For generations, humans have fantasized about the ability to create devices that can see into a person's mind and thoughts, or to communicate and interact with machines through thought alone. Such ideas have long captured the imagination of humankind in the form of ancient myths and modern science fiction stories. Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging technologies have started to turn these myths into a reality, and are providing us with the ability to interface directly with the human brain. This ability is made possible through the use of sensors that monitor physical processes within the brain which correspond with certain forms of thought. Brain-Computer Interfaces: Applying our Minds to Human-Computer Interaction broadly surveys research in the Brain-Computer Interface domain. More specifically, each chapter articulates some of the challenges and opportunities for using brain sensing in Human-Computer Interaction work, as well as applying Human-Computer Interaction solutions to brain sensing work. For researchers with little or no expertise in neuroscience or brain sensing, the book provides background information to equip them to not only appreciate the state-of-the-art, but also ideally to engage in novel research. For expert Brain-Computer Interface researchers, the book introduces ideas that can help in the quest to interpret intentional brain control and develop the ultimate input device. It challenges researchers to further explore passive brain sensing to evaluate interfaces and feed into adaptive computing systems. Most importantly, the book will connect multiple communities allowing research to leverage their work and expertise and blaze into the future.

A software architecture manifests the major early design decisions, which determine the system's development, deployment and evolution. Thus, making better architectural decisions is one of the large challenges in software engineering. Software architecture knowledge management is about capturing practical experience and translating it into generalized architectural knowledge, and using this knowledge in the communication with stakeholders during all phases of the software lifecycle.

This book presents a concise description of knowledge management in the software architecture discipline. It explains the importance of sound knowledge management practices for improving software architecture processes and products, and makes clear the role of knowledge management in software architecture and software development processes. It presents many approaches that are in use in software companies today, approaches that have been used in other domains, and approaches under development in academia. After an initial introduction by the editors, the contributions are grouped in three parts on "Architecture Knowledge Management," "Strategies and Approaches for Managing Architectural Knowledge," and "Tools and Techniques for Managing Architectural Knowledge."

The presentation aims at information technology and software engineering professionals, in particular software architects and software architecture researchers. For the industrial audience, the book gives a broad and concise understanding of the importance of knowledge management for improving software architecture process and building capabilities in designing and evaluating better architectures for their mission- and business-critical systems. For researchers, the book will help to understand the applications of various knowledge management approaches in an industrial setting and to identify research challenges and opportunities.

This book focuses on the importance of adaptation and personalization in today's society and the upgraded role computational systems and the Internet play in our day-to-day activities. In this era of wireless communication, pervasive computing and the Internet of Things, it is becoming increasingly critical to ensure humans remain central in the developmental process of new technologies to guarantee their continued usefulness and a positive end-user experience. Organized into three clear parts - theory, principles and practice, a holistic approach to designing and developing adaptive interactive systems and services has been adopted. With an emphasis on distinct human factors, both basic and applied research topics are explored, extending from human-centred user models, driven by user's individual differences in cognitive processing and emotions, to the creation of smart interfaces that can handle the ever increasing volume and complexity of information to the benefit of the end-user. Human-Centred Web Adaptation and Personalization - From Theory to Practice is meticulously crafted to serve researchers, practitioners, and students who wish to have an end-to-end understanding of how to convert pure research and scientific results into viable user interfaces, system components and applications. It will serve to bridge the knowledge gap that still remains by suggesting interaction design and implementation guidelines for areas like E-Commerce, E-Learning and Usable Security.

The IFIP World Computer Congress (WCC) is one of the most important conferences in the area of computer science and a number of related Human and Social Science disciplines at the worldwide level and it has a federated structure, which takes into account the rapidly growing and expanding interests in this area. Human-Computer Interaction is now a mature and still dynamically evolving part of this area, which is represented in IFIP by the Technical Committee 13 on HCI. We are convinced that in this edition of WCC, which takes place for the first time in Italy, it will be interesting and useful to have a Symposium on Human- Computer Interaction in order to present and discuss a number of contributions in this field. There has been increasing awareness among designers of interactive systems of the importance of designing for usability, but we are still far from having products that are really usable, and usability can mean different things depending on the application domain. We are all aware that too many users of current technology feel often frustrated because computer systems are not compatible with their abilities and needs with existing work practices. As designers of tomorrow technology, we have the responsibility of creating computer artefacts that would permit better user experience with the various computing devices, so that users may enjoy more satisfying experiences with information and communications technologies.

Information visualization is not only about creating graphical displays of complex and latent information structures; it contributes to a broader range of cognitive, social, and collaborative activities. This is the first book to examine information visualization from this perspective.

This 2nd edition continues the unique and ambitious quest for setting information visualization and virtual environments in a unifying framework. Information Visualization: Beyond the Horizon pays special attention to the advances made over the last 5 years and potentially fruitful directions to pursue. It is particularly updated to meet the need for practitioners. The book is a valuable source for researchers and graduate students. This new edition is forwarded by Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland.

Key features:

• Latest advances in information visualization.
• Applications of information visualization, including knowledge domain visualization, knowledge diffusion, and social networks.
• Detecting topics, emergent trends, and abrupt changes.
• Empirical findings concerning information visualization.
• Virtual environments and collaborative virtual environments.

Chaomei Chen is an Associate Professor in the College of Information Science and Technology at Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA. He is the author of Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization (Springer, 2003).

Since the beginning of the computer age, researchers from many disciplines have sought to facilitate people's use of computers and to provide ways for scientists to make sense of the immense quantities of data coming out of them. One gainful result of these efforts has been the field of information visualization, whose technology is increasingly applied in scientific research, digital libraries, data mining, financial data analysis, market studies, manufacturing production control, and data discovery.
This book collects 38 of the key papers on information visualization from a leading and prominent research lab, the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL). Celebrating HCIL's 20th anniversary, this book presents a coherent body of work from a respected community that has had many success stories with its research and commercial spin-offs.
Each chapter contains an introduction specifically written for this volume by two leading HCI researchers, to describe the connections among those papers and reveal HCIL's individual approach to developing innovations.
*Presents key ideas, novel interfaces, and major applications of information visualization tools, embedded in inspirational prototypes.
*Techniques can be widely applied in scientific research, digital libraries, data mining, financial data analysis, business market studies, manufacturing production control, drug discovery, and genomic studies.
*Provides an "insider" view to the scientific process and evolution of innovation, as told by the researchers themselves.
*This work comes from the prominent and high profile University of Maryland's Human Computer Interaction Lab

Information Communication Technologies (ICT) have become an increasingly prevalent part of everyday life. Today, there are many cases in which ICT assist the elderly and people with disabilities to complete tasks once thought impossible. Enhancing the Human Experience through Assistive Technologies and E-Accessibility discusses trends in ICT in relation to assistive technologies and their impact on everyday tasks for those with disabilities. This reference work provides different perspectives on upcoming technologies and their impact on e-accessibility and e-inclusion, essential topics for researchers, businesses, and ICT product developers in the field of assistive technologies.

This book presents a new approach to examining the perceived quality of audiovisual sequences. It uses electroencephalography (EEG) to explain in detail how user quality judgments are formed within a test participant, and what the physiological implications might be when subjects are exposed to lower quality media. The book redefines the experimental paradigms of using EEG in the area of quality assessment so that they better suit the requirements of standard subjective quality testing, and presents experimental protocols and stimuli that have been adjusted accordingly.

The Social Web (including services such as MySpace, Flickr, last.fm, and WordPress) has captured the attention of millions of users as well as billions of dollars in investment and acquisition. Social websites, evolving around the connections between people and their objects of interest, are encountering boundaries in the areas of information integration, dissemination, reuse, portability, searchability, automation and demanding tasks like querying. The Semantic Web is an ideal platform for interlinking and performing operations on diverse person- and object-related data available from the Social Web, and has produced a variety of approaches to overcome the boundaries being experienced in Social Web application areas.

After a short overview of both the Social Web and the Semantic Web, Breslin et al. describe some popular social media and social networking applications, list their strengths and limitations, and describe some applications of Semantic Web technology to address their current shortcomings by enhancing them with semantics. Across these social websites, they demonstrate a twofold approach for interconnecting the islands that are social websites with semantic technologies, and for powering semantic applications with rich community-created content. They conclude with observations on how the application of Semantic Web technologies to the Social Web is leading towards the "Social Semantic Web" (sometimes also called "Web 3.0"), forming a network of interlinked and semantically-rich content and knowledge.

The book is intended for computer science professionals, researchers, and graduates interested in understanding the technologies and research issues involved in applying Semantic Web technologies to social software. Practitioners and developers interested in applications such as blogs, social networks or wikis will also learn about methods for increasing the levels of automation in these forms of Web communication.

This book applies a new analytical framework to the study of the evolution of large Internet companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Samsung. It sheds light on the dynamics of business groups, which are approached as 'business ecosystems,' and introduces the concept of Epigenetic Economic Dynamics (EED), which is defined as the study of the epigenetic dynamics generated as a result of the adaptation of organizations to major changes in their respective environments. The book augments the existing literature on evolutionary economic thinking with findings from epigenetics, which are proving increasingly useful in analyzing the workings of large organizations. It also details the theoretical and conceptual nature of recent work based on evolutionary economics, mainly from the perspective of generalized Darwinism, resilience and related variety, and complements the work conducted on evolutionary economics by applying the analytical framework of EED. It makes it easier to forecast future dynamics on the Internet by proving that a sizable number of big business groups are veering from their initial paths to take unprecedented new directions as a result of competition pressure, and as such is a valuable resource for postgraduates and researchers as well as those involved in economics and innovation studies.

Achieving enterprise success necessitates addressing enterprises in ways that match the complexity and dynamics of the modern enterprise environment. However, since the majority of enterprise strategic initiatives appear to fail - among which those regarding information technology - the currently often practiced approaches to strategy development and implementation seem more an obstacle than an enabler for strategic enterprise success.

Two themes underpin the fundamentally different views outlined in this book. First, the competence-based perspective on governance, whereby employees are viewed as the crucial core for effectively addressing the complex, dynamic and uncertain enterprise reality, as well as for successfully defining and operationalizing strategic choices. Second, enterprise engineering as the formal conceptual framework and methodology for arranging a unified and integrated enterprise design, which is a necessary condition for enterprise success.

Jan Hoogervorst's presentation, which is based on both research and his professional background at Sogeti B.V., aims at professionals in management and consulting as well as students in management science and business information systems.

This is the first book to describe how Autonomous Virtual Humans and Social Robots can interact with real people, be aware of the environment around them, and react to various situations. Researchers from around the world present the main techniques for tracking and analysing humans and their behaviour and contemplate the potential for these virtual humans and robots to replace or stand in for their human counterparts, tackling areas such as awareness and reactions to real world stimuli and using the same modalities as humans do: verbal and body gestures, facial expressions and gaze to aid seamless human-computer interaction (HCI). The research presented in this volume is split into three sections: *User Understanding through Multisensory Perception: deals with the analysis and recognition of a given situation or stimuli, addressing issues of facial recognition, body gestures and sound localization. *Facial and Body Modelling Animation: presents the methods used in modelling and animating faces and bodies to generate realistic motion. *Modelling Human Behaviours: presents the behavioural aspects of virtual humans and social robots when interacting and reacting to real humans and each other. Context Aware Human-Robot and Human-Agent Interaction would be of great use to students, academics and industry specialists in areas like Robotics, HCI, and Computer Graphics.

You don't need to be convinced. You know that usability is key to the success of any interactive system-from commercial software to B2B Web sites to handheld devices. But you need skills to make usability part of your product development equation. How will you assess your users' needs and preferences? How will you design effective solutions that are grounded in users' current practices? How will you evaluate and refine these designs to ensure a quality product?

"Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction" is a radical departure from traditional books that emphasize theory and address experts. This book focuses on the realities of product development, showing how user interaction scenarios can make usability practices an integral part of interactive system development. As you'll learn, usability engineering is not the application of inflexible rules; it's a process of analysis, prototyping, and problem solving in which you evaluate tradeoffs, make reasoned decisions, and maximize the overall value of your product.
* Written by prominent HCI educators who understand how to teach usability practices to students and professional developers.
* Interleaves HCI theory and concepts with a running case study demonstrating their application.
* Gradually elaborates the case study to introduce increasingly sophisticated usability engineering techniques.
* Analyzes usability issues in realistic scenarios that describe existing or envisioned systems from the perspective of one or more users.
* Emphasizes the real world of usability engineering-a world in which tradeoffs must be weighed and difficult decisions made to achieve desired results.
* Includes a companion Web site which provides additional case studies in a multimedia format, along with a Java application for creating and editing scenarios. This site also provides instructors with sample syllabi, lecture slides and notes, in-class exercises, solutions to textbook exercises, additional project ideas, and links to other HCI resources.

This book develops a crowdsourced sensor-cloud service composition framework taking into account spatio-temporal aspects. This book also unfolds new horizons to service-oriented computing towards the direction of crowdsourced sensor data based applications, in the broader context of Internet of Things (IoT). It is a massive challenge for the IoT research field how to effectively and efficiently capture, manage and deliver sensed data as user-desired services. The outcome of this research will contribute to solving this very important question, by designing a novel service framework and a set of unique service selection and composition frameworks. Delivering a novel service framework to manage crowdsourced sensor data provides high-level abstraction (i.e., sensor-cloud service) to model crowdsourced sensor data from functional and non-functional perspectives, seamlessly turning the raw data into "ready to go" services. A creative indexing model is developed to capture and manage the spatio-temporal dynamism of crowdsourced service providers. Delivering novel frameworks to compose crowdsourced sensor-cloud services is vital. These frameworks focuses on spatio-temporal composition of crowdsourced sensor-cloud services, which is a new territory for existing service oriented computing research. A creative failure-proof model is also designed to prevent composition failure caused by fluctuating QoS. Delivering an incentive model to drive the coverage of crowdsourced service providers is also vital. A new spatio-temporal incentive model targets changing coverage of the crowdsourced providers to achieve demanded coverage of crowdsourced sensor-cloud services within a region. The outcome of this research is expected to potentially create a sensor services crowdsourcing market and new commercial opportunities focusing on crowdsourced data based applications. The crowdsourced community based approach adds significant value to journey planning and map services thus creating a competitive edge for a technologically-minded companies incentivizing new start-ups, thus enabling higher market innovation. This book primarily targets researchers and practitioners, who conduct research work in service oriented computing, Internet of Things (IoT), smart city and spatio-temporal travel planning, as well as advanced-level students studying this field. Small and Medium Entrepreneurs, who invest in crowdsourced IoT services and journey planning infrastructures, will also want to purchase this book.

Ever since its inception, the Web has changed the landscape of human experiences on how we interact with one another and data through service infrastructures via various computing devices. This interweaving environment is now becoming ever more embedded into devices and systems that integrate seamlessly on how we live, both in our working or leisure time. For this volume, King and Baeza-Yates selected some pioneering and cutting-edge research work that is pointing to the future of the Web. Based on the Workshop Track of the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008) in Beijing, they selected the top contributions and asked the authors to resubmit their work with a minimum of one third of additional material from their original workshop manuscripts to be considered for this volume. After a second-round of reviews and selection, 16 contributions were finally accepted. The work within this volume represents the tip of an iceberg of the many exciting advancements on the WWW. It covers topics like semantic web services, location-based and mobile applications, personalized and context-dependent user interfaces, social networks, and folksonomies. The presentations aim at researchers in academia and industry by showcasing latest research findings. Overall they deliver an excellent picture of the current state-of-the-art, and will also serve as the basis for ongoing research discussions and point to new directions.

Social computing concerns the study of social behavior and context based on computational systems. Behavioral modeling reproduces the social behavior, and allows for experimenting with and deep understanding of behavior, patterns, and potential outcomes. The pervasive use of computer and Internet technologies provides an unprecedented environment where people can share opinions and experiences, offer suggestions and advice, debate, and even conduct experiments. Social computing facilitates behavioral modeling in model building, analysis, pattern mining, anticipation, and prediction. The proceedings from this interdisciplinary workshop provide a platform for researchers, practitioners, and graduate students from sociology, behavioral and computer science, psychology, cultural study, information systems, and operations research to share results and develop new concepts and methodologies aimed at advancing and deepening our understanding of social and behavioral computing to aid critical decision making.

This text helps the reader generate clear, effective documentation that is tailored to the information requirements of the end-user. Written for technical writers and their managers, quality assurance experts, and software engineers, the book describes a user-centered information design method (UCID) that should help ensure documentation conveys significant information for the user. The UCID shows how to: integrate the four major information components of a software system - user interface labels, messages, online and printed documentation; make sure these elements work together to improve usability; deploy iterative design and prototyping procedures that minimize flaws and save time and money; and guide technical writers effectively.

Collaborative Networks A Tool for Promoting Co-creation and Innovation The collaborative networks paradigm offers powerful socio-organizational mec- nisms, supported by advanced information and communication technologies for p- moting innovation. This, in turn, leads to new products and services, growth of better customer relationships, establishing better project and process management, and building higher-performing consortia. By putting diverse entities that bring different perspectives, competencies, practices, and cultures, to work together, collaborative networks develop the right environment for the emergence of new ideas and more efficient, yet practical, solutions. This aspect is particularly important for small and medium enterprises which typically lack critical mass and can greatly benefit from participation in co-innovation networks. However, larger organizations also benefit from the challenges and the diversity found in collaborative ecosystems. In terms of research, in addition to the trend identified in previous years toward a sounder consolidation of the theoretical foundation in this discipline, there is now a direction of developments more focused on modeling and reasoning about new c- laboration patterns and their contribution to value creation. "Soft issues," including social capital, cultural aspects, ethics and value systems, trust, emotions, behavior, etc. continue to deserve particular attention in terms of modeling and reasoning. Exploi- tion of new application domains such as health care, education, and active aging for retired professionals also help identify new research challenges, both in terms of m- eling and ICT support development.

This book gathers visionary ideas from leading academics and scientists to predict the future of wireless communication and enabling technologies in 2050 and beyond. The content combines a wealth of illustrations, tables, business models, and novel approaches to the evolution of wireless communication. The book also provides glimpses into the future of emerging technologies, end-to-end systems, and entrepreneurial and business models, broadening readers' understanding of potential future advances in the field and their influence on society at large

Usability has become increasingly important as an essential part of the design and development of software and systems for all sectors of society, business, industry, government and education, as well as a topic of research. Today, we can safely say that, in many parts of the world, information technology and communications is or is becoming a central force in revolutionising the way that we all live and how our societies function. IFIP's mission states clearly that it "encourages and assists in the development, exploitation and application of information technology for the benefit of all people." The question that must be considered now is how much attention has been given to the usability of the IT-based systems that we use in our work and daily lives. There is much evidence to indicate that the real interests and needs of people have not yet been embraced in a substantial way by IT decision makers and when developing and implementing the IT systems that shape our lives, both as private individuals and at work. But some headway has been made. Three years ago, the IFIP Technical Committee on Human Computer Interaction (IFIP TC13) gave the subject of usability its top priority for future work in advancing HCI within the international community. This Usability Stream of the IFIP World Computer Congress is a result of this initiative. It provides a showcase on usability involving some practical business solutions and experiences, and some research findings."

Designing Inclusive Interactions contains the proceedings of the fifth Cambridge Workshop on Universal Access and Assistive Technology (CWUAAT), incorporating the 8th Cambridge Workshop on Rehabilitation Robotics, held in Cambridge, England, in March 2010. It contains contributions from an international group of leading researchers in the fields of Universal Access and Assistive Technology. This conference will mainly focus on the following principal topics: 1. Designing assistive and rehabilitation technology for working and daily living environments 2. Measuring inclusion for the design of products for work and daily living 3. Inclusive interaction design and new technologies for inclusive design 4. Assembling new user data for inclusive design 5. The design of accessible and inclusive contexts: work and daily living environments 6. Business advantages and applications of inclusive design 7. Legislation, standards and government awareness of inclusive design

The book includes 61 selected papers from 106 presented at the second International Conference on Machine Automation (ICMA2000). The conference focused, for the first time, on human friendly mechantronics which covers machine systems interacting with human beings, psychological, physiological, and physical behaviors of the human being itself, robotics, human-mimetic mechanical systems, commercial application examples and so on. Machine automation has owed a lot to mechatronics technology in the last decades, however, a paradigm shift is desired and emphasized in the 21st century in every aspect of our society, and mechantronics is not an exception. The paradigm shift in mechatronics is a pursuit of productivity and efficiency to the preference of humans, and it is time that a new concept of a human friendly robot must be proposed that is welcome by human users. The book aims to offer the most up-to-date and valuable information on:
Human Interface & Communication
Human Support Technology
Actuator & Control
Vision & Sensing
Robotics and Design
Manufacturing System
We believe this book will bring advanced knowledge and valuable information to the industries as well as to academics and will contribute to the further development in mechatronics and its related fields.
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