Kate is a 30-something social anthropologist returning to the emotional crime scene she reluctantly calls home. While she mercilessly unearths the remnants of a life littered with abandonment, lies and loss, she also unravels the coil that binds her to Iris, the mother she never knew. Iris' haunting disappearance lurks on the periphery of Kate's strained relations with her only surviving family: Joe, her taciturn father; Rose, her benevolent aunt; and Elaine, her reticent stepmother. Like the endangered cultures she researches, Kate faces extinction through contact with poisonous knowledge and must weigh the price of truth or risk annihilation at the hands of those she so desperately wants to trust.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence, PReMI 2009, held in New Delhi, India in December 2009. The 98 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 221 initial submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on pattern recognition and machine learning, soft computing andapplications, bio and chemo informatics, text and data mining, image analysis, document image processing, watermarking and steganography, biometrics, image and video retrieval, speech and audio processing, as well as on applications.

The definitive work on iris recognition technology, this comprehensive handbook presents a broad overview of the state of the art in this exciting and rapidly evolving field. Revised and updated from the highly-successful original, this second edition has also been considerably expanded in scope and content, featuring four completely new chapters. Features: provides authoritative insights from an international selection of preeminent researchers from government, industry, and academia; reviews issues covering the full spectrum of the iris recognition process, from acquisition to encoding; presents surveys of topical areas, and discusses the frontiers of iris research, including cross-wavelength matching, iris template aging, and anti-spoofing; describes open source software for the iris recognition pipeline and datasets of iris images; includes new content on liveness detection, correcting off-angle iris images, subjects with eye conditions, and implementing software systems for iris recognition.

This edited book gives a comprehensive picture of the state of the art in authoring systems and authoring tools for advanced technology instructional systems. It includes descriptions of fifteen systems and research projects from almost every significant effort in the field. The book will appeal to researchers, teachers and advanced students working in education, instructional technology and computer-based education, psychology, cognitive science and computer science.

A Handbook of Process Tracing Methods demonstrates how to better understand decision outcomes by studying decision processes, through the introduction of a number of exciting techniques. Decades of research have identified numerous idiosyncrasies in human decision behavior, but some of the most recent advances in the scientific study of decision making involve the development of sophisticated methods for understanding decision process—known as process tracing. In this volume, leading experts discuss the application of these methods and focus on the best practices for using some of the more popular techniques, discussing how to incorporate them into formal decision models. This edition has been expanded and thoroughly updated throughout, and now includes new chapters on mouse tracking, protocol analysis, neurocognitive methods, the measurement of valuation, as well as an overview of important software packages. The volume not only surveys cutting-edge research to illustrate the great variety in process tracing techniques, but also serves as a tutorial for how the novice researcher might implement these methods. A Handbook of Process Tracing Methods will be an essential read for all students and researchers of decision making.