This book interconnects two essential disciplines to study the perception of speech: Neuroscience and Quality of Experience, which to date have rarely been used together for the purposes of research on speech quality perception. In five key experiments, the book demonstrates the application of standard clinical methods in neurophysiology on the one hand and of methods used in fields of research concerned with speech quality perception on the other. Using this combination, the book shows that speech stimuli with different lengths and different quality impairments are accompanied by physiological reactions related to quality variations, e.g., a positive peak in an event-related potential. Furthermore, it demonstrates that - in most cases - quality impairment intensity has an impact on the intensity of physiological reactions.

When we look at some of the most pressing issues in environmental politics today, it is hard to avoid data technologies. Big data, artificial intelligence, and data dashboards all promise "revolutionary" advances in the speed and scale at which governments, corporations, conservationists, and even individuals can respond to environmental challenges. By bringing together scholars from geography, anthropology, science and technology studies, and ecology, The Nature of Data explores how the digital realm is a significant site in which environmental politics are waged. This collection as a whole makes the argument that we cannot fully understand the current conjuncture in critical, global environmental politics without understanding the role of data platforms, devices, standards, and institutions. In particular, The Nature of Data addresses the contested practices of making and maintaining data infrastructure, the imaginaries produced by data infrastructures, the relations between state and civil society that data infrastructure reworks, and the conditions under which technology can further socio-ecological justice instead of re-entrenching state and capitalist power. This innovative volume presents some of the first research in this new but rapidly growing subfield that addresses the role of data infrastructures in critical environmental politics.

Construct, analyze, and visualize networks with networkx, a Python language module. Network analysis is a powerful tool you can apply to a multitude of datasets and situations. Discover how to work with all kinds of networks, including social, product, temporal, spatial, and semantic networks. Convert almost any real-world data into a complex network--such as recommendations on co-using cosmetic products, muddy hedge fund connections, and online friendships. Analyze and visualize the network, and make business decisions based on your analysis. If you're a curious Python programmer, a data scientist, or a CNA specialist interested in mechanizing mundane tasks, you'll increase your productivity exponentially. Complex network analysis used to be done by hand or with non-programmable network analysis tools, but not anymore! You can now automate and program these tasks in Python. Complex networks are collections of connected items, words, concepts, or people. By exploring their structure and individual elements, we can learn about their meaning, evolution, and resilience. Starting with simple networks, convert real-life and synthetic network graphs into networkx data structures. Look at more sophisticated networks and learn more powerful machinery to handle centrality calculation, blockmodeling, and clique and community detection. Get familiar with presentation-quality network visualization tools, both programmable and interactive--such as Gephi, a CNA explorer. Adapt the patterns from the case studies to your problems. Explore big networks with NetworKit, a high-performance networkx substitute. Each part in the book gives you an overview of a class of networks, includes a practical study of networkx functions and techniques, and concludes with case studies from various fields, including social networking, anthropology, marketing, and sports analytics. Combine your CNA and Python programming skills to become a better network analyst, a more accomplished data scientist, and a more versatile programmer. What You Need: You will need a Python 3.x installation with the following additional modules: Pandas (>=0.18), NumPy (>=1.10), matplotlib (>=1.5), networkx (>=1.11), python-louvain (>=0.5), NetworKit (>=3.6), and generalizesimilarity. We recommend using the Anaconda distribution that comes with all these modules, except for python-louvain, NetworKit, and generalizedsimilarity, and works on all major modern operating systems.

This book features selected papers presented at the International Conference on Information Management and Machine Intelligence (ICIMMI 2019), held at the Poornima Institute of Engineering & Technology, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, on December 14-15, 2019. It covers a range of topics, including data analytics; AI; machine and deep learning; information management, security, processing techniques and interpretation; applications of artificial intelligence in soft computing and pattern recognition; cloud-based applications for machine learning; application of IoT in power distribution systems; as well as wireless sensor networks and adaptive wireless communication.

This book presents selected research and development on virtual reality (VR) and serious games (SG) applications to assist children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in their learning of different skills. Children with ASD have challenges to learn skills of learning, living, and working, due to their cognitive and behavioral limitations. The authors and their research teams of this book have many years' research experience developing innovative and interactive VR and SG technology for the special needs education. More specifically, several VR serious games are designed to train children with ASD on learning skill, life skill, and job skill. Such games are often developed based on the needs of special education and used by special needs schools in Singapore. This book is a useful resource for students, scholars, and designers of learning material who want to embrace VR and SG for children with ASD.

In The Human Factor, Kim Vicente coined the term 'Human-tech' to describe a more encompassing and ambitious approach to the study of Human-Technology Interaction (HTI) than is now evident in any of its participating disciplines, such as human factors, human-computer interaction, cognitive science and engineering, industrial design, informatics or applied psychology. Observing that the way forward is 'not by widgets alone,' Vicente's Human-tech approach addresses every level-physical, psychological, team, organizational, and political-at which technology impacts quality of life, identifies a human or societal need, and then tailors technology to what we know about human nature at that level. The Human Factor was written for a broad audience, in part to educate general readers beyond the HTI community about the need to think seriously about the tremendous impact that poorly designed technology can have, ranging from user frustration to the tragic loss of human life. The articles collected in this book provide much of the technical material behind the work that was presented in The Human Factor, and the commentaries by Alex Kirlik situate these articles in their broader historical, scientific and ethical context. This collection of articles and commentaries forms a set of recommendations for how HTI research ought to broaden both its perspective and its practical, even ethical, aspirations to meet the increasingly complicated challenges of designing technology to support human work, to improve quality of life, and to design the way will live with technology. As the first book both to integrate the theory and research underlying Human-tech, and to clearly delineate the scientific challenges and ethical responsibilities that await those who either design technology for human use, or design technology that influences or even structures the working or daily lives of others, Human-tech: Ethical and Scientific Foundations will appeal to the broad range of students and scholars in all of the HTI disciplines.

In this book Part I presents first an overview of the ECHORD++ project, with its mission and vision together with a detailed structure of its functionalities and instruments: Experiments, Robotic Innovation Facilities and Public end-user Driven Technology Innovation PDTI. Chapter 1 explains how the project is born, the partners, the different instruments and the new concept of cascade funding projects. This novelty made ECHORD++ a special project along the huge number of research groups and consortia involved in the whole project. So far, it is the European funded project with more research team and partners involved in the robotic field. In Chapter 2, one of the instruments in ECHORD++ is explained in detail: RIF. Robotic innovation facilities are a set of laboratories across Europe funded with the project with the goal of hosting consortia involved in any experiment that have special needs when testing their robotic research. In the chapter the three different and specific RIFs will be described and analyzed. Chapter 3 explains an important instrument in ECHORD++: the Experiments. In this part, a big number of research groups have been involve in short time funded research projects. The chapter explains the management of such Experiments, from the call for participation, the candidate's selection, the monitoring, reviews and funding for each of the 36 experiments funded for Echord. Chapter 4 is very special because it presents the innovation of funding public end-user driven technology, in particular, robotic technology. The robotic challenge is the key of such an instruments together with the management of the different consortia that participated competitively in the success of the robotic challenge proposed by a public entity, selected also with a very special and innovative process.

Over the next few decades, millions of people, with varying backgrounds and levels of technical expertise, will have to effectively interact with robotic technologies on a daily basis. This means it will have to be possible to modify robot behavior without explicitly writing code, but instead via a small number of wearable devices or visual demonstrations. At the same time, robots will need to infer and predict humans' intentions and internal objectives on the basis of past interactions in order to provide assistance before it is explicitly requested; this is the basis of imitation learning for robotics. This book introduces readers to robotic imitation learning based on human demonstration with wearable devices. It presents an advanced calibration method for wearable sensors and fusion approaches under the Kalman filter framework, as well as a novel wearable device for capturing gestures and other motions. Furthermore it describes the wearable-device-based and vision-based imitation learning method for robotic manipulation, making it a valuable reference guide for graduate students with a basic knowledge of machine learning, and for researchers interested in wearable computing and robotic learning.

Auralization is the technique of creation and reproduction of sound on the basis of computer data. With this tool it is possible to predict the character of sound signals which are generated at the source and modified by reinforcement, propagation and transmission in systems such as rooms, buildings, vehicles or other technical devices. This book is organized as a comprehensive collection of the basics of sound and vibration, acoustic modelling, simulation, signal processing and audio reproduction. With some mathematical prerequisites, the readers will be able to follow the main strategy of auralization easily and work out their own implementations of auralization in various fields of application in architectural acoustics, acoustic engineering, sound design and virtual reality. For readers interested in basic research, the technique of auralization may be useful to create sound stimuli for specific investigations in linguistic, medical, neurological and psychological research, and in the field of human-machine interaction.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 28th European Conference on Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement, EuroSPI 2021, held in Krems, Austria, in September 2021*.The 42 full papers and 9 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 100 submissions. The volume presents core research contributions and selected industrial contributions. Core research contributions: SPI and emerging software and systems engineering paradigms; SPI and team skills and diversity; SPI and recent innovations; SPI and agile; SPI and standards and safety and security norms; SPI and good/bad SPI practices in improvement; SPI and functional safety and cybersecurity; digitalisation of industry, infrastructure and e-mobility. Selected industrial contributions: SPI and emerging software and systems engineering paradigms; SPI and recent innovations; SPI and agile; SPI and standards and safety and security norms; SPI and good/bad SPI practices in improvement; SPI and functional safety and cybersecurity; digitalisation of industry, infrastructure and e-mobility; virtual reality. *The conference was partially held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This book is the fourth in the series and describes some of the most recent advances and examines emerging problems in engineering psychology and cognitive ergonomics. It bridges the gap between the academic theoreticians, who are developing models of human performance, and practitioners in the industrial sector, responsible for the design, development and testing of new equipment and working practices.

This is the first book that focuses entirely on the fundamental questions in visualization. Unlike other existing books in the field, it contains discussions that go far beyond individual visual representations and individual visualization algorithms. It offers a collection of investigative discourses that probe these questions from different perspectives, including concepts that help frame these questions and their potential answers, mathematical methods that underpin the scientific reasoning of these questions, empirical methods that facilitate the validation and falsification of potential answers, and case studies that stimulate hypotheses about potential answers while providing practical evidence for such hypotheses. Readers are not instructed to follow a specific theory, but their attention is brought to a broad range of schools of thoughts and different ways of investigating fundamental questions. As such, the book represents the by now most significant collective effort for gathering a large collection of discourses on the foundation of data visualization. Data visualization is a relatively young scientific discipline. Over the last three decades, a large collection of computer-supported visualization techniques have been developed, and the merits and benefits of using these techniques have been evidenced by numerous applications in practice. These technical advancements have given rise to the scientific curiosity about some fundamental questions such as why and how visualization works, when it is useful or effective and when it is not, what are the primary factors affecting its usefulness and effectiveness, and so on. This book signifies timely and exciting opportunities to answer such fundamental questions by building on the wealth of knowledge and experience accumulated in developing and deploying visualization technology in practice.

Customer experience engineering applied to the engineering department is rare, but needed. Most companies keep support, UX, engineering, product, and CX separate. To address this gap, this book highlights roles and techniques that are proven to accelerate issue detection and prevention by 30% or more. With the author's vast experience in tech support, he has developed techniques and skills that allow engineers to gain customer insights faster and through new and insightful sources that are within their reach. You will develop a deep understanding of the impact of issues; understand and optimize the speed of the engineering feedback loop (issue resolution time); and develop the ability to calculate the cost of the issues or customer friction to the business (in aggregate and on a case-by-case basis). Organizations can save significant money and add additional revenue by addressing customer friction proactively in collaboration with product, engineering, and site reliability engineering (SRE) functions and reduce the average time of an issue resolution by 80%. The cross-functional leadership, mentoring, and engineering techniques you'll learn from this proactive stance are very valuable and teachable, and this book will show you the path forward. What You Will Learn Gain the techniques and tools necessary to validate customer journey success in production Contribute to customer-centric key performance indicators (KPIs) on executive dashboards Create meaningful insights and data points that allowed the feedback loop to be optimized and efficient Who This Book is For Professionals participating in the value stream of digital software engineering for the benefit of customer experiences, directly or indirectly. You may be an engineer practicing DevOps or site reliability, or you might be a product owner, UX designer, or researcher. You might be working in support and seeking for new ways to engage with your engineering teams.

Interaction design is acknowledged as an important area of study, and more especially of design practice. Hugely popular and profitable consumer devices, such as mobile phones and tablets, are seen as owing much of their success to the way they have been designed, not least their interface characteristics and the styles of interaction that they support. Interaction design studies point to the importance of a user-centred approach, whereby products are in principle designed around their future users' needs and capacities. However, it is the market, and marketing, that determine which products are available for people to interact with and to a great extent what their designed characteristics are. Primitive Interaction Design is based on the realisation that designers need to be freed from the marketplace and industry pressure, and that the usual user-centred arguments are not enough to make a practical difference. Interaction designers are invited to cast themselves as "savages", as if wielding primitive tools in concrete physical environments. A theoretical perspective is presented that opens up new possibilities for designers to explore fresh ideas and practices, including the importance of conscious and unconscious being, emptiness and trickery. Building on this, a set of design tools for primitive design work is presented and illustrated with practical examples. This book will be of particular interest to undergraduate and graduate students and researchers in interaction design and HCI, as well as practicing interaction designers and computer professions. It will also appeal to those with an interest in psychology, anthropology, cultural studies, design and the future of technology in society.

Emotions and Affect in Human Factors and Human-Computer Interaction is a complete guide for conducting affect-related research and design projects in H/F and HCI domains. Introducing necessary concepts, methods, approaches, and applications, the book highlights how critical emotions and affect are to everyday life and interaction with cognitive artifacts. The text covers the basis of neural mechanisms of affective phenomena, as well as representative approaches to Affective Computing, Kansei Engineering, Hedonomics, and Emotional Design. The methodologies section includes affect induction techniques, measurement techniques, detection and recognition techniques, and regulation models and strategies. The application chapters discuss various H/F and HCI domains: product design, human-robot interaction, behavioral health and game design, and transportation. Engineers and designers can learn and apply psychological theories and mechanisms to account for their affect-related research and can develop their own domain-specific theory. The approach outlined in this handbook works to close the existing gap between the traditional affect research and the emerging field of affective design and affective computing.

This book presents interdisciplinary research in software engineering with applications for the social sector. The author focuses on software applications that are used for social good and that serve the needs of society. The author aims to bridge the knowledge gap between requirement engineers, industry, and users in order to help identify a diverse range of needs in the social sector (taking into account user crowd diversity in terms of technological competencies, geography, demographics, and behavioral and psychographic aspects). The book provides rigorous empirical studies and validates solutions that serve as a guide to the software engineering community, researchers, graduate students, and teachers. Provides interdisciplinary research in software engineering and the needs of the social sector, helping to increase success rates of society focused startups and applications Ideal for social entrepreneurs who can use the book for doing customer development with diverse users Establishes a new research line of social sector requirement engineering, taking into account user age, language, ability, and access

This monograph presents innovative research regarding the body experience of human individuals who are using assistive robotic devices such as wearable robots or teleoperation systems. The focus is set on human-in-the-loop experiments that help to empirically evaluate how users experience devices. Moreover, these experiments allow for further examination of the underlying mechanisms of body experience through extending existing psychological paradigms, e.g., by disentangling tactile feedback from contacts. Besides reporting and discussing psychological examinations, the influence of various aspects of engineering design is investigated, e.g., different implementations of haptic interfaces or robot control. As haptics are of paramount importance in this tight type of human-robot interaction, it is explored with respect to modality as well as temporal and spatial effects. The first part of the book motivates the research topic and gives an in-depth analysis of the experimental requirements. The second and third part present experimental designs and studies of human-robot body experience regarding the upper and lower limbs as well as cognitive models to predict them. The fourth part discusses a multitude of design considerations and provides directions to guide future research on bidirectional human-machine interfaces and non-functional haptic feedback.

This book provides the readers with a timely guide to the application and integration of interdisciplinary principles from the fields of kinetic design, mechanics, energy and materials engineering in the fields of architecture and engineering design. It explores the potential integration of autoreactive solutions, unpowered kinetic systems triggered by changes in the surrounding latent energy conditions, within man-made artefacts with added functionality and efficiency. Related interdisciplinary parameters are explored discussing morphology, mechanics, energy and materials in detail. Each chapter examines the implications of autoreactivity in one specific field, providing a general overview and listing relevant motion design parameters and identifying for the reader those aspects that have a high potential to open up for new design directions. The book guides readers through a highly multidisciplinary field of design, offering an extraordinary resource of knowledge for professional architects, engineers and designers, as well as for university teachers, researchers and students. Interdisciplinary research is presented throughout the book as a powerful resource that can serve architecture and design, and a learning method to rethink innovative, optimal and sustainable solutions.

This book is a collection of best selected research papers presented at International Conference on Intelligent and Smart Computing in Data Analytics (ISCDA 2020), held at K L University, Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, India. The primary focus is to address issues and developments in advanced computing, intelligent models and applications, smart technologies and applications. It includes topics such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, pattern recognition and analysis, computational intelligence, signal and image processing, bioinformatics, ubiquitous computing, genetic fuzzy systems, hybrid evolutionary algorithms, nature-inspired smart hybrid systems, Internet of things, industrial IoT, health informatics, human-computer interaction and social network analysis. The book presents innovative work by leading academics, researchers and experts from industry.

This book first explains autism, its prevalence, and some conventional intervention techniques, and it then describes how virtual reality technology can support autism intervention and skills training. The approaches and technologies covered include immersive virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality. The tasks covered include emotion recognition, affective computing, teaching communication skills, imparting literacy skills, training for imitation skills, and joint attention skills. Most of the chapters assume no prerequisite knowledge of autism or virtual reality, and they are supported throughout with detailed references for further investigation. While the author is an engineer by profession, with specialist knowledge in robotics and computer-based platforms, in this book she adopts a user perspective and cites many real-life examples from her own experience. The book is suitable for students of cognitive science, and researchers and practitioners engaged with designing and offering technological assistance for special needs training.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams, Diagrams 2021, held virtually in September 2021. The 16 full papers and 25 short papers presented together with 16 posters were carefully reviewed and selected from 94 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: design of concrete diagrams; theory of diagrams; diagrams and mathematics; diagrams and logic; new representation systems; analysis of diagrams; diagrams and computation; cognitive analysis; diagrams as structural tools; formal diagrams; and understanding thought processes. 10 chapters are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

An accessible primer on how to create effective graphics from data This book provides students and researchers a hands-on introduction to the principles and practice of data visualization. It explains what makes some graphs succeed while others fail, how to make high-quality figures from data using powerful and reproducible methods, and how to think about data visualization in an honest and effective way. Data Visualization builds the reader's expertise in ggplot2, a versatile visualization library for the R programming language. Through a series of worked examples, this accessible primer then demonstrates how to create plots piece by piece, beginning with summaries of single variables and moving on to more complex graphics. Topics include plotting continuous and categorical variables; layering information on graphics; producing effective "small multiple" plots; grouping, summarizing, and transforming data for plotting; creating maps; working with the output of statistical models; and refining plots to make them more comprehensible. Effective graphics are essential to communicating ideas and a great way to better understand data. This book provides the practical skills students and practitioners need to visualize quantitative data and get the most out of their research findings. Provides hands-on instruction using R and ggplot2 Shows how the "tidyverse" of data analysis tools makes working with R easier and more consistent Includes a library of data sets, code, and functions