This book investigates the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on development and well-being (beyond economic benefits) and highlights some emerging issues relating to the realities, constraints and digital divides with particular reference to India. It collects a series of novel contributions, studying the Indian experience in an international cross-country perspective. The book also discusses economic, social, and behavioural aspects of well-being as well as access to ICTs across regions, states and individuals to account for the digital divide. The book establishes an aggregate relationship between ICT exposure and well-being at the country level and addresses a number of fundamental issues, such as whether ICT raises the level of transparency and governance. Based on case studies and anecdotal evidence, it then further assesses the effective implementation of service delivery through ICT innovations. The book is divided into four parts: The introductory part surveys the literature and presents background information on the Indian case; introduces the main themes on the relationships between ICT, socio-economic development and digital divides; and provides a summary and roadmap to the chapters of the book. Part II focuses on the impact of ICT on economic performance, including economic growth, productivity and trade. Part III examines the extent of the digital divides in India, including international, regional as well as inter-personal inequality. Finally, Part IV investigates the impact of ICT on governance, users' well-being and social outcomes. Combining insights from analyses of a variety of socio-economic dimensions related to digitalisation, this book is relevant for a wide range of scholars and researchers across disciplines, as well as practitioners and policy-makers. While the book has a main focus on India, various contributions take an international cross-country comparative perspective, and the results have general relevance for digitalisation and development. On the whole, the main message of this book is that the impact of ICTs is contingent upon other assets, capabilities and institutional conditions. National policies should, therefore, not only promote digitalization as such but also ensure its co-evolution and complementarity with a variety of other country-specific factors. Chapter 'Digitalisation and Development: Issues for India and Beyond' of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

Understanding emotions is becoming ever more valuable in design, both in terms of what people prefer as well as in relation to how they behave in relation to it. Approaches to conceptualising emotions in technology design, how emotions can be operationalised and how they can be measured are paramount to ascertaining the core principles of design. Emotions in Technology Design: From Experience to Ethics provides a multi-dimensional approach to studying, designing and comprehending emotions in design. It presents emotions as understood through basic human-technology research, applied design practice, culture and aesthetics, ethical approaches to emotional design, and ethics as a cultural framework for emotions in design experience. Core elements running through the book are: cognitive science - cognitive-affective theories of emotions (i.e., Appraisal); culture - the ways in which our minds are trained to recognise, respond to and influence design; and ethics - a deep cultural framework of interpretations of good versus evil. This ethical understanding brings culture and cognition together to form genuine emotional experience. This book is essential reading for designers, technology developers, HCI and cognitive science scholars, educators and students (at both undergraduate and graduate levels) in terms of emotional design methods and tools, systematic measurement of emotion in design experience, cultural theory underpinning how emotions operate in the production and interaction of design, and how ethics influence basic (primal) and higher level emotional reactions. The broader scope equips design practitioners, developers and scholars with that 'something more' in terms of understanding how emotional experience of technology can be positioned in relation to cultural discourse and ethics.

Recent years have witnessed important advancements in our understanding of the psychological underpinnings of subjective properties of visual information, such as aesthetics, memorability, or induced emotions. Concurrently, computational models of objective visual properties such as semantic labelling and geometric relationships have made significant breakthroughs using the latest achievements in machine learning and large-scale data collection. There has also been limited but important work exploiting these breakthroughs to improve computational modelling of subjective visual properties. The time is ripe to explore how advances in both of these fields of study can be mutually enriching and lead to further progress. This book combines perspectives from psychology and machine learning to showcase a new, unified understanding of how images and videos influence high-level visual perception - particularly interestingness, affective values and emotions, aesthetic values, memorability, novelty, complexity, visual composition and stylistic attributes, and creativity. These human-based metrics are interesting for a very broad range of current applications, ranging from content retrieval and search, storytelling, to targeted advertising, education and learning, and content filtering. Work already exists in the literature that studies the psychological aspects of these notions or investigates potential correlations between two or more of these human concepts. Attempts at building computational models capable of predicting such notions can also be found, using state-of-the-art machine learning techniques. Nevertheless their performance proves that there is still room for improvement, as the tasks are by nature highly challenging and multifaceted, requiring thought on both the psychological implications of the human concepts, as well as their translation to machines.

This book focuses on software sustainability, regarded in terms of how software is or can be developed while taking into consideration environmental, social, and economic dimensions. The sixteen chapters cover various related issues ranging from technical aspects like energy-efficient programming techniques, formal proposals related to energy efficiency measurement, patterns to build energy-efficient software, the role of developers on energy efficient software systems and tools for detecting and refactoring code smells/energy bugs; to human aspects like its impact on software sustainability or the adaptation of ACM/IEEE guidelines for student and professional education and; and an economics-driven architectural evaluation for sustainability. Also aspects as the elements of governance and management that organizations should consider when implementing, assessing and improving Green IT or the relationship between software sustainability and the Corporate Social Responsibility of software companies are included. The chapters are complemented by usage scenarios and experience reports on several domains as cloud applications, agile development or e-Health, among others. As a whole, the chapters provide a complete overview of the various issues related to sustainable software development. The target readership for this book includes CxOs, (e.g. Chief Information Officers, Chief Executive Officers, Chief Technology Officers, etc.) software developers, software managers, auditors, business owners, and quality professionals. It is also intended for students of software engineering and information systems, and software researchers who want to know the state of the art regarding software sustainability.

We are living in a multilingual world and the diversity in languages which are used to interact with information access systems has generated a wide variety of challenges to be addressed by computer and information scientists. The growing amount of non-English information accessible globally and the increased worldwide exposure of enterprises also necessitates the adaptation of Information Retrieval (IR) methods to new, multilingual settings.

Peters, Braschler and Clough present a comprehensive description of the technologies involved in designing and developing systems for Multilingual Information Retrieval (MLIR). They provide readers with broad coverage of the various issues involved in creating systems to make accessible digitally stored materials regardless of the language(s) they are written in. Details on Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) are also covered that help readers to understand how to develop retrieval systems that cross language boundaries. Their work is divided into six chapters and accompanies the reader step-by-step through the various stages involved in building, using and evaluating MLIR systems. The book concludes with some examples of recent applications that utilise MLIR technologies. Some of the techniques described have recently started to appear in commercial search systems, while others have the potential to be part of future incarnations.

The book is intended for graduate students, scholars, and practitioners with a basic understanding of classical text retrieval methods. It offers guidelines and information on all aspects that need to be taken into consideration when building MLIR systems, while avoiding too many 'hands-on details' that could rapidly become obsolete. Thus it bridges the gap between the material covered by most of the classical IR textbooks and the novel requirements related to the acquisition and dissemination of information in whatever language it is stored.

This book provides insights into the state of the art of digital cultural heritage using computer graphics, image processing, computer vision, visualization and reconstruction, virtual and augmented reality and serious games. It aims at covering the emergent approaches for digitization and preservation of Cultural Heritage, both in its tangible and intangible facets. Advancements in Digital Cultural Heritage research have been abundant in recent years covering a wide assortment of topics, ranging from visual data acquisition, pre-processing, classification, analysis and synthesis, 3D modelling and reconstruction, semantics and symbolic representation, metadata description, repository and archiving, to new forms of interactive and personalized presentation, visualization and immersive experience provision via advanced computer graphics, interactive virtual and augmented environments, serious games and digital storytelling. Different aspects pertaining to visual computing with regard to tangible (books, images, paintings, manuscripts, uniforms, maps, artefacts, archaeological sites, monuments) and intangible (e.g. dance and performing arts, folklore, theatrical performances) cultural heritage preservation, documentation, protection and promotion are covered, including rendering and procedural modelling of cultural heritage assets, keyword spotting in old documents, drone mapping and airborne photogrammetry, underwater recording and reconstruction, gamification, visitor engagement, animated storytelling, analysis of choreographic patterns, and many more. The book brings together and targets researchers from the domains of computing, engineering, archaeology and the arts, and aims at underscoring the potential for cross-fertilization and collaboration among these communities.

This volume highlights current research and developments on organizations and (their) performance against the background of ubiquitous complexity. It investigates some of the challenges and trends dominating the complex world of nowadays and the ways organizations are dealing with them in their continuous search for performance. The papers in the volume cover a series of hot and/or emerging topics (i.e. sustainable development, corporate social responsibility, green marketing, digital revolution, social media, global trade, intangible assets, economic intelligence and innovation). Built on an interdisciplinary perspective and a multi-level approach global (trade, power, sustainable development), regional (EU, BRICS), national (country-based systems, cultures, policies, practices), industry (airlines, pharma, luxury, retailing, banking, tourism), local (communities, destinations), and organization (entrepreneurship, MNEs, public organizations: national and local) the volume uniquely addresses issues of high interest for researchers, practitioners and policymakers.

Everyday Innovators explores the active role of people, collectively and individually, in shaping the use of information and communication technologies. It examines issues around acquiring and using that knowledge of users, how we should conceptualise the role of users and understand the forms and limitations of their participation.

• To what extent should we think of users as being innovative and creative?
• To what extent is this routine or exceptional, confined to particular group of users or part of many people 's experience of technologies?
• Where does the nature of the ICT or the particularities of its design impose constraints on the active role that users can play in their interaction with devices and services?
• Where do the horizons and orientations of the users influence or limit what they want and expect of their ICTs and how they use them?

This book enables a cross-fertilisation of perspectives from different disciplines and aims to provide new insights into the role of users, drawing out both applied and theoretical implications

This book provides the readers with a timely guide to the application and integration of interdisciplinary principles from the fields of kinetic design, mechanics, energy and materials engineering in the fields of architecture and engineering design. It explores the potential integration of autoreactive solutions, unpowered kinetic systems triggered by changes in the surrounding latent energy conditions, within man-made artefacts with added functionality and efficiency. Related interdisciplinary parameters are explored discussing morphology, mechanics, energy and materials in detail. Each chapter examines the implications of autoreactivity in one specific field, providing a general overview and listing relevant motion design parameters and identifying for the reader those aspects that have a high potential to open up for new design directions. The book guides readers through a highly multidisciplinary field of design, offering an extraordinary resource of knowledge for professional architects, engineers and designers, as well as for university teachers, researchers and students. Interdisciplinary research is presented throughout the book as a powerful resource that can serve architecture and design, and a learning method to rethink innovative, optimal and sustainable solutions.

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

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.