Presents current trends and potential future developments by leading researchers in immersive media production, delivery, rendering and interaction The underlying audio and video processing technology that is discussed in the book relates to areas such as 3D object extraction, audio event detection; 3D sound rendering and face detection, gesture analysis and tracking using video and depth information. The book will give an insight into current trends and developments of future media production, delivery and reproduction. Consideration of the complete production, processing and distribution chain will allow for a full picture to be presented to the reader. Production developments covered will include integrated workflows developed by researchers and industry practitioners as well as capture of ultra-high resolution panoramic video and 3D object based audio across a range of programme genres. Distribution developments will include script based format agnostic network delivery to a full range of devices from large scale public panoramic displays with wavefield synthesis and ambisonic audio reproduction to ’small screen’ mobile devices. Key developments at the consumer end of the chain apply to both passive and interactive viewing modes and will incorporate user interfaces such as gesture recognition and ‘second screen’ devices to allow manipulation of the audio visual content. Presents current trends and potential future developments by leading researchers in immersive media production, delivery, rendering and interaction. Considers the complete production, processing and distribution chain illustrating the dependencies and the relationship between different components. Proposes that a format-agnostic approach to the production and delivery of broadcast programmes will overcome the problems faced with the steadily growing number of production and delivery formats. Explains the fundamentals of media production in addition to the complete production chain, beyond current-state-of-the-art through to presenting novel approaches and technologies for future media production. Focuses on the technologies that will allow for the realization of an E2E media platform that supports flexible content representations and interactivity for users. An essential read for Researchers and developers of audio-visual technology in industry and academia, such as engineers in broadcast technology companies and students working toward a career in the rapidly changing area of broadcast both from a production and an engineering perspective.

Media product portfolios are rapidly becoming the predominant shared characteristic of media companies worldwide. This volume is the result of a coordinated effort of scholars in the United States and Europe to explore the characteristics,

Interactivity is at the very heart of learning and is evident at all levels of engagement, whether between fellow students, students and tutors, online learning materials or interfacing with the learning environment. Covering both theory and the practical implications of the issues discussed, this book provides international perspectives on key topics including: analysing and designing e-learning interactions, social and conceptual dimensions of learning, interactions in online discussions, interactions in peer learning and professional development of online facilitators. It is essential reading for all those involved in the design, implementation, management and use of open and flexible learning.

Recently, there has been an increase in the number of e-commerce users. This has caused online shopping to become a new and challenging market for e-commerce vendors. Security, inventory management, reliability, and performance of e-commerce websites are a few of the challenges associated with the rising popularity of e-commerce. On a daily basis, millions of e-commerce transactions are taking place. This generates a huge amount of data that can be used to solve the various challenges of e-commerce. Further study on how this data can be used to address these issues is required to propel businesses forward. Empirical Research for Futuristic E-Commerce Systems: Foundations and Applications shares experiences and research outcomes on all aspects of intelligent software solutions such as machine learning, nature-inspired computing, and data science for business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce. By looking at the exponential growth of the e-commerce market and its popularity, this book also focuses on the current issues, solutions, and future possibilities in the B2C model of e-commerce. Covering a range of critical topics such as online shopping, supply chain management, and blockchain, this reference work is ideal for academic scientists, data scientists, software developers, business experts, researchers, scholars, practitioners, academicians, instructors, and students.

The digitisation of traditional media formats, such as text, images, video, and sound provides us with the ability to store, process, and transport content in a uniform way. This has led the formerly distinct industries of media, telecommunications, and information technology to converge. Cross-media publishing and service delivery are important new trends emerging in the content industry landscape. Mass-media organizations and content providers traditionally targeted content production towards a single delivery channel. However, recent economic and technological changes in the industry led content providers to extend their brands to cover multiple delivery channels. Following the content industry trend to "create once and publish everywhere"-COPE, a number of architectures, technologies, and tools are currently being developed and deployed to facilitate the automatic conversion of content to multiple formats, and the creation of innovative multi-platform services. This new approach enables the seamless access to information over different network infrastructures and client platforms. This work aims to bring together a cross-disciplinary core of contributors to address the technical and business issues of cross-media publishing and service delivery. The volume is based on papers presented at the conference on Cross-Media Service Delivery-CMSD-2003 that took place in Santorini, Greece in May 2003. Each contribution was reviewed by at least two reviewers-typically three. From the 30 papers that were submitted 20 were selected for presentation at the conference. Those were further "shepherded" by programme committee members to be improved according to the review suggestions.

Production and Operations Management in business administration focuses on planning, controlling, and improving processes to efficiently manufacture products or deliver services, optimizing resources and customer satisfaction.

The political economy deals with the structure of production and the social relations of people in production. With its focus on structures and practices, the political economy also analyzes the contradictions of capitalism and suggests resistance and intervention strategies using methods from history, economics, sociology, and political science. The dominant commercial media in capitalism operates both as a product of economic and political structure and as an industrial institution with economic and political functions. Current Theories and Practice in the Political Economy of Communications and Media is a collection of innovative research on new approaches in the political economy of communication in the process of globalization. While highlighting topics including consumer behavior, news production, and public relations, this book is ideally designed for newscasters, broadcasters, journalists, marketers, advertisers, production managers, researchers, industry professionals, academics, and students seeking to extend the border of standard political economy of communication studies into relatively undiscovered areas.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Electronic Government, EGOV 2004, held in Zaragoza, Spain in August/September 2004. The 92 revised papers presented together with an introduction and abstracts of 16 workshop papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on e-democracy; interoperability; process management; technical issues; e-voting; services; processes, and general assistance; empowering regions; methods and tools; g2g collaboration, change and risk management; e-governance; ID-management and security; policies and strategies; geographical information systems, legal aspects; teaching and empowering; designing Web services, public information; and regional developments in global context.

This book was conceived from a simple question as to why cancer is so difficult to treat. Ultimately we want to find ways to cure cancers, but that may be an elusive dream at least with the technologies we have now and expect to have in the near future. This leads the question of whether it is possible to improve current cancer treatment methods, especially from the perspective of enhancing targeted drug delivery to tumors. This volume is designed to provide information related to the difficulties in treating cancers through targeted drug delivery, our current understanding of cancer biology, and potential technologies that might be used to achieve enhanced drug delivery to tumors. An ideal drug delivery system for treating cancers would maximize the therapeutic efficacy with minimal side effects in clinical applications. The seemingly improved anticancer efficacy of the current nanoparticle-based formulations needs to be viewed from the context of very poor success rates for translation to human applications. The results of in vitro cell culture models and small animal in vivo experiments have not been extrapolated to clinical applications. Finding the reasons for the lack of successful translation is required if we are to discover approaches to substantially extend the survival time of cancer patients, and hopefully identify cures. Cancer Targeted Drug Delivery: Elusive Dream describes some answers of achieving the so far elusive dream of treating cancers like other chronic diseases with therapies that focus using improved drug delivery systems designed to better align with the unique biological and physiological properties of cancer.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CAiSE 2006, held in Luxembourg, in June 2006. The book presents 33 revised full papers together with 3 keynote talks. The papers are organized in topical sections on security, conceptual modeling, queries, document conceptualization, service composition, workflow, business modeling, configuration and separation, business process modeling, agent orientation, and requirements management.