The story of a 19th-century adventurer who battled pirates, hunted buffalo, sailed the Arctic, and was “one of the most arresting figures of his time” (The Globe). Few men have lived such an extraordinary life as Admiral Albert Hastings Markham. Besides dedicating five decades of his career to Britain’s Royal Navy, Markham was a voracious reader, prolific writer, keen naturalist, and daring explorer. He battled Chinese pirates during the Second Opium War and Taiping Rebellion; chased down Australian blackbirding ships in the South Pacific; trekked to within 400 miles of the North Pole; hunted buffalo and visited Indian reservations in the United States; observed a bloody war in South America; canoed Canada’s remote Hayes River; and explored the icy waters of Baffin Bay and the Arctic Ocean archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. At the time of his death in 1918, The Globe declared that Markham had been “one of the most arresting figures of his time.” While Markham’s life was filled with adventure, it was also marred by tragedy. Regrettably, Markham is best remembered for his role in the sinking of HMS Victoria in 1893. This one incident has tarnished his legacy until now. This book follows Markham through his adventures and misfortunes—and reassesses the life of this forgotten yet fascinating admiral.

This work provides biographies of more than 500 men and women who have served as admiral, vice admiral, or rear admiral. While officers from the U.S., British, French and Japanese navies make up the bulk of the work, officers from 22 countries, including Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, and Spain, are also included. The main criterion for inclusion is that each person must have actively served in the rank of at least rear admiral, but not necessarily in enemy action. This effectively rules out people who were granted the rank on retirement, as a courtesy title or posthumously. The book also includes lists of admirals organized by nationality and by year of birth.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2016, held in Los Angeles, CA, USA, in September 2016. The 12 full papers, 18 short papers, and 37 demo and poster papers accepted were carefully reviewed and selected from 81 submissions. IVA 2016 also includes three workshops: Workshop on Chatbots and Conversational Agents (WOCHAT), Can you feel me now? Creating Physiologically Aware Virtual Agents (PAVA), and Graphical and Robotic Embodied Agents for Therapeutic Systems, GREATS16. Intelligent Virtual Aspects (IVAs) are intelligent digital interactive characters that can communicate with humans and other agents using natural human modalities such as facial expressions, speech, gestures, and movement. They are capable of real-time perception, cognition, emotion and action that allow them to participate in dynamic social environments. Constructing and studying IVAs requires tools from a wide range of fields such as computer science, psychology, cognitive science, communication, linguistics, interactive media, human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence.