The analysis of commonalities and differences between agile technology and open source software development is needed to understand how advancement approaches have evolved and whether they produce concrete benefits in terms of software quality and customer satisfaction. ""Agile Technologies in Open Source Development"" explores the overlap between open source and agile technologies, providing valuable strategies for advancement in software. This innovative publication provides a valuable resource to assist project managers, engineers, and developers interested in experimenting with new approaches in software expansion.

This volume traces back the history of interaction between the "computational" or "algorithmic" aspects of elementary mathematics and mathematics education throughout ages. More specifically, the examples of mathematical practices analyzed by the historians of mathematics and mathematics education who authored the chapters in the present collection show that the development (and, in some cases, decline) of counting devices and related computational practices needs to be considered within a particular context to which they arguably belonged, namely, the context of mathematics instruction; in their contributions the authors also explore the role that the instruments played in formation of didactical approaches in various mathematical traditions, stretching from Ancient Mesopotamia to the 20th century Europe and North America.

The focus of Assertion-Based Design is three-fold:
*How to specify assertions;
*How to create and adopt a methodology that supports assertion-based design (predominately for RTL design);
*What to do with the assertions and methodology once you have them.

To support these three over-arching goals, the authors showcase multiple forms of assertion specification: Accellera Open Verification Library (OVL), Accellera Property Specification Language (PSL), and Accellera SystemVerilog.

The recommendations and claims the authors make in this book are based on their combined actual experiences in applying an assertion-based methodology to real design and verification as well as their work in developing industry assertion standards.

This book illustrates all the concepts of web mining from gathering the web data sources to discovering and representing the extracted knowledge. This book is ideal for many researchers and scholars who are interested in a reference book that involves all the techniques and algorithms that are applied to a Web environment. This book illustrates, analyzes, and compares all the techniques, applications, and algorithms that are used in Web mining categories and provides a thorough overview to undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars who wish to learn more about Web and data mining. The goal of this book is to foster transformative, multidisciplinary, and novel approaches that introduce the practical approach of analyzing various web data sources and extracting knowledge by taking into consideration the unique challenges present in the environment. This book provides a complete overview of Web mining techniques and applications; it will be crucial for postgraduate students who want to understand the Web environment better and do not know the differences between Web mining and data mining. It will also be helpful for companies and organizations to discover practical solutions to handle their internet data in a more efficient way, as well as undergraduate students in software engineering and computer science engineering departments who do not have a complete reference book that offers them a full explanation about Web mining.

In today's society, the professional development of teachers is urgent due to the constant change in working conditions and the impact that information and communication technologies have in teaching practices. ""Online Learning Communities and Teacher Professional Development: Methods for Improved Education Delivery"" features innovative applications and solutions useful for teachers in developing knowledge and skills for the integration of technology into everyday teaching practices. This defining collection of field research discusses how technology itself can serve as an important resource in terms of providing arenas for professional development.

The World Wide Web is changing the way we use technology, bringing e-learning and teaching to a whole new dimension of collaboration and communication. Looking Toward the Future of Technology-Enhanced Education: Ubiquitous Learning and the Digital Native bridges the gap between technology and education by presenting innovative research on the future of education. An essential reference on e-learning, this scholarly publication examines current research in technology enhanced learning, provides new didactic models for education, and discusses the newest technologies and their impact on education.

Social media has redefined the way marketers communicate with their customers, giving consumers an advantage that they did not have previously. However, recent issues in online communication platforms have increased the challenges faced by marketers in developing and retaining their customers. Practitioners need to develop effective marketing communication programs that incorporate the meaningful forms of sociality into a customer-driven marketing program. Leveraging Computer-Mediated Marketing Environments discusses the nature of heightened interaction between marketers and consumers in the evolving technological environments, particularly on the central nature of online communities and other emerging technologies on dialogic engagement. Additionally, it aims to examine the relevant roles of online communities and emerging technologies in creating and retaining customers through effective dialogue management. Highlighting brand strategy, e-services, and web analytics, it is designed for marketers, brand managers, business managers, academicians, and students.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the implementation of digital transformation strategies, and there has been an exponential increase in the demand for intelligent and reliable communications solutions. The pandemic brings huge challenges for all economic agents, as resilience and the capacity to adapt to new risks and hindrances are now fundamental elements in our societies. In this context, it is essential that digitalization brings opportunities to transition to a smarter economy based on innovation, sustainability, and well-being. The Handbook of Research on Digitalization as a Driver for Smart Economy in the Post-COVID-19 Era discusses digitalization, information and communication technologies, marketing, entrepreneurship, and innovation in an organizational context to optimize the practices established in the most diverse domains of knowledge, specifically attending to the relation between digitalization and sustainability in a post-pandemic era. It is ideal for academicians, instructors, researchers, industry professionals, business managers, private institutions, and students as it covers a range of key topics such as sustainability and smart economy.

This volume is the result of the 11th International Conference on Information Systems Development: Methods and Tools, Theory and Practice, held in Riga, Latvia, September 12-14, 2002. The purpose of this conference was to address issues facing academia and industry when specifying, developing, managing, reengineering and improving information systems. This volume should be a useful reference for anyone in the fields of general management, systems and control theory, software engineering and operation systems.

This book presents explorable XR environments-their rationale, concept, architectures as well as methods and tools for spatial-temporal composition based on domain knowledge, including geometrical, presentational, structural and behavioral elements. Explorable XR environments enable monitoring, analyzing, comprehending, examining and controlling users' and objects' behavior and features as well as users' skills, experience, interests and preferences. The E-XR approach proposed in this book relies on two main pillars. The first is knowledge representation technologies, such as logic programming, description logics and the semantic web, which permit automated reasoning and queries. The second is imperative programming languages, which are a prevalent solution for building XR environments. Potential applications of E-XR are in a variety of domains, e.g., education, training, medicine, design, tourism, marketing, merchandising, engineering and entertainment. The book's readers will understand the emerging domain of explorable XR environments with their possible applications. Special attention is given to an in-depth discussion of the field with taxonomy and classification of the available related solutions. Examples and design patterns of knowledge-based composition and exploration of XR behavior are provided, and an extensive evaluation and analysis of the proposed approach is included. This book helps researchers in XR systems, 3D modeling tools and game engines as well as lecturers and students who search for clearly presented information supported by use cases. For XR and game programmers as well as graphic designers, the book is a valuable source of information and examples in XR development. Professional software and web developers may find the book interesting as the proposed ideas are illustrated by rich examples demonstrating design patterns and guidelines in object-oriented, procedural and declarative programming.

Take an active role in managing technology!

From new business models to new types of business, information technology has become a key driver of business and an essential component of corporate strategy. But simply acquiring technology is not enough; organizations must manage IT effectively to gain the competitive advantage.

Henry Lucas's Information Technology: Strategic Decision Making for Managers focuses on the key knowledge and skills you need to take an active role in managing technology and obtain the maximum benefits from investing in IT. Offering streamlined, up-to-date coverage, the text is ideally suited for MBA students or anyone who wants to learn more about how to gain the competitive advantage by successfully managing IT.

Features Focuses on managerial issues: This text explores the many real technology issues confronting today's managers, such as what to do with legacy systems, when to outsource, and how to choose a source of processing and services. Shows how to evaluate IT investments: Two full chapters cover the value of information technology and how to evaluate IT project proposals using both net present value and real options approaches. Balances technical and managerial coverage: This balance helps you understand how diverse companies have developed their IT architectures and environments. Explains the various applications of technology: Concrete examples illustrate major IT applications, such as ecommerce, ERP, CRM, decision and intelligent systems, and knowledge management.

This open access book provides a broad range of insights on market engineering and information management. It covers topics like auctions, stock markets, electricity markets, the sharing economy, information and emotions in markets, smart decision-making in cities and other systems, and methodological approaches to conceptual modeling and taxonomy development. Overall, this book is a source of inspiration for everybody working on the vision of advancing the science of engineering markets and managing information for contributing to a bright, sustainable, digital world. Markets are powerful and extremely efficient mechanisms for coordinating individuals' and organizations' behavior in a complex, networked economy. Thus, designing, monitoring, and regulating markets is an essential task of today's society. This task does not only derive from a purely economic point of view. Leveraging market forces can also help to tackle pressing social and environmental challenges. Moreover, markets process, generate, and reveal information. This information is a production factor and a valuable economic asset. In an increasingly digital world, it is more essential than ever to understand the life cycle of information from its creation and distribution to its use. Both markets and the flow of information should not arbitrarily emerge and develop based on individual, profit-driven actors. Instead, they should be engineered to serve best the whole society's goals. This motivation drives the research fields of market engineering and information management. With this book, the editors and authors honor Professor Dr. Christof Weinhardt for his enormous and ongoing contribution to market engineering and information management research and practice. It was presented to him on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in April 2021. Thank you very much, Christof, for so many years of cooperation, support, inspiration, and friendship.

Technological innovation continues to be present in all areas of our lives, offering seemingly endless possibilities. As technology is increasingly implemented in healthcare applications, it is necessary to understand whether users respond to a predefined organizational strategy of model of care or whether they will become wholly dependent on the healthcare technology. This understanding is especially crucial when dealing with the possibility of generating inequities, especially with individuals that are elderly. Exploring the Role of ICTs in Healthy Aging is a collection of innovative research that proposes the detailed study of a strategic framework for the development of technological innovation in healthcare and for its adoption by health organizations. While highlighting topics including emotional health, quality of life, and telemedicine, this book is ideally designed for physicians, nurses, hospital staff, medical professionals, home care providers, hospital administrators, academicians, students, and researchers. Moreover, the book will provide insights and support executives concerned with the management of expertise, knowledge, information, and organizational development in different types of healthcare units at various levels.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and the Internet of Things are facing tremendous advances both in terms of energy-efficiency as well as in the number of available applications. Consequently, there are challenges that need to be tackled for the future generation of WSNs. After giving an overview of the WSN protocols and IEEE 802.15.4 standard, this book proposes IEEE 802.15.4 Medium Access Control (MAC) sub-layer performance enhancements by employing not only RTS/CTS combined with packet concatenation but also scheduled channel poling (MC-SCP). Results have shown that the use of the RTS/CTS mechanism improves channel efficiency by decreasing the deferral time before transmitting a data packet. Furthermore, the Sensor Block Acknowledgment MAC (SBACK-MAC) protocol enables more efficiency as it allows the aggregation of several acknowledgement responses in one special Block Acknowledgment (BACK) Response packet. The throughput and delay performance have been mathematically derived under both ideal conditions (a channel environment with no transmission errors) and non-ideal conditions (with transmission errors). Simulation results successfully validate the proposed analytical models. This research reveals the importance of an appropriate design for the MAC sub-layer protocol for the desired WSN application. Depending on the mission of the WSN application, different protocols are required. Therefore, the overall performance of a WSN application certainly depends on the development and application of suitable e.g., MAC, network layer protocols.

Proposing the concept of real-world data circulation (RWDC), this book presents various practical and industry-related studies in human, mechanical, and social data domains. RWDC is a new field of study, established by the information technology (IT) community. In the real world, the speed of data transmission between computers surpassed that of human communications long ago and has since expanded exponentially. As a result, the origin of the majority of data has become non-human, mechanical, or natural sources; in fact, humans are merely the source of a small part of the current data explosion. Such expanding data transmission does not simply consist of single source-destination pairs, but actually circulates over a complex network connecting numerous sources and destinations. Such circulation is an important aspect of the underlying systems. Based on this concept, in order to tame and control the massive amount of data originating from non-human sources, the authors have been considering the insertion of acquisition, analysis, and implementation processes in the flow of data circulation. This book introduces the outcome of the RWDC degree program organized at Nagoya University, Japan, collecting contributions from graduate students enrolled in the program from various research fields targeting diverse applications. Through examples of RWDC, the resulting creation of social value is illustrated. This book will be useful not only for those working on the topics discussed, but also to anyone who is interested in RWDC, digital transformation, and Industry 4.0.

This book covers several new areas in the growing field of analytics with some innovative applications in different business contexts, and consists of selected presentations at the 6th IIMA International Conference on Advanced Data Analysis, Business Analytics and Intelligence. The book is conceptually divided in seven parts. The first part gives expository briefs on some topics of current academic and practitioner interests, such as data streams, binary prediction and reliability shock models. In the second part, the contributions look at artificial intelligence applications with chapters related to explainable AI, personalized search and recommendation, and customer retention management. The third part deals with credit risk analytics, with chapters on optimization of credit limits and mitigation of agricultural lending risks. In its fourth part, the book explores analytics and data mining in the retail context. In the fifth part, the book presents some applications of analytics to operations management. This part has chapters related to improvement of furnace operations, forecasting food indices and analytics for improving student learning outcomes. The sixth part has contributions related to adaptive designs in clinical trials, stochastic comparisons of systems with heterogeneous components and stacking of models. The seventh and final part contains chapters related to finance and economics topics, such as role of infrastructure and taxation on economic growth of countries and connectedness of markets with heterogenous agents, The different themes ensure that the book would be of great value to practitioners, post-graduate students, research scholars and faculty teaching advanced business analytics courses.

The book aim is to define the Internet of Things (IoT) in a global view, present the research agenda for Internet of Things technologies by addressing the new technological developments and providing a global balanced coverage of the challenges and the technical and industrial trends.Energy consumption by the data, communication and networking devices and global CO2 emission is increasing exponentially. ICT has a dual role in this process: it accounts for about two percent of global CO2 emissions and at the same the ICT including IoT technologies and applications have a direct effect on lowering CO2 emissions, increasing energy efficiency, reducing power consumption, and achieving efficient waste recycling.The book builds on the ideas put forward by the European research Cluster on the Internet of Things Strategic Research Agenda and presents global views and state of the art results on the challenges facing the research, development and deployment of IoT at the global level.IoT together with the other emerging Internet developments such as Internet of Energy, Media, People, Services, Business/Enterprises are the backbone of the digital economy, the digital society and the foundation for the future knowledge based economy and innovation society. IoT developments show that we will have 16 billion connected devices by the year 2020 , which will average out to six devices per person on earth and to many more per person in digital societies.Devices like smart phones and machine to machine or thing to thing communication will be the main drivers for further IoT development. The first direct consequence of the IoT is the generation of huge quantities of data, where every physical or virtual object may have a digital twin in the cloud, which could be generating regular updates. The IoT contribution is in the increased value of information created by the number of interconnections among things and the transformation of the processed information into knowledge for the benefit of mankind and society. The Internet of Things market is connected to industrial machine to machine (M2M) systems, smart meters and enabling technologies such as nanoelectronics, communications, sensors, smart phones, embedded systems, cloud computing and software technologies that will create new products, new services, new interfaces by creating smart environments and smart spaces with applications ranging from smart transport, cities, buildings, energy, grid, to smart health and life.Technical topics discussed in the book include:* The Internet of Things: The Way Ahead* Internet of Things Strategic Research Agenda* Challenges of a Sustainable Roadmap for the Internet of Things* Technologies behind Internet of Things: From Nanoelectronics and Embedded Systems to Cloud Computing and Cognitive Systems* Machine to machine (M2M) communication and the emerging Internet of Things applications* The "Internet of Things" based on IPv6. Paving the way to Smart IPv6 Buildings* "Internet of Things - from Ubiquitous Computing to Ubiquitous Intelligence Applications"* Virtualization of network resources and Physical devices in Internet of Things applications* Validation and Interoperability challenges for IoT* Mobile devices enable IoT evolution from industrial applications to mass consumer applications* Interoperability, Standardisation and Governance in the era of Internet of Things (IoT)* Technologies, Applications, and Governance in the Internet of Things* Opportunities, Challenges for Internet of Things Technologies

This third edition volume expands on the previous editions with new topics that cover drug discovery through translational bioinformatics, informatics, clinical research informatics, as well as clinical informatics. The chapters discuss new methods to study target identification, genome analysis, cheminformatics, protein analysis, and text mining. Written in the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology series format, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials, software workflows, reagents and on-line resources, together with step-by-step, readily reproducible laboratory and computational protocols, and tips on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls. Cutting-edge and thorough, Bioinformatics and Drug Discovery, Third Edition is a valuable resource for anyone interested in drug design, including academicians (biologists, informaticists and data scientists, chemists, and biochemists), clinicians, and pharmaceutical scientists.