This book presents a thorough analysis of gestural data extracted from raw images and/or range data with an aim to recognize the gestures conveyed by the data. It covers image morphological analysis, type-2 fuzzy logic, neural networks and evolutionary computation for classification of gestural data. The application areas include the recognition of primitive postures in ballet/classical Indian dances, detection of pathological disorders from gestural data of elderly people, controlling motion of cars in gesture-driven gaming and gesture-commanded robot control for people with neuro-motor disability. The book is unique in terms of its content, originality and lucid writing style. Primarily intended for graduate students and researchers in the field of electrical/computer engineering, the book will prove equally useful to computer hobbyists and professionals engaged in building firmware for human-computer interfaces. A prerequisite of high school level mathematics is sufficient to understand most of the chapters in the book. A basic background in image processing, although not mandatory, would be an added advantage for certain sections.

A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.
Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don't know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the "impossible."
For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don't know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.
Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications "The Black Swan" will change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. "The Black Swan" is a landmark book-itself a black swan.

"From the Hardcover edition."

Interaction with computers is becoming an increasingly ubiquitous and public affair. With more and more interactive digital systems being deployed in places such as museums, city streets and performance venues, understanding how to design for them is becoming ever more pertinent. Crafting interactions for these public settings raises a host of new challenges for human-computer interaction, widening the focus of design from concern about an individual's dialogue with an interface to also consider the ways in which interaction affects and is affected by spectators and bystanders.

"Designing Interfaces in Public Settings" takes a performative perspective on interaction, exploring a series of empirical studies of technology at work in public performance environments. From interactive storytelling to mobile devices on city streets, from digital telemetry systems on fairground rides to augmented reality installation interactive, the book documents the design issues emerging from the changing role of technology as it pushes out into our everyday lives.

Building a design framework from these studies and the growing body of literature examining public technologies, this book provides a new perspective for understanding human-computer interaction. Mapping out this new and challenging design space, "Designing Interfaces in Public Settings "offers both conceptual understandings and practical strategies for interaction design practitioners, artists working with technology, and computer scientists.

"

"Human Factors in System Design, Development, and Testing" describes engineering system design as a behavioral process, a process which raises questions the designer must answer. It focuses on the concepts underlying the design process, culminating in a behavioral theory of the design process. Special effort has been made to depict human factors design as it actually occurs. Particular attention is paid to users of the design products, with special emphasis on design for the elderly and handicapped.
Written by one of the first leaders in human factors, this book features:
*the use of a large scale survey of design specialists to determine how design issues and problems are dealt with in real life;
*an analysis of the engineering design process as actually being based on cognitive behaviors; and
*the development of a behavioral theory of design.

This book reports on the latest advances in the modeling, analysis and efficient management of information in Internet of Things (IoT) applications in the context of 5G access technologies. It presents cutting-edge applications made possible by the implementation of femtocell networks and millimeter wave communications solutions, examining them from the perspective of the universally and constantly connected IoT. Moreover, it describes novel architectural approaches to the IoT and presents the new framework possibilities offered by 5G mobile networks, including middleware requirements, node-centrality and the location of extensive functionalities at the edge. By providing researchers and professionals with a timely snapshot of emerging mobile communication systems, and highlighting the main pitfalls and potential solutions, the book fills an important gap in the literature and will foster the further developments of 5G hosting IoT devices.

"User Interfaces for All" is the first book dedicated to the issues of Universal Design and Universal Access in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Universal Design (or Design for All) is an inclusive and proactive approach seeking to accommodate diversity in the users and usage contexts of interactive products, applications, and services, starting from the design phase of the development life cycle. The ongoing paradigm shift toward a knowledge-intensive information society is already bringing about radical changes in the way people work and interact with each other and with information. The requirement for Universal Design stems from the growing impact of the fusion of the emerging technologies, and from the different dimensions of diversity, which are intrinsic to the information society.
This book unfolds the various aspects of this ongoing evolution from a variety of viewpoints. It's a collection of 30 chapters written by leading international authorities, affiliated with academic, research, and industrial organizations, and non-market institutions. The book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in the field, and includes contributions from a variety of theoretical and applied disciplines and research themes.
This book can also be used for teaching purposes in HCI courses at the undergraduate as well as graduate level. Students will be introduced to the human-, organizational-, and technology-oriented dimensions that call for a departure from traditional approaches to user interface development. Students will also get an overview of novel methods, techniques, tools, and frameworks for the design, implementation, and evaluation of user interfaces that are universally accessible and usable by the broadest possible end-user population.
This comprehensive book is targeted to a broad readership, including HCI researchers, user interface designers, computer scientists, software engineers, ergonomists and usability engineers, Human Factors researchers and practitioners, organizational psychologists, system/product designers, sociologists, policy- and decision makers, scientists in government, industry and education, as well as assistive technology and rehabilitation experts.

This book offers readers fresh insights on applying Extended Reality to Digital Anatomy, a novel emerging discipline. Indeed, the way professors teach anatomy in classrooms is changing rapidly as novel technology-based approaches become ever more accessible. Recent studies show that Virtual (VR), Augmented (AR), and Mixed-Reality (MR) can improve both retention and learning outcomes. Readers will find relevant tutorials about three-dimensional reconstruction techniques to perform virtual dissections. Several chapters serve as practical manuals for students and trainers in anatomy to refresh or develop their Digital Anatomy skills. We developed this book as a support tool for collaborative efforts around Digital Anatomy, especially in distance learning, international and interdisciplinary contexts. We aim to leverage source material in this book to support new Digital Anatomy courses and syllabi in interdepartmental, interdisciplinary collaborations. Digital Anatomy - Applications of Virtual, Mixed and Augmented Reality provides a valuable tool to foster cross-disciplinary dialogues between anatomists, surgeons, radiologists, clinicians, computer scientists, course designers, and industry practitioners. It is the result of a multidisciplinary exercise and will undoubtedly catalyze new specialties and collaborative Master and Doctoral level courses world-wide. In this perspective, the UNESCO Chair in digital anatomy was created at the Paris Descartes University in 2015 (www.anatomieunesco.org). It aims to federate the education of anatomy around university partners from all over the world, wishing to use these new 3D modeling techniques of the human body.

Cognitive task analysis is a broad area consisting of tools and techniques for describing the knowledge and strategies required for task performance. Cognitive task analysis has implications for the development of expert systems, training and instructional design, expert decision making and policymaking. It has been applied in a wide range of settings, with different purposes, for instance: specifying user requirements in system design or specifying training requirements in training needs analysis. The topics to be covered by this work include: general approaches to cognitive task analysis, system design, instruction, and cognitive task analysis for teams. The work settings to which the tools and techniques described in this work have been applied include: 911 dispatching, faultfinding on board naval ships, design aircraft, and various support systems.
The editors' goal in this book is to present in a single source a comprehensive, in-depth introduction to the field of cognitive task analysis. They have attempted to include as many examples as possible in the book, making it highly suitable for those wishing to undertake a cognitive task analysis themselves. The book also contains a historical introduction to the field and an annotated bibliography, making it an excellent guide to additional resources.

Human factors considerations are increasingly being incorporated into the product design process. Users are seen more as being important factors in the overall look and usability of products than just as passive users. We are now treated as cognitive and physical components of the person/product system. The author, who is one of the leading lights in the field of cognitive ergonomics, looks at approaches that assume that if a task can be accomplished with a reasonable degree of efficiency and within acceptable levels of comfort, then the product can be seen as fitting to the user. In this book it is argued that in practice these approaches can be dehumanising. People are more than merely physical and cognitive processors. They have hopes, fears, dreams, values and aspirations, indeed these are the very things that make us human.
Designing Pleasurable Products looks both at and beyond usability, considering how products can appeal to use holistically, leading to products that are a joy to own.

eBook available with sample pages: 020330568X

The potential of new information technologies to support learning has been widely recognized, and educational institutions at all levels have invested heavily in realising such potential. Depite a good deal of early interest in using computers to 'individualize' learning, one of the clearest findings of recent research in computer-based learning is that learning is often positively affected by peer interaction. Learning with Computers brings together a collection of chapters from well-known researchers in this field, and will be of interest to those working within psychology and education.

Related link: Free Email Alerting

This special issue contains essays regarding the CHI '95 conference, which featured a panel titled, Discount or Disservice? Discount Usability Analysis: Evaluation at a Bargain Price or Simply Damaged Merchandise? Wayne Gray, who organized the panel, presented a controversial critique of studies that had evaluated various usability evaluation methods (UEMs). The level of interest in this discussion led Gray to propose a review article that dealt with the issues in a more systematic fashion. The resulting essay, written by Gray and his collaborator Marilyn Salzman, conducted an in-depth review of a series of influential studies that used experimental methods to compare a variety of UEMs. Gray and Salzman's analysis was framed using Cook and Campbell's (1979) well-known discussion of various forms of validity. They used this to evaluate numerous details of these comparative studies, and they concluded that the studies fell short on the criteria by which good experimental studies are designed and interpreted.

In his remarkable ethnography of computer engineers, Gary Downey investigates the interface between the human body and the machine. Drawing on interviews, observations and personal interaction with engineers, Downey documents the everyday power of technologys dominant image in our society.
Downey argues that we need to appreciate how deeply connected we are to The Machine, and that it would be hugely beneficial if we could understand ourselves and machines as partially configured of the other - we as part machines, machines as part humans. In this way, we can begin to see both the power and the limitations of technology.

In his remarkable ethnography of computer engineers, Gary Downey investigates the interface between the human body and the machine. Drawing on interviews, observations and personal interaction with engineers, Downey documents the everyday power of technologys dominant image in our society.
Downey argues that we need to appreciate how deeply connected we are to The Machine, and that it would be hugely beneficial if we could understand ourselves and machines as partially configured of the other - we as part machines, machines as part humans. In this way, we can begin to see both the power and the limitations of technology.

Noise is everywhere and in most applications that are related to audio and speech, such as human-machine interfaces, hands-free communications, voice over IP (VoIP), hearing aids, teleconferencing/telepresence/telecollaboration systems, and so many others, the signal of interest (usually speech) that is picked up by a microphone is generally contaminated by noise. As a result, the microphone signal has to be cleaned up with digital signal processing tools before it is stored, analyzed, transmitted, or played out. This cleaning process is often called noise reduction and this topic has attracted a considerable amount of research and engineering attention for several decades. One of the objectives of this book is to present in a common framework an overview of the state of the art of noise reduction algorithms in the single-channel (one microphone) case. The focus is on the most useful approaches, i.e., filtering techniques (in different domains) and spectral enhancement methods. The other objective of Noise Reduction in Speech Processing is to derive all these well-known techniques in a rigorous way and prove many fundamental and intuitive results often taken for granted. This book is especially written for graduate students and research engineers who work on noise reduction for speech and audio applications and want to understand the subtle mechanisms behind each approach. Many new and interesting concepts are presented in this text that we hope the readers will find useful and inspiring.

This volume reveals the history of Information Architecture (IA), reflects on the relationship between practice and research within the discipline, and presents educators with the latest models, frameworks and theories that have emerged from the Information Architecture Academics and Practitioners Roundtable between 2014 and 2019. The most comprehensive and up-to-date overview of Information Architecture so far, this collection is a valuable tool for teachers, researchers, and practitioners interested in recent advances in information architecture in areas such as pervasive computing and embodiment, artificial intelligence, design practice, diversity and ethics in design, and critique. The information landscape has grown more complex, porous and connected-the information challenges of smart phones, sensors and IoT demand focused attention from organizations that often embrace a 'move fast and break things' ethos. This book not only explores the shift from Classical IA to Contemporary IA-it asks, are today's creators prepared to solve the challenges ahead? Have industry-led disciplines abdicated their responsibility to the people who inhabit current information environments? Will this discipline persist? Advances in Information Architecture examines the maturity of the field, revisits the discipline's efforts to transform itself in 2013 with the publication of "Reframing Information Architecture", and considers the opportunities that remain to bridge the academic and practitioner communities.

"Dynamic Provisioning for Community Services" outlines a dynamic provisioning and maintenance mechanism in a running distributed system, e.g. the grid, which can be used to maximize the utilization of computing resources and user demands. The book includes a complete and reliable maintenance system solution for the large-scale distributed system and an interoperation mechanism for the grid middleware deployed in the United States, Europe, and China. The experiments and evaluations have all been practically implemented for ChinaGrid, and the best practices established can help readers to construct reliable distributed systems.
This book is intended for researchers, developers, and graduate students in the fields of grid computing, service-oriented architecture and dynamic maintenance for large distributed systems.
Li Qi is an Associate Professor and the Deputy Director of the R&D Center for the Internet of Things at the Third Research Institute of Ministry of Public Security (TRIMPS), China. Hai Jin is a Professor and the Director of Department of Computer Science, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China.
"

Providing a comprehensive introduction into an overview of the field of pervasive healthcare applications, this volume incorporates a variety of timely topics ranging from medical sensors and hardware infrastructures, to software platforms and applications and addresses issues of user experience and technology acceptance. The recent developments in the area of information and communication technologies have laid the groundwork for new patient-centred healthcare solutions. While the majority of computer-supported healthcare tools designed in the last decades focused mainly on supporting care-givers and medical personnel, this trend changed with the introduction of pervasive healthcare technologies, which provide supportive and adaptive services for a broad variety and diverse set of end users. With contributions from key researchers the book integrates the various aspects of pervasive healthcare systems including application design, hardware development, system implementation, hardware and software infrastructures as well as end-user aspects providing an excellent overview of this important and evolving field.

Computers are increasingly able to mimic abilities we often think of as exclusively human - memory, decision-making and now, speech. A new generation of speech recognition systems can make at least some attempt at understanding what is said to them and can respond accordingly. These systems are coming into daily use for home banking, for airline flights enquiries and for placing orders over the telephone and are fast becoming more powerful and more pervasive. Using data taken from a major, European Union funded project on speech understanding, the SunDial project, this book shows how this data may be analyzed to yield important conclusions about the organization of both human-human and human-computer information dialogues. It describes the Wizard-of-Oz method of collecting speech dialogues from people who believe they are interacting with a speech understanding system before that system has been fully designed or built and it shows how the resulting dialogues may be analyzed to guide further design. This book provides detailed and comparative studies of human and human-computer speech dialogues, including analyses of opening and closing sequences and turn-taking.

This book's purpose is to offer various perspectives relating to the development, effectiveness, and implementation of interactive computing technology for health promotion--programs and interventions aimed at improving various health-related outcomes such as involvement in care, quality of life, adherence, disease management, healthy lifestyle, and more. Its coverage includes:
*conceptual foundations for examining how characteristics of media, messages, and users relate to one another and how interactive media can effectively and appropriately promote health outcomes;
*examinations of the development, utilization, and evaluation of specific computer applications for health promotion featuring discussions of the theoretical rationale for the program, the targeted audience, research on the program's effectiveness, and implications for future program development; and
*analyses of critical issues such as potential benefits and limitations of technology on the delivery of care, institutional obstacles to the adoption of computing technology, and prospects for integrating information technology into the health system.

This book's purpose is to offer various perspectives relating to the development, effectiveness, and implementation of interactive computing technology for health promotion--programs and interventions aimed at improving various health-related outcomes such as involvement in care, quality of life, adherence, disease management, healthy lifestyle, and more. Its coverage includes:
*conceptual foundations for examining how characteristics of media, messages, and users relate to one another and how interactive media can effectively and appropriately promote health outcomes;
*examinations of the development, utilization, and evaluation of specific computer applications for health promotion featuring discussions of the theoretical rationale for the program, the targeted audience, research on the program's effectiveness, and implications for future program development; and
*analyses of critical issues such as potential benefits and limitations of technology on the delivery of care, institutional obstacles to the adoption of computing technology, and prospects for integrating information technology into the health system.

The Great East Japan Earthquake, which occurred on March 11, 2011, reminded us that we were just one species within the great cycle of life on earth, that we were allowed to survive only because of nature, and that the idea that we were somehow able to conquer nature was simply an illusion. Now more than ever it is time that we confront head-on the change from the "underground resources" type of civilization to one with a new way of life and technology that embraces a sense of nature. To do so, we must learn from nature, the only sustainable society on earth, and create technology that embraces such a view of nature. We call such technology, which cleverly revives nature's greatness, Nature Technology. Taking a casual glance at nature, a nest of termites in the savanna region can be observed to maintain a steady temperature of 30 DegreesC despite the fact that the outside air temperature ranges from 50 DegreesC during the day to nearly 0 DegreesC at night. There are countless numbers of open pores just several billionths of a meter (nanometer) wide in the "earth" of the nest, which serve to regulate the temperature and humidity. In fact, all kinds of "earth" have these pores (clay mineral with aggregated structures) and air conditioners that require no electricity have been created by hardening this earth while preserving its structure; a cooling floor or wall becomes the alternative to a conventional air conditioner. This book provides many such examples of how Nature Technology can support a new lifestyle that is both environmentally sound and spiritually uplifting.

Contents:
Part 1 The communication process: human-computer-human interaction - how computers affect interpersonal communication, Rodney Fuller; designing for cognitive communication - epistemic fidelity or mediating collaborative inquiry?, Jeremy Roschelle; computer-mediated interpersonal communication - the HCHI approach, Lajos Balint. Part 2 Knowledge representation: mapping the mapper, John Wood and Paul Taylor; mapping spatial cognition with computers, Phil Moose et al. Part 3 Co-operative work: the world view of collaborative tools, Munir Mandviwalla; computer- based simulation models for problem-solving - communicating problem understandings, Ray Paul and Peter Thomas; the effects of combining interactive graphics and text in computer-mediated small group decision- making, Jozsef Toth. Postscript - a convergence of disciplines.

Man-machine interaction is the gateway providing access to functions and services, which, due to the ever increasing complexity of smart systems, threatens to become a bottleneck. This book therefore introduces not only advanced interfacing concepts, but also gives insight into the related theoretical background.This refers mainly to the realization of video-based multimodal interaction via gesture, mimics, and speech, but also to interacting with virtual object in virtual environments, cooperating with local or remote robots, and user assistance.

While most publications in the field of human factors engineering focus on interface design, this book puts special emphasis on implementation aspects. To this end it is accompanied by software development environments for image processing, classification, and virtual environment implementation. In addition a test data base is included for gestures, head pose, facial expressions, full-body person recognition, and people tracking. These data are used for the examples throughout the book, but are also meant to encourage the reader to start experimentation on his own.

Thus the book may serve as a self-contained introduction both for researchers and developers of man-machine interfaces. It may also be used for graduate-level university courses.

There is perhaps no facet of modern society where the influence of computer automation has not been felt. Flight management systems for pilots, diagnostic and surgical aids for physicians, navigational displays for drivers, and decision-aiding systems for air-traffic controllers, represent only a few of the numerous domains in which powerful new automation technologies have been introduced. The benefits that have been reaped from this technological revolution have been many. At the same time, automation has not always worked as planned by designers, and many problems have arisen--from minor inefficiencies of operation to large-scale, catastrophic accidents. Understanding how humans interact with automation is vital for the successful design of new automated systems that are both safe and efficient.
The influence of automation technology on human performance has often been investigated in a fragmentary, isolated manner, with investigators conducting disconnected studies in different domains. There has been little contact between these endeavors, although principles gleaned from one domain may have implications for another. Also, with a few exceptions, the research has tended to be empirical and only theory-driven. In recent years, however, various groups of investigators have begun to examine human performance in automated systems in general and to develop theories of human interaction with automation technology.
This book presents the current theories and assesses the impact of automation on different aspects of human performance. Both basic and applied research is presented to highlight the general principles of human-computer interaction in several domains where automation technologies are widely implemented. The major premise is that a broad-based, theory-driven approach will have significant implications for the effective design of both current and future automation technologies. This volume will be of considerable value to researchers in human factors, human-computer interaction, aviation and cognitive psychology, industrial engineering--and related disciplines as well as computer scientists, aeronautical, biomedical, and mechanical engineers. In addition, it should interest others involved in the design and manufacture of automation technologies.
Part I covers broad theoretical perspectives and concepts in automation research. Part II assesses the impact of automation on different aspects of human performance, including monitoring, mental workload, situational awareness, vigilance, decision making, and supervisory control. Aspects of team performance in automated systems are also discussed. Part III examines issues related to human performance in different domains where automation technologies have been introduced including: aviation, different modes of transportation, motor vehicles on the road, maritime operations, medical systems, quality control and maintenance, and oil and gas pipeline operations. Part IV speculates on the future relationship between humans and automation and explores this relationship in the context of understanding the "teleology," or grand purpose in design, of automation technology.