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CaiSE 2003, held in Klagenfurt, Austria in June 2003. The 45 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 219 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on XML, methods and models for information systems, UML, Internet business and social modeling, peer-to-peer systems, ontology-based methods, advanced design of information systems, knowledge, knowledge management, Web services, data warehouses, electronic agreements and workflow, requirements engineering, metrics and method engineering, and agent technologies and advanced environments.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Extending Database Technology, EDBT 2004, held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece, in March 2004. The 42 revised full papers presented together with 2 industrial application papers, 15 software demos, and 3 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 294 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on distributed, mobile and peer-to-peer database systems; data mining and knowledge discovery; trustworthy database systems; innovative query processing techniques for XML data; data and information on the web; query processing techniques for spatial databases; foundations of query processing; advanced query processing and optimization; query processing techniques for data and schemas; multimedia and quality-aware systems; indexing techniques; and imprecise sequence pattern queries.

This book is published as part of the broad area of research on the changing global climate and its impact on the environment. After an introduction into the complexities of the subject, the history and present state of timberline research are outlined. Chapters on the tree species at timberline and on the relationship of timberline elevation to marcroclimate, climate character and the mass-elevation effect follow. The main chapter deals with the physiognomic and ecological differentiation of altitudinal timberlines, in particular with the timberline controlling physical and biological factors, their interactions and their influence on the spatial structures and temporal dynamics in the timberline ecotone. Also, the feedbacks of trees and trees stands on the timberline environment are considered. This is the base for understanding the response of timberlines to climatically driven changes, which are considered in the last chapters.

Images have always been very important in human life. Their applications range from primitive communication between humans of all ages to advanced technologies in the industrial, medical and military field. The increased possibilities to capture and analyze images have contributed to the largeness that the scientific field of image processing has become today. Many techniques are being applied, including soft computing.
Soft Computing in Image Processing: Recent Advances follows the edited volumes Fuzzy Techniques in Image Processing (volume 52, published in 2000) and Fuzzy Filters for Image Processing (volume 122, published in 2003), and covers a wide range of both practical and theoretical applications of soft computing in image processing. The 16 excellent chapters of the book have been grouped into five parts: Applications in Remote Sensing, Applications in Image Retrieval, Applications in Image Analysis, Other Applications, and Theoretical Contributions. The focus of the book is on practical applications, which makes it interesting for every researcher that is involved with soft computing, image processing, or both scientific branches.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Rough Sets, Fuzzy Sets, Data Mining, and Granular Computing, RSFDGrC 2007, held in Toronto, Canada in May 2007 in conjunction with the Second International Conference on Rough Sets and Knowledge Technology, RSKT 2007, both as part of the Joint Rough Set Symposium, JRS 2007. The 65 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 319 general submissions to the JRS 2007 symposium. The papers are organized in topical sections on fuzzy-rough hybridization, fuzzy sets, soft computing in medical image processing, soft computing in information retrieval, clustering, text and Web mining, learning, data mining and rough classifiers, granular computing, soft computing in multimedia processing, soft computing applications, and rough and complex concepts.

This easy-to-read text focuses on challenges in coverage control in sensor networks, examines fundamental coverage problems, and presents the most recent advances and techniques in the field. Features: provides an introduction to sensors, sensor nodes, sensor networks, and sensor coverage models; supplies an informal definition and taxonomy for network-wide coverage control; explores the node placement optimization problem for coverage configuration before network deployment; investigates the coverage lifetime maximization problem by controlling coverage characteristics in a randomly deployed network; discusses the critical sensor-density problem for coverage configuration before network deployment; examines the sensor-activity scheduling problem of controlling network coverage characteristics in a randomly deployed network; introduces the node movement strategy problem for sensor networks containing mobile nodes; presents the challenges of building intrusion barriers and finding penetration paths.