Replication is a topic of interest in the distributed computing, distributed systems, and database communities. Although these communities have traditionally looked at replication from different viewpoints and with different goals (e.g., performance versus fault tolerance), recent developments have led to a convergence of these different...

Algorithms specify the way computers process information and how they execute tasks. Many recent technological innovations and achievements rely on algorithmic ideas – they facilitate new applications in science, medicine, production, logistics, traffic, communi¬cation and entertainment. Efficient algorithms not only enable your...

In 2009, for the second time in a row, Jena hosted an extraordinary event. In 2008, Jena celebrated the 450th birthday of the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena with the motto “Lichtgedanken” – “flashes of brilliance.” This year, for almost one week, Jena became the center for the pattern recognition research...

This volume collects the papers accepted for presentation at MIRAGE 2009. The MIRAGE conference is continuing to receive international recognition, with this year’s presentations coming from 25 countries despite the large worldwide financial crisis. This time Asia submitted far fewer papers than previously and fewer than Europe. France...

It is a pleasure and an honour both to organize ICB 2009, the 3rd IAPR/IEEE International Conference on Biometrics. This will be held 2–5 June in Alghero, Italy, hosted by the Computer Vision Laboratory, University of Sassari. The conference series is the premier forum for presenting research in biometrics and its allied technologies:...

Nowadays, there is software everywhere in our life. It controls cars, airplanes, factories, medical implants. Without software, banking, logistics and transportation, media, and even scientific research would not function in the accustomed way. Building and maintaining software is a knowledge-intensive endeavour and requires that specific...

When in 1986 Yves Kodratoff started the European Working Session on Learning at Orsay, France, it could not be foreseen that the conference would grow year by year and become the premier European conference of the field, attracting submissions from all over the world. The first European Conference on Principles of Data Mining and Knowledge...

Case-based reasoning (CBR) is an artificial intelligence approach whereby new problems are solved by remembering, adapting and reusing solutions to a previously solved, similar problem. The collection of previously solved...

Pattern recognition is a central topic in contemporary computer sciences, with continuously evolving topics, challenges, and methods, including machine learning, content-based image retrieval, and model- and knowledge-based approaches, just to name a few. The Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition (CIARP) has become established as a...

The Social Web (including services such as MySpace, Flickr, last.fm, and WordPress) has captured the attention of millions of users as well as billions of dollars in investment and acquisition. Social websites, evolving around the connections between people and their objects of interest, are encountering boundaries in the areas of information...

The goal of the AMR workshops is to intensify the exchange...