The January 12, 2010 earthquake completely compromised Haiti’s already unstable infrastructure, rendering local communications useless for coordinating relief and aid. The ensuing chaos highlighted the lack of redundant geospatial systems that were local and accessible by the Haitian people and relief community. Thermopylae teamed up with U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) to remedy this problem. The resulting development of the SOUTHCOM 3D User-Defined Operational Picture (UDOP) maximized the efficiency of the coordination of relief efforts of government, non-government, international, and local emergency response units by compiling spatial information from a variety of sources on a single platform for universal access. In conjunction with the Google Earth browser plug-in and Thermopylae's iSpatialTM framework, the UDOP provides a three-dimensional Web portal where users can easily create and share spatial information.

Mr. Clark has more than 15 years of program management and systems integration experience, and has worked with the U.S. State Department and other relief organizations. Additionally, he has worked with visualization, analysis, and dissemination of disaster / post-conflict data in the Middle East, Caribbean, South and Central America, and Central Asia for over 12 years. His focus has been on South and Central America as well as the Caribbean in a supporting role to SOUTHCOM since 2003.

Prior to joining TST, Mr. Clark worked as a vice president of a US Fortune 500 technology company serving as Vice President for Global Information Systems. He holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA), a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Business Management Information Systems, is a certified Program Management Professional, and a member of the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association.

Peter Stanchev (http://kettering.edu/~pstanche/) is currently professor at Kettering University, Flint, Michigan, USA and professor and chair at the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria. He publish 2 books, more than 200 chapters in monographs, journal and conference peer-reviewed papers, more than 200 conference papers and seminars, and have more than 600 citations. His research interests are in the field of multimedia systems, database systems, multimedia semantics, and medical systems. Serving also on many database and multimedia conference program committees, he is currently on the editorial boards of several journals.

Software testing is a key part of software development life cycle. Due to time, cost and other circumstances, exhaustive testing is not feasible, that’s why there is need to automate the testing process. Generation of the automated and effective test suit is a very difficult task in the software testing process. Effective test suite can decrease the overall cost of testing as well as increase the probability of finding defects in software systems. Testing effectiveness can be achieved by the State Transition Testing which is commonly used in, real time, embedded and web-based kind of software system. State transition testing focuses upon the testing of transitions from one state of an object to other states. The tester’s main job is to test all the possible transitions in the system. This chapter proposed an Ant Colony Optimization technique for automated and fully coverage state-transitions in the system. Through proposed algorithm all the transitions are easily traversed at least once in the test-sequence.

The common understanding of e-learning has shifted over the last decade from the traditional learning objects portals to learning paradigms that enforces constructivism, discovery learning and social collaboration. Such type of learning takes place outside the formal academic settings (e.g., seminars or lectures) where a learning environment is created by using some kind of web application that uses variety of emerging technologies including Web-Harvesting, Web Intelligence, Widget-Based and Mashup Techniques. The use of these innovative tools and techniques moves the learning environment further away from being a monolithic platform towards providing an open set of learning tools, an unrestricted number of actors, and an open corpus of artifacts, either pre-existing or created by the learning process – freely combinable and utilizable by learners within their learning activities. This invited article and tutorial identifies the new type of Web-based learning technologies suitable for creating effective personal learning environments.

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