A weakened but determined Elminster seeks new followers for the mother of magic, hoping to restore the balance of good and evil After a vicious battle with his vampiric archenemy, the Lord Manshoon, Elminster is charged by the spirit of Mystra to locate new trustworthy followers to uphold her legacy. It is up to Elminster to preserve magic however he can and to keep the art of enchantment alive. Severely weakened from his ordeals, Elminster elicits the unlikely help of Amarune Whitewave, a rogue sometimes known as the Secret Shadow. Joined by other adventurers along the way, the two embark on a quest to defeat Manshoon and save the Forgotten Realms.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Joint IAPR International Workshop on Structural, Syntactic, and Statistical Pattern Recognition, S+SSPR 2020, held in Padua, Italy, in January 2021. The 35 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 81 submissions. The accepted papers cover the major topics of current interest in pattern recognition, including classification and clustering, deep learning, structural matching and graph-theoretic methods, and multimedia analysis and understanding.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Information Processing in Medical Imaging, IPMI 2019, held at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China, in June 2019. The 69 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 229 submissions. They were organized in topical sections on deep learning and segmentation; classification and inference; reconstruction; disease modeling; shape, registration; learning motion; functional imaging; and white matter imaging. The book also includes a number of post papers.

This book gathers the outcomes of the thirteenth Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR), the premier event for showcasing cutting-edge research on algorithmic robotics. The latest WAFR, held at Universidad Politécnica de Yucatán in Mérida, México on December 9–11, 2018, continued this tradition. This book contains fifty-four papers presented at WAFR, which highlight the latest research on fundamental algorithmic robotics (e.g., planning, learning, navigation, control, manipulation, optimality, completeness, and complexity) demonstrated through several applications involving multi-robot systems, perception, and contact manipulation. Addressing a diverse range of topics in papers prepared by expert contributors, the book reflects the state of the art and outlines future directions in the field of algorithmic robotics.