The Restoration Game


Book Description

There is no such place as Krassnia. Lucy Stone should know—she was born there. In that tiny, troubled region of the former Soviet Union, revolution is brewing. Its organizers need a safe place to meet, and where better than the virtual spaces of an online game? Lucy, who works for a start-up games company in Edinburgh, has a project that almost seems made for the job: a game inspired by The Krassniad, an epic folk tale concocted by Lucy’s mother, Amanda, who studied there in the 1980s. Lucy knows Amanda is a spook. She knows her great-grandmother Eugenie also visited the country in the 1930s and met the man who originally collected Krassnian folklore, and who perished in Stalin’s terror. As Lucy digs up details about her birthplace to slot into the game, she finds the open secrets of her family’s past, the darker secrets of Krassnia’s past—and hints about the crucial role she is destined to play in The Restoration Game. Combining international intrigue with cutting-edge philosophical speculation, romance with adventure, and online gaming with real-life consequences, this book delivers as science fiction and as a sharp take on our present world from the viewpoint of a complex, engaging heroine who has to fight her way through a maze of political and family manipulation to take control of her own life. From the Trade Paperback edition.










The Restoration of the Roman Forum in Late Antiquity


Book Description

In The Restoration of the Roman Forum in Late Antiquity, Gregor Kalas examines architectural conservation during late antiquity period at Rome's most important civic center: the Roman Forum. During the fourth and fifth centuries CE—when emperors shifted their residences to alternate capitals and Christian practices overtook traditional beliefs—elite citizens targeted restoration campaigns so as to infuse these initiatives with political meaning. Since construction of new buildings was a right reserved for the emperor, Rome's upper echelon funded the upkeep of buildings together with sculptural displays to gain public status. Restorers linked themselves to the past through the fragmentary reuse of building materials and, as Kalas explores, proclaimed their importance through prominently inscribed statues and monuments, whose placement within the existing cityscape allowed patrons and honorees to connect themselves to the celebrated history of Rome. Building on art historical studies of spolia and exploring the Forum over an extended period of time, Kalas demonstrates the mutability of civic environments. The Restoration of the Roman Forum in Late Antiquity maps the evolution of the Forum away from singular projects composed of new materials toward an accretive and holistic design sensibility. Overturning notions of late antiquity as one of decline, Kalas demonstrates how perpetual reuse and restoration drew on Rome's venerable past to proclaim a bright future.



















Handbook of Mathematical Models and Algorithms in Computer Vision and Imaging


Book Description

This handbook gathers together the state of the art on mathematical models and algorithms for imaging and vision. Its emphasis lies on rigorous mathematical methods, which represent the optimal solutions to a class of imaging and vision problems, and on effective algorithms, which are necessary for the methods to be translated to practical use in various applications. Viewing discrete images as data sampled from functional surfaces enables the use of advanced tools from calculus, functions and calculus of variations, and nonlinear optimization, and provides the basis of high-resolution imaging through geometry and variational models. Besides, optimization naturally connects traditional model-driven approaches to the emerging data-driven approaches of machine and deep learning. No other framework can provide comparable accuracy and precision to imaging and vision. Written by leading researchers in imaging and vision, the chapters in this handbook all start with gentle introductions, which make this work accessible to graduate students. For newcomers to the field, the book provides a comprehensive and fast-track introduction to the content, to save time and get on with tackling new and emerging challenges. For researchers, exposure to the state of the art of research works leads to an overall view of the entire field so as to guide new research directions and avoid pitfalls in moving the field forward and looking into the next decades of imaging and information services. This work can greatly benefit graduate students, researchers, and practitioners in imaging and vision; applied mathematicians; medical imagers; engineers; and computer scientists.