This comprehensive textbook/reference presents a focused review of the state of the art in privacy research, encompassing a range of diverse topics. The first book of its kind designed specifically to cater to courses on privacy, this authoritative volume provides technical, legal, and ethical perspectives on privacy issues from a global selection of renowned experts. Features: examines privacy issues relating to databases, P2P networks, big data technologies, social networks, and digital information networks; describes the challenges of addressing privacy concerns in various areas; reviews topics of privacy in electronic health systems, smart grid technology, vehicular ad-hoc networks, mobile devices, location-based systems, and crowdsourcing platforms; investigates approaches for protecting privacy in cloud applications; discusses the regulation of personal information disclosure and the privacy of individuals; presents the tools and the evidence to better understand consumers' privacy behaviors.

This book provides a timely and unique survey of next-generation social computational methodologies. The text explains the fundamentals of this field, and describes state-of-the-art methods for inferring social status, relationships, preferences, intentions, personalities, needs, and lifestyles from human information in unconstrained visual data. Topics and features: includes perspectives from an international and interdisciplinary selection of pre-eminent authorities; presents balanced coverage of both detailed theoretical analysis and real-world applications; examines social relationships in human-centered media for the development of socially-aware video, location-based, and multimedia applications; reviews techniques for recognizing the social roles played by people in an event, and for classifying human-object interaction activities; discusses the prediction and recognition of human attributes via social media analytics, including social relationships, facial age and beauty, and occupation.

Developing a successful game in today's market is a challenging endeavor. Thousands of titles are published yearly, all competing for players' time and attention. Game analytics has emerged in the past few years as one of the main resources for ensuring game quality, maximizing success, understanding player behavior and enhancing the quality of the player experience. It has led to a paradigm shift in the development and design strategies of digital games, bringing data-driven intelligence practices into the fray for informing decision making at operational, tactical and strategic levels. Game Analytics - Maximizing the Value of Player Data is the first book on the topic of game analytics; the process of discovering and communicating patterns in data towards evaluating and driving action, improving performance and solving problems in game development and game research. Written by over 50 international experts from industry and research, it covers a comprehensive range of topics across more than 30 chapters, providing an in-depth discussion of game analytics and its practical applications. Topics covered include monetization strategies, design of telemetry systems, analytics for iterative production, game data mining and big data in game development, spatial analytics, visualization and reporting of analysis, player behavior analysis, quantitative user testing and game user research. This state-of-the-art volume is an essential source of reference for game developers and researchers. Key takeaways include: Thorough introduction to game analytics; covering analytics applied to data on players, processes and performance throughout the game lifecycle. In-depth coverage and advice on setting up analytics systems and developing good practices for integrating analytics in game-development and -management. Contributions by leading researchers and experienced professionals from the industry, including Ubisoft, Sony, EA, Bioware, Square Enix, THQ, Volition, and PlayableGames. Interviews with experienced industry professionals on how they use analytics to create hit games.

Teaches you to start up Nginx and quickly take your expertise to a level where you can comfortably work with various aspects of the web server and make informed design decisions for your web farm. Nginx powers more than 40% of the top 1000 websites and is among the handful of web servers that can handle more than 10K simultaneous connections. It has some features which are simply unparalleled. Nginx: From Beginner to Pro teaches the Nginx server in a practical way. Frequently, it is found that web administrators struggle to fix the skill set gaps that happen due to a platform change. Migration from IIS & Apache becomes tedious at best. The book is targeted toward real-world administrators who would want to get up to speed as soon as possible and make good, informed design decisions. First you will set up Nginx and understand the architectural nuances. Then you will learn how to scale out, secure, monitor and troubleshoot the web server. Once you are fully comfortable with Nginx, you will start learning about migrating applications (or its part) from IIS or Apache web servers. Finally, you will learn to troubleshoot and maintain your Nginx professionally. Written by an author who has gone through the rough phase while moving from IIS/Apache to Nginx, this book is practical and filled with step-by-step instructions to make your time with Nginx as straightforward as possible. What You Will Learn Install and set up Nginx on CentOS, Ubuntu & Mac. Understand Nginx modules and compiling Nginx with appropriate modules. Learn about basic configuration and architecture along with hosting nuances. Load balance Nginx and use it as a highly available web platform. Monitor traffic and automate common administrative tasks. Use scripts to perform routine checks for health issues. Implement security and authentication in Nginx. Learn how and what to migrate from IIS & Apache web servers. Who This Book Is For Provides a crisp background of Nginx and then gears towards technical and practical topics. You need to know HTTP protocol, and have basic knowledge of Linux and networking concepts. The target audience is web administrators who would like to learn the finer nuances of Nginx, or map their existing skillset from IIS or Apache.

This book explores how digital technology is altering the relationships between people and how the very nature of interface itself needs to be reconsidered to reflect this - how we can make sense of each other, handle ambiguities, negotiate differences, empathise and collectively make skilled judgments in our modern society. The author presents new directions for research at the relational-transactional intersection of contrasting disciplines of arts, science and technology, and in so doing, presents philosophical and artistic questions for future research on human connectivity in our digital age. The book presents frameworks and methods for conducting research and study of tacit engagement that includes ethnography, experiments, discourse analysis, gesture analysis, psycholinguistic analysis, artistic experiments, installations, and improvisation. Case studies illustrate the use of various methods and the application and emergence of frameworks. Tacit Engagement will be of interest to researchers, designers, teachers and students concerned with new media, social media and communications networks; interactive interfaces, including information systems, knowledge management, robotics, and presence technologies. Not since Michael Polanyi have we seen such wise science about the tacit: how we know more than we can tell. Gill brings to the present era of design and data a profoundly needed perspective on meaning that comes from social dialogue, skilled performance, relational gesture and rhythm. - Sha Xin Wei, Ph.D. (Synthesis, ASU)

Time is an exceptional dimension that is common to many application domains such as medicine, engineering, business, or science. Due to the distinct characteristics of time, appropriate visual and analytical methods are required to explore and analyze them. This book starts with an introduction to visualization and historical examples of visual representations. At its core, the book presents and discusses a systematic view of the visualization of time-oriented data along three key questions: what is being visualized (data), why something is visualized (user tasks), and how it is presented (visual representation). To support visual exploration, interaction techniques and analytical methods are required that are discussed in separate chapters. A large part of this book is devoted to a structured survey of 101 different visualization techniques as a reference for scientists conducting related research as well as for practitioners seeking information on how their time-oriented data can best be visualized.

In this book, the capability map, a novel general representation of the kinematic capabilities of a robot arm, is introduced. The capability map allows to determine how well regions of the workspace are reachable for the end effector in different orientations. It is a representation that can be machine processed as well as intuitively visualized for the human. The capability map and the derived algorithms are a valuable source of information for high- and low-level planning processes. The versatile applicability of the capability map is shown by examples from several distinct application domains. In human-robot interaction, a bi-manual interface for tele-operation is objectively evaluated. In low-level geometric planning, more human-like motion is planned for a humanoid robot while also reducing the computation time. And in high-level task reasoning, the suitability of a robot for a task is evaluated.

This book covers state-of-the-art topics on the practical implementation of Spoken Dialog Systems and intelligent assistants in everyday applications. It presents scientific achievements in language processing that result in the development of successful applications and addresses general issues regarding the advances in Spoken Dialog Systems with applications in robotics, knowledge access and communication. Emphasis is placed on the following topics: speaker/language recognition, user modeling / simulation, evaluation of dialog system, multi-modality / emotion recognition from speech, speech data mining, language resource and databases, machine learning for spoken dialog systems and educational and healthcare applications.

The book describes the K-Method which has been developed by the authors. The purpose of the K-Method is to negotiate and administrate a complex portfolio of customised materials, all belonging to the same purchasing group (e.g. labels). The underlying idea is to agree prices for specification features, instead of giving each material an individual price based on its unique specification. By doing so, a price formula will be agreed between the buyer and supplier which even defines prices of future materials with any kind of specification.

While standardization has empowered the software industry to substantially scale software development and to provide affordable software to a broad market, it often does not address smaller market segments, nor the needs and wishes of individual customers. Software product lines reconcile mass production and standardization with mass customization in software engineering. Ideally, based on a set of reusable parts, a software manufacturer can generate a software product based on the requirements of its customer. The concept of features is central to achieving this level of automation, because features bridge the gap between the requirements the customer has and the functionality a product provides. Thus features are a central concept in all phases of product-line development. The authors take a developer's viewpoint, focus on the development, maintenance, and implementation of product-line variability, and especially concentrate on automated product derivation based on a user's feature selection. The book consists of three parts. Part I provides a general introduction to feature-oriented software product lines, describing the product-line approach and introducing the product-line development process with its two elements of domain and application engineering. The pivotal part II covers a wide variety of implementation techniques including design patterns, frameworks, components, feature-oriented programming, and aspect-oriented programming, as well as tool-based approaches including preprocessors, build systems, version-control systems, and virtual separation of concerns. Finally, part III is devoted to advanced topics related to feature-oriented product lines like refactoring, feature interaction, and analysis tools specific to product lines. In addition, an appendix lists various helpful tools for software product-line development, along with a description of how they relate to the topics covered in this book. To tie the book together, the authors use two running examples that are well documented in the product-line literature: data management for embedded systems, and variations of graph data structures. They start every chapter by explicitly stating the respective learning goals and finish it with a set of exercises; additional teaching material is also available online. All these features make the book ideally suited for teaching - both for academic classes and for professionals interested in self-study.

Enterprise Interoperability is the ability of an enterprise or organisation to work with other enterprises or organisations without special effort. It is now recognised that interoperability of systems and thus sharing of information is not sufficient to ensure common understanding between enterprises. Knowledge of information meaning and understanding of how is to be used must also be shared if decision makers distributed between those enterprises in the network want to act consistently and efficiently. Industry's need for Enterprise Interoperability has been one of the significant drivers for research into the Internet of the Future. EI research will embrace and extend contributions from the Internet of Things and the Internet of Services, and will go on to drive the future needs for Internets of People, Processes, and Knowledge.

This thesis focuses on the problem of optimizing the quality of network multimedia services. This problem spans multiple domains, from subjective perception of multimedia quality to computer networks management. The work done in this thesis approaches the problem at different levels, developing methods for modeling the subjective perception of quality based on objectively measurable parameters of the multimedia coding process as well as the transport over computer networks. The modeling of subjective perception is motivated by work done in psychophysics, while using Machine Learning techniques to map network conditions to the human perception of video services. Furthermore, the work develops models for efficient control of multimedia systems operating in dynamic networked environments with the goal of delivering optimized Quality of Experience. Overall this thesis delivers a set of methods for monitoring and optimizing the quality of multimedia services that adapt to the dynamic environment of computer networks in which they operate.

How did the Commodore 64 conquer the hearts of millions and become a platform people still actively develop for even today? What made it so special? This book will appeal to both those who like tinkering with old technology as a hobby and nostalgic readers who simply want to enjoy a trip down memory lane. It discusses in a concise but rigorous format the different areas of home gaming and personal computing where the C64 managed to innovate and push forward existing boundaries. Starting from Jack Tramiel's vision of designing computers "for the masses, not the classes," the book introduces the 6510, VIC-II and SID chips that made the C64 unique. It briefly discusses its Basic programming language and then proceeds to illustrate not only many of the games that are still so fondly remembered but also the first generation of game engines that made game development more approachable among other topics that are often neglected but are necessary to provide a comprehensive overview of how far reaching theC64 influence was. Written in a straightforward and accessible style, readers will relive the dawn of modern technology and gain a better understanding of the legacy that was built, bit by bit, in those pioneering days by computers that had only a tiny fraction of the power modern machines have and, yet, were used to create the technological world we are now living in. With a foreword by Michael Tomczyk

Due to the increased global political importance of the nonprofit sector, its technological support and organizational characteristics have become important fields of research. In order to conduct effective work, nonprofits need to communicate and coordinate effectively. However, such settings are generally characterized by a lack of resources, an absence of formal hierarchical structures and differences in languages and culture among the activists. Modern technologies could help nonprofit networks in improving their working. In order to design appropriate technological support for such settings, it is important to understand their work practices, which widely differ from traditional business organizations. This book aims to strengthen the body of knowledge by providing user studies and concepts related to user centered technology design process for nonprofit settings. The examination of ethnographic studies and user centered evaluation of IT artifacts in practice will further the understanding of design requirements of these systems. This book includes chapters from leading scholars and practitioners on the technology design process examining human centered factors. The chapters will focus on developed and developing countries as they both have unique issues in technology design. The book will be useful or of interest to academics from a range of fields including information systems, human computer interaction, computer supported cooperative work and organizational science as well as for government officials and governmental organizations.

This book redefines community discovery in the new world of Online Social Networks and Web 2.0 applications, through real-world problems and applications in the context of the Web, pointing out the current and future challenges of the field. Particular emphasis is placed on the issues of community representation, efficiency and scalability, detection of communities in hypergraphs, such as multi-mode and multi-relational networks, characterization of social media communities and online privacy aspects of online communities. User Community Discovery is for computer scientists, data scientists, social scientists and complex systems researchers, as well as students within these disciplines, while the connections to real-world problem settings and applications makes the book appealing for engineers and practitioners in the industry, in particular those interested in the highly attractive fields of data science and big data analytics.

By bringing together various current direc tions, Software Project Management in a Changing World focuses on how people and organizations can make their processes more change-adaptive. The selected chapters closely correspond to the project management knowledge areas introduced by the Project Management Body of Knowledge, including its extension for managing software projects. The contributions are grouped into four parts, preceded by a general introduction. Part I "Fundamentals" provides in-depth insights into fundamental topics including resource allocation, cost estimation and risk management. Part II "Supporting Areas" presents recent experiences and results related to the management of quality systems, knowledge, product portfolios and glob al and virtual software teams. Part III "New Paradigms" details new and evolving software-development practices including agile, distributed and open and inner-source development. Finally, Part IV "Emerging Techniques" introduces search-based tech niques, social media, software process simulation and the efficient use of empirical data and their effects on software-management practices. This book will attract readers from both academia and practice with its excellent balance between new findings and experience of their usage in new contexts. Whenever appropriate, the presentation is based on evidence from empirical evaluation of the proposed approaches. For researchers and graduate students, it presents some of the latest methods and techniques to accommodate new challenges facing the discipline. For professionals, it serves as a source of inspiration for refining their project-management skills in new areas.

This book describes the theoretical foundations of cognitive infocommunications (CogInfoCom), and provides a survey on state-of-the-art solutions and applications within the field. The book covers aspects of cognitive infocommunications in research fields such as affective computing, BCI, future internet, HCI, HRI, sensory substitution, and virtual/augmented interactions, and also introduces newly proposed paradigms and initiatives under the field, including CogInfoCom channels, speechability and socio-cognitive ICT. The book focuses on describing the merging between humans and information and communications technology (ICT) at the level of cognitive capabilities with an approach towards developing future cognitive ICT.

This contributed volume presents state-of-the-art advances in logistics theory in various fields as well as case studies. The book reports on a number of recently conducted studies in the Dinalog and the EffizienzCluster LogistikRuhr, thus bridging the gap between different perspectives of theoretical and applied research. A selection of theoretical topics, practical examples, case studies and project reports is presented in this volume. The editors carefully selected contributions from a wide variety of projects, which were carried out in both the Dinalog cluster and the Effizienzcluster LogistikRuhr. The contributions are grouped in five main sections, each representing key domains in the evolution of logistics and supply chain management: sustainability, urban logistics, value chain management, IT-based innovation, knowledge management. This book is intended for both researchers and practitioners in the field of logistics and supply chain management, to serve as an important source of information for further research as well as to stimulate further innovation.

The main goal of this book is to help organizations improve their effort estimates and effort estimation processes by providing a step-by-step methodology that takes them through the creation and validation of models that are based on their own knowledge and experience. Such models, once validated, can then be used to obtain predictions, carry out risk analyses, enhance their estimation processes for new projects and generally advance them as learning organizations. Emilia Mendes presents the Expert-Based Knowledge Engineering of Bayesian Networks (EKEBNs) methodology, which she has used and adapted during the course of several industry collaborations with different companies world-wide over more than 6 years. The book itself consists of two major parts: first, the methodology's foundations in knowledge management, effort estimation (with special emphasis on the intricacies of software and Web development) and Bayesian networks are detailed; then six industry case studies are presented which illustrate the practical use of EKEBNs. Domain experts from each company participated in the elicitation of the bespoke models for effort estimation and all models were built employing the widely-used Netica (TM) tool. This part is rounded off with a chapter summarizing the experiences with the methodology and the derived models. Practitioners working on software project management, software process quality or effort estimation and risk analysis in general will find a thorough introduction into an industry-proven methodology as well as numerous experiences, tips and possible pitfalls invaluable for their daily work.

This book examines the principles of and advances in personalized task recommendation in crowdsourcing systems, with the aim of improving their overall efficiency. It discusses the challenges faced by personalized task recommendation when crowdsourcing systems channel human workforces, knowledge, skills and perspectives beyond traditional organizational boundaries. The solutions presented help interested individuals find tasks that closely match their personal interests and capabilities in a context of ever-increasing opportunities of participating in crowdsourcing activities. In order to explore the design of mechanisms that generate task recommendations based on individual preferences, the book first lays out a conceptual framework that guides the analysis and design of crowdsourcing systems. Based on a comprehensive review of existing research, it then develops and evaluates a new kind of task recommendation service that integrates with existing systems. The resulting prototype provides a platform for both the field study and the practical implementation of task recommendation in productive environments.

This book provides essential insights on the adoption of modern software engineering practices at large companies producing software-intensive systems, where hundreds or even thousands of engineers collaborate to deliver on new systems and new versions of already deployed ones. It is based on the findings collected and lessons learned at the Software Center (SC), a unique collaboration between research and industry, with Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg University and Malmoe University as academic partners and Ericsson, AB Volvo, Volvo Car Corporation, Saab Electronic Defense Systems, Grundfos, Axis Communications, Jeppesen (Boeing) and Sony Mobile as industrial partners. The 17 chapters present the "Stairway to Heaven" model, which represents the typical evolution path companies move through as they develop and mature their software engineering capabilities. The chapters describe theoretical frameworks, conceptual models and, most importantly, the industrial experiences gained by the partner companies in applying novel software engineering techniques. The book's structure consists of six parts. Part I describes the model in detail and presents an overview of lessons learned in the collaboration between industry and academia. Part II deals with the first step of the Stairway to Heaven, in which R&D adopts agile work practices. Part III of the book combines the next two phases, i.e., continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), as they are closely intertwined. Part IV is concerned with the highest level, referred to as "R&D as an innovation system," while Part V addresses a topic that is separate from the Stairway to Heaven and yet critically important in large organizations: organizational performance metrics that capture data, and visualizations of the status of software assets, defects and teams. Lastly, Part VI presents the perspectives of two of the SC partner companies. The book is intended for practitioners and professionals in the software-intensive systems industry, providing concrete models, frameworks and case studies that show the specific challenges that the partner companies encountered, their approaches to overcoming them, and the results. Researchers will gain valuable insights on the problems faced by large software companies, and on how to effectively tackle them in the context of successful cooperation projects.

This book reports on the latest technological and clinical advances in the field of neurorehabilitation. It is, however, much more than a conventional survey of the state-of-the-art in neurorehabilitation technologies and therapies. It was written on the basis of a week of lively discussions between PhD students and leading research experts during the Summer School on Neurorehabilitation (SSNR2014), held September 15-19 in Baiona, Spain. Its unconventional format makes it a perfect guide for all PhD students, researchers and professionals interested in gaining a multidisciplinary perspective on current and future neurorehabilitation scenarios. The book addresses various aspects of neurorehabilitation research and practice, including a selection of common impairments affecting CNS function, such as stroke and spinal cord injury, as well as cutting-edge rehabilitation and diagnostics technologies, including robotics, neuroprosthetics, brain-machine interfaces and neuromodulation.

The development of low-cost, compact digital storage, sensors and radio modules allows us to embed digital memories into products to record key events. Such computationally enhanced products can perceive and control their environment, analyze their observations, and communicate with other smart objects and human users. Digital product memories (DPMs) will play a key role in the upcoming fourth industrial revolution based on cyber-physical production systems, resulting in improvements in traceability and quality assurance, more efficient and flexible production, logistics, customization, and recycling, and better information for the consumer. SemProM was a major industrial and academic research project that examined all aspects of the design and implementation of semantic product memories, and this book is a comprehensive assessment of the results achieved. The introductory chapters explain the fundamental ideas and the organization of the related project, while the remaining parts explain how to build, model and process DPMs, multimodal interaction using them, and selected applications. This work is inherently multidisciplinary and the related ideas, technologies, and implementations draw on results in fields such as semantic technologies, machine-to-machine communication, intelligent sensor networks, instrumented environments, embedded systems, smart objects, RFID technology, security, and privacy. The contributing authors are leading scientists and engineers, representing key academic teams and companies. The book explains successful deployment in applications such as manufacturing, green logistics, retail, healthcare, and food distribution, and it will be of value to both researchers and practitioners.

This book aims to deconstruct ethnography to alert systems designers, and other stakeholders, to the issues presented by new approaches that move beyond the studies of 'work' and 'work practice' within the social sciences (in particular anthropology and sociology). The theoretical and methodological apparatus of the social sciences distort the social and cultural world as lived in and understood by ordinary members, whose common-sense understandings shape the actual milieu into which systems are placed and used. In Deconstructing Ethnography the authors show how 'new' calls are returning systems design to 'old' and problematic ways of understanding the social. They argue that systems design can be appropriately grounded in the social through the ordinary methods that members use to order their actions and interactions. This work is written for post-graduate students and researchers alike, as well as design practitioners who have an interest in bringing the social to bear on design in a systematic rather than a piecemeal way. This is not a 'how to' book, but instead elaborates the foundations upon which the social can be systematically built into the design of ubiquitous and interactive systems.

The interaction between a user and a device forms the foundation of today's application design. Covering the following topics: A suite of five structural principles helping designers to structure their mockups; An agile method for exploiting desktop eye tracker equipment in combination with mobile devices; An approach to explore large-scale collections based on classification systems; A framework based on the use of modeling and components composition techniques to simplify the development of organizational collaborative systems; A low-cost virtual reality system that provides highly satisfying virtual experiences; Popular hardware and software tools and technologies for developing augmented and virtual reality applications; An implementation to handle connectivity between virtual reality applications and SensAble (R) Technology Phantom Haptic Devices; The results of a research study implementing a teaching technological strategy to help Down syndrome children develop their reading skills; Platform independent models decreasing the level of cohesion between communication technologies and software for ubiquitous computing; A method for applying gamification as a tool to improve the participation and motivation of people in performing different tasks. New Trends in Interaction, Virtual Reality and Modeling collects the best research from Interaccion 2012 and MexIHC 2012, and presents the state-of-the-art in human-computer interaction, user interfaces, user experience and virtual reality. Written by researchers from leading universities, research institutes and industry, this volume forms a valuable source of reference for researchers in HCI and VR.