Social media platforms have emerged as an influential and popular tool in the digital era. No longer limited to just personal use, the applications of social media have expanded in recent years into the business realm. Analyzing the Strategic Role of Social Networking in Firm Growth and Productivity examines the role of social media technology in organizational settings to promote business development and growth. Highlighting a range of relevant discussions from the public and private sectors, this book is a pivotal reference source for professionals, researchers, upper-level students, and academicians.

The transformative impacts of digitalization on society are visible both within nation states and across borders. Information and communication technologies are typically considered beneficial for democracy. Nevertheless, this book explores the challenges that technology brings to democracy, and in so doing advances our understanding of this crucial digital, social and political phenomenon. It contributes to the broader discussion of the relationship between international, national and sub-national norms, institutions and actors in an increasingly connected world. Insightful and current, this book offers a wide variety of perspectives in an area where there is still not yet an extensive body of research. It considers, for example: the extent to which new forms of digital political engagement change traditional democratic decision-making; how receptive national governments and authorities are to digital democratic movements; how governments can uphold the values of democratic society while also ensuring flexibility with regard to the private sector; and how we should judge these developments in light of the cross-border effects of digitalization. Understanding the influence of digitalization on democracy is crucial. As such, this book will appeal to a broad audience including, but not limited to, social scientists, policy makers, legal researchers, NGOs, governments, students and lawyers. Contributors include: M. Adams, A. Banerjee, E. Bayamlioglu, C.L. Blake, J. Cudmore, C. Cuijpers, A. Dumas, C.R. Farina, M.-J. Garot, T. Gylfason, H.L. Kong, E.A. Lazzari, P.L. Lindseth, N. Luka, A. Meuwese, L.F.M. Moncau, C. Nam, M. Newhart, U. Pagallo, I. Pernice, C. Prins, R. Radu, M.S.G. Rosina, R. Weill, K. van Aeken, B. Zhao, N. Zingales

Born since the mid-1990s, Generation Z is the first generation never to know the world without the internet, and it is the most diverse generation yet. As Gen Z starts to emerge into adulthood and enter the workforce, what do we really know about them? And what can we learn from them? Gen Z, Explained is the authoritative portrait of this significant generation. It draws on extensive interviews that display this generation's candor, surveys that explore their views and attitudes, and a vast database of their astonishingly inventive lexicon to build a comprehensive picture of their values, daily lives, and outlook. Gen Z emerges here as an extraordinarily thoughtful, promising, and perceptive generation-one that is sounding a warning to their elders about the world around them of a complexity and depth the "OK, Boomer" phenomenon could only suggest. Much of the existing literature about Gen Z has been highly judgmental. In contrast, this book provides a deep and nuanced understanding of a generation facing a future of enormous challenges, from climate change to civil unrest. What's more, they are facing this future head-on, relying on themselves and their peers to work collaboratively to solve these problems. As Gen Z, Explained shows, this group of young people is as compassionate and imaginative as any that has come before, and understanding the way they tackle issues may enable us to envision new kinds of solutions. This portrait of Gen Z is ultimately an optimistic one, suggesting they have something to teach all of us about how to live and thrive in this digital world.

As recently as 1968, computer scientists were uncertain how best to interconnect even two computers. The notion that within a few decades the challenge would be how to interconnect millions of computers around the globe was too far-fetched to contemplate. Yet, by 1988, that is precisely what was happening. The products and devices developed in the intervening years-such as modems, multiplexers, local area networks, and routers-became the linchpins of the global digital society. How did such revolutionary innovation occur? This book tells the story of the entrepreneurs who were able to harness and join two factors: the energy of computer science researchers supported by governments and universities, and the tremendous commercial demand for Internetworking computers. The centerpiece of this history comes from unpublished interviews from the late 1980s with over 80 computing industry pioneers, including Paul Baran, J.C.R. Licklider, Vint Cerf, Robert Kahn, Larry Roberts, and Robert Metcalfe. These individuals give us unique insights into the creation of multi-billion dollar markets for computer-communications equipment, and they reveal how entrepreneurs struggled with failure, uncertainty, and the limits of knowledge.

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.

The Internet of Things has become a major influence on the development of new technologies and innovations. When combined with smart services, the end-user experience can be significantly enhanced. Novel Design and the Applications of Smart-M3 Platforms in the Internet of Things: Emerging Research and Opportunities provides an innovative outlook on the development of open source technology for the creation of smart spaces and services. Including a range of relevant topics such as interoperability, system architecture, and information processing, this book is an ideal reference source for academics, researchers, graduate students, and practitioners interested in the latest advancements in the Internet of things.

This book discusses issues relating to the application of AI and computational modelling in criminal proceedings from a European perspective. Part one provides a definition of the topics. Rather than focusing on policing or prevention of crime - largely tackled by recent literature - it explores ways in which AI can affect the investigation and adjudication of crime. There are two main areas of application: the first is evidence gathering, which is addressed in Part two. This section examines how traditional evidentiary law is affected by both new ways of investigation - based on automated processes (often using machine learning) - and new kinds of evidence, automatically generated by AI instruments. Drawing on the comprehensive case law of the European Court of Human Rights, it also presents reflections on the reliability and, ultimately, the admissibility of such evidence. Part three investigates the second application area: judicial decision-making, providing an unbiased review of the meaning, benefits, and possible long-term effects of 'predictive justice' in the criminal field. It highlights the prediction of both violent behaviour, or recidivism, and future court decisions, based on precedents. Touching on the foundations of common law and civil law traditions, the book offers insights into the usefulness of 'prediction' in criminal proceedings.

Social media and new social facilities have made it necessary to develop new media design processes with different communication strategies in order to promote sustainable communication. Visual communication emphasizes messages that are transmitted through visual materials in order to effectively communicate emotions, thoughts, and concepts using symbols instead of words. Social networks present an ideal environment for utilizing this communication technique. New Media and Visual Communication in Social Networks is a pivotal scholarly publication that examines communication strategies in the context of social media and new digital media platforms and explores the effects of visual communication on social networks, visual identity, television, magazines, newspapers, and more. Highlighting a range of topics such as consumer behavior, visual identity, and digital pollution, this book is essential for researchers, practitioners, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and educators.

As the disciplines of art, technology, and information science collide, computer graphics and multimedia are presenting a myriad of applications and problems to professionals and scholars in Computer Science, Information Science, Digital Art, Multimedia, Educational Technology, and Media Arts. Today's digital scholar can use Computer Graphics and Multimedia: Applications, Problems and Solutions as a tool to explore the vast parameters of the applications, problems, and solutions related to digital disciplines. Contributing authors include computer scientists, multimedia researchers, computer artists, graphic designers, and digital media specialists. The book has an extensive range of topics for the digital scholar who wants to discover and research other areas within the computer graphics and multimedia disciplines beyond their own.

Digital technologies are deeply embedded in everyday life with opportunities for information access and perpetual social contact now mediating most of our activities and relationships. This book expands the lens of Cyberpsychology to consider how digital experiences play out across the various stages of people's lives. Most psychological research has focused on whether human-technology interactions are a 'good' or a 'bad' thing for humanity. This book offers a distinctive approach to the emergent area of Cyberpsychology, moving beyond these binary dilemmas and considering how popular technologies have come to frame human experience and relationships. In particular the authors explore the role of significant life stages in defining the evolving purpose of digital technologies. They discuss how people's symbiotic relationship with digital technologies has started to redefine our childhoods, how we experience ourselves, how we make friends, our experience of being alone, how we have sex and form romantic relationships, our capacity for being antisocial as well as the experience of growing older and dying. This interdisciplinary book will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners across psychology, digital technology and media studies as well as anyone interested in how technology influences our behaviour.

The book provides a detailed overview and analysis of important EU Internet regulatory challenges currently found in various key fields of law directly linked to the Internet such as information technology, consumer protection, personal data, e-commerce and copyright law. In addition, it aims to shed light on the content and importance of various pending legislative proposals in these fields, and of the Court of Justice of the European Union's recent case law in connection with solving the different problems encountered. The book focuses on challenging legal questions that have not been sufficiently analyzed, while also presenting original thinking in connection with the regulation of emerging legal questions. As such, it offers an excellent reference tool for researchers, policymakers, judges, practitioners and law students with a special interest in EU Internet law and regulation.

This book addresses the question of how competition authorities assess mergers in the Information Communication Technology (ICT) sector so as to promote competition in innovation. A closer look at the question reveals that it is far more complex and difficult to answer for the ICT, telecommunications and multi-sided platform (MSP) economy than for more traditional sectors of the economy. This has led many scholars to re-think and question whether the current merger control framework is suitable for the ICT sector, which is often also referred to as the new economy. The book pursues an interdisciplinary approach combining insights from law, economics and corporate strategy. Further, it has a comparative dimension, as it discusses the practices of the US, the EU and, wherever relevant, of other competition authorities from around the globe. Considering that the research was conducted in the EU, the practices of the European Commission remain a key aspect of the content.Considering its normative dimension, the book concentrates on the substantive aspects of merger control. To facilitate a better understanding of the most important points, the book also offers a brief overview of the procedural aspects of merger control in the EU, the US and the UK, and discusses recent amendments to Austrian and German law regarding the notification threshold. Given its scope, the book offers an invaluable guide for competition law scholars, practitioners in the field, and competition authorities worldwide.

This book focuses on novel and state-of-the-art scientific work in the area of detection and prediction techniques using information found generally in graphs and particularly in social networks. Community detection techniques are presented in diverse contexts and for different applications while prediction methods for structured and unstructured data are applied to a variety of fields such as financial systems, security forums, and social networks. The rest of the book focuses on graph-based techniques for data analysis such as graph clustering and edge sampling. The research presented in this volume was selected based on solid reviews from the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks, Analysis, and Mining (ASONAM '17). Chapters were then improved and extended substantially, and the final versions were rigorously reviewed and revised to meet the series standards. This book will appeal to practitioners, researchers and students in the field.

The rate of cybercrimes is increasing because of the fast-paced advancements in computer and internet technology. Crimes employing mobile devices, data embedding/mining systems, computers, network communications, or any malware impose a huge threat to data security. Countering Cyber Attacks and Preserving the Integrity and Availability of Critical Systems addresses current problems and issues emerging in cyber forensics and investigations and proposes new solutions that can be adopted and implemented to counter security breaches within various organizations. The publication examines a variety of topics such as advanced techniques for forensic developments in computer and communication-link environments and legal perspectives including procedures for cyber investigations, standards, and policies. It is designed for policymakers, forensic analysts, technology developers, security administrators, academicians, researchers, and students.

This important text/reference presents the first dedicated review of techniques for contactless 3D fingerprint identification, including novel and previously unpublished research. The text provides a systematic introduction to 3D fingerprint identification, covering the latest advancements in contactless 2D and 3D sensing technologies, and detailed discussions on each key aspect in the development of an effective 3D fingerprint identification system. Topics and features: introduces the key concepts and trends in the acquisition and identification of fingerprint images, and a range of 3D fingerprint imaging techniques; proposes a low-cost method for online 3D fingerprint image acquisition, and an efficient 3D fingerprint imaging approach using coloured photometric stereo; describes pre-processing operations on point cloud 3D fingerprint data, and explains the specialized operations for reconstructing 3D fingerprints from live finger scans; examines the representation of minutiae in 3D space, providing details on recovering these features from point cloud data, and on matching such 3D minutiae templates; reviews various 3D fingerprint matching methods, including binary surface code-based approaches and a tetrahedron-based matching approach; discusses the uniqueness of 3D fingerprints, evaluating the benefits of employing 3D fingerprint identification over conventional 2D fingerprint techniques. This unique work is a must-read for all researchers seeking to make further advances in this area, towards the exciting opportunities afforded by contactless 3D fingerprint identification for improving the hygiene, user convenience, and matching accuracy of fingerprint biometric technologies.

This book introduces social manufacturing, the next generation manufacturing paradigm that covers product life cycle activities that deal with Internet-based organizational and interactive mechanisms under the context of socio-technical systems in the fields of industrial and production engineering. Like its subject, the book's approach is multi-disciplinary, including manufacturing systems, operations management, computational social sciences and information systems applications. It reports on the latest research findings regarding the social manufacturing paradigm, the architecture, configuration and execution of social manufacturing systems and more. Further, it describes the individual technologies enabled by social manufacturing for each topic, supported by case studies. The technologies discussed include manufacturing resource minimalization and their socialized reorganizations, blockchain models in cybersecurity, computing and decision-making, social business relationships and organizational networks, open product design, social sensors and extended cyber-physical systems, and social factory and inter-connections. This book helps engineers and managers in industry to practice social manufacturing, as well as offering a systematic reference resource for researchers in manufacturing. Students also benefit from the detailed discussions of the latest research and technologies that will have been put into practice by the time they graduate.

To survive in today's competitive business environment, marketing professionals must look to develop innovative methods of reaching their customers and stakeholders. Web 2.0 provides a useful tool in developing the relationships between business and consumer. The Handbook of Research on Integrating Social Media into Strategic Marketing explores the use of social networking and other online media in marketing communications, including both best practices and common pitfalls to provide comprehensive coverage of the topic. This book is intended for marketing professionals, business managers, and anyone interested in how social media fits into today's marketing environments.

In today's society, the utilization of social media platforms has become an abundant forum for individuals to post, share, tag, and, in some cases, overshare information about their daily lives. As significant amounts of data flood these venues, it has become necessary to find ways to collect and evaluate this information. Social Media Data Extraction and Content Analysis explores various social networking platforms and the technologies being utilized to gather and analyze information being posted to these venues. Highlighting emergent research, analytical techniques, and best practices in data extraction in global electronic culture, this publication is an essential reference source for researchers, academics, and professionals.

Countries are increasingly introducing data localization laws and data export restrictions, threatening digital globalization and inhibiting cloud computing's adoption despite its acknowledged benefits. Through a cloud computing lens, this multi-disciplinary book examines the personal data transfers restriction under the EU Data Protection Directive (including the EUUS Privacy Shield and General Data Protection Regulation). It covers historical objectives and practical problems, showing why the focus should move from physical data location to effective jurisdiction over those controlling access to intelligible data and control of access to data through security measures. The book further discusses data localization laws' failure to solve concerns regarding the topical and contentious issue of mass state surveillance. Its arguments are also relevant to other data localization laws, cross-border transfers of non personal data and transfers not involving cloud computing. Comprehensive yet accessible, this book is of great value to academics in law, policy, computer science and technology. It is also highly relevant to cloud computing/technology organisations and other businesses in the EU and beyond, data privacy professionals, policymakers and regulators.

Since the dawn of the digital era, the transfer of knowledge has shifted from analog to digital, local to global, and individual to social. Complex networked communities are a fundamental part of these new information-based societies. Emerging Pedagogies in the Networked Knowledge Society: Practices Integrating Social Media and Globalization examines the production, dissemination, and consumption of knowledge within networked communities in the wider global context of pervasive Web 2.0 and social media services. This book will offer insight for business stakeholders, researchers, scholars, and administrators by highlighting the important concepts and ideas of information- and knowledge-based economies.