Chinya V. Ravishankar

Presents rare biographies of traditional Indian scholars during the nineteenth century, a critical moment of transition for the Indian intellectual tradition. Traditional Indian pāṇḍitya (scholarship) has a long and distinguished history but is now practically extinct. Its decline is remarkably recent—traditional pāṇḍitya flourished as recently as 150 years ago. The decline is also paradoxical, having occurred precipitously following a broad and remarkable flowering of the tradition between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The important questions this decline poses are the subject of much ongoing work. The intellectual history of the period is still under construction, and the present book represents a major contribution to the project. A notable impediment has been the lack of critical biographies of significant thinkers in this tradition. The importance of personal and social context for reconstructing intellectual histories is widely understood. In the classical Indian intellectual tradition, however, authors systematically exclude such context, making intellectual biography something of a rarity—very rare in English and sparse even in the regional languages. This book contains translations from the original Kannaḍa of the biographies of Garaḷapurī Śāstri, Śrīkaṇṭha Śāstri, and Kuṇigala Rāmaśāstri of nineteenth-century Mysore, all representing the highest echelons of traditional pāṇḍitya at this critical period of transition. Their fields are literature, grammar, and logic, respectively. The biographies focus on the personal lives of these scholars and their many contexts. These biographies are almost contemporaneous accounts, reflecting firsthand knowledge. The translations are accompanied by copious footnotes as well as appendices drawn from the relevant primary sources. “What has been missing in the past forty years of discussion of nineteenth-century Indian Orientalism and colonialism are fine-textured accounts of the Indian orientalists themselves, those who cultivated, reproduced, and promulgated knowledge of their own textual past. Ravishankar’s book is a valuable contribution toward that project. He has given us a fascinating and unique picture of Indian intellectual life in its pre-colonized form.” — Sheldon Pollock, Arvind Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies, Columbia University

Late Exemplars of the Indian Intellectual Tradition

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Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury

Hamid Aghajan

Demetri Terzopoulos

Large-scale video networks are of increasing importance in a wide range of applications. However, the development of automated techniques for aggregating and interpreting information from multiple video streams in real-life scenarios is a challenging area of research. Collecting the work of leading researchers from a broad range of disciplines, this timely text/reference offers an in-depth survey of the state of the art in distributed camera networks. The book addresses a broad spectrum of critical issues in this highly interdisciplinary field: current challenges and future directions; video processing and video understanding; simulation, graphics, cognition and video networks; wireless video sensor networks, communications and control; embedded cameras and real-time video analysis; applications of distributed video networks; and educational opportunities and curriculum-development. Topics and features: presents an overview of research in areas of motion analysis, invariants, multiple cameras for detection, object tracking and recognition, and activities in video networks; provides real-world applications of distributed video networks, including force protection, wide area activities, port security, and recognition in night-time environments; describes the challenges in graphics and simulation, covering virtual vision, network security, human activities, cognitive architecture, and displays; examines issues of multimedia networks, registration, control of cameras (in simulations and real networks), localization and bounds on tracking; discusses system aspects of video networks, with chapters on providing testbed environments, data collection on activities, new integrated sensors for airborne sensors, face recognition, and building sentient spaces; investigates educational opportunities and curriculum development from the perspective of computer science and electrical engineering. This unique text will be of great interest to researchers and graduate students of computer vision and pattern recognition, computer graphics and simulation, image processing and embedded systems, and communications, networks and controls. The large number of example applications will also appeal to application engineers.

Chinya V. Ravishankar

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