Is meaningful communication possible between two intelligent parties who share no common language or background? In this work, a theoretical framework is proposed in which it is possible to address when and to what extent such semantic communication is possible: such problems can be rigorously addressed by explicitly focusing on the goals of the communication. Under this framework, it is possible to show that for many goals, communication without any common language or background is possible using universal protocols. This work should be accessible to anyone with an undergraduate-level knowledge of the theory of computation. The theoretical framework presented here is of interest to anyone wishing to design systems with flexible interfaces, either among computers or between computers and their users.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th IFIP WG 8.1 Working Conference on Method Engineering, ME 2011, held in Paris, France, in April 2011. The 13 revised full papers and 6 short papers presented together with the abstracts of two keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 30 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on situated method engineering, method engineering foundations, customized methods, tools for method engineering, new trends to build methods, and method engineering services.

Our digital technologies have inspired new ways of thinking about old religious topics. Digitalists include computer scientists, transhumanists, singularitarians, and futurists. Writers such as Moravec, Bostrom, Kurzweil, and Chalmers are digitalists. Although they are usually scientists, rationalists, and atheists, digitalists they have worked out novel and entirely naturalistic ways of thinking about bodies, minds, souls, universes, gods, and life after death. Your Digital Afterlives starts with three digitalist theories of life after death. It examines personality capture, body uploading, and promotion to higher levels of simulation. It then examines the idea that reality itself is ultimately a system of self-surpassing computations. On that view, you will have infinitely many digital lives across infinitely many digital worlds. Your Digital Afterlives looks at superhuman bodies and infinite bodies. Thinking of nature in purely computational terms has the potential to radically and positively change our understanding of life after death.

The main target of this book is to raise the awareness about social networking systems design, implementation, security requirements, and approaches. The book entails related issues including computing, engineering, security, management, and organization policy. It interprets the design, implementation and security threats in the social networks and offers some solutions in this concern. It clarifies the authentication concept between servers to identity users. Most of the models that focus on protecting users' information are also included. This book introduces the Human-Interactive Security Protocols (HISPs) efficiently. Presenting different types of the social networking systems including the internet and mobile devices is one of the main targets of this book. This book includes the social network performance evaluation metrics. It compares various models and approaches used in the design of the social networks. This book includes various applications for the use of the social networks in the healthcare, e-commerce, crisis management, and academic applications. The book provides an extensive background for the development of social network science and its challenges. This book discusses the social networks integration to offer online services, such as instant messaging, email, file sharing, transferring patients' medical reports/images, location-based recommendations and many other functions. This book provides users, designers, engineers and managers with the valuable knowledge to build a better secured information transfer over the social networks. The book gathers remarkable materials from an international experts' panel to guide the readers during the analysis, design, implementation and security achievement for the social network systems. In this book, theories, practical guidance, and challenges are included to inspire designers and researchers. The book guides the engineers, designers, and researchers to exploit the intrinsic design of the social network systems.

The success of a BCI system depends as much on the system itself as on the user's ability to produce distinctive EEG activity. BCI systems can be divided into two groups according to the placement of the electrodes used to detect and measure neurons firing in the brain. These groups are: invasive systems, electrodes are inserted directly into the cortex are used for single cell or multi unit recording, and electrocorticography (EcoG), electrodes are placed on the surface of the cortex (or dura); noninvasive systems, they are placed on the scalp and use electroencephalography (EEG) or magnetoencephalography (MEG) to detect neuron activity. The book is basically divided into three parts. The first part of the book covers the basic concepts and overviews of Brain Computer Interface. The second part describes new theoretical developments of BCI systems. The third part covers views on real applications of BCI systems.

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

This book provides a broad survey of advanced pattern recognition techniques for human behavior analysis. Clearly structured, the book begins with concise coverage of the major concepts, before introducing the most frequently used techniques and algorithms in detail, and then discussing examples of real applications. Features: contains contributions from an international selection of experts in the field; presents a thorough introduction to the fundamental topics of human behavior analysis; investigates methods for activity recognition, including gait and posture analysis, hand gesture analysis, and semantics of human behavior in image sequences; provides an accessible psychological treatise on social signals for the analysis of social behaviors; discusses voice and speech analysis, combined audiovisual cues, and social interactions and group dynamics; examines applications in different research fields; each chapter concludes with review questions, a summary of the topics covered, and a glossary.

This pioneering book develops definitions and concepts related to Quality of Experience in the context of multimedia- and telecommunications-related applications, systems and services and applies these to various fields of communication and media technologies. The editors bring together numerous key-protagonists of the new discipline Quality of Experience and combine the state-of-the-art knowledge in one single volume."

Agent-centric theories, approaches and technologies are contributing to enrich interactions between users and computers. This book aims at highlighting the influence of the agency perspective in Human-Computer Interaction through a careful selection of research contributions. Split into five sections; Users as Agents, Agents and Accessibility, Agents and Interactions, Agent-centric Paradigms and Approaches, and Collective Agents, the book covers a wealth of novel, original and fully updated material, offering:

To provide a coherent, in depth, and timely material on the agency perspective in HCI

To offer an authoritative treatment of the subject matter presented by carefully selected authors

To offer a balanced and broad coverage of the subject area, including, human, organizational, social, as well as technological concerns.

u To offer a hands-on-experience by covering representative case studies and offering essential design guidelines

The book will appeal to a broad audience of researchers and professionals associated to software engineering, interface design, accessibility, as well as agent-based interaction paradigms and technology. "

This book proposes a data-driven methodology using multi-way data analysis for the design of video-quality metrics. It also enables video- quality metrics to be created using arbitrary features. This data- driven design approach not only requires no detailed knowledge of the human visual system, but also allows a proper consideration of the temporal nature of video using a three-way prediction model, corresponding to the three-way structure of video. Using two simple example metrics, the author demonstrates not only that this purely data- driven approach outperforms state-of-the-art video-quality metrics, which are often optimized for specific properties of the human visual system, but also that multi-way data analysis methods outperform the combination of two-way data analysis methods and temporal pooling.

Remarkable progress in eye-tracking technologies opened the way to design novel attention-based intelligent user interfaces, and highlighted the importance of better understanding of eye-gaze in human-computer interaction and human-human communication. For instance, a user's focus of attention is useful in interpreting the user's intentions, their understanding of the conversation, and their attitude towards the conversation. In human face-to-face communication, eye gaze plays an important role in floor management, grounding, and engagement in conversation. Eye Gaze in Intelligent User Interfaces draws on ideas from a number of contributors working on how attentional information can be applied to novel intelligent interfaces. Part I focuses on analyzing human eye gaze behaviors to reveal characteristics of human communication and cognition; Part II addresses estimation and prediction of the cognitive state of the users using gaze information; and Part III presents proposals of novel gaze-aware interfaces which integrate eye-trackers as a system component. The contributions highlight a direction for the future of human-computer interaction, and discuss issues in human attentional behaviors and face-to-face communication which are essential in designing gaze aware interactive interfaces.

"Semantic Analysis and Understanding of Human Behaviour in Video Streaming "investigates the semantic analysis of the human behaviour captured by video streaming, and introduces both theoretical and technological points of view. Video analysis based on the semantic content is in fact still an open issue for the computer vision research community, especially when real-time analysis of complex scenes is concerned."
"This book explores an innovative, original approach to human behaviour analysis and understanding by using the syntactical symbolic analysis of images and video streaming described by means of strings of symbols. A symbol is associated to each area of the analyzed scene. When a moving object enters an area, the corresponding symbol is appended to the string describing the motion. This approach allows for characterizing the motion of a moving object with a word composed by symbols. By studying and classifying these words we can categorize and understand the various behaviours. The main advantage of this approach lies in the simplicity of the scene and motion descriptions so that the behaviour analysis will have limited computational complexity due to the intrinsic nature both of the representations and the related operations used to manipulate them. Besides, the structure of the representations is well suited for possible parallel processing, thus allowing for speeding up the analysis when appropriate hardware architectures are used. A new methodology for design systems for hierarchical high semantic level analysis of video streaming in narrow domains is also proposed. Guidelines to design your own system are provided in this book."
"Designed for practitioners, computer scientists and engineers working within the fields ofhuman computer interaction, surveillance, image processing and computer vision, this book can also be used assecondary text book for advanced-level students in computer science and engineering."
""

Advanced Topics in End User Computing features the latest research findings dealing with end user computing concepts, issues, and trends. Empirical and theoretical research concerned with all aspects of end user computing including development, utilization, and management are included. Volume three is specifically interested in those studies that show a significant contribution by relating end user computing to end user satisfaction, end user productivity, and strategic and competitive advantage. *Note: This book is part of a new series entitled "Advanced Topics in End User Computing." This book is Volume Three within this series (Vol. III, 2004).

This book addresses extensible and adaptable computing, a broad range of methods and techniques used to systematically tackle the future growth of systems and respond proactively and seamlessly to change. The book is divided into five main sections: Agile Software Development, Data Management, Web Intelligence, Machine Learning and Computing in Education. These sub-domains of computing work together in mutually complementary ways to build systems and applications that scale well, and which can successfully meet the demands of changing times and contexts. The topics under each track have been carefully selected to highlight certain qualitative aspects of applications and systems, such as scalability, flexibility, integration, efficiency and context awareness. The first section (Agile Software Development) includes six contributions that address related issues, including risk management, test case prioritization and tools, open source software reliability and predicting the change proneness of software. The second section (Data Management) includes discussions on myriad issues, such as extending database caches using solid-state devices, efficient data transmission, healthcare applications and data security. In turn, the third section (Machine Learning) gathers papers that investigate ML algorithms and present their specific applications such as portfolio optimization, disruption classification and outlier detection. The fourth section (Web Intelligence) covers emerging applications such as metaphor detection, language identification and sentiment analysis, and brings to the fore web security issues such as fraud detection and trust/reputation systems. In closing, the fifth section (Computing in Education) focuses on various aspects of computer-aided pedagogical methods.

Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is easy to define yet difficult to predict. Encompassing the management, study, planning, and design of the ways in which users interact with computers, this field has evolved from using punch cards to force touch in a matter of decades. What was once considered science fiction is now ubiquitous. The future of HCI is mercurial, yet predictions point to the effortless use of high-functioning services. The Handbook of Research on Human-Computer Interfaces, Developments, and Applications is primarily concerned with emerging research regarding gesture interaction, augmented reality, and assistive technologies and their place within HCI. From gaming to rehabilitation systems, these new technologies share the need to interface with humans, and as computers become thoroughly integrated into everyday life, so does the necessity of HCI research. This handbook of research benefits the research needs of programmers, developers, students and educators in computer science, and researchers.

This book provides a comprehensive discussion on urban growth and sprawl, and how they can be analyzed using remote sensing imageries. It compiles views of numerous researchers that help in understanding the urban growth and sprawl; their patterns, process, causes, consequences, and countermeasures; how remote sensing data and geographic information system techniques can be used in mapping, monitoring, measuring, analyzing, and simulating the urban growth and sprawl; and what are the merits and demerits of available methods and models.

This book will be of value for the scientists and researchers engaged in urban geographic research, especially using remote sensing imageries. This book will serve as a rigours literature review for them. Post graduate students of urban geography or urban/regional planning may refer this book as additional studies. This book may help the academicians for preparing lecture notes and delivering lectures. Industry professionals may also be benefited from the discussed methods and models along with numerous citations.

This book presents the proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Management Science and Engineering Management (ICMSEM2013) held from November 7 to 9, 2013 at Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA and organized by the International Society of Management Science and Engineering Management, Sichuan University (Chengdu, China) and Drexel University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA). The goals of the Conference are to foster international research collaborations in Management Science and Engineering Management as well as to provide a forum to present current research findings. The selected papers cover various areas in management science and engineering management, such as Decision Support Systems, Multi-Objective Decisions, Uncertain Decisions, Computational Mathematics, Information Systems, Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Relationship Management, Scheduling and Control, Data Warehousing and Data Mining, Electronic Commerce, Neural Networks, Stochastic Models and Simulation, Fuzzy Programming, Heuristics Algorithms, Risk Control, Organizational Behavior, Green Supply Chains, and Carbon Credits. The proceedings introduce readers to novel ideas on and different problem-solving methods in Management Science and Engineering Management. We selected excellent papers from all over the world, integrating their expertise and ideas in order to improve research on Management Science and Engineering Management.

"Introducing Spoken Dialogue Systems into Intelligent Environments "outlines the formalisms of a novel knowledge-driven framework for spoken dialogue management and presents the implementation ofa model-based Adaptive Spoken Dialogue Manager(ASDM) called OwlSpeak. The authors have identified three stakeholders thatpotentially influence the behavior of the ASDM: the user, the SDS, and a complex Intelligent Environment (IE) consisting of various devices, services, and task descriptions.
The theoretical foundation of a working ontology-based spoken dialogue description framework, the prototype implementation of the ASDM, and the evaluation activities that are presented as part of this book contribute to the ongoing spoken dialogue research by establishing the fertile ground of model-based adaptive spoken dialogue management.
Thismonograph is ideal for advanced undergraduate students, PhD students, and postdocs as well as academic and industrial researchers and developers in speech and multimodal interactive systems."

A 3D user interface (3DUI) is an interface in which the user performs tasks in three dimensions. For example, interactions using hand/body gestures, interaction using a motion controller (e.g. Sony PlayStation Move), interaction with virtual reality devices using tracked motion controllers, etc. All these technologies which let a user interact in three dimensions are called 3D user interface technologies. These 3D user interfaces have the potential to make games more immersive & engaging and thus potentially provide a better user experience to gamers. Although 3D user interface technologies are available for games, it is unclear how their usage affects game play and if there are any user performance benefits. This book presents state of the art research on exploring 3D user interface technologies for improving video games. It also presents a review of research work done in this area and describes experiments focused on usage of stereoscopic 3D, head tracking, and hand gesture-based control in gaming scenarios. These experiments are systematic studies in gaming environments and are aimed at understanding the effect of the underlined 3D interface technology on the gaming experience of a user. Based on these experiments, several design guidelines are presented which can aid game designers in designing better immersive games.

Logic and the Organization of Information closely examines the historical and contemporary methodologies used to catalogue information objects-books, ebooks, journals, articles, web pages, images, emails, podcasts and more-in the digital era.
This book provides an in-depth technical background for digital librarianship, and covers a broad range of theoretical and practical topics including: classification theory, topic annotation, automatic clustering, generalized synonymy and concept indexing, distributed libraries, semantic web ontologies and Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS). It also analyzes the challenges facing today's information architects, and outlines a series of techniques for overcoming them.
Logic and the Organization of Information is intended for practitioners and professionals working at a design level as a reference book for digital librarianship. Advanced-level students, researchers and academics studying information science, library science, digital libraries and computer science will also find this book invaluable.

The ability to harness Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) is increasingly at the heart of competitiveness and sustainable growth. As countries engage in an increasingly competitive global economy, they are trying to weave ICT into their development strategies, in the same way enterprises have learned to use ICT to transform their business models and strategies. This integration offers a new path to development that is responsive to the challenges of our times.

In National Strategies to Harness Information Technology, Nagy Hanna and Peter Knight provide a framework for assessing the opportunities, challenges, and prospects for "e-transformation"and for analyzing the options and innovations adopted to manage the e-transformation process. They ask hard questions: what does it take to harness ICT to transform an economy? Why some countries accelerate their development journey with ICT while others fail? How did successful countries balance the need for strategic leadership with bottom up innovation? Can countries reduce the risks of digital divide? What have been the roles of government and private sectors? What lessons can be learned for countries at different levels of development?

Featuring contributions from country experts, the editors and authors provide in-depth case studies of ICT deployment in Singapore, Finland, the Philippines, and South Africa, and asses the progress of such efforts. The result is an essential resource for academic researchers, policy analysts, policymakers, and industry leaders interested in the role of ICT in national development, innovation, and economic growth.In National Strategies to Harness Information Technology, Nagy Hanna and Peter Knight provide a framework for assessing the opportunities, challenges, and prospects for "e-transformation"and for analyzing the options and innovations adopted to manage the e-transformation process. They ask hard questions: what does it take to harness ICT to transform an economy? Why some countries accelerate their development journey with ICT while others fail? How did successful countries balance the need for strategic leadership with bottom up innovation? Can countries reduce the risks of digital divide? What have been the roles of government and private sectors? What lessons can be learned for countries at different levels of development?

Featuring contributions from country experts, the editors and authors provide in-depth case studies of ICT deployment in Singapore, Finland, the Philippines, and South Africa, and asses the progress of such efforts. The result is an essential resource for academic researchers, policy analysts, policymakers, and industry leaders interested in the role of ICT in national development, innovation, and economic growth."

Touch and gesturaldeviceshave been hailed as next evolutionary step in human-computer interaction. As software companies struggle to catch up with one another in terms of developing the next great touch-based interface, designers are charged with the daunting task of keeping up with the advances innew technology and this new aspect to user experience design.

Product and interaction designers, developers and managers are already well versed in UI design, but touch-based interfaces have added a new level of complexity. They need quick references and real-world examples in order to make informed decisions when designing for these particular interfaces. "Brave NUI World" is the first practical book for product and interaction developers and designing touch and gesture interfaces. Written by developers of industry-first, multi-touch, multi-user products, this book gives you the necessary tools and information to integrate touch and gesture practices into your daily work, presenting scenarios, problem solving, metaphors, and techniques intended to avoid making mistakes.

*Provides easy-to-apply design guidance for the unique challenge of creating touch- and gesture-based user interfaces

*Considers diverse user needs and context, real world successes and failures, and a look into the future of NUI

*Presents thirty scenarios, giving practitioners a multitude of considerations for making informed design decisions and helping to ensure that missteps are never made again"

This book explores a society currently being transformed by the influence of advanced information technology, and provides insights into the main technological and human issues and a holistic approach to inclusion, security, safety and, last but not least, privacy and freedom of expression. Its main aim is to bridge the gap between technological solutions, their successful implementation, and the fruitful utilization of the main set of e-Services offered by governments, private institutions, and commercial companies. Today, various parameters actively influence e-Services' success or failure: cultural aspects, organisational issues, bureaucracy and workflow, infrastructure and technology in general, user habits, literacy, capacity or merely interaction design. The purpose of this book is to help in outlining and understanding a realistic scenario of what we can term e-Citizenry. It identifies today's citizen, who is surrounded by an abundance of digital services, as an "e-Citizen" and explores the transition from their traditional role and behaviour to new ones. The respective chapters presented here will lay the foundation of the technological and social environment in which this societal transition takes place. With its balanced humanistic and technological approach, the book mainly targets public authorities, decision-makers, stakeholders, solution developers, and graduate students.

The information infrastructure - comprising computers, embedded devices, networks and software systems - is vital to operations in every sector: inf- mation technology, telecommunications, energy, banking and ?nance, tra- portation systems, chemicals, agriculture and food, defense industrial base, public health and health care, national monuments and icons, drinking water and water treatment systems, commercial facilities, dams, emergency services, commercial nuclear reactors, materials and waste, postal and shipping, and government facilities. Global business and industry, governments, indeed - ciety itself, cannot function if major components of the critical information infrastructure are degraded, disabled or destroyed. This book, Critical Infrastructure Protection III, is the third volume in the annualseriesproducedbyIFIP WorkingGroup11.10onCriticalInfrastructure Protection, an active international community of scientists, engineers, prac- tioners and policy makers dedicated to advancing research, development and implementation e?orts related to critical infrastructure protection. The book presents original research results and innovative applications in the area of infrastructure protection. Also, it highlights the importance of weaving s- ence, technology and policy in crafting sophisticated, yet practical, solutions that will help secure information, computer and network assets in the various critical infrastructure sectors. This volume contains seventeen edited papers from the Third Annual IFIP Working Group 11.10 International Conference on Critical Infrastructure P- tection, held at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, March 23-25, 2009. The papers were refereed by members of IFIP Working Group 11.10 and other internationally-recognized experts in critical infrastructure protection.

Collaboration among individuals - from users to developers - is central to modern software engineering. It takes many forms: joint activity to solve common problems, negotiation to resolve conflicts, creation of shared definitions, and both social and technical perspectives impacting all software development activity. The difficulties of collaboration are also well documented. The grand challenge is not only to ensure that developers in a team deliver effectively as individuals, but that the whole team delivers more than just the sum of its parts.

The editors of this book have assembled an impressive selection of authors, who have contributed to an authoritative body of work tackling a wide range of issues in the field of collaborative software engineering. The resulting volume is divided into four parts, preceded by a general editorial chapter providing a more detailed review of the domain of collaborative software engineering. Part 1 is on "Characterizing Collaborative Software Engineering," Part 2 examines various "Tools and Techniques," Part 3 addresses organizational issues, and finally Part 4 contains four examples of "Emerging Issues in Collaborative Software Engineering."

As a result, this book delivers a comprehensive state-of-the-art overview and empirical results for researchers in academia and industry in areas like software process management, empirical software engineering, and global software development. Practitioners working in this area will also appreciate the detailed descriptions and reports which can often be used as guidelines to improve their daily work.