This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th Congress of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, AI*IA 2007. Coverage includes knowledge representation and reasoning, multiagent systems, distributed AI, knowledge engineering, ontologies and the semantic Web, machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval and extraction, AI and robotics, AI and expressive media, and intelligent access to multimedia information.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th Congress of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, AI*IA 2007. Coverage includes knowledge representation and reasoning, multiagent systems, distributed AI, knowledge engineering, ontologies and the semantic Web, machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval and extraction, AI and robotics, AI and expressive media, and intelligent access to multimedia information.

An impassioned look at games and game design that offers the most ambitious framework for understanding them to date. As pop culture, games are as important as film or television—but game design has yet to develop a theoretical framework or critical vocabulary. In Rules of Play Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman present a much-needed primer for this emerging field. They offer a unified model for looking at all kinds of games, from board games and sports to computer and video games. As active participants in game culture, the authors have written Rules of Play as a catalyst for innovation, filled with new concepts, strategies, and methodologies for creating and understanding games. Building an aesthetics of interactive systems, Salen and Zimmerman define core concepts like "play," "design," and "interactivity." They look at games through a series of eighteen "game design schemas," or conceptual frameworks, including games as systems of emergence and information, as contexts for social play, as a storytelling medium, and as sites of cultural resistance. Written for game scholars, game developers, and interactive designers, Rules of Play is a textbook, reference book, and theoretical guide. It is the first comprehensive attempt to establish a solid theoretical framework for the emerging discipline of game design.

The book reports the proceedings of the 15th Italian workshop on neural networks issued by the Italian Society on Neural Networks SIREN. The longevity recipe of this conference stands in three main points that normally renders the reading of these proceedings so interesting as appealing. 1. The topics of the neural networks is considered an attraction pole for a set of researches centered on the inherent paradigm of the neural networks, rather than on a specific tool exclusively. Thus, the subsymbolic management of the data information content constitutes the key feature of papers in various fields such as Pattern Recognition, Stochastic Optimization, Learning, Granular Computing, and so on, with a special bias toward bioinformatics operational applications. An excerpt of all these matters may be found in the book. 2. Though managed at domestic level, the conference attracts contributions from foreign researchers as well, so that in the book the reader may capture the flavor of the state of the art in the international community. 3. The conference is a meeting of friends as well. Thus the papers generally reflect a relaxed atmosphere where researchers meet to generously exchange their thought and explain their actual results in view of a common cultural growing of the community.

This two volume set constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Adaptive and Natural Computing Algorithms, ICANNGA 2007, held in Warsaw, Poland, in April 2007. Coverage in the first volume includes evolutionary computation, genetic algorithms, and particle swarm optimization. The second volume covers neural networks, support vector machines, biomedical signal and image processing, biometrics, computer vision.

This book gathers the latest advances, innovations, and applications in the field of innovative biosystems engineering for sustainable agriculture, forestry and food production. Focusing on the challenges of implementing sustainability in various contexts in the fields of biosystems engineering, it shows how the research has addressed the sustainable use of renewable and non-renewable resources. It also presents possible solutions to help achieve sustainable production. The Mid-Term Conference of the Italian Association of Agricultural Engineering (AIIA) is part of a series of conferences, seminars and meetings that the AIIA organizes, together with other public and private stakeholders, to promote the creation and dissemination of new knowledge in the sector. The contributions included in the book were selected by means of a rigorous peer-review process, and offer an extensive and multidisciplinary overview of interesting solutions in the field of innovative biosystems engineering for sustainable agriculture.