Natural and anthropogenic disasters have caused a large number of victims and significant social and economic losses in the last few years. There is no doubt that the risk prevention and disaster management sector needs drastic measures and improvements in order to decrease damage and save lives of inhabitants.

This state-of-the-art survey comprises a selection of the material presented at the International Dagstuhl Seminar on Annotating, Extracting and Reasoning about Time and Events, held in Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in April 2005. The seminar centered around an emerging de facto standard for time and event annotation: TimeML.

Debates over post-Kyoto Protocol climate change policy often take note of two issues: the feasibility and desirability of international cooperation on climate change policies, given the failure of the United States to ratify Kyoto and the very limited involvement of developing countries, and the optimal timing of climate policies. In this book essays by leading international economists offer insights on both these concerns.

High inequality in incomes and assets and persistent poverty continue to plague Latin America and remain a central economic policy challenge for Latin American policymakers. At the same time, dramatically improved methods and data allow researchers to analyze these problems and how they are affected by economic policy. In this book, experts on Latin American economic affairs use these new approaches to examine the dynamics of poverty and inequality in Latin America and the ability of policy to address them.

Computer Aided Innovation (CAI) is a young domain in the array of CAx technologies, the goal of which is to support enterprises throughout the complete innovation process. This book has a comprehensive vision which conceives CAI systems beginning at the creative stage of perceiving business opportunities and customer demands, then continuing to help in developing inventions and turning inventions into successful innovations in the market.