In the real world, the human eye is confronted with a wide range of luminances from bright sunshine to low night light. Our eyes cope with this vast range of intensities by adaptation; changing their sensitivity to be responsive at different illumination levels. This adaptation is highly localized, allowing us to see both dark and bright regions of a high dynamic range environment. In this paper we present a new model of eye adaptation based on physiological data. The model, which can be easily integrated into existing renderers, can function either as a static local tone mapping operator for single high dynamic range image, or as a temporal adaptation model taking into account time elapsed and intensity of preadaptation for a dynamic sequence. We finally validate our technique with a high dynamic range display and a psychophysical study.

The infl uence of gender on intimate partner violence (IPV) has been predominantly studied in opposite sex relationships. This article presents the results of a systematic literature review in which the aim was to understand how gender may aff ect not only the violence in same-sex IPV but also, and mostly, each element of the couple and third-party responses. The search was conducted in four electronic databases: B-on, PubMed, Sage and PsycINFO. From the analysis of seven articles selected, four major domains were identifi ed in which gender aff ects these relationships: normalizing violence; diffi culty in recognizing violence; diffi culty in seeking help; and social isolation. It was concluded that gender, or gender role expectations, cannot be ignored while studying this phenomenon. More than infl uencing violence per se, gender shapes the way each element of the couple perceives their experiences and third-party perceptions (e.g., family, friends, justice system, and victims support services professionals), preventing an adequate social response to this form of violence.

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Abstract. The efficient execution of irregular parallel applications on shared distributed systems requires novel approaches to scheduling, since both the application requirements and the system resources exhibit an unpredictable behavior. This paper proposes Bayesian decision networks as the paradigm to handle the uncertainty a scheduler has about the environment's current and future states. Experiments performed with a parallel ray tracer show promising performance improvements over a deterministic approach of identical complexity. These improvements grow as the level of system sharing and the application's workload irregularity increase, suggesting that the effectiveness of decision network based schedulers grows with the complexity of the environment being managed.

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The use of virtual worlds and games for serious applications has emerged as a dominating force in training, education, and simulation due to its capacity to engage younger, hi-tech generations in the highly motivated gaming environments and to the opportunities offered by the commodity technologies commonly associated with the entertainment industries. This field is informed by theories, methods, applications, and the state-of-the-art in a number of areas based on technological principles and innovation, advances in games design, pedagogic methodologies, and the convergence of these fields. While the serious games community has made it possible to bring together such diverse fields, further academic and industrial collaboration is needed to define, formalize, and apply the standards and methodologies for the future. The VS-GAMES 2010 proceedings presents a step forward in this direction and will, we hope, encourage a further exchange of knowledge and experience in this crossdisciplinary area and its related applications in the use of games and virtual worlds for serious applications.

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This article presents an evaluation study of point-to-point and collective communication performance on a parallel processing system, a 16 node Parsytec PowerXplorer, using three di erent communication environments: PARIX, PVM and MPI.