This book starts with the proposition that digital media invite play and indeed need to be played by their everyday users. Play is probably one of the most visible and powerful ways to appropriate the digital world. The diverse, emerging practices of digital media appear to be essentially playful: Users are involved and active, produce form and content, spread, exchange and consume it, take risks, are conscious of their own goals and the possibilities of achieving them, are skilled and know how to acquire more skills. They share a perspective of can-do, a curiosity of what happens next? Play can be observed in social, economic, political, artistic, educational and criminal contexts and endeavours. It is employed as a (counter) strategy, for tacit or open resistance, as a method and productive practice, and something people do for fun. The book aims to define a particular contemporary attitude, a playful approach to media. It identifies some common ground and key principles in this novel terrain. Instead of looking at play and how it branches into different disciplines like business and education, the phenomenon of play in digital media is approached unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries. The contributions in this book provide a glimpse of a playful technological revolution that is a joyful celebration of possibilities that new media afford. This book is not a practical guide on how to hack a system or to pirate music, but provides critical insights into the unintended, artistic, fun, subversive, and sometimes dodgy applications of digital media. Contributions from Chris Crawford, Mathias Fuchs, Rilla Khaled, Sybille Lammes, Eva and Franco Mattes, Florian 'Floyd' Mueller, Michael Nitsche, Julian Oliver, and others cover and address topics such as reflective game design, identity and people's engagement in online media, conflicts and challenging opportunities for play, playing with cartographical interfaces, player-emergent production practices, the re-purposing of data, game creation as an educational approach, the ludification of society, the creation of meaning within and without play, the internalisation and subversion of roles through play, and the boundaries of play.

This book explores the subject of artificial psychology and how the field must adapt human neuro-psychological testing techniques to provide adequate cognitive testing of advanced artificial intelligence systems. It shows how classical testing methods will reveal nothing about the cognitive nature of the systems and whether they are learning, reasoning, and evolving correctly; for these systems, the authors outline how testing techniques similar to/adapted from human psychological testing must be adopted, particularly in understanding how the system reacts to failure or relearning something it has learned incorrectly or inferred incorrectly. The authors provide insights into future architectures/capabilities that artificial cognitive systems will possess and how we can evaluate how well they are functioning. It discusses at length the notion of human/AI communication and collaboration and explores such topics as knowledge development, knowledge modeling and ambiguity management, artificial cognition and self-evolution of learning, artificial brain components and cognitive architecture, and artificial psychological modeling. Explores the concepts of Artificial Psychology and Artificial Neuroscience as applied to advanced artificially cognitive systems; Provides insight into the world of cognitive architectures and biologically-based computing designs which will mimic human brain functionality in artificial intelligent systems of the future; Provides description and design of artificial psychological modeling to provide insight into how advanced artificial intelligent systems are learning and evolving; Explores artificial reasoning and inference architectures and the types of modeling and testing that will be required to "trust" an autonomous artificial intelligent systems.

Many people today struggle with problematic ICT interfaces in their attempts to adapt to the ever-changing digital information environment. To effectively address these issues with strong, highly usable, and effective solutions, it is essential to keep pace with the newest advances in the field.""Handbook of Research on Digital Information Technologies: Innovations, Methods, and Ethical Issues"" addresses this need for complete information on the current state of best techniques and pracitices by presenting a full spectrum of successful designs, defined as communicative relation-building solutions, for individuals and collectives of interlocutors. The handbook also includes a longitudinal perspective of past mistakes, current trends and future opportunities, and is a must-have for beginners in the field as well as qualified professionals exploring the full potential of human interactions as facilitated by digital technologies.

This book covers ideas, methods, algorithms, and tools for the in-depth study of the performance and reliability of dependable fault-tolerant systems. The chapters identify the current challenges that designers and practitioners must confront to ensure the reliability, availability, and performance of systems, with special focus on their dynamic behaviors and dependencies. Topics include network calculus, workload and scheduling; simulation, sensitivity analysis and applications; queuing networks analysis; clouds, federations and big data; and tools. This collection of recent research exposes system researchers, performance analysts, and practitioners to a spectrum of issues so that they can address these challenges in their work.

The book reports on advanced topics in interactive robotics research and practice; in particular, it addresses non-technical obstacles to the broadest uptake of these technologies. It focuses on new technologies that can physically and cognitively interact with humans, including neural interfaces, soft wearable robots, and sensor and actuator technologies; further, it discusses important regulatory challenges, including but not limited to business models, standardization, education and ethical-legal-socioeconomic issues. Gathering the outcomes of the 1st INBOTS Conference (INBOTS2018), held on October 16-20, 2018 in Pisa, Italy, the book addresses the needs of a broad audience of academics and professionals working in government and industry, as well as end users. In addition to providing readers with detailed information and a source of inspiration for new projects and collaborations, it discusses representative case studies highlighting practical challenges in the implementation of interactive robots in a number of fields, as well as solutions to improve communication between different stakeholders. By merging engineering, medical, ethical and political perspectives, the book offers a multidisciplinary, timely snapshot of interactive robotics.

Online Harassment is one of the most serious problems in social media. To address it requires understanding the forms harassment takes, how it impacts the targets, who harasses, and how technology that stands between users and social media can stop harassers and protect users. The field of Human-Computer Interaction provides a unique set of tools to address this challenge. This book brings together experts in theory, socio-technical systems, network analysis, text analysis, and machine learning to present a broad set of analyses and applications that improve our understanding of the harassment problem and how to address it. This book tackles the problem of harassment by addressing it in three major domains. First, chapters explore how harassment manifests, including extensive analysis of the Gamer Gate incident, stylistic features of different types of harassment, how gender differences affect misogynistic harassment. Then, we look at the results of harassment, including how it drives people offline and the impacts it has on targets. Finally, we address techniques for mitigating harassment, both through automated detection and filtering and interface options that users control. Together, many branches of HCI come together to provide a comprehensive look at the phenomenon of online harassment and to advance the field toward effective human-oriented solutions.

This book provides theoretical perspectives and practical experiences on smart governance for smart cities. It presents a balanced linkage between research, policies and practices on this area. The authors discuss the sustainability challenges raised by rapid urbanization, challenges with smart governance models in various countries, and a new governance paradigm seen as a capable approach able to overcome social, economic and environmental sustainability problems. The authors include case studies on transformation, adaption and transfers; and country, regional, municipal contextualization. Also included are best practices on monitoring and evaluating smart governance and impact assessment. The book features contributions from researchers, academics, and practitioners in the field. Analyzes smart governance for cities from a variety of perspectives and a variety of sectors - both in theory and in practice Features information on the linkage between United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and smart governance Covers the connection between research, policies and practice in smart governance for smart cities

This book presents a comprehensive framework for IoT, including its architectures, security, privacy, network communications, and protocols. The book starts by providing an overview of the aforementioned research topics, future directions and open challenges that face the IoT development. The authors then discuss the main architectures in the field, which include Three- and Five-Layer Architectures, Cloud and Fog Based Architectures, a Social IoT Application Architecture. In the security chapter, the authors outline threats and attacks, privacy preservation, trust and authentication, IoT data security, and social awareness. The final chapter presents case studies including smart home, wearables, connected cars, industrial Internet, smart cities, IoT in agriculture, smart retail, energy engagement, IoT in healthcare, and IoT in poultry and farming. Discusses ongoing research into the connection of the physical and virtual worlds; Includes the architecture, security, privacy, communications, and protocols of IoT; Presents a variety of case studies in IoT including wearables, smart cities, and energy management.

As computers become more prevalent throughout society, the issue of computer-human interaction has become paramount to computer scientists and professionals furthering the computerization of organizations. "Computers, Human Interaction, and Organizations" revisits important theoretical and conceptual issues that have not been resolved in discussions of the increasing computerization of society. The authors here move beyond the technical issues relating to computerization to examine the social and political nature of information and computer technology using contemporary critical theory. This unique volume, therefore, offers a serious reflection on the proper scope and nature of computerization and the proper adjustment to and utilization of these instruments.

According to the authors, without the guiding use of theory, computer use will be misguided and socially disruptive. Without a critical analysis of the issues involved in computer-human interaction, the current push to have computers support intimate interaction among workers and other groups may never come to fruition. By contrast, recognizing the computer as an expression of the technological worldview allows one to recognize the limits as well as the promise of these instruments and to define the proper scope of computerization. The authors of this volume help the reader understand the social nature of computer technology and the limits of its application while circumscribing socially responsible uses of the new technology.

This book offers a systematic introduction to an understanding-oriented approach to multimedia content analysis. It integrates the visual understanding and learning models into a unified framework, within which the visual understanding guides the model learning while the learned models improve the visual understanding. More specifically, it discusses multimedia content representations and analysis including feature selection, feature extraction, image tagging, user-oriented tag recommendation and understanding-oriented multimedia applications. The book was nominated by the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and China Computer Federation as an outstanding PhD thesis. By providing the fundamental technologies and state-of-the-art methods, it is a valuable resource for graduate students and researchers working in the field computer vision and machine learning.

This book provides an in-depth insight into the emerging paradigm of End-User Development (EUD), discussing the diversity and potential for creating effective environments for end users. Containing a unique set of contributions from a number of international researchers and institutes, many relevant issues are discussed and solutions proposed, making important aspects of end-user development research available to a broader audience. Most people are familiar with the basic functionality and interfaces of computers. However, developing new or modified applications that can effectively support users' goals still requires considerable programming expertise that cannot be expected of everyone. One of the fundamental challenges that lie ahead is the development of environments that enable users with little or no programming experience to develop and modify their own applications. The ultimate goal is to empower people to flexibly employ and personalise advanced inform ation and communication technologies.

This book presents a technology to help speech-, hearing- and sight-impaired people. It explains how they will benefit from an enhancement in their ability to recognize and produce speech or to detect sounds in their surroundings. Additionally, it is considered how sound-based assistive technology might be applied to the areas of speech recognition, speech synthesis, environmental recognition, virtual reality and robots. The primary focus of this book is to provide an understanding of both the methodology and basic concepts of assistive technology rather than listing the variety of assistive devices developed. This book presents a number of different topics which are sufficiently independent from one another that the reader may begin at any chapter without lacking background information. Much of the research quoted in this book was conducted in the author's laboratories at Hokkaido University and University of Tokyo. This book offers the reader a better understanding of a number of unsolved problems that still persist in the field of sound-based assistive technology.

It has been over twenty years since developments in actor-network theory were first written on paper. Since then, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) community has begun to discover the power of using actor-network theory as an explanatory framework for much of its research. This research community has come to an understanding that information systems are, of necessity, socio-technical in nature and require a socio-technical approach to their investigation. Thanks to developments in actor-network theory, researchers can now approach people and technology as one single entity that gives support to social influences on technological innovations. Social Influences on Information and Communication Technology Innovations discusses in great detail the use of actor-network theory in offering explanations for socio-technical phenomena, focusing greatly on information communication technologies. Implementation and use of information and communication technologies inevitably involves the interactions of both technology and people. This publication facilitates international growth in the body of research investigating the value of using actor-network theory as a means of understanding socio-technical phenomena and technological innovation.

This book offers a compendium of best practices in game dynamics. It covers a wide range of dynamic game elements ranging from player behavior over artificial intelligence to procedural content generation. Such dynamics make virtual worlds more lively and realistic and they also create the potential for moments of amazement and surprise. In many cases, game dynamics are driven by a combination of random seeds, player records and procedural algorithms. Games can even incorporate the player's real-world behavior to create dynamic responses. The best practices illustrate how dynamic elements improve the user experience and increase the replay value. The book draws upon interdisciplinary approaches; researchers and practitioners from Game Studies, Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, Psychology and other disciplines will find this book to be an exceptional resource of both creative inspiration and hands-on process knowledge.

Computing is transforming how we interact with music. New theories and new technologies have emerged that present fresh challenges and novel perspectives for researchers and practitioners in music and human-computer interaction (HCI). In this collection, the interdisciplinary field of music interaction is considered from multiple viewpoints: designers, interaction researchers, performers, composers, audiences, teachers and learners, dancers and gamers. The book comprises both original research in music interaction and reflections from leading researchers and practitioners in the field. It explores a breadth of HCI perspectives and methodologies: from universal approaches to situated research within particular cultural and aesthetic contexts. Likewise, it is musically diverse, from experimental to popular, classical to folk, including tango, laptop orchestras, composition and free improvisation.

This book introduces a number of recent developments on connectivity of communication networks, ranging from connectivity of large static networks and connectivity of highly dynamic networks to connectivity of small to medium sized networks. This book also introduces some applications of connectivity studies in network optimization, in network localization, and in estimating distances between nodes. The book starts with an overview of the fundamental concepts, models, tools, and methodologies used for connectivity studies. The rest of the chapters are divided into four parts: connectivity of large static networks, connectivity of highly dynamic networks, connectivity of small to medium sized networks, and applications of connectivity studies.

This book explores the ways in which the broad range of technologies that make up the smart city infrastructure can be harnessed to incorporate more playfulness into the day-to-day activities that take place within smart cities, making them not only more efficient but also more enjoyable for the people who live and work within their confines. The book addresses various topics that will be of interest to playable cities stakeholders, including the human-computer interaction and game designer communities, computer scientists researching sensor and actuator technology in public spaces, urban designers, and (hopefully) urban policymakers. This is a follow-up to another book on Playable Cities edited by Anton Nijholt and published in 2017 in the same book series, Gaming Media and Social Effects.

This book demonstrates the use of a wide range of strategic engineering concepts, theories and applied case studies to improve the safety, security and sustainability of complex and large-scale engineering and computer systems. It first details the concepts of system design, life cycle, impact assessment and security to show how these ideas can be brought to bear on the modeling, analysis and design of information systems with a focused view on cloud-computing systems and big data analytics. This informative book is a valuable resource for graduate students, researchers and industry-based practitioners working in engineering, information and business systems as well as strategy.

Managing the Web of Things: Linking the Real World to the Web presents a consolidated and holistic coverage of engineering, management, and analytics of the Internet of Things. The web has gone through many transformations, from traditional linking and sharing of computers and documents (i.e., Web of Data), to the current connection of people (i.e., Web of People), and to the emerging connection of billions of physical objects (i.e., Web of Things). With increasing numbers of electronic devices and systems providing different services to people, Web of Things applications present numerous challenges to research institutions, companies, governments, international organizations, and others. This book compiles the newest developments and advances in the area of the Web of Things, ranging from modeling, searching, and data analytics, to software building, applications, and social impact. Its coverage will enable effective exploration, understanding, assessment, comparison, and the selection of WoT models, languages, techniques, platforms, and tools. Readers will gain an up-to-date understanding of the Web of Things systems that accelerates their research.

Every day we are bombarded with new technology products that are confusing and difficult to use. For example, the new touch-screen voting machines in Florida are so difficult to use that some elections have been nullified due to all of the errors voters made while using the machines. There has to be a way to make things easy-to-use. There is-and it is found inside the covers of this book.

Continuous improvements in technological applications have allowed more opportunities to develop systems with user-focused designs. This not only leads to higher success in day-to-day usage, but it increases the overall probability of technology adoption. Design Solutions for User-Centric Information Systems provides a comprehensive examination of the latest strategies and methods for creating technological systems with end users as the focal point of the design process. Highlighting innovative practices and applications across a variety of areas, such as cloud-based computing services, e-government adoption, and logistics evaluation, this book is an ideal reference source for computer engineers, practitioners, project managers, graduate students, and researchers interested in the enhancement of user-centric information system development.