Reasoning for Information: Seeking and Planning Dialogues provides a logic-based reasoning component for spoken language dialogue systems. This component, called Problem Assistant is responsible for processing constraints on a possible solution obtained from various sources, namely user and the system's domain-specific information. The authors also present findings on the implementation of a dialogue management interface to the Problem Assistant. The dialogue system supports simple mixed-initiative planning interactions in the TRAINS domain, which is still a relatively complex domain involving a number of logical constraints and relations forming the basis for the collaborative problem-solving behavior that drives the dialogue.

In this book, a novel approach that combines speech-based emotion recognition with adaptive human-computer dialogue modeling is described. With the robust recognition of emotions from speech signals as their goal, the authors analyze the effectiveness of using a plain emotion recognizer, a speech-emotion recognizer combining speech and emotion recognition, and multiple speech-emotion recognizers at the same time. The semi-stochastic dialogue model employed relates user emotion management to the corresponding dialogue interaction history and allows the device to adapt itself to the context, including altering the stylistic realization of its speech. This comprehensive volume begins by introducing spoken language dialogue systems and providing an overview of human emotions, theories, categorization and emotional speech. It moves on to cover the adaptive semi-stochastic dialogue model and the basic concepts of speech-emotion recognition. Finally, the authors show how speech-emotion recognizers can be optimized, and how an adaptive dialogue manager can be implemented. The book, with its novel methods to perform robust speech-based emotion recognition at low complexity, will be of interest to a variety of readers involved in human-computer interaction.

Organizational change is becoming increasingly complex, challenging and difficult to handle as technology advances. And there is a need to discuss how it can be both more effectively managed by large and small organizations, while at the same time the strategies for changes are based on ethical notions of democracy and participation. Redesigning Human Systems assists those interested in and responsible for the management of major change within organizations, and provides the theories and values that should be adhered to in order to achieve that change successfully and effectively.

By combining agent capabilities with computational linguistics, conversational agents can exploit natural language technologies to improve communication between humans and computers. Conversational Agents and Natural Language Interaction: Techniques and Effective Practices is a reference guide for researchers entering the promising field of conversational agents. It provides an introduction to fundamental concepts in the field, collects experiences of researchers working on conversational agents, and reviews techniques for the design and application of conversational agents. The book discusses the successes of and challenges faced by researchers, designers, and programmers who want to use conversational agents for e-commerce, help desks, website navigation, personalized service, and training or education applications.

In this book, hierarchical structures based on neural networks are investigated for automatic speech recognition. These structures are mainly evaluated within the phoneme recognition task under the Hybrid Hidden Markov Model/Artificial Neural Network (HMM/ANN) paradigm. The baseline hierarchical scheme consists of two levels each which is based on a Multilayered Perceptron (MLP). Additionally, the output of the first level is used as an input for the second level. This system can be substantially speeded up by removing the redundant information contained at the output of the first level.

Databases have been designed to store large volumes of data and to provide efficient query interfaces. Semantic Web formats are geared towards capturing domain knowledge, interlinking annotations, and offering a high-level, machine-processable view of information. However, the gigantic amount of such useful information makes efficient management of it increasingly difficult, undermining the possibility of transforming it into useful knowledge.

The research presented by De Virgilio, Giunchiglia and Tanca tries to bridge the two worlds in order to leverage the efficiency and scalability of database-oriented technologies to support an ontological high-level view of data and metadata. The contributions present and analyze techniques for semantic information management, by taking advantage of the synergies between the logical basis of the Semantic Web and the logical foundations of data management. The book's leitmotif is to propose models and methods especially tailored to represent and manage data that is appropriately structured for easier machine processing on the Web.

After two introductory chapters on data management and the Semantic Web in general, the remaining contributions are grouped into five parts on Semantic Web Data Storage, Reasoning in the Semantic Web, Semantic Web Data Querying, Semantic Web Applications, and Engineering Semantic Web Systems. The handbook-like presentation makes this volume an important reference on current work and a source of inspiration for future development, targeting academic and industrial researchers as well as graduate students in Semantic Web technologies or database design.

Virtual worlds are an area of growing interest in many sectors, including higher education. While Web-based tools have existed for years to help deliver course content, these tools have not traditionally provided means for creation of community with the embedded communication and collaboration necessary for successful teaching and learning. Teaching and Learning in 3D Immersive Worlds: Pedagogical Models and Constructivist Approaches examines successful implementation of social constructivist instructional design tenets in 3D virtual immersive environments. Authors share best practices, challenges, and advice to those working to utilize virtual environments in higher education and other venues. Readers will gain both a research background in the use of virtual worlds for teaching and learning and practical advice as they begin to design and implement these environments.

The design of various virtual environments should be based on the needs of a diverse population of users around the globe. Interface design should be user centric and should strive for making the user's interaction as simple, meaningful, and efficient as possible. User Interface Design for Virtual Environments: Challenges and Advances focuses on challenges that designers face in creating interfaces for users of various virtual environments. Chapters included in this book address various critical issues that have implications for user interface design from a number of different viewpoints. This book is written for professionals who want to improve their understanding of challenges associated with user interface design issues for globally-dispersed users in various virtual environments.

This book stages a dialogue between international researchers from the broad fields of complexity science and narrative studies. It presents an edited collection of chapters on aspects of how narrative theory from the humanities may be exploited to understand, explain, describe, and communicate aspects of complex systems, such as their emergent properties, feedbacks, and downwards causation; and how ideas from complexity science can inform narrative theory, and help explain, understand, and construct new, more complex models of narrative as a cognitive faculty and as a pervasive cultural form in new and old media. The book is suitable for academics, practitioners, and professionals, and postgraduates in complex systems, narrative theory, literary and film studies, new media and game studies, and science communication.

Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between service provider and customers. It is now a growing field of both practice and academic research. Designing for Service brings together a wide range of international contributors to map the field of service design and identify key issues for practitioners and researchers such as identity, ethics and accountability. Designing for Service aims to problematize the field in order to inform a more critical debate within service design, thereby supporting its development beyond the pure methodological discussions that currently dominate the field. The contributors to this innovative volume consider the practice of service design, ethical challenges designers may encounter, and the new spaces opened up by the advent of modern digital technologies.

What the book is about This book is about the theory and practice of the use of multimedia, multimodal interfaces for leaming. Yet it is not about technology as such, at least in the sense that the authors do not subscribe to the idea that one should do something just because it is technologically possible. 'Multimedia' has been adopted in some commercial quarters to mean little more than a computer with some form of audio ar (more usually) video attachment. This is a trend which ought to be resisted, as exemplified by the material in this book. Rather than merely using a new technology 'because it is there', there is a need to examine how people leam and eommunicate, and to study diverse ways in which computers ean harness text, sounds, speech, images, moving pietures, gestures, touch, etc. , to promote effective human leaming. We need to identify which media, in whieh combinations, using what mappings of domain to representation, are appropriate far which educational purposes . . The word 'multimodal ' in the title underlies this perspective. The intention is to focus attention less on the technology and more on how to strueture different kinds of information via different sensory channels in order to yield the best possible quality of communication and educational interaction. (Though the reader should refer to Chapter 1 for a discussion of the use of the word 'multimodal' . ) Historically there was little problem.

This book is the result of a group of researchers from different disciplines asking themselves one question: what does it take to develop a computer interface that listens, talks, and can answer questions in a domain? First, obviously, it takes specialized modules for speech recognition and synthesis, human interaction management (dialogue, input fusion, and multimodal output fusion), basic question understanding, and answer finding. While all modules are researched as independent subfields, this book describes the development of state-of-the-art modules and their integration into a single, working application capable of answering medical (encyclopedic) questions such as "How long is a person with measles contagious?" or "How can I prevent RSI?."

The contributions in this book, which grew out of the IMIX project funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, document the development of this system, but also address more general issues in natural language processing, such as the development of multidimensional dialogue systems, the acquisition of taxonomic knowledge from text, answer fusion, sequence processing for domain-specific entity recognition, and syntactic parsing for question answering. Together, they offer an overview of the most important findings and lessons learned in the scope of the IMIX project, making the book of interest to both academic and commercial developers of human-machine interaction systems in Dutch or any other language.

Highlights include: integrating multi-modal input fusion in dialogue management (Van Schooten and Op den Akker), state-of-the-art approaches to the extraction of term variants (Van der Plas, Tiedemann, and Fahmi; Tjong Kim Sang, Hofmann, and De Rijke), and multi-modal answer fusion (two chapters by Van Hooijdonk, Bosma, Krahmer, Maes, Theune, and Marsi).

Watch the IMIX movie at www.nwo.nl/imix-film.

Like IBM's Watson, the IMIX system described in the book gives naturally phrased responses to naturally posed questions. Where Watson can only generate synthetic speech, the IMIX system also recognizes speech. On the other hand, Watson is able to win a television quiz, while the IMIX system is domain-specific, answering only to medical questions.

"The Netherlands has always been one of the leaders in the general field of Human Language Technology, and IMIX is no exception. It was a very ambitious program, with a remarkably successful performance leading to interesting results. The teams covered a remarkable amount of territory in the general sphere of multimodal question answering and information delivery, question answering, information extraction and component technologies."

Eduard Hovy, USC, USA, Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Norbert Reithinger, DFKI, Germany"

Grounded in the user-centered design movement, this book offers a broad consideration of how our civilization has evolved its technical infrastructure for human purpose to help us make sense of the contemporary world of information infrastructure and online existence. The author incorporates historical, cultural and aesthetic approaches to situating information and its underlying technologies across time in the collective, lived experiences of humanity. In today's digital information world, user experience is vital to the success of any product or service. Yet as the user population expands to include us all, designing for people who vary in skills, abilities, preferences and backgrounds is challenging. This book provides an integrated understanding of users, and the methods that have evolved to identify usability challenges, that can facilitate cohesive and earlier solutions. The book treats information creation and use as a core human behavior based on acts of representation and recording that humans have always practiced. It suggests that the traditional ways of studying information use, with their origins in the distinct layers of social science theories and models is limiting our understanding of what it means to be an information user and hampers our efforts at being truly user-centric in design. Instead, the book offers a way of integrating the knowledge base to support a richer view of use and users in design education and evaluation. Understanding Users is aimed at those studying or practicing user-centered design and anyone interested in learning how people might be better integrated in the design of new technologies to augment human capabilities and experiences.

ED-L2L, Learning to Live in the Knowledge Society, is one of the co-located conferences of the 20th World Computer Congress (WCC2008). The event is organized under the auspices of IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) and is to be held in Milan from 7th to 10th September 2008. ED-L2L is devoted to themes related to ICT for education in the knowledge society. It provides an international forum for professionals from all continents to discuss research and practice in ICT and education. The event brings together educators, researchers, policy makers, curriculum designers, teacher educators, members of academia, teachers and content producers. ED-L2L is organised by the IFIP Technical Committee 3, Education, with the support of the Institute for Educational Technology, part of the National Research Council of Italy. The Institute is devoted to the study of educational innovation brought about through the use of ICT. Submissions to ED-L2L are published in this conference book. The published papers are devoted to the published conference themes: Developing digital literacy for the knowledge society: information problem solving, creating, capturing and transferring knowledge, commitment to lifelong learning Teaching and learning in the knowledge society, playful and fun learning at home and in the school New models, processes and systems for formal and informal learning environments and organisations Developing a collective intelligence, learning together and sharing knowledge ICT issues in education - ethics, equality, inclusion and parental role Educating ICT professionals for the global knowledge society Managing the transition to the knowledge society

This book offers a comprehensive guide to implementing SAP and HANA on private, public and hybrid clouds. Cloud computing has transformed the way organizations run their IT infrastructures: the shift from legacy monolithic mainframes and UNIX platforms to cloud based infrastructures offering ubiquitous access to critical information, elastic provisioning and drastic cost savings has made cloud an essential part of every organization's business strategy. Cloud based services have evolved from simple file sharing, email and messaging utilities in the past, to the current situation, where their improved technical capabilities and SLAs make running mission-critical applications such as SAP possible. However, IT professionals must take due care when deploying SAP in a public, private or hybrid cloud environment. As a foundation for core business operations, SAP cloud deployments must satisfy stringent requirements concerning their performance, scale and security, while delivering measurable improvements in IT efficiency and cost savings. The 2nd edition of "SAP on the Cloud" continues the work of its successful predecessor released in 2013, providing updated guidance for deploying SAP in public, private and hybrid clouds. To do so, it discusses the technical requirements and considerations necessary for IT professionals to successfully implement SAP software in a cloud environment, including best-practice architectures for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS deployments. The section on SAP's in-memory database HANA has been significantly extended to cover Suite on HANA (SoH) and the different incarnations of HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) and Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI). As cyber threats are a significant concern, it also explores appropriate security models for defending SAP cloud deployments against modern and sophisticated attacks. The reader will gain the insights needed to understand the respective benefits and drawbacks of various deployment models and how SAP on the cloud can be used to deliver IT efficiency and cost-savings in a secure and agile manner.

This book is based on contributions to the Seventh European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication that was held at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden, in July of 1999 under the auspices of the European Language and Speech Network (ELSNET). The topic of the summer school was "Multimodality in Language and Speech Systems" (MiLaSS). The issue of multimodality in interpersonal, face-to-face communication has been an important research topic for a number of years. With the increasing sophistication of computer-based interactive systems using language and speech, the topic of multimodal interaction has received renewed interest both in terms of human-human interaction and human-machine interaction. Nine lecturers contri buted to the summer school with courses on specialized topics ranging from the technology and science of creating talking faces to human-human communication, which is mediated by computer for the handicapped. Eight of the nine lecturers are represented in this book. The summer school attracted more than 60 participants from Europe, Asia and North America representing not only graduate students but also senior researchers from both academia and industry."

Data visualization has emerged as a serious scholarly topic, and a wide range of tools have recently been developed at an accelerated pace to aid in this research area. Examining different ways of analyzing big data can result in increased efficiency for many corporations and organizations. Data Visualization and Statistical Literacy for Open and Big Data highlights methodological developments in the way that data analytics is both learned and taught. Featuring extensive coverage on emerging relevant topics such as data complexity, statistics education, and curriculum development, this publication is geared toward teachers, academicians, students, engineers, professionals, and researchers that are interested in expanding their knowledge of data examination and analysis.

Edited by thought leaders in the fields of urban informatics and urban interaction design, this book brings together case studies and examples from around the world to discuss the role that urban interfaces, citizen action, and city making play in the quest to create and maintain not only secure and resilient, but productive, sustainable and viable urban environments. The book debates the impact of these trends on theory, policy and practice. The individual chapters are based on blind peer reviewed contributions by leading researchers working at the intersection of the social / cultural, technical / digital, and physical / spatial domains of urbanism scholarship. The book will appeal not only to researchers and students, but also to a vast number of practitioners in the private and public sector interested in accessible content that clearly and rigorously analyses the potential offered by urban interfaces, mobile technology, and location-based services in the context of engaging people with open, smart and participatory urban environments.

The core message of this book is: computer games best realise affective interaction. This book brings together contributions from specialists in affective computing, game studies, game artificial intelligence, user experience research, sensor technology, multi-modal interfaces and psychology that will advance the state-of-the-art in player experience research; affect modelling, induction, and sensing; affect-driven game adaptation and game-based learning and assessment. In 3 parts the books covers Theory, Emotion Modelling and Affect-Driven Adaptation, and Applications. This book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in the fields of game research, affective computing, human computer interaction, and artificial intelligence.

How can we design better experiences? Experience Design brings together leading international scholars to provide a cross-section of critical thinking and professional practice within this emerging field. Contributors writing from theoretical, empirical and applied design perspectives address the meaning of 'experience'; draw on case studies to explore ways in which specific 'experiences' can be designed; examine which methodologies and practices are employed in this process; and consider how experience design interrelates with other academic and professional disciplines. Chapters are grouped into thematic sections addressing positions, objectives and environments, and interactions and performances, with individual case studies addressing a wide range of experiences, including urban spaces, the hospital patient, museum visitors, mobile phone users, and music festival and restaurant goers.

Practically every crime now involves some aspect of digital evidence. This is the most recent volume in the Advances in Digital Forensics series. It describes original research results and innovative applications in the emerging discipline of digital forensics. In addition, it highlights some of the major technical and legal issues related to digital evidence and electronic crime investigations.

This book contains a selection of twenty-eight edited papers from the Fourth Annual IFIP WG 11.9 Conference on Digital Forensics, held at Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan in the spring of 2008.

From security training simulations to war games to role-playing games, to sports games to gambling, playing video games has become a social phenomena, and the increasing number of players that cross gender, culture, and age is on a dramatic upward trajectory. "Playing Video Games: Motives, Responses, and Consequences" integrates communication, psychology, and technology to examine the psychological and mediated aspects of playing video games. It is the first volume to delve deeply into these aspects of computer game play. It fits squarely into the media psychology arm of entertainment studies, the next big wave in media studies. The book targets one of the most popular and pervasive media in modern times, and it will serve to define the area of study and provide a theoretical spine for future research.
This unique and timely volume will appeal to scholars, researchers, and graduate students in media studies and mass communication, psychology, and marketing.

Starting with novel algorithms for optimally updating bounding volume hierarchies of objects undergoing arbitrary deformations, the author presents a new data structure that allows, for the first time, the computation of the penetration volume. The penetration volume is related to the water displacement of the overlapping region, and thus corresponds to a physically motivated and continuous force. The practicability of the approaches used is shown by realizing new applications in the field of robotics and haptics, including a user study that evaluates the influence of the degrees of freedom in complex haptic interactions. New Geometric Data Structures for Collision Detection and Haptics closes by proposing an open source benchmarking suite that evaluates both the performance and the quality of the collision response in order to guarantee a fair comparison of different collision detection algorithms. Required in the fields of computer graphics, physically-based simulations, computer animations, robotics and haptics, collision detection is a fundamental problem that arises every time we interact with virtual objects. Some of the open challenges associated with collision detection include the handling of deformable objects, the stable computation of physically-plausible contact information, and the extremely high frequencies that are required for haptic rendering. New Geometric Data Structures for Collision Detection and Haptics presents new solutions to all of these challenges, and will prove to be a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners of collision detection in the haptics, robotics and computer graphics and animation domains.

Voice recognition is here at last. Alexa and other voice assistants have now become widespread and mainstream. Is your app ready for voice interaction? Learn how to develop your own voice applications for Amazon Alexa. Start with techniques for building conversational user interfaces and dialog management. Integrate with existing applications and visual interfaces to complement voice-first applications. The future of human-computer interaction is voice, and we'll help you get ready for it. For decades, voice-enabled computers have only existed in the realm of science fiction. But now the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) lets you develop your own voice-first applications. Leverage ASK to create engaging and natural user interfaces for your applications, enabling them to listen to users and talk back. You'll see how to use voice and sound as first-class components of user-interface design. We'll start with the essentials of building Alexa voice applications, called skills, including useful tools for creating, testing, and deploying your skills. From there, you can define parameters and dialogs that will prompt users for input in a natural, conversational style. Integrate your Alexa skills with Amazon services and other backend services to create a custom user experience. Discover how to tailor Alexa's voice and language to create more engaging responses and speak in the user's own language. Complement the voice-first experience with visual interfaces for users on screen-based devices. Add options for users to buy upgrades or other products from your application. Once all the pieces are in place, learn how to publish your Alexa skill for everyone to use. Create the future of user interfaces using the Alexa Skills Kit today. What You Need: You will need a computer capable of running the latest version of Node.js, a Git client, and internet access.