Graph transformations in computer science

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Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, Daniel Thalmann

With the increasing success of Networked Virtual Environments, Games and Web 3D, there is a need for new techniques to permit the creation and animation of Virtual Humans. Users may be represented by realistic avatars that they can control, but also autonomous Virtual Humans agents can now inhabit these Virtual Worlds. Virtual Humans with their soft tissues, skin, muscles, organs and clothes are completely deformable. There are many methods to enable the representation and deformation of these structures. These methods may be geometric or physics-based. Presenting a selection of the latest research work addressing various aspects related to deformable avatars, this book covers complementary topics such as body modelling and animation, face modelling and animation, physics-based and free-form deformations, motion capture, avatars technologies and agents. This volume is comprised of the combined proceedings of the DEFORM'2000 and AVATARS'2000 workshops, which were sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and organized by IFIP Working Group 5.10. The workshops were held in Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland in November/December 2000.

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Savitri Bevinakoppa

"Still Image Compression on Parallel Computer Architectures is designed for advanced students and practitioners of computer science. This comprehensive reference provides a foundation for understanding digital image compression techniques and parallel computer architectures."--BOOK JACKET.

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Nils J. Nilsson

Intelligent agents are employed as the central characters in this introductory text. Beginning with elementary reactive agents, Nilsson gradually increases their cognitive horsepower to illustrate the most important and lasting ideas in AI. Neural networks, genetic programming, computer vision, heuristic search, knowledge representation and reasoning, Bayes networks, planning, and language understanding are each revealed through the growing capabilities of these agents. A distinguishing feature of this text is in its evolutionary approach to the study of AI. This book provides a refreshing and motivating synthesis of the field by one of AI's master expositors and leading researches.

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Charles S. Edge Jr., Beau Hunter, Zach Smith

"Charles Edge, Zack Smith, and Beau Hunter provide detailed explanations of the technology required for large-scale Mac OS X deployments and show you how to integrate it with other operating systems and applications"--Resource description page.