Smart homes, smart cities, and wearable technologies are the growing applications of the internet of things (IoT). Ranging from healthcare tracking applications to smart watches and smart bands for personal safety, the IoT has turned out to be one of the most indispensable parts of our lives even as it is becoming more interconnected to better serve people. With the exponential growth of the IoT and its applications, building the next-generation smart world becomes much more feasible. The IoT and the Net Revolutions Automating the World covers a spectrum of intelligent applications of the IoT in parking, traffic management, waste management, lighting, air pollution controlling, healthcare, weather tracking, retail, and other areas calling for automation. Highlighting a wide range of topics such as e-commerce, security management, and web infrastructure, this book is ideal for academicians, students, researchers, industry professionals, IT consultants, engineers, and scientists.

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.

A key focus in recent years has been on sustainable development and promoting environmentally conscious practices. In today's rapidly evolving technological world, it is important to consider how technology can be applied to solve problems across disciplines and fields in these areas. Further study is needed in order to understand how technology can be applied to sustainability and the best practices, considerations, and challenges that follow. Futuristic Trends for Sustainable Development and Sustainable Ecosystems discusses recent advances and innovative research in the area of information and communication technology for sustainable development and covers practices in several artificial intelligence fields such as knowledge representation and reasoning, natural language processing, machine learning, and the semantic web. Covering topics such as blockchain, deep learning, and renewable energy, this reference work is ideal for computer scientists, industry professionals, researchers, academicians, scholars, instructors, and students.

Developments in Technologies for Human-Centric Mobile Computing and Applications is a comprehensive collection of knowledge and practice in the development of technologies in human -centric mobile technology. This book focuses on the developmental aspects of mobile technology; bringing together researchers, educators, and practitioners to encourage readers to think outside of the box.

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.

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.

This book presents recently developed computational approaches for the study of reactive materials under extreme physical and thermodynamic conditions. It delves into cutting edge developments in simulation methods for reactive materials, including quantum calculations spanning nanometer length scales and picosecond timescales, to reactive force fields, coarse-grained approaches, and machine learning methods spanning microns and nanoseconds and beyond. These methods are discussed in the context of a broad range of fields, including prebiotic chemistry in impacting comets, studies of planetary interiors, high pressure synthesis of new compounds, and detonations of energetic materials. The book presents a pedagogical approach for these state-of-the-art approaches, compiled into a single source for the first time. Ultimately, the volume aims to make valuable research tools accessible to experimentalists and theoreticians alike for any number of scientific efforts, spanning many different types of compounds and reactive conditions.

The past few years have seen a major change in computing systems, as growing data volumes and stalling processor speeds require more and more applications to scale out to clusters. Today, a myriad data sources, from the Internet to business operations to scientific instruments, produce large and valuable data streams. However, the processing capabilities of single machines have not kept up with the size of data. As a result, organizations increasingly need to scale out their computations over clusters. At the same time, the speed and sophistication required of data processing have grown. In addition to simple queries, complex algorithms like machine learning and graph analysis are becoming common. And in addition to batch processing, streaming analysis of real-time data is required to let organizations take timely action. Future computing platforms will need to not only scale out traditional workloads, but support these new applications too. This book, a revised version of the 2014 ACM Dissertation Award winning dissertation, proposes an architecture for cluster computing systems that can tackle emerging data processing workloads at scale. Whereas early cluster computing systems, like MapReduce, handled batch processing, our architecture also enables streaming and interactive queries, while keeping MapReduce's scalability and fault tolerance. And whereas most deployed systems only support simple one-pass computations (e.g., SQL queries), ours also extends to the multi-pass algorithms required for complex analytics like machine learning. Finally, unlike the specialized systems proposed for some of these workloads, our architecture allows these computations to be combined, enabling rich new applications that intermix, for example, streaming and batch processing. We achieve these results through a simple extension to MapReduce that adds primitives for data sharing, called Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs). We show that this is enough to capture a wide range of workloads. We implement RDDs in the open source Spark system, which we evaluate using synthetic and real workloads. Spark matches or exceeds the performance of specialized systems in many domains, while offering stronger fault tolerance properties and allowing these workloads to be combined. Finally, we examine the generality of RDDs from both a theoretical modeling perspective and a systems perspective. This version of the dissertation makes corrections throughout the text and adds a new section on the evolution of Apache Spark in industry since 2014. In addition, editing, formatting, and links for the references have been added.

Complexes of physically interacting proteins constitute fundamental functional units that drive almost all biological processes within cells. A faithful reconstruction of the entire set of protein complexes (the "complexosome") is therefore important not only to understand the composition of complexes but also the higher level functional organization within cells. Advances over the last several years, particularly through the use of high-throughput proteomics techniques, have made it possible to map substantial fractions of protein interactions (the "interactomes") from model organisms including Arabidopsis thaliana (a flowering plant), Caenorhabditis elegans (a nematode), Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly), and Saccharomyces cerevisiae (budding yeast). These interaction datasets have enabled systematic inquiry into the identification and study of protein complexes from organisms. Computational methods have played a significant role in this context, by contributing accurate, efficient, and exhaustive ways to analyze the enormous amounts of data. These methods have helped to compensate for some of the limitations in experimental datasets including the presence of biological and technical noise and the relative paucity of credible interactions. In this book, we systematically walk through computational methods devised to date (approximately between 2000 and 2016) for identifying protein complexes from the network of protein interactions (the protein-protein interaction (PPI) network). We present a detailed taxonomy of these methods, and comprehensively evaluate them for protein complex identification across a variety of scenarios including the absence of many true interactions and the presence of false-positive interactions (noise) in PPI networks. Based on this evaluation, we highlight challenges faced by the methods, for instance in identifying sparse, sub-, or small complexes and in discerning overlapping complexes, and reveal how a combination of strategies is necessary to accurately reconstruct the entire complexosome.

The latest advances in technology development have been particularly useful to actor-network theory as a structure for much of its research. With a socio-technical approach to the understanding of information systems and applications, the actor-network theory aims to bring support for social influence on technological innovations. Social and Professional Applications of Actor-Network Theory for Technology Development presents a platform for the approaches and implementations on the actor-network theory and its relationship with technology development. This book provides researchers and practitioners with a better understanding of the usefulness of the social and technical connection.

During the last two decades, computer and information technologies have forced great changes in the ways businesses manage operations in meeting the desired quality of products and services, customer demands, competition, and other challenges.

This is an information science reference. Distance learning technologies have reshaped the diffusion of communication within the educational system. Within this expanding field, the possibilities for an interactive, cross-boundary education are endless.""Strategic Applications of Distance Learning Technologies"" provides tactical uses of distance education technologies to assist instructors and researchers in their quest to provide a progressive, alternative approach to traditional education techniques. This collection of advanced research incorporates global challenges and opportunities of technology integration while outlining strategies for distance learning within developing countries.

This book introduces the linkage between evolutionary computation and complex networks and the advantages of cross-fertilising ideas from both fields. Instead of introducing each field individually, the authors focus on the research that sits at the interface of both fields. The book is structured to address two questions: (1) how complex networks are used to analyze and improve the performance of evolutionary computation methods? (2) how evolutionary computation methods are used to solve problems in complex networks? The authors interweave complex networks and evolutionary computing, using evolutionary computation to discover community structure, while also using network analysis techniques to analyze the performance of evolutionary algorithms. The book is suitable for both beginners and senior researchers in the fields of evolutionary computation and complex networks.

Talk to just about any Information Technology (IT) executive today and you're likely to hear the same complaint: "Even though we have invested millions of dollars each year in technical infrastructure and support, we don't get the results we expect." The focus of IT management over the past several decades has been on maximizing the benefit that comes from IT investments. Particular attention is paid to finding the right hardware, software, networks, and processes to allow IT to contribute to the bottom line of the business. And still, with all of this focus, IT organizations find themselves unable to meet the demands of their clients. Perhaps a shift in focus is needed. IT PEOPLE: Doing More With Less shifts the focus to the IT people. Because while it is right to focus on getting the hardware, software, networks, and processes right, people are the resources that ultimately make a difference in getting results and meeting the demands of clients. And since people costs are often the largest part of the IT budgets, and our focus has been elsewhere, it could be that a focus on IT people is long overdue. This book is intended for every IT professional (management and individual contributors) who faces the constant challenge of performing a big job with ever-shrinking departmental resources. Whether you are a manager or an individual technician, this book is for you. It will help you improve your ability to plan your work and, meet your commitments while being an effective political actor. Our aim in this book is to provide you with a tool that will not only help you deliver greater value to your organization, but do so in a way that provides a greater degree of job satisfaction andquality of life. IT PEOPLE: Doing More With Less is intended as a practical tool, not a theoretical book. The content of the book comes from the experiences of the authors, each of whom has spent years managing IT organizations and consulting with clients around the worl

The exponential digitization of medical data has led to a transformation of the practice of medicine. This change notably raises a new complexity of issues surrounding health IT. The proper use of these communication tools, such as telemedicine, e-health, m-health the big medical data, should improve the quality of monitoring and care of patients for an information system to "human face". Faced with these challenges, the author analyses in an ethical angle the patient-physician relationship, sharing, transmission and storage of medical information, setting pins to an ethic for the digitization of medical information. Drawing on good practice recommendations closely associated with values, this model is developing tools for reflection and present the keys to understanding the decision-making issues that reflect both the technological constraints and the complex nature of human reality in medicine .

Computational Methods for Agricultural Research: Advances and Applications brings computing solutions to ancient practices and modern concerns, sowing the seeds for a sustainable, constant food supply. This book treats subjects as old modeling flood patterns and predicting potential climates to distinctly 21st century topics such as pesticide leaching models and the impact of agricultural policy. All of these studies utilize cutting-edge computational techniques of interest to both academics and practitioners in agriculture but also computational modeling researchers, creating a reference practical significance.

Applications and Developments in Grid, Cloud, and High Performance Computing provides insight into the current trends and emerging issues by investigating grid and cloud evolution, workflow management, and the impact new computing systems have on the education fields as well as the industries. This book is practical for both researchers and IT professionals.

Innovation is a time-consuming process that involves invention as a beginning and a marketable service or product as an end. But innovation itself, once concluded, is not necessarily a constructive act as some innovations yield positive and some negative results. The way we recognize and develop innovation - so often a serendipitous and almost invisible act in its beginning - is thus a matter of primary importance in today's world where new thoughts and products play such a crucial role in economies across the globe. Nowhere is the general support structure required for success in innovation more starkly illuminated than in the fields of science and medicine, where human well-being is so manifestly at stake. In this work, which draws together the perspectives of a multidisciplinary group of professionals - medical doctors, innovation policy analysts, and academics in business management - Shantha Liyanage and his colleagues provide a thorough examination of the technology innovation process, and display its critical links with organizational functions, so the innovative capacities of organizations can be better prepared to meet the rapid changes of our age.

The utilization of information and communication technologies in almost all spheres of modern society has changed the social picture in significant ways while simultaneously leading to tensions with regard to traditional ethical and legal practices-particularly given the global context of its application. Where these technologies impact on the practice and implementation of healthcare, it is vital to recognize the extent and nature of the ethical and social impact both at the level of professional practice and the patient. Ethical, Legal and Social Issues in Medical Informatics presents a fundamental compendium of research on the ethical, social, and legal issues facing the healthcare industry as it adopts information technologies to provide fast, efficient, and cost effective healthcare. An essential resource for every reference library, this comprehensive book offers a multidisciplinary perspective, drawing from the expertise of a wide variety of global industries including law, ethics, medicine, philosophy, and computer science.

Expansive growth and use of the Internet in recent years has led to computational networking and an increased use of e-collaborative technologies leading to many possibilities including collaboration of tasks from remote locations. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on E-Collaboration: Emerging Trends and Applications focuses on e-collaboration technologies that enable group-based interaction, and the impact that those technologies have on group work. A defining body of research, this reference addresses a range of e-collaboration topics including interdisciplinary perspectives on e-collaboration, and adaptation and creativity in e-collaboration.

The association of personal time management research with calendar applications has remained a relatively under-researched area due to the complexity and challenges it faces. ""Temporal Structures in Individual Time Management: Practices to Enhance Calendar Tool Design"" covers the latest concepts, methodologies, techniques, tools, and perspectives essential to understanding individual time management experiences. Emphasizing personal temporal structure usage involving calendar tools, this book provides both qualitative and quantitative evidences and insights valuable for researchers and practitioners in enhancing current electronic calendar systems design and implementation.