This volume seeks to answer the question: "Can findings from cognitive science enhance the user-computer interaction process?" In so doing, it recognizes that user-computer interfaces (UCIs) are often essential parts of an information or decision support system -- and often critical components of software-intensive systems of all kinds. From the outset, the authors note that the design, prototyping, and evaluation of user-computer interfaces are part of larger systems and are therefore ideally designed, developed, and evaluated as part of a larger design and developmental process or "life cycle."
Thus, this book describes the process by which functional, nonfunctional, or display-oriented requirements are converted first into prototypes and then into working systems. While the process may at times seem almost mysterious, there is in fact a methodology that drives the process -- a methodology that is defined in terms of an adaptive life cycle. There are a number of steps or phases that comprise the standard life cycle, as well as methods, tools and techniques that permit each step to be taken. Describing the effort to implement this process to enhance user-computer interaction, this book presents a methodological approach that seeks to identify and apply findings from cognitive science to the design, prototyping, and evaluation of user-computer interfaces.

By now, most people have become familiar with the basic functionality and interfaces of computers. However, developing new or modified applications that effectively support users' goals still requires considerable expertise in programming that cannot be expected from most people. Thus, one fundamental challenge for the coming years is to develop environments that allow users who do not have background in programming to develop or modify their own applications, with the ultimate aim of empowering people to flexibly employ advanced information and communication technologies.The present book is an effort to make many important aspects of the international discussion on End User Development (EUD) available to a broader audience. It provides a unique set of contributions from various research institutes in various countries addressing relevant issues and proposing original solutions.

The potential of software applications to solve an array of office and administrative problems is increasing faster than the ability of users to exploit it. We need to make systems easier to learn and more comfortable to use. This book reports a major advance in the effort to accomplish both goals.
" Flexcel" enables users to modify access and dialog dynamics to their specific requirements. Relying on a plan recognition feature, the system proposes adaptations or uses of adaptations. The ongoing conflict between the adaptive and the adaptable is resolved in an integration: user and system share the responsibility for the initiatives, decision-making and execution. A "critic" component of the system then analyzes the user's handling of the adaptation tools and suggests improvements. The system offers an environment in which users can explore as they learn.
"HyPlan" implements the context-sensitive help that facilitates learning on demand. When the PLANET plan-recognition feature identifies the kinds of support for work that may possibly be required, HyPlan provides, on request, specific assistance in the form of hypermedia or animated displays and tutorials.
Developmental research has shown that users take advantage of opportunities to adapt interfaces only in conjunction with help-functions -- which are accepted when they do not interrupt work. And studies by social scientists have shown that adaptations of technical systems have to be integrated into the overall process of organizational innovation and undertaken cooperatively.
This book will stimulate all those concerned with software -- from computational, cognitive, ergonomic, or organizational standpoints -- to reconceive the relationship between design and user support.

With rapid advancements in human enhancement technologies, society struggles with many issues, such as definition, effects, participation, regulation, and control. Current and future initiatives in these technologies may not be in the participants' best interests; therefore, it is imperative for research on humanitarian considerations to be available to those affiliated with this field. Global Issues and Ethical Considerations in Human Enhancement Technologies compiles prestigious research and provides a well-rounded composite of the field's role in emerging technologies. Addressing both present and future concerns, this publication serves as a valuable reference work for researchers, students, professionals, and practitioners involved in computer science and the humanities, as well as many engaged in a humanities approach to metasystems, new artificial life, and robotics.

This book reports on innovative research and practices in contemporary design, showing how to integrate different concepts and discussing the emerging role of design in different field, its meaning for humans and citizens, at both local and global level. Gathering the best papers from Senses & Sensibility, held in 2019 in Lisbon, Portugal, it highlights the role of design in fostering education, physical and social wellbeing, industrial innovation and cultural preservation, as well as inclusivity, sustainability and communication in a global, digital world.

This book investigates processes for the prototyping of user interfaces for mobile apps, and describes the development of new concepts and tools that can improve the prototype driven app development in the early stages. It presents the development and evaluation of a new requirements catalogue for prototyping mobile app tools that identifies the most important criteria such tools should meet at different prototype-development stages. This catalogue is not just a good point of orientation for designing new prototyping approaches, but also provides a set of metrics for a comparing the performance of alternative prototyping tools. In addition, the book discusses the development of Blended Prototyping, a new approach for prototyping user interfaces for mobile applications in the early and middle development stages, and presents the results of an evaluation of its performance, showing that it provides a tool for teamwork-oriented, creative prototyping of mobile apps in the early design stages.

Social robots not only work with humans in collaborative workspaces - we meet them in shopping malls and even more personal settings like health and care. Does this imply they should become more human, able to interpret and adequately respond to human emotions? Do we want them to help elderly people? Do we want them to support us when we are old ourselves? Do we want them to just clean and keep things orderly - or would we accept them helping us to go to the toilet, or even feed us if we suffer from Parkinson's disease? The answers to these questions differ from person to person. They depend on cultural background, personal experiences - but probably most of all on the robot in question. This book covers the phenomenon of social robots from the historic roots to today's best practices and future perspectives. To achieve this, we used a hands-on, interdisciplinary approach, incorporating findings from computer scientists, engineers, designers, psychologists, doctors, nurses, historians and many more. The book also covers a vast spectrum of applications, from collaborative industrial work over education to sales. Especially for developments with a high societal impact like robots in health and care settings, the authors discuss not only technology, design and usage but also ethical aspects. Thus this book creates both a compendium and a guideline, helping to navigate the design space for future developments in social robotics.

"Dynamic Provisioning for Community Services" outlines a dynamic provisioning and maintenance mechanism in a running distributed system, e.g. the grid, which can be used to maximize the utilization of computing resources and user demands. The book includes a complete and reliable maintenance system solution for the large-scale distributed system and an interoperation mechanism for the grid middleware deployed in the United States, Europe, and China. The experiments and evaluations have all been practically implemented for ChinaGrid, and the best practices established can help readers to construct reliable distributed systems.
This book is intended for researchers, developers, and graduate students in the fields of grid computing, service-oriented architecture and dynamic maintenance for large distributed systems.
Li Qi is an Associate Professor and the Deputy Director of the R&D Center for the Internet of Things at the Third Research Institute of Ministry of Public Security (TRIMPS), China. Hai Jin is a Professor and the Director of Department of Computer Science, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China.
"

This book presents lectures given at the 8th International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems. As agents evolve in terms of their ability to carry on a dialog with users, several qualities are emerging as essential components of a successful system. Users do not carry on long conversations on only one topic-they tend to switch between several topics. Thus the authors are observing the emergence of multi-domain systems that enable users to seamlessly hop from one domain to another. The systems have become active social partners. Accordingly, work on social dialog has become crucial to active and engaging human-robot/agent interaction. These new systems call for a coherent framework that guides their actions as chatbots and conversational agents. Human-Robot/Agent assessment mechanisms naturally lend themselves to this task. As these systems increasingly assist humans in a multitude of tasks, the ethics of their existence, their design and their interaction with users are becoming crucial issues. This book discusses the essential players and features involved, such as chat-based agents, multi-domain dialog systems, human-robot interaction, social dialog policy, and advanced dialog system architectures.

Providing a comprehensive introduction into an overview of the field of pervasive healthcare applications, this volume incorporates a variety of timely topics ranging from medical sensors and hardware infrastructures, to software platforms and applications and addresses issues of user experience and technology acceptance. The recent developments in the area of information and communication technologies have laid the groundwork for new patient-centred healthcare solutions. While the majority of computer-supported healthcare tools designed in the last decades focused mainly on supporting care-givers and medical personnel, this trend changed with the introduction of pervasive healthcare technologies, which provide supportive and adaptive services for a broad variety and diverse set of end users. With contributions from key researchers the book integrates the various aspects of pervasive healthcare systems including application design, hardware development, system implementation, hardware and software infrastructures as well as end-user aspects providing an excellent overview of this important and evolving field.

This text presents a theoretical and practical examination of the latest developments in Information Retrieval and their application to existing systems. By starting with a functional discussion of what is needed for an information system, the reader can grasp the scope of information retrieval problems and discover the tools to resolve them. The book takes a system approach to explore every functional processing step in a system from ingest of an item to be indexed to displaying results, showing how implementation decisions add to the information retrieval goal, and thus providing the user with the needed outcome, while minimizing their resources to obtain those results.

The text stresses the current migration of information retrieval from just textual to multimedia, expounding upon multimedia search, retrieval and display, as well as classic and new textual techniques. It also introduces developments in hardware, and more importantly, search architectures, such as those introduced by Google, in order to approach scalability issues.

About this textbook:

A first course text for advanced level courses, providing a survey of information retrieval system theory and architecture, complete with challenging exercisesApproaches information retrieval from a practical systems view in order for the reader to grasp both scope and solutionsFeatures what is achievable using existing technologies and investigates what deficiencies warrant additional exploration

The Great East Japan Earthquake, which occurred on March 11, 2011, reminded us that we were just one species within the great cycle of life on earth, that we were allowed to survive only because of nature, and that the idea that we were somehow able to conquer nature was simply an illusion. Now more than ever it is time that we confront head-on the change from the "underground resources" type of civilization to one with a new way of life and technology that embraces a sense of nature. To do so, we must learn from nature, the only sustainable society on earth, and create technology that embraces such a view of nature. We call such technology, which cleverly revives nature's greatness, Nature Technology. Taking a casual glance at nature, a nest of termites in the savanna region can be observed to maintain a steady temperature of 30 DegreesC despite the fact that the outside air temperature ranges from 50 DegreesC during the day to nearly 0 DegreesC at night. There are countless numbers of open pores just several billionths of a meter (nanometer) wide in the "earth" of the nest, which serve to regulate the temperature and humidity. In fact, all kinds of "earth" have these pores (clay mineral with aggregated structures) and air conditioners that require no electricity have been created by hardening this earth while preserving its structure; a cooling floor or wall becomes the alternative to a conventional air conditioner. This book provides many such examples of how Nature Technology can support a new lifestyle that is both environmentally sound and spiritually uplifting.

Visual Thinking for Information Design, Second Edition brings the science of perception to the art of design. The book takes what we now know about perception, cognition and attention and transforms it into concrete advice that students and designers can directly apply. It demonstrates how designs can be considered as tools for cognition and extensions of the viewer's brain in much the same way that a hammer is an extension of the user's hand. The book includes hundreds of examples, many in the form of integrated text and full-color diagrams. Renamed from the first edition, Visual Thinking for Design, to more accurately reflect its focus on infographics, this timely revision has been updated throughout and includes more content on pattern perception, the addition of new material illustrating color assimilation, and a new chapter devoted to communicating ideas through images.

"A Journey Through Cultures" addresses one of the hottest topics in contemporary HCI: cultural diversity amongst users. For a number of years the HCI community has been investigating alternatives to enhance the design of cross-cultural systems. Most contributions to date have followed either a 'design for each' or a 'design for all' strategy.

"A Journey Through Cultures "takes a very different approach. Proponents of CVM - the Cultural Viewpoint Metaphors perspective - the authors invite HCI practitioners to think of how to expose and communicate the idea of cultural diversity. A detailed case study is included which assesses the metaphors' potential in cross-cultural design and evaluation. The results show that cultural viewpoint metaphors have strong epistemic power, leveraged by a combination of theoretic foundations coming from Anthropology, Semiotics and the authors' own work in HCI and Semiotic Engineering.

Luciana Salgado, Carla Leitao and Clarisse de Souza are members of SERG, the Semiotic Engineering Research Group at the Departamento de Informatica of Rio de Janeiro's Pontifical Catholic University (PUC-Rio)."

Man-machine interaction is the gateway providing access to functions and services, which, due to the ever increasing complexity of smart systems, threatens to become a bottleneck. This book therefore introduces not only advanced interfacing concepts, but also gives insight into the related theoretical background.This refers mainly to the realization of video-based multimodal interaction via gesture, mimics, and speech, but also to interacting with virtual object in virtual environments, cooperating with local or remote robots, and user assistance.

While most publications in the field of human factors engineering focus on interface design, this book puts special emphasis on implementation aspects. To this end it is accompanied by software development environments for image processing, classification, and virtual environment implementation. In addition a test data base is included for gestures, head pose, facial expressions, full-body person recognition, and people tracking. These data are used for the examples throughout the book, but are also meant to encourage the reader to start experimentation on his own.

Thus the book may serve as a self-contained introduction both for researchers and developers of man-machine interfaces. It may also be used for graduate-level university courses.

In providing a theoretical framework for understanding human- computer interaction as well as design of user interfaces, this book combines elements of anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, software engineering, and computer science. The framework examines the everyday work practices of users when analyzing and designing computer applications. The text advocates the unique theory that computer application design is fundamentally a collective activity in which the various practices of the participants meet in a process of mutual learning.

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.

Analyzes the influence of technology and social media on human development with parents and families in mind. This is a story about a family coming of age at the same time as smartphones and social media; a multiracial family coming into its own as windows into social injustice opened up before our very screens; and a multi-parent multi-professional family with children living differently depending on which house and which combination of family members happen to be home. While it is a story about a family, it is really the story of technological and global changes unfolding on our doorsteps. While many revile the ascendance of smartphones and social media and the way they suck us into the vortex of cyberspace, there are cultural touchpoints that reflect deeper human and technology development patterns, patterns which we would all do well to understand, no matter whether or how we choose to engage in the ever-innovating digital frontiers. Informed by research and interviews with leaders in policy, human development, ethics, and technology Loretta Brady helps readers understand the complex systemic challenges and findings related to technology and human development. We do not have to hate or fear technology. It is neither friend nor foe. But understanding its impact on our daily lives is paramount to cultivating a healthier relationship both with our digital lives and our real, lived ones.

For the first time in history, the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) held the joint "E-Health" Symposium as part of "Treat IT" stream of the IFIP World Congress 2010 at Brisbane, Australia during September 22-23, 2010. IMIA is an independent organization established under Swiss law in 1989. The organization originated in 1967 from Technical Committee 4 of IFIP that is a n- governmental, non-profit umbrella organization for national societies working in the field of information processing. It was established in 1960 under the auspices of UNESCO following the First World Computer Congress held in Paris in 1959. Today, IFIP has several types of members and maintains friendly connections to specialized agencies of the UN system and non-governmental organizations. Technical work, which is the heart of IFIP's activity, is managed by a series of Technical Committees. Due to strong needs for promoting informatics in healthcare and the rapid progress of information and communication technology, IMIA President Reinhold Haux p- posed to strengthen the collaboration with IFIP. The IMIA General Assembly (GA) approved the move and an IMIA Vice President (VP) for special services (Hiroshi Takeda) was assigned as a liaison to IFIP at Brisbane during MEDINFO2007 where th the 40 birthday of IMIA was celebrated.

This book gathers contributions to the EU-funded Horizon 2020 project INDIMO (Inclusive Digital Mobility Solutions), its sister projects DIGNITY (Digital Transport in and for Society) and TRIPS (Transport Innovation for Persons with Disabilities Needs Satisfaction), which have been focusing on making transport systems inclusive and accessible for all. Digitalization has enabled the emergence and proliferation of novel, 'disruptive' transport and delivery services. These services are often exclusively only available through digital channels such as a smartphone app or website. Yet a substantial segment of the population is at risk of being excluded from these services for a variety of reasons. Therefore, it is strongly necessary to integrate inclusivity and accessibility into the design and operation of mobility services. This book aims at discussing cases of and reasons for digital exclusion in transport. It also investigates the role of participatory and user-centric planning and design methods in making digital mobility more inclusive and accessible. Further, it discusses tools and technologies that could help policy makers to develop digital mobility as a more inclusive and accessible service. This is an open access book.

Service-oriented computing has recently gained extensive momentum in both industry and academia, and major software vendors hook on to the service paradigm and tailor their software systems towards services in order to accommodate ever-changing process and product requirements in today s dynamic market environments. While dynamic binding of services at runtime was identified as a core functionality of service-based environments as far back as 2000, its industrial-strength implementation has yet to be achieved. The main reason for this is the lack of rich service specifications, concepts, and tools to process them.

This book introduces advanced concepts in service provisioning and service engineering, including semantic concepts, dynamic discovery and composition, and illustrates them in a concrete business use case scenario. To prove the validity of the concepts and technologies, a semantic service provisioning reference architecture framework as well as a prototypical implementation of its subsystems and a prototypical realization of a proper business scenario are presented. Thus the book goes way beyond current service-based software technologies by providing a coherent and consistent set of technologies and systems functionality that realizes advanced concepts in service provisioning.

Both the use case scenario and the provisioning platform have already been substantiated and implemented by the EU-funded Adaptive Services Grid project. The book therefore presents state-of-the-art research results that have already passed a real industrial implementation evaluation which is based on the work of over 20 European partners cooperating in the field of semantic service provisioning."

This volume contains a selection of papers on the most up-to-date experiences in the field of computers and education. It includes most relevant case studies and novel research results addressing technical and methodological aspects of computers and educations. It is relevant to researchers, practitioners, teaching staff and developers working in e-learning, computer-based education, educational software, distributed learning, lifelong learning, and open and distance learning.

Over the last two decades, a major challenge for researchers working on modeling and evaluation of computer-based systems has been the assessment of system Non Functional Properties (NFP) such as performance, scalability, dependability and security.

In this book, the authors present cutting-edge model-driven techniques for modeling and analysis of software dependability. Most of them are based on the use of UML as software specification language. From the software system specification point of view, such techniques exploit the standard extension mechanisms of UML (i.e., UML profiling). UML profiles enable software engineers to add non-functional properties to the software model, in addition to the functional ones. The authors detail the state of the art on UML profile proposals for dependability specification and rigorously describe the trade-off they accomplish. The focus is mainly on RAMS (reliability, availability, maintainability and safety) properties. Among the existing profiles, they emphasize the DAM (Dependability Analysis and Modeling) profile, which attempts to unify, under a common umbrella, the previous UML profiles from literature, providing capabilities for dependability specification and analysis. In addition, they describe two prominent model-to-model transformation techniques, which support the generation of the analysis model and allow for further assessment of different RAMS properties. Case studies from different domains are also presented, in order to provide practitioners with examples of how to apply the aforementioned techniques.

Researchers and students will learn basic dependability concepts and how to model them usingUML and its extensions. They will also gain insights into dependability analysis techniques through the use of appropriate modeling formalisms as well as of model-to-model transformation techniques for deriving dependability analysis models from UML specifications. Moreover, software practitioners will find a unified framework for the specification of dependability requirements and properties of UML, and will benefit from the detailed case studies."