There is a strong need for advances in the fields of image indexing and retrieval and visual query languages for multimedia databases. Image technology is facing both classical and novel problems for the organization and filtering of increasingly large amounts of pictorial data. Novel kinds of problems, such as indexing and high-level content-base, accessing to image databases, human interaction with multimedia systems, approaches to multimedia data, biometrics, data mining, computer graphics and augmented reality, have grown into real-life issues. The papers in this proceedings volume relate...

Over the years, a variety of software process models have been designed to structure, describe and prescribe the software systems construction process. More recently, software process modelling is increasingly dealing with new challenges raised by the tests that the software industry has to face. This book addresses these new trends in software process modeling related to: 1. Processes for open source software; 2. Systems dynamics to model and simulate the software process; 3. Peopleware: the importance of people in the software development and by extension in the software process. One new...

When architecting dependable systems, fault tolerance is required to improve the overall system robustness. Many studies have been proposed, but the solutions are usually commissioned late during the design and implementation phases of the software life-cycle (e.g., Java and Windows NT exception handling), thus reducing the error recovery effectiveness. Since the system design typically models only normal behaviors of the system while ignoring exceptional ones, the generated system implementation is unable to handle abnormal events. Consequently, the system may fail in unexpected ways due to...