The 2nd Annual Conference of the International Conference of Geography (ICGEO) was held on November 19, 2022, with the theme "Discovering New Geography Trends." The conference was organized by the Department of Geography, Faculty of Social Sciences, Universitas Negeri Padang in West Sumatra, Indonesia. The conference utilized a combination of virtual and offline methods. The conference covered various topics, including advancements in geomorphology, meteorology, climatology, hydrology, historical geography, transport geography, industrial geography, rural settlement geography, and the ecology of agricultural systems. Additionally, the significance of geography in area studies was discussed. The conference commenced by examining the progress made in the field of geography. Subsequently, it explored diverse aspects of urban geography, the role of geography in physical and economic planning, studies on rural areas, and geographical research concerning local government. This monograph will be valuable for geography teachers, students, and practitioners.

The success of storytelling in games depends on the entire development team—game designers, artists, writers, programmers and musicians, etc.—working harmoniously together towards a singular artistic vision. Interactive Stories and Video Game Art is first to define a common design language for understanding and orchestrating interactive masterpieces using techniques inherited from the rich history of art and craftsmanship that games build upon. Case studies of hit games like The Last of Us, Journey, and Minecraft illustrate the vital components needed to create emotionally-complex stories that are mindful of gaming’s principal relationship between player actions and video game aesthetics. This book is for developers of video games and virtual reality, filmmakers, gamification and transmedia experts, and everybody else interested in experiencing resonant and meaningful interactive stories. Key Features: The first book to define a common visual and interactive language for understanding and orchestrating sophisticated stories in video games Accessible to industry professionals as well as non-developers Featured concepts apply to all media with an interactive component including: transmedia, gamification and interactive art The definitive framework for designing interactive stories

The acting process is an interlocking trinity: the person, the actor, and the character. The person has habits and idiosyncrasies cultivated over the years in response to life experiences. The actor may have developed another set of behaviors that manifest themselves during a performance. The exercises within this text will guide the user toward making the necessary choices needed to achieve the extension of self to character—whether that involves utilizing personal traits that are congruent to a character's make-up, or discarding personal habits which do not fit. Movement: From Person to Actor to Character concisely collects many common movement principles such as use of breath, alignment, relaxation, imagery, and surroundings. Illustrations are included which provide the actor with a basic knowledge of the human body and function that can serve as a foundation for advanced movement techniques. Case studies outline a variety of characterization projects from a range of well-known plays, to further illustrate some of the exercises within the text. Mitchell's text will be useful for beginning to intermediate movement courses or as a supplement to acting or directing courses, or by actors seeking to enrich their movement technique.

International Conference on Islamic Early Childhood Education in Multiperspectives (ICECEM) 2022 is a program of the Early Childhood Education study program at Prof.KH Saifuddin Zuhri Purwokerto State Islamic University. Aims to encourage and provide opportunities for researchers and academics to exchange views and opinions, answer and debate policy-relevant issues, and produce academic research outputs on important topics. The basic idea to encourage research in linguistics is to have maximum research impact on education, Islam, science, socio-culture, humanity, technology and digital.

“There is no end to the writing of books,” we are told. Certainly it seems to be the fact that one book leads to another, and the many demands made upon me for explanations of points, problems and paradoxes, contained in some of my recent works, have induced me to a comprehensive effort in the present volume. Whether I shall have succeeded in throwing more light upon the dark problems of Occultism, or only in making confusion worse confounded, it is for the reader to judge. “All truth is paradoxical,” says Laotze, the great philosopher of Quietism. In such case it were hard indeed to offer any argument which may be regarded as final and conclusive, and especially is this the case in reference to the debatable ground of Occultism. Yet a very wise writer has said that nothing can be accepted as true which does not submit to a mathematical statement. This is a tacit confession of faith in the law of numerical ratios, the geometry of the universe which underlies all revelation. We cannot truly be said to know a thing until we have reduced it to a mathematical concept. We may conveniently regard life as manifesting 2in three stages or degrees, namely, Principles, Causes and Effects. Our conscious relation to these three stages of life gives rise to Ethic, Philosophy and Science. Science is what we know of the universe; philosophy what we think of it; ethic, how that thought affects our conduct. Thus the final appeal is to utility. The virtue of everything is in its use. Science, philosophy and ethic must eventually submit to the test of utility. It is not for the sake of the mathematical statement, nor yet for the pleasure of abstract argument, but chiefly for the sake of utility that I have attempted this popular exposition of Occultism, for I think it deserves more attention than has hitherto been given to it. The idea that Occultism serves any useful end in life may not at once appeal to the casual reader. The deeper thinker will, however, discern in any coherent system of thought, in any orderly statement of fact, a possible means of self-adjustment to the problems of life, howsoever dimly apprehended. To the categorical imperative of Kant—I must because I ought, but why ought I?—Occultism offers a very definite answer. It gives a cogent reason for all action, and may indeed be finally judged on its ethical value. It will not be found inadequate. Purposive action has no value without free will in man. That “free will in man is necessity in play” is true only of those who are not divine conspirators. We are fated to the extent that we are ignorant of 3the cosmical and spiritual laws—the one order is a reflex of the other—by which the universe is upheld. We are culpable to the extent that we neglect those laws we know. Science has succeeded in harnessing many of the forces of Nature to the service of mankind. Philosophy will bring man into conscious relations with the laws governing his existence, and ethic will instruct him concerning their employment for the good of the race. To the extent that we understand the laws of our being and use them for our personal benefit, and through ourselves for the good of all mankind, we become conspirators with the Divine Will, conscious co-operators towards “that one divine far-off event to which the whole creation moves,” an apotheosis warranted by the trend of the physical and spiritual evolution of humanity, and prophetically indicated by the words: “Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, to crown him with glory and worship.” As fragments in the fabric of a spiritual upbuilding, as detached observations of the law of universal harmony, as things of isolated interest, all conspiring to the founding of a single idea, these curiosities of Occultism are offered to those who are able to appreciate them...FROM THE BOOKS.

Cognitive architectures represent an umbrella term to describe ways in which the flow of thought can be engineered towards cerebral and behavioral outcomes. Cognitive Architectures are meant to provide top-down guidance, a knowledge base, interactive heuristics and concrete or fuzzy policies for which the virtual character can utilize for intelligent interaction with his/her/its situated virtual environment. Integrating Cognitive Architectures into Virtual Character Design presents emerging research on virtual character artificial intelligence systems and procedures and the integration of cognitive architectures. Emphasizing innovative methodologies for intelligent virtual character integration and design, this publication is an ideal reference source for graduate-level students, researchers, and professionals in the fields of artificial intelligence, gaming, and computer science.

Life-like characters is one of the most exciting technologies for human-computer interface applications today. They convincingly take the roles of virtual presenters, synthetic actors and sales personas, teammates and tutors. A common characteristic underlying their life-likeness or believability as virtual conversational partners is computational models that provide them with affective functions such as synthetic emotions and personalities and implement human interactive behavior. The wide dissemination of life-like characters in multimedia systems, however, will greatly depend on the availability of control languages and tools that facilitate scripting of intelligent conversational behaviour. This book presents the first comprehensive collection of the latest developments in scripting and representation languages for life-like characters, rounded off with an in-depth comparison and synopsis of the major approaches. Introducing toolkits for authoring animated characters further supports the ease of use of this new interface technology. Life-like characters being a vibrant research area, various applications have been designed and implemented. This book offers coverage of the most successful and promising applications, ranging from product presentation and student training to knowledge integration and interactive gaming. It also discusses the key challenges in the area and provides design guidelines for employing life-like characters.

Hansen-Love, that the meaning of a work of literature is generated by the interaction of paradigmatic and syntagmatic mechanisms. The image of character in Turgenev's stories is the result of devices characteristic of "narrative" as well as of "verbal art". It is partly created with the help of leitmotivs that form sequences of equivalences, and of intertextual references. Thus (social) representation is supplemented by lyrical and philosophical overtones. Comparable observations have been made by V. M. Markovic (1982) on Turgenev's novels, as well as on those by Puskin, Gogol and Lermontov.

The 8-volume set, comprising the LNCS books 13801 until 13809, constitutes the refereed proceedings of 38 out of the 60 workshops held at the 17th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2022. The conference took place in Tel Aviv, Israel, during October 23-27, 2022; the workshops were held hybrid or online. The 367 full papers included in this volume set were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the ECCV 2022 workshop proceedings. They were organized in individual parts as follows: Part I: W01 - AI for Space; W02 - Vision for Art; W03 - Adversarial Robustness in the Real World; W04 - Autonomous Vehicle Vision Part II: W05 - Learning With Limited and Imperfect Data; W06 - Advances in Image Manipulation; Part III: W07 - Medical Computer Vision; W08 - Computer Vision for Metaverse; W09 - Self-Supervised Learning: What Is Next?; Part IV: W10 - Self-Supervised Learning for Next-Generation Industry-Level Autonomous Driving; W11 - ISIC Skin Image Analysis; W12 - Cross-Modal Human-Robot Interaction; W13 - Text in Everything; W14 - BioImage Computing; W15 - Visual Object-Oriented Learning Meets Interaction: Discovery, Representations, and Applications; W16 - AI for Creative Video Editing and Understanding; W17 - Visual Inductive Priors for Data-Efficient Deep Learning; W18 - Mobile Intelligent Photography and Imaging; Part V: W19 - People Analysis: From Face, Body and Fashion to 3D Virtual Avatars; W20 - Safe Artificial Intelligence for Automated Driving; W21 - Real-World Surveillance: Applications and Challenges; W22 - Affective Behavior Analysis In-the-Wild; Part VI: W23 - Visual Perception for Navigation in Human Environments: The JackRabbot Human Body Pose Dataset and Benchmark; W24 - Distributed Smart Cameras; W25 - Causality in Vision; W26 - In-Vehicle Sensing and Monitorization; W27 - Assistive Computer Vision and Robotics; W28 - Computational Aspects of Deep Learning; Part VII: W29 - Computer Vision for Civil and Infrastructure Engineering; W30 - AI-Enabled Medical Image Analysis: Digital Pathology and Radiology/COVID19; W31 - Compositional and Multimodal Perception; Part VIII: W32 - Uncertainty Quantification for Computer Vision; W33 - Recovering 6D Object Pose; W34 - Drawings and Abstract Imagery: Representation and Analysis; W35 - Sign Language Understanding; W36 - A Challenge for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Computer Vision; W37 - Vision With Biased or Scarce Data; W38 - Visual Object Tracking Challenge.