As communication resource technologies improve and adjust to the needs of the individual, the prevalence of distance learning increases, continuing the development of educational advancements. Second-Language Distance Learning and Teaching: Theoretical Perspectives and Didactic Ergonomics explores the construct of distance second language learning, its defined parameters, theoretical models, and model method validation. This reference work offers educators and practitioners a comprehensive and interdisciplinary perspective, while introducing the principles for understanding, designing, and running learning environments.

This book discusses human emotion recognition from face images using different modalities, highlighting key topics in facial expression recognition, such as the grid formation, distance signature, shape signature, texture signature, feature selection, classifier design, and the combination of signatures to improve emotion recognition. The book explains how six basic human emotions can be recognized in various face images of the same person, as well as those available from benchmark face image databases like CK+, JAFFE, MMI, and MUG. The authors present the concept of signatures for different characteristics such as distance and shape texture, and describe the use of associated stability indices as features, supplementing the feature set with statistical parameters such as range, skewedness, kurtosis, and entropy. In addition, they demonstrate that experiments with such feature choices offer impressive results, and that performance can be further improved by combining the signatures rather than using them individually. There is an increasing demand for emotion recognition in diverse fields, including psychotherapy, biomedicine, and security in government, public and private agencies. This book offers a valuable resource for researchers working in these areas.

Fundamental Design and Automation Technologies in Offshore Robotics introduces technological design, modelling, stability analysis, control synthesis, filtering problem and real time operation of robotics vehicles in offshore environments. The book gives numerical and simulation results in each chapter to reflect the engineering practice yet demonstrate the focus of the developed analysis and synthesis approaches. The book is ideal to be used as a reference book for senior and graduate students. It is written in a way that the presentation is simple, clear, and easy to read and understand which would be appreciated by graduate students. Researchers working on marine vehicles and robotics would be able to find reference material on related topics from the book. The book could be of a significant interest to the researchers within offshore and deep see society, including both academic and industrial parts.

This book consists of selected peer-reviewed articles from the International Conference on Computer Vision, High Performance Computing, Smart Devices and Networks (CHSN-2020), held at JNTU, Kakinada, India. The theme and areas of the conference include vast scope for latest concepts and trends in communication engineering, information theory and networks, signal, image and speech processing, wireless and mobile communication, Internet of Things, and cybersecurity for societal causes and humanitarian applications.

This book presents a collection of contributions in the field of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). The themes addressed are multidisciplinary in nature, and closely connected in their ultimate aim to identify features from dynamic realistic signal exchanges and invariant machine representations that can be exploited to improve the quality of life of their end users. Mathematical tools like ANNs are currently exploited in many scientific domains because of their solid theoretical background and effectiveness in providing solutions to many demanding tasks such as appropriately processing (both for extracting features and recognizing) mono- and bi-dimensional dynamic signals, solving strong nonlinearities in the data and providing general solutions for deep and fully connected architectures. Given the multidisciplinary nature of their use and the interdisciplinary characterization of the problems they are applied to - which range from medicine to psychology, industrial and social robotics, computer vision, and signal processing (among many others) - ANNs may provide a basis for redefining the concept of information processing. These reflections are supported by theoretical models and applications presented in the chapters of this book. This book is of primary importance for: (a) the academic research community, (b) the ICT market, (c) PhD students and early-stage researchers, (d) schools, hospitals, rehabilitation and assisted-living centers, and (e) representatives of multimedia industries and standardization bodies.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the third international conference AsiaHaptics 2018, held in Songdo, Korea. It presents the state-of-the-art of the diverse haptics (touch)-related research, including perception and illusion, development of haptics devices, and applications to a wide variety of fields such as education, medicine, telecommunication, navigation and entertainment. This book is a valuable resource not only for active haptics researchers, but also for general readers wishing to understand the status quo in this interdisciplinary area of science and technology.

Smart Homes (SH) offer a promising approach to assisted living for the ageing population. Yet the main obstacle to the rapid development and deployment of Smart Home (SH) solutions essentially arises from the nature of the SH field, which is multidisciplinary and involves diverse applications and various stakeholders. Accordingly, an alternative to a one-size-fits-all approach is needed in order to advance the state of the art towards an open SH infrastructure. This book makes a valuable and critical contribution to smart assisted living research through the development of new effective, integrated, and interoperable SH solutions. It focuses on four underlying aspects: (1) Sensing and Monitoring Technologies; (2) Context Interference and Behaviour Analysis; (3) Personalisation and Adaptive Interaction, and (4) Open Smart Home and Service Infrastructures, demonstrating how fundamental theories, models and algorithms can be exploited to solve real-world problems. This comprehensive and timely book offers a unique and essential reference guide for policymakers, funding bodies, researchers, technology developers and managers, end users, carers, clinicians, healthcare service providers, educators and students, helping them adopt and implement smart assisted living systems.

This book takes a deep dive into ubiquitous computing for applications in health, business, education, tourism, and transportation. The rich interdisciplinary contents of the book appeal to readers from diverse disciplines who aspire to create new and innovative research initiatives and applications in ubiquitous computing. Topics include condition monitoring and diagnostics; multi-objective optimization in design, multi-objective optimization of machining parameters, and more. The book benefits researchers, advanced students, as well as practitioners interested in applications of ubiquitous computing. Features practical, tested applications in ubiquitous computing Includes applications such as health, business, education, electronics, tourism, and transportation Applicable to researchers, academics, students, and professionals

What's the best book ever written? What would happen if we all stopped eating meat? What's the secret to living past 110? And what actually is the best thing since sliced bread? In An Answer For Everything, 200 of the world's most intriguing questions are settled once and for all through beautiful and brilliant infographics. The results will leave you shocked, informed and thoroughly entertained. Created by the team behind the award-winning Delayed Gratification magazine, these compelling, darkly funny data visualisations will change the way you think about ... everything

This book offer clear descriptions of the basic structure for the recognition and classification of human activities using different types of sensor module and smart devices in e.g. healthcare, education, monitoring the elderly, daily human behavior, and fitness monitoring. In addition, the complexities, challenges, and design issues involved in data collection, processing, and other fundamental stages along with datasets, methods, etc., are discussed in detail. The book offers a valuable resource for readers in the fields of pattern recognition, human-computer interaction, and the Internet of Things.

This book introduces state-of-the-art research on virtual reality, simulation and serious games for education and its chapters presented the best papers from the 4th Asia-Europe Symposium on Simulation and Serious Games (4th AESSSG) held in Turku, Finland, December 2018. The chapters of the book present a multi-facet view on different approaches to deal with challenges that surround the uptake of educational applications of virtual reality, simulations and serious games in school practices. The different approaches highlight challenges and potential solutions and provide future directions for virtual reality, simulation and serious games research, for the design of learning material and for implementation in classrooms. By doing so, the book is a useful resource for both students and scholars interested in research in this field, for designers of learning material, and for practitioners that want to embrace virtual reality, simulation and/or serious games in their education.

Perception of human beings has evolved from natural biosensor to powerful sensors and sensor networks. In sensor networks, trillions of devices are interconnected and sense a broad spectrum of contexts for human beings, laying the foundation of Internet of Things (IoT). However, sensor technologies have several limitations relating to deployment cost and usability, which render them unacceptable for practical use. Consequently, the pursuit of convenience in human perception necessitates a wireless, sensorless and contactless sensing paradigm. Recent decades have witnessed rapid developments in wireless sensing technologies, in which sensors detect wireless signals (such as acoustic, light, and radio frequency) originally designed for data transmission or lighting. By analyzing the signal measurements on the receiver end, channel characteristics can be obtained to convey the sensing results. Currently, significant effort is being devoted to employing the ambient Wi-Fi, RFID, Bluetooth, ZigBee, and television signals for smart wireless sensing, eliminating the need for dedicated sensors and promoting the prospect of the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT). This book provides a comprehensive and in-depth discussion of wireless sensing technologies. Specifically, with a particular focus on Wi-Fi-based sensing for understanding human behavior, it adopts a top-down approach to introduce three key topics: human detection, localization, and activity recognition. Presenting the latest advances in smart wireless sensing based on an extensive review of state-of-the-art research, it promotes the further development of this area and also contributes to interdisciplinary research.

This book offers a snapshot of cutting-edge applications of digital phenotyping and mobile sensing for studying human behavior and planning innovative e-healthcare interventions. The respective chapters, written by authoritative researchers, cover both theoretical perspectives and good scientific and professional practices related to the use and development of these technologies. They share novel insights into established applications of mobile sensing, such as predicting personality or mental and behavioral health on the basis of smartphone usage patterns, and highlight emerging trends, such as the use of machine learning, big data and deep learning approaches, and the combination of mobile sensing with AI and expert systems. Important issues relating to privacy and ethics are analyzed, together with selected case studies. This thoroughly revised and extended second edition provides researchers and professionals with extensive information on the latest developments in the field of digital phenotyping and mobile sensing. It gives a special emphasis to trends in diagnostics systems and AI applications, suggesting important future directions for research in public health and social sciences.

The book presents the history of time-domain representation and the extent of its development along with that of spectral domain representation in the cognitive and technology domains. It discusses all the cognitive experiments related to this development, along with details of technological developments related to both automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text to speech synthesis (TTS), and introduces a viable time-domain representation for both objective and subjective analysis, as an alternative to the well-known spectral representation. The book also includes a new cohort study on the use of lexical knowledge in ASR. India has numerous official dialects, and spoken-language technology development is a burgeoning area. In fact TTS and ASR taken together constitute the most important technology for empowering people. As such, the book describes time domain representation in such a way that it can be easily and seamlessly incorporated into ASR and TTS research and development. In short, it is a valuable guidebook for the development of ASR and TTS in all the Indian Standard Dialects using signal domain parameters.

This book systematically presents the wireless sensing technology, which has become a promising sensing paradigm in recent years. It includes the introduction of underlying sensing principles, wireless signals, sensing methodologies and enabled applications. Meanwhile, it provides case studies to demonstrate how wireless sensing is applied for representative human and object sensing applications. This book also provides a wireless sensing framework as a guidance to understand and design a wireless sensing system or prototype based on their needs. It also presents a critical investigation of the challenges in achieving wireless sensing in both signal-level and application-level contexts. Accordingly, it summarizes the typical solutions to tackle the related challenges. Researchers and advanced-level students in computer science or electrical engineering working on the design of a wireless system will find this book useful as a reference. Professionals working in the wireless sensing industry will also find this book valuable as a reference tool.

Presenting the latest technological developments in arts and culture, this volume demonstrates the advantages of a union between art and science. Electronic Visualisation in Arts and Culture is presented in five parts: Imaging and Culture New Art Practice Seeing Motion Interaction and Interfaces Visualising Heritage Electronic Visualisation in Arts and Culture explores a variety of new theory and technologies, including devices and techniques for motion capture for music and performance, advanced photographic techniques, computer generated images derived from different sources, game engine software, airflow to capture the motions of bird flight and low-altitude imagery from airborne devices. The international authors of this book are practising experts from universities, art practices and organisations, research centres and independent research. They describe electronic visualisation used for such diverse aspects of culture as airborne imagery, computer generated art based on the autoimmune system, motion capture for music and for sign language, the visualisation of time and the long term preservation of these materials. Selected from the EVA London conferences from 2009-2012, held in association with the Computer Arts Society of the British Computer Society, the authors have reviewed, extended and fully updated their work for this state-of-the-art volume.

This book highlights new trends and challenges in intelligent systems, which play an essential part in the digital transformation of many areas of science and practice. It includes papers offering a deeper understanding of the human-centred perspective on artificial intelligence, of intelligent value co-creation, ethics, value-oriented digital models, transparency, and intelligent digital architectures and engineering to support digital services and intelligent systems, the transformation of structures in digital business and intelligent systems based on human practices, as well as the study of interaction and co-adaptation of humans and systems. All papers were originally presented at the International KES Conference on Human Centred Intelligent Systems 2021 (KES HCIS 2021) held on June 14-16, 2021 in the KES Virtual Conference Centre.

The contributions to this volume are drawn from the interdisciplinary research c- ried out within the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB 378), a special long-term funding scheme of the German National Science Foundation (DFG). Sonderforschungsbe- ich 378 was situated at Saarland University, with colleagues from arti?cial intel- gence, computational linguistics, computer science, philosophy, psychology - and in its ?nal phases - cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics. The funding covered a period of 12 years, which was split into four phases of 3 years each, ending in December of 2007. Every sub-period culminated in an intensive reviewing process, comprising written reports as well as on-site p- sentations and demonstrations to the external reviewers. We are most grateful to these reviewers for their extensive support and critical feedback; they contributed 1 their time and labor freely to the DFG, the independent and self-organized ins- tution of German scientists. The ?nal evaluation of the DFG reviewers judged the overall performance and the actual work with the highest possible mark, i.e. "excellent".

This book presents the development of a gaming quality model to predict the gaming Quality of Experience (QoE) of players that could be used for planning the network service or quality monitoring of cloud gaming services. The author presents a model that is developed following a modular structure approach that keeps the different types of impairments separately. The book shows how such a modular structure allows developing a sustainable model as each component can be updated by advances in that specific research area or technology. The presented gaming quality model takes into account two modules of video quality and input quality. The latter considers the interactivity aspects of gaming. The video quality module offers a series of models that differ depending on the level of access to the video stream information, allowing high flexibility for service providers regarding the positions of measuring points within their system. In summary, the present book focuses on (1) creation of multiple image/video and cloud gaming quality datasets, (2) development of a gaming video classification, and (3) development of a series of gaming QoE models to predict the gaming QoE depending on the level of access to the video stream information.

This book presents a comprehensive guide to the design of playing robots and the related play experiences. Play is a natural activity for building and improving abilities, and it reveals important particularly for persons with disabilities. Many social, physical and cultural factors may hinder children with disabilities from fully enjoying play as their peers. Autonomous robots with specific characteristics can enhance the ludic experience, having implications for the character of the play and presenting opportunities related to autonomy and physical movement, the very nature of robots. Their introduction into play thus provides everybody, and in particular persons with disabilities, new possibilities for developing abilities, improving general status, participating in social contexts, as well as supporting professionals in monitoring progress. This book presents a framework for the design of playful activities with robots, developed over 20 years' experience at AIRLab - POLIMI. Part 1 introduces the play concepts and characteristics, and research results about play of children with different kinds of impairments. Part 2 focuses on implementing robots able to play. The design of playful activities is discussed, as well as the necessary characteristics for them to be useful in both general play and activities involving disability-related limitations. In Part 3, the defined framework is used to analyze possibilities involving robots available on the toy market, robots developed at research labs, and robots to be developed in the next future. The aim of the book is to give developers, caregivers, and users a set of methodological tools for selecting, exploring, and designing inclusive play activities where robots play a central role.

This book provides a systematic treatment of the theoretical foundation and algorithmic tools necessary in the design of energy-efficient algorithms and protocols in wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs). These problems addressed in the book are of both fundamental and practical importance. Specifically, the book delivers a comprehensive treatment on the following problems ranging from theoretical modeling and analysis, to practical algorithm design and optimization: energy-efficient clustering-based leader election algorithms in WBSNs; MAC protocol for duty-cycling WBSNs with concurrent traffic; multi-channel broadcast algorithms in duty-cycling WBSNs; and energy-efficient sleep scheduling algorithms in WBSNs. Target readers of the book are researchers and advanced-level engineering students interested in acquiring in-depth knowledge on the topic and on WBSNs and their applications, both from theoretical and engineering perspective.

This book presents a new paradigm of software testing by emphasizing the role of critical thinking, system thinking and rationality as the most important skills for the tester. It thus approaches software testing from a different perspective than in past literature, as the vast majority of books describe testing in the context of specific tools, automation, documentation, particular test design techniques or test management. In addition, the book proposes a novel meta-approach for designing effective test strategies, which is based on recent advances in psychology, economics, system sciences and logic. Chapter 1 starts by introducing the fundamental ideas underlying software testing. Chapter 2 then describes meta-strategies in software testing, i.e. general approaches that can be adapted to many different situations that a software tester encounters. Next, Chapter 3 presents the concept of Thinking-Driven Testing (TDT). This approach utilizes the concepts discussed in the two previous chapters and introduces the main ideas that underlie a reasonable and optimal approach to software testing. Chapter 4 builds on this basis and proposes a specific approach to testing, called TQED, that makes it possible to increase creativity in the context of delivering effective, optimal test ideas. Chapter 5 provides an overview of different types of testing techniques in order to understand the fundamental concepts of test design, while Chapter 6 details various pitfalls a tester may encounter and that can originate from a wide range of testing process areas. Lastly, Chapter 7 puts all this into practice, as it contains several exercises that will help testers develop a number of crucial skills: logical thinking and reasoning, thinking out of the box, creativity, counting and estimating, and analytical thinking. By promoting critical, rational and creative thinking, this book invites readers to re-examine common assumptions regarding software testing and shows them how to become professional testers who bring added value to their company.

Discusses algorithms and design methodologies for the implementation of HMI based IoT systems. Covers real-time utility of IoT based devices and systems. Provides human-machine interactive technologies and smart applications using IoT. Covers cyber-physical systems, IoT in HMI, using a blend of theoretical knowledge with a practical approach.

Research on students' media use outside of education is just slowly taking off. Influences of information and communication technologies (ICT) on human information processing are widely assumed and particularly effects of dis- and misinformation are a current threat to democracies. Today, higher education competes with a very diverse (online) media landscape and domain-specific content from sources of varying quality, ranging from high-quality videographed lectures by top-level university lecturers, popular-scientific video talks, collaborative wikis, anonymous forum comments or blog posts to YouTube remixes of discipline factoids and unverified twitter feeds. Self-organizing learners need more knowledge, skills, and awareness on how to critically evaluate quality and select trustworthy sources, how to process information, and what cognitive, affective, attitudinal, behavioral, and neurological effects it can have on them in the long term. The PLATO program takes on the ambitious goal of uniting strands of research from various disciplines to address these questions through fundamental analyses of human information processing when learning with the Internet. This innovative interdisciplinary approach includes elements of ICT innovations and risks, learning analytics and large-scale computational modelling aimed to provide us with a better understanding of how to effectively and autonomously acquire reliable knowledge in the Information Age, how to design ICTs, and shape social and human-machine interactions for successful learning. This volume will be of interest to researchers in the fields of educational sciences, educational measurement and applied branches of the involved disciplines, including linguistics, mathematics, media studies, sociology of knowledge, philosophy of mind, business, ethics, and educational technology.