Anna is desperate to be popular, but the key to being cool has devastating consequences About to start her freshman year of high school, Anna wants more than anything to be popular. At a family reunion, her cousin describes a secret “slam book”—a notebook kids use to write all kinds of comments about one another. Anna decides this may be her key to success. Anna’s friends Paige, Randy, and Jessie quickly jump in on the nasty fun and before long, Anna has realized her dreams of popularity. But the slam book keeps getting meaner, and Paige and Anna start using the book to fight with each other. Soon, Anna comes up with the ultimate prank, using lonely and insecure Cheryl as her means to pull it off. But Anna’s vicious trick may lead to tragic consequences. This ebook features an illustrated personal history of Ann M. Martin, including rare images from the author’s collection.

The two-volume set LNICST 236-237 constitutes the post-conference proceedings of the 12th EAI International Conference on Communications and Networking, ChinaCom 2017, held in Xi’an, China, in September 2017. The total of 112 contributions presented in these volumes are carefully reviewed and selected from 178 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on wireless communications and networking, satellite and space communications and networking, big data network track, multimedia communications and smart networking, signal processing and communications, network and information security, advances and trends of V2X networks.

Robotics is undergoing a major transformation in scope and dimension. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics is rapidly expanding into human en- ronments and vigorously engaged in its new challenges. Interacting with, assisting, serving, and exploring with humans, the emerging robots will increasingly touch people and their lives. Beyond its impact on physical robots, the body of knowledge robotics has p- duced is revealing a much wider range of applications reaching across diverse research areas and scienti?c disciplines, such as: biomechanics, haptics, neu- sciences, virtual simulation, animation, surgery, and sensor networks among others. In return, the challenges of the new emerging areas are proving an abundant source of stimulation and insights for the ?eld of robotics. It is indeed at the intersection of disciplines that the most striking advances happen. The SpringerTracts in AdvancedRobotics(STAR) is devoted to bringing to the research community the latest advances in the robotics ?eld on the basis of their signi?cance and quality. Through a wide and timely dissemination of critical - search developments in robotics, our objective with this series is to promote more exchanges and collaborations among the researchers in the community and c- tribute to further advancements in this rapidly growing ?eld.

Sixtee-year-old "Slam" Harris is counting on his noteworthy basketball talents to get him out of the inner city and give him a chance to succeed in life, but his coach sees things differently.

This monograph introduces a unifying framework for mapping, planning and exploration with mobile robots considering uncertainty, linking such problems with a common SLAM approach, adopting Pose SLAM as the basic state estimation machinery. Pose SLAM is the variant of SLAM where only the robot trajectory is estimated and where landmarks are used to produce relative motion measurements between robot poses. With regards to extending the original Pose SLAM formulation, this monograph covers the study of such measurements when they are obtained with stereo cameras, develops the appropriate noise propagation models for such case, extends the Pose SLAM formulation to SE(3), introduces information-theoretic loop closure tests, and presents a technique to compute traversability maps from the 3D volumetric maps obtained with Pose SLAM. A relevant topic covered in this monograph is the introduction of a novel path planning approach that exploits the modeled uncertainties in Pose SLAM to search for the path in the pose graph that allows the robot to navigate to a given goal with the least probability of becoming lost. Another relevant topic is the introduction of an autonomous exploration method that selects the appropriate actions to drive the robot so as to maximize coverage, while minimizing localization and map uncertainties. This monograph is appropriate for readers interested in an information-theoretic unified perspective to the SLAM, path planning and exploration problems, and is a reference book for people who work in mobile robotics research in general.

Vols. 28-30 accompanied by separately published parts with title: Indices and necrology.