Mobile Sensors and Context-Aware Computing is a useful guide that explains how hardware, software, sensors, and operating systems converge to create a new generation of context-aware mobile applications. This cohesive guide to the mobile computing landscape demonstrates innovative mobile and sensor solutions for platforms that deliver enhanced, personalized user experiences, with examples including the fast-growing domains of mobile health and vehicular networking. Users will learn how the convergence of mobile and sensors facilitates cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things, and how applications which directly interact with the physical world are becoming more and more compatible. The authors cover both the platform components and key issues of security, privacy, power management, and wireless interaction with other systems.

The Physics of Computing gives a foundational view of the physical principles underlying computers. Performance, power, thermal behavior, and reliability are all harder and harder to achieve as transistors shrink to nanometer scales. This book describes the physics of computing at all levels of abstraction from single gates to complete computer systems. It can be used as a course for juniors or seniors in computer engineering and electrical engineering, and can also be used to teach students in other scientific disciplines important concepts in computing. For electrical engineering, the book provides the fundamentals of computing that link core concepts to computing. For computer science, it provides foundations of key challenges such as power consumption, performance, and thermal. The book can also be used as a technical reference by professionals.

Complex Systems and Clouds: A Self-Organization and Self-Management Perspective provides insights into the intricate world of self-organizing systems. Large scale distributed computer systems have evolved into very complex systems and are at the point where they need to borrow self-adapting organizing concepts from nature. The book explores complexity in big distributed systems and in the natural processes in physics and chemistry, building a platform for understanding how self-organization in big distributed systems can be achieved. It goes beyond the theoretical description of self-organization to present principles for designing self-organizing systems, and concludes by showing the need for a paradigm shift in the development of large-scale systems from strictly deterministic to non-deterministic and adaptive.

4 zettabytes (4 billion terabytes) of data generated in 2013, 44 zettabytes predicted for 2020 and 185 zettabytes for 2025. These figures are staggering and perfectly illustrate this new era of data deluge. Data has become a major economic and social challenge. The speed of processing of these data is the weakest link in a computer system: the storage system. It is therefore crucial to optimize this operation. During the last decade, storage systems have experienced a major revolution: the advent of flash memory. Flash Memory Integration: Performance and Energy Issues contributes to a better understanding of these revolutions. The authors offer us an insight into the integration of flash memory in computer systems, their behavior in performance and in power consumption compared to traditional storage systems. The book also presents, in their entirety, various methods for measuring the performance and energy consumption of storage systems for embedded as well as desktop/server computer systems. We are invited on a journey to the memories of the future.

Advances in Computers, the latest volume in the series published since 1960, presents detailed coverage of innovations in computer hardware, software, theory, design, and applications. In addition, it provides contributors with a medium in which they can explore their subjects in greater depth and breadth than journal articles usually allow. As a result, many articles have become standard references that continue to be of significant, lasting value in this rapidly expanding field.

Usability Testing for Survey Research provides researchers with a guide to the tools necessary to evaluate, test, and modify surveys in an iterative method during the survey pretesting process. It includes examples that apply usability to any type of survey during any stage of development, along with tactics on how to tailor usability testing to meet budget and scheduling constraints. The book's authors distill their experience to provide tips on how usability testing can be applied to paper surveys, mixed-mode surveys, interviewer-administered tools, and additional products. Readers will gain an understanding of usability and usability testing and why it is needed for survey research, along with guidance on how to design and conduct usability tests, analyze and report findings, ideas for how to tailor usability testing to meet budget and schedule constraints, and new knowledge on how to apply usability testing to other survey-related products, such as project websites and interviewer administered tools.

Cyber-Physical Systems: Foundations, Principles and Applications explores the core system science perspective needed to design and build complex cyber-physical systems. Using Systems Science's underlying theories, such as probability theory, decision theory, game theory, organizational sociology, behavioral economics, and cognitive psychology, the book addresses foundational issues central across CPS applications, including System Design -- How to design CPS to be safe, secure, and resilient in rapidly evolving environments, System Verification -- How to develop effective metrics and methods to verify and certify large and complex CPS, Real-time Control and Adaptation -- How to achieve real-time dynamic control and behavior adaptation in a diverse environments, such as clouds and in network-challenged spaces, Manufacturing -- How to harness communication, computation, and control for developing new products, reducing product concepts to realizable designs, and producing integrated software-hardware systems at a pace far exceeding today's timeline. The book is part of the Intelligent Data-Centric Systems: Sensor-Collected Intelligence series edited by Fatos Xhafa, Technical University of Catalonia. Indexing: The books of this series are submitted to EI-Compendex and SCOPUS