The pigment patterns on tropical shells are of great beauty and diversity. Their mixture of regularity and irregularity is fascinating. A particular pattern seems to follow particular rules but these rules allow variations. No two shells are identical. The motionless patterns appear to be static, and, indeed, they consist of calci?ed material. However, as will be shown in this book, the underlying mechanism that generates this beauty is eminently dynamic. It has much in common with other dynamic systems that generate patterns, such as a wind-sand system that forms large dunes, or rain and erosion that form complex rami?ed river systems. On other shells the underlying mechanism has much in common with waves such as those commonly observed in the spread of an epidemic. A mollusk can only enlarge its shell at the shell margin. In most cases, only at this margin are new elements of the pigmentation pattern added. Therefore, the shell pattern preserves the record of a process that took place over time in a narrow zone at the growing edge. A certain point on the shell represents a certain moment in its history. Like a time machine one can go into the past or the future just by turning the shell back and forth. Having this complete historical record opens the possibility of decoding the generic principles behind this beauty.

Just a few years ago, virtual reality was regarded as more a toy than a tool. Today, however, it is becoming the enabling technology for man-machine communications. The rapid development of graphics hardware and soft­ ware makes its application possible. Besides building walkthroughs and landscape fly-overs with very realistic visual effects, we can recognize the trend toward industrial applications. This is because of the emerging need for tools for rapid product development. Especially in the aeronautical and automotive industries, companies have began to investigate and develop virtual reality tools for their own needs in co-operation with research or­ ganizations. In co-operation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics (IGD), the Computer Graphics Center (ZGDV) in Darmstadt established the German working group on virtual reality in 1993 as a forum for infor­ mation exchange between industry and research. German researchers, system developers, and industrial users have met several times in Darm­ stadt at the Computer Graphics Center. In these meetings they discussed the essential issues inherent in applying virtual reality to industrial appli­ cations and exchanged their latest research results and experiences.

In this groundbreaking new volume, computer researchers discuss the development of technologies and specific systems that can interpret data with respect to domain knowledge. Although the chapters each illuminate different aspects of image interpretation, all utilize a common approach - one that asserts such interpretation must involve perceptual learning in terms of automated knowledge acquisition and application, as well as feedback and consistency checks between encoding, feature extraction, and the known knowledge structures in a given application domain. The text is profusely illustrated with numerous figures and tables to reinforce the concepts discussed.

Mining Very Large Databases with Parallel Processing addresses the problem of large-scale data mining. It is an interdisciplinary text, describing advances in the integration of three computer science areas, namely `intelligent' (machine learning-based) data mining techniques, relational databases and parallel processing. The basic idea is to use concepts and techniques of the latter two areas - particularly parallel processing - to speed up and scale up data mining algorithms.