The Shadow Matrix

After spending her youth in the Terran Empire, Margaret Alton returns to Darkover, the planet of her birth. There she discovers she has the Alton Gift--forced rapport and compulsion--one of the strongest and most dangerous of the inherited Laran gifts of the telepathic Comyn--the ruling families of Darkover. And even as she struggles to control her newfound powers, Margaret finds herself falling in love with the Regent to the royal Elhalyn Domain, a man she has been forbidden to marry, for their alliance would irrevocably alter the power balance of their planet!

Important elements of games, movies, and other computer-generated content, shadows are crucial for enhancing realism and providing important visual cues. In recent years, there have been notable improvements in visual quality and speed, making high-quality realistic real-time shadows a reachable goal. Real-Time Shadows is a comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of real-time shadow techniques. It covers a large variety of different effects, including hard, soft, volumetric, and semi-transparent shadows. The book explains the basics as well as many advanced aspects related to the domain of shadow computation. It presents interactive solutions and practical details on shadow computation. The authors compare various algorithms for creating real-time shadows and illustrate how they are used in different situations. They explore the limitations and failure cases, advantages and disadvantages, and suitability of the algorithms in several applications. Source code, videos, tutorials, and more are available on the book’s website www.realtimeshadows.com.

Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 9.0c: A Shader Approach presents an introduction to programming interactive computer graphics, with an emphasis on game development, using real-time shaders with DirectX 9.0. The book is divided into three parts that explain basic mathematical and 3D concepts, show how to describe 3D worlds and implement fundamental 3D rendering techniques, and demonstrate the application of Direct3D to create a variety of special effects. With this book understand basic mathematical tools used in video game creation such as vectors, matrices, and transformations; discover how to describe and draw interactive 3D scenes using Direct3D and the D3DX library; learn how to implement lighting, texture mapping, alpha blending, and stenciling using shaders and the high-level shading language (HLSL); explore a variety of techniques for creating special effects, including vertex blending, character animation, terrain rendering, multi-texturing, particle systems, reflections, shadows, and normal mapping;f ind out how to work with meshes, load and render .X files, program terrain/camera collision detection, and implement 3D object picking; review key ideas, gain programming experience, and explore new topics with the end-of-chapter exercises.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st European Symposium on Programming, ESOP 2012, held in Tallinn, Estonia, as part of ETAPS 2012, in March/April 2012. The 28 full papers, presented together with one full length invited talk, were carefully reviewed and selected from 92 submissions. Papers were invited on all aspects of programming language research, including: programming paradigms and styles, methods and tools to write and specify programs and languages, methods and tools for reasoning about programs, methods and tools for implementation, and concurrency and distribution.

Multimedia databases address a growing number of commercially important applications such as media on demand, surveillance systems and medical systems. The book presents essential and relevant techniques and algorithms to develop and implement large multimedia database systems. The traditional relational database model is based on a relational algebra that is an offshoot of first-order logic and of the algebra of sets. The simple relational model is not powerful enough to address multimedia data. Because of this, multimedia databases are categorized into many major areas. Each of these areas are now so extensive that a major understanding of the mathematical core concepts requires the study of different fields such as information retrieval, digital image processing, feature extraction, fractals, machine learning, neuronal networks and high-dimensional indexing. This book unifies the essential concepts and recent algorithms into a single comprehensive volume. Contents:IntroductionMultimedia DatabasesTransform FunctionsCompressionFeature ExtractionLow Dimensional IndexingApproximative IndexingHigh Dimensional IndexingDealing with Text DatabasesStatistical Supervised Machine LearningMultimodal FusionSoftware ArchitectureMultimedia Databases in Medicine Readership: Professionals, academics, researchers and graduate students in databases, artificial intelligence, pattern recognition and neural networks. Keywords:Big Data;Content-Based Multimedia Retrieval;Wavelets;Compression;Feature Extractopm;High-Dimensional Indexing;Information Retrieval;Machine Learning

Over the last fifteen years a variety of problems in combinatorics have been solved in terms of random matrix theory. More precisely, the situation is as follows: the problems at hand are probabilistic in nature and, in an appropriate scaling limit, it turns out that certain key quantities associated with these problems behave statistically like the eigenvalues of a (large) random matrix. Said differently, random matrix theory provides a “stochastic special function theory” for a broad and growing class of problems in combinatorics. The goal of this book is to analyze in detail two key examples of this phenomenon, viz., Ulam's problem for increasing subsequences of random permutations and domino tilings of the Aztec diamond. Other examples are also described along the way, but in less detail. Techniques from many different areas in mathematics are needed to analyze these problems. These areas include combinatorics, probability theory, functional analysis, complex analysis, and the theory of integrable systems. The book is self-contained, and along the way we develop enough of the theory we need from each area that a general reader with, say, two or three years experience in graduate school can learn the subject directly from the text.

Problems of climate change, biodiversity and air pollution are clearly growing globally, but more particularly in Asia because of its economic importance and richness in nature. The increasing interest in environmental and resource economics applied in regions of Asia will make this book an outstanding resource to the existing literature, particularly in the fields of environmental and resource economics and the integration of applied content in traditional and agricultural development. At present there is no single handbook or text on the state of current knowledge in environmental economics in Asia or one which offers a comprehensive guide to students and academics on the subjects of environmental economics research. This book will help to fill the gap in the existing literature.