<p>Skin is the outer-most tissue of the human body. As a result, people are very aware of, and very sensitive to, the appearance of their skin. Skin appearance has, consequently, been a subject of great interest in various fields of science and technology. In particular, research on skin appearance has been intensely pursued in the fields of computer graphics, computer vision, cosmetology, and medicine. The Appearance of Human Skin: A Survey reviews the most prominent results related to skin in these fields and shows how these seemingly disconnected studies are related to one another. In each of the fields, the optical behaviors of specific skin components have been studied from the viewpoint of the specific objectives of the field. However, the different components of skin produce different types of optical phenomena that are determined by their physioanatomical characteristics (sizes, shapes and functions of the components). The final appearance of skin has contributions from complex optical interactions of many different skin components with light. In order to view these interactions in a unified manner, The Appearance of Human Skin describes and categorizes past works based on the physiological and anatomical characteristics of the various skin components. One of the major goals of skin research is to develop a precise and yet computationally efficient model of skin appearance. The Appearance of Human Skin surveys the many important results that have brought us closer to achieving this goal. However, it also highlights the many important and challenging problems that remain unsolved and need to be addressed. It will be of interest to anybody researching, or planning to conduct research, on the appearance of human skin.</p>

The Appearance of Human Skin: A Survey

Computers & Technology

Igarashi, Takanori

Nishino, Ko

Nayar, Shree K.

Computer Science

Now Publishers Inc

Dynamic Performance Measurement examines alternative performance measures and their ability to align the interests of owners and managers.  It advocates and illustrates the use of dynamic models to examine the incentive properties of commonly used accounting performance metrics.  Drawing from recent work in this emerging field, this treatise illustrates how one can use tractable multiperiod models to shed light of fundamental interest to accountants.   Dynamic Performance Measurement focuses on the body of research that has reviewed multiperiod models of accrual accounting.  The author: · examines the choice of goal congruent performance measures · explains how the insights obtained from the goal congruent framework can be adapted to second-best contracting in formal agency models · builds an analytically tractable multiperiod moral hazard model with a risk averse manager to examine the issue of aggregate accounting and non-accounting information in optimal performance measures.

Dynamic Performance Measurement

Business & Money

Dutta, Sunil

Accounting

Property Testing: A Learning Theory Perspective takes the learning-theory point of view of property testing and focuses on results for testing properties of functions that are of interest to the learning theory community. In particular it covers results for testing algebraic properties of functions such as linearity, testing properties defined by concise representations, such as having a small DNF representation, and more. Property Testing: A Learning Theory Perspective starts with some preliminaries, including a precise statement and proof of the simple but important observation that testing is no harder than learning. It goes on to consider the first type of properties that were studied in the context of property testing: algebraic properties. These include testing whether a function is (multi-)linear and more generally whether it is a polynomial of bounded degree. It then turns to the study of function class that have a concise (propositional logic) representation such as singletons, monomials and small DNF formula. It proceeds to discuss distribution free testing, and testing from random examples alone. Finally, it contains a brief survey of other results in property testing. These include testing monotonicity, testing of clustering, testing properties of distributions, and more. Property Testing: A Learning Theory Perspective is an ideal text for anybody with an interest in property testing and how it connects to topics in machine learning.

Property Testing

Ron, Dana

Consumer Search Behavior and its Effect on Markets focuses on the consumer side of the market, on what is known about how consumers search for needed information, and on how this impacts the behavior of markets. The author discusses three broad strands of this literature -- normative models of search and their application to consumer search; empirical studies of the search process; and implications of consumer search for the behavior of markets, including pricing, advertising and retailing. In general, the author examines external search -- the search for information from sources other than memory. Particular attention is paid to the impact of the Internet on markets. Consumer Search Behavior and its Effect on Markets also examines the broader issues about alternatives considered, sources consulted, extent of consumer knowledge, and the impact of these factors on markets and marketing institutions.

Consumer Search Behavior and its Effect on Markets

Ratchford, Brian T.

Marketing & Sales

The Challenge of Improving Water and Sanitation Services in Less Developed Countries shows the key to successful water and sanitation investments is to discover forms of service and payment mechanisms that will render the improvements worthwhile for those who must pay for them. However for any investment, the outcome is likely to be context-dependent - the outcome depends on economic and social conditions, including how it is implemented, by whom, and to what extent complementary changes - in behavior, in institutions, and sometimes in economic organization - also occur. The Challenge of Improving Water and Sanitation Services in Less Developed Countries is organized in three parts. Part I focuses on conventional network technologies for water supply and sanitation. Part II presents the probabilistic analytical approach that we use to analyze investments in the water and sanitation sector. In Part III we deploy this analytical framework to examine the costs and benefits of three specific low-cost, non-network water and sanitation interventions (deep boreholes with public handpumps, total community-led sanitation campaigns, and biosand filters) and one high-cost intervention (large multipurpose dams in Africa).

The Challenge of Improving Water and Sanitation Services in Less Developed Countries

Whittington, Dale

Hanemann, W. Michael

Sadoff, Claudia

Economics

Bilateral filtering is one of the most popular image processing techniques. The bilateral filter is a nonlinear process that can blur an image while respecting strong edges. Its ability to decompose an image into different scales without causing haloes after modification has made it ubiquitous in computational photography applications such as tone mapping, style transfer, relighting, and denoising. Bilateral Filtering: Theory and Applications provides a graphical, intuitive introduction to bilateral filtering, a practical guide for efficient implementation, an overview of its numerous applications, as well as mathematical analysis. This broad and detailed overview covers theoretical and practical issues that will be useful to researchers and software developers.

Bilateral Filtering

Kornprobst, Pierre

Tumblin, Jack

Paris, Sylvain

Robot vision refers to the capability of a robot to visually perceive the environment and use this information to execute different tasks. Visual feedback has been used extensively for robot navigation and obstacle avoidance. In recent years, there have also been examples that include interaction with people and manipulation of objects. Vision for Robotics reviews aspects of robot vision from its early beginnings to the most recent research. It focuses primarily on some of the work that goes beyond the use of artificial landmarks and fiducial markers for the purpose of implementing vision-based control in robots. It discusses various application areas, both from the systems perspective and individual problems such as object tracking and recognition.  Vision for Robotics is an ideal and current reference for researchers and professionals working in the fields of machine vision, image processing, and pattern recognition. Its extensive bibliography serves as an invaluable guide to current research.

Vision for Robotics

Kragic, Danica

Vincze, Markus

The Sense and Nonsense of Consumer Product Testing reviews the classic issue of product taste testing based on recent advancements made in psychology, neuroscience, and marketing, on how sensory cues affect product judgments. The authors:  • examine the implications that the five different sensory modalities (the olfactory, auditory, tactile, gustatory and visual systems) interact with each other, rather than exert independent influences, to define a customer's experience; • propose that since consumers are unaware of the influence of a range of stimuli on their judgments and experience, they cannot explicate them, creating methodological challenges for managers to collect valid and reliable consumer insights regarding the consumers' experience; • propose that the methodological paradigm of taste testing can be used to examine the effect of strategic and tactical marketing mix decisions.  The goal of this monograph is to use the taste-test as a paradigm to understand how consumers make a range of sensory decisions combining intrinsic product information with the information available in the environment - specifically the research testing context.  The Sense and Nonsense of Consumer Product Testing yields reliable insights for managers that would be elusive using standard survey techniques, and adds to the nascent, but growing, literature in marketing on how sensory product experience is multi-modal.

The Sense and Nonsense of Consumer Product Testing

Raghubir, Priya

Tyebjee, Tyzoon T.

Lin, Ying-Ching

This monograph is dedicated to those who have something to hide. It is a monograph about "privacy-preserving data publishing" - the art of publishing sensitive personal data, collected from a group of individuals, in a form that does not violate their privacy. This problem has numerous and diverse areas of application, including releasing Census data, search logs, medical records, and interactions on a social network. The purpose of this monograph is to provide a detailed overview of the current state of the art as well as open challenges, focusing particular attention on four key themes: • RIGOROUS PRIVACY POLICIES: Repeated and highly-publicized attacks on published data have demonstrated that simplistic approaches to data publishing do not work. Significant recent advances have exposed the shortcomings of naive (and not-so-naive) techniques. They have also led to the development of mathematically rigorous definitions of privacy that publishing techniques must satisfy. • METRICS FOR DATA UTILITY: While it is necessary to enforce stringent privacy policies, it is equally important to ensure that the published version of the data is useful for its intended purpose. The authors provide an overview of diverse approaches to measuring data utility. • ENFORCEMENT MECHANISMS: This monograph describes in detail various key data publishing mechanisms that guarantee privacy and utility. • EMERGING APPLICATIONS: The problem of privacy-preserving data publishing arises in diverse application domains with unique privacy and utility requirements. The authors elaborate on the merits and limitations of existing solutions, based on which we expect to see many advances in years to come.

Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing

Chen, Bee-Chung

Kifer, Daniel

LeFevre, Kristen

Software

The Economics and Mathematics of Aggregation provides a general characterization of group behavior in a market environment. A crucial feature of the authors' approach is that they do not restrict the form of individual preferences or the nature of individual consumptions. The authors allow for public as well as private consumption, for intragroup production, and for any type of consumption externalities across group members.  The main questions addressed are:  • What restrictions (if any) on the aggregate demand function characterize the efficient behavior of the group? And • When is it possible to recover the underlying structure - namely, individual preferences, the decision process and the resulting intragroup transfers - from the group's aggregate behavior?  The Economics and Mathematics of Aggregation takes an alternative, axiomatic perspective - the 'collective' approach - and assumes that the group always reaches Pareto efficient decisions. The authors view efficiency as a natural assumption in many contexts and as a natural benchmark in all cases. Finally, even in the presence of asymmetric information, first best efficiency is a natural benchmark. However, it is important to note that no restriction is placed on the form of the decision process beyond efficiency.

The Economics and Mathematics of Aggregation

Ekeland, Ivar

Chiappori, P. A.

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