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 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th IFIP WG 2.13 International Conference on Open Source Systems, OSS 2021, held virtually in May 2021.The 4 full papers and 3 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 23 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics in the field of free/libre open source software (FLOSS) and discuss theories, practices, experiences, and tools on development and applications of OSS systems, with a specific focus on two aspects:(a) the development of open source systems and the underlying technical, social, and economic issue, (b) the adoption of OSS solutions and the implications of such adoption both in the public and in the private sector.

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 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.

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 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.

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 presents a guide to navigating the complicated issues of quality and process improvement in enterprise software implementation, and the effect these have on the software development life cycle (SDLC). Offering an integrated approach that includes important management and decision practices, the text explains how to create successful automated solutions that fit user and customer needs, by mixing different SDLC methodologies. With an emphasis on the realities of practice, the book offers essential advice on defining business requirements, and managing change. This revised and expanded second edition includes new content on such areas as cybersecurity, big data, and digital transformation. Features: presents examples, case studies, and chapter-ending problems and exercises; concentrates on the skills needed to distinguish successful software implementations; considers the political and cultural realities in organizations; suggests many alternatives for how to manage and model a system.

This book makes the case that traditional security design does not take the end-user into consideration, and therefore, fails. This book goes on to explain, using a series of examples, how to rethink security solutions to take users into consideration. By understanding the limitations and habits of users - including malicious users, aiming to corrupt the system - this book Illustrates how better security technologies are made possible. Traditional security books focus on one of the following areas: cryptography, security protocols, or existing standards. They rarely consider the end user as part of the security equation, and when they do, it is in passing. This book considers the end user as the most important design consideration, and then shows how to build security and privacy technologies that are both secure and which offer privacy. This reduces the risk for social engineering and, in general, abuse. Advanced-level students interested in software engineering, security and HCI (Human Computer Interaction) will find this book useful as a study guide. Engineers and security practitioners concerned with abuse and fraud will also benefit from the methodologies and techniques in this book.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Frontier Computing (FC 2016), Tokyo, Japan, July 13-15, 2016. This international meeting provided a forum for researchers to share current understanding of recent advances and emergence in information technology, science, and engineering, with themes in the scope of Communication Networks, Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management, Web Intelligence, and any related fields that further the development of information technology. The articles presented cover a wide spectrum of topics: database and data mining, networking and communications, web and internet of things, embedded system, soft computing, social network analysis, security and privacy, optics communication, and ubiquitous/pervasive computing. Many papers report results of great academic potential and value, and in addition, indicate promising directions of research in the focused realm of this conference series. Readers, including students, academic researchers, and professionals, will benefit from the results presented in this book. It also provides an overview of current research and can be used as a guidebook for those new to the field.

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.

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.

Intelligent Computing for Interactive System Design provides a comprehensive resource on what has become the dominant paradigm in designing novel interaction methods, involving gestures, speech, text, touch and brain-controlled interaction, embedded in innovative and emerging human-computer interfaces. These interfaces support ubiquitous interaction with applications and services running on smartphones, wearables, in-vehicle systems, virtual and augmented reality, robotic systems, the Internet of Things (IoT), and many other domains that are now highly competitive, both in commercial and in research contexts. This book presents the crucial theoretical foundations needed by any student, researcher, or practitioner working on novel interface design, with chapters on statistical methods, digital signal processing (DSP), and machine learning (ML). These foundations are followed by chapters that discuss case studies on smart cities, brain-computer interfaces, probabilistic mobile text entry, secure gestures, personal context from mobile phones, adaptive touch interfaces, and automotive user interfaces. The case studies chapters also highlight an in-depth look at the practical application of DSP and ML methods used for processing of touch, gesture, biometric, or embedded sensor inputs. A common theme throughout the case studies is ubiquitous support for humans in their daily professional or personal activities. In addition, the book provides walk-through examples of different DSP and ML techniques and their use in interactive systems. Common terms are defined, and information on practical resources is provided (e.g., software tools, data resources) for hands-on project work to develop and evaluate multimodal and multi-sensor systems. In a series of in-chapter commentary boxes, an expert on the legal and ethical issues explores the emergent deep concerns of the professional community, on how DSP and ML should be adopted and used in socially appropriate ways, to most effectively advance human performance during ubiquitous interaction with omnipresent computers. This carefully edited collection is written by international experts and pioneers in the fields of DSP and ML. It provides a textbook for students and a reference and technology roadmap for developers and professionals working on interaction design on emerging platforms.

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 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.

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.

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.

This monograph presents an application of concepts and methods from algebraic topology to models of concurrent processes in computer science and their analysis. Taking well-known discrete models for concurrent processes in resource management as a point of departure, the book goes on to refine combinatorial and topological models. In the process, it develops tools and invariants for the new discipline directed algebraic topology, which is driven by fundamental research interests as well as by applications, primarily in the static analysis of concurrent programs. The state space of a concurrent program is described as a higher-dimensional space, the topology of which encodes the essential properties of the system. In order to analyse all possible executions in the state space, more than "just" the topological properties have to be considered: Execution paths need to respect a partial order given by the time flow. As a result, tools and concepts from topology have to be extended to take privileged directions into account. The target audience for this book consists of graduate students, researchers and practitioners in the field, mathematicians and computer scientists alike.

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 presents a series of high performance product design (PD) and development best practices that can create or improve product development organization. In contrast to other books that focus only on Toyota or other individual companies applying lean IPD, this book explains the lean philosophy more broadly and includes discussions of systems engineering, design for X (DFX), agile development, integrated product development, and project management. The "Lean Journey" proposed here takes a value-centric approach, where the lean principles are applied to PD to allow the tools and methods selected to emerge from observation of the individual characteristics of each enterprise. This means that understanding lean product development (LPD) is not about knowing which tools are available but knowing how to apply the philosophy. The book comes with an accompanying manual with problems and solutions available on Springer Extras.

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.

"Kawaii" is a Japanese word that denotes "cute," "lovable," or "charming" although it does not have exactly the same meaning as those adjectives. This book proposes engineering methodologies for systematic measurement of the affective perception of kawaii, by using virtual reality and biological signals, and discusses the effectiveness of kawaii engineering for designing industrial products and services. Kawaii can draw sympathy from people and can embody a special kind of cute design, which reduces fear and makes dull information more acceptable and appealing. Following the introduction of the background of kawaii engineering in Chapter 1, Chapters 2 and 3 describe experiments on the systematic measurement and evaluation methods for kawaii products and affective evaluation experiments. Chapter 4 proposes a mathematical model to identify the physical attributes that determine kawaii in motion. Chapters 5 and 6 explain research that uses biological signals and eye-tracking. After a brief survey of psychological research on kawaii and cuteness in Chapter 7, Chapters 8 and 9 introduce the use of spoons designed to stimulate the appetite of the elderly and the practical implementation of an emotion-driven camera. Chapters 10-14 explain experimental research that examines kawaii perception of people from various cultural backgrounds. Kawaii Engineering will appeal to those who work on affective computing, product design, user experience design, virtual reality, and biological signals.