"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.
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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

Provides a hands-on approach in Tableau in a simplified manner with steps Discusses the broad background of data and its fundamentals, Internet of everything to analytics Emphasizes the use of context in delivering the stories Presents case studies with building of a dashboard Reviews application areas and case studies with identification of the impactful visualization

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.

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.

"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.

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."

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the world around us, and it is changing the way people are living, working, and entertaining. As a result, demands for understanding how AI functions to achieve and enhance human goals from basic needs to high level well-being (whilst maintaining human health) are increasing. This edited book systematically investigates how AI facilitates enhancing human needs in the digital age, and reports on the state-of-the-art advances in theories, techniques, and applications of humanity driven AI. Consisting of five parts, it covers the fundamentals of AI and humanity, AI for productivity, AI for well-being, AI for sustainability, and human-AI partnership. Humanity Driven AI creates an important opportunity to not only promote AI techniques from a humanity perspective, but also to invent novel AI applications to benefit humanity. It aims to serve as the dedicated source for the theories, methodologies, and applications on humanity driven AI, establishing state-of-the-art research, and providing a ground-breaking book for graduate students, research professionals, and AI practitioners.

With the continual development of professional industries in today's modernized world, certain technologies have become increasingly applicable. Cyber-physical systems, specifically, are a mechanism that has seen rapid implementation across numerous fields. This is a technology that is constantly evolving, so specialists need a handbook of research that keeps pace with the advancements and methodologies of these devices. Tools and Technologies for the Development of Cyber-Physical Systems is an essential reference source that discusses recent advancements of cyber-physical systems and its application within the health, information, and computer science industries. Featuring research on topics such as autonomous agents, power supply methods, and software assessment, this book is ideally designed for data scientists, technology developers, medical practitioners, computer engineers, researchers, academicians, and students seeking coverage on the development and various applications of cyber-physical systems.

This book introduces a unique perspective on the use of data from popular emerging technologies and the effect on user quality of experience (QoE). The term data is first refined into specific types of data such as financial data, personal data, public data, context data, generated data, and the popular big data. The book focuses the responsible use of data, with consideration to ethics and wellbeing, in each setting. The specific nuances of different technologies bring forth interesting case studies, which the book breaks down into mathematical models so they can be analyzed and used as powerful tools. Overall, this perspective on the use of data from popular emerging technologies and the resulting QoE analysis will greatly benefit researchers, educators and students in fields related to ICT studies, especially where there is additional interest in ethics and wellbeing, user experience, data management, and their link to emerging technologies.

Welcome to the Second International IFIP Entertainment Computing Symposium on st Cultural Computing (ECS 2010), which was part of the 21 IFIP World Computer Congress, held in Brisbane, Australia during September 21-23, 2010. On behalf of the people who made this conference happen, we wish to welcome you to this inter- tional event. The IFIP World Computer Congress has offered an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to present their findings and research results in several prominent areas of computer science and engineering. In the last World Computer Congress, WCC 2008, held in Milan, Italy in September 2008, IFIP launched a new initiative focused on all the relevant issues concerning computing and entertainment. As a - sult, the two-day technical program of the First Entertainment Computing Symposium (ECS 2008) provided a forum to address, explore and exchange information on the state of the art of computer-based entertainment and allied technologies, their design and use, and their impact on society. Based on the success of ECS 2008, at this Second IFIP Entertainment Computing Symposium (ECS 2010), our challenge was to focus on a new area in entertainment computing: cultural computing.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th IFIP WG 11.12 International Symposium on Human Aspects of Information Security and Assurance, HAISA 2022, held in Mytilene, Lesbos, Greece, in July 2022. The 25 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 30 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: cyber security education and training; cyber security culture; privacy; and cyber security management.

Benchmarking is considered a must for modern management. This book presents an approach to benchmarking that has a solid mathematical basis and is easy to understand and apply. The book focuses on three main topics. It shows how to formalize the representation of benchmarking objects. Furthermore, it presents different methods from decision making and voting and their application to benchmarking. Finally, it discusses suitable features for different benchmarking objects. The objects considered are taken from IT management, but can be easily transferred to other business areas, which makes the book interesting for all practitioners in the management field.

Education and Technology for a Better World was the main theme for WCCE 2009. The conference highlights and explores different perspectives of this theme, covering all levels of formal education as well as informal learning and societal aspects of education. The conference was open to everyone involved in education and training. Additionally players from technological, societal, business and political fields outside education were invited to make relevant contributions within the theme: Education and Technology for a Better World. For several years the WCCE (World Conference on Computers in Education) has brought benefits to the fields of computer science and computers and education as well as to their communities. The contributions at WCCE include research projects and good practice presented in different formats from full papers to posters, demonstrations, panels, workshops and symposiums. The focus is not only on presentations of accepted contributions but also on discussions and input from all participants. The main goal of these conferences is to provide a forum for the discussion of ideas in all areas of computer science and human learning. They create a unique environment in which researchers and practitioners in the fields of computer science and human learning can interact, exchanging theories, experiments, techniques, applications and evaluations of initiatives supporting new developments that are potentially relevant for the development of these fields. They intend to serve as reference guidelines for the research community.

This book presents how to apply recent machine learning (deep learning) methods for the task of speech quality prediction. The author shows how recent advancements in machine learning can be leveraged for the task of speech quality prediction and provides an in-depth analysis of the suitability of different deep learning architectures for this task. The author then shows how the resulting model outperforms traditional speech quality models and provides additional information about the cause of a quality impairment through the prediction of the speech quality dimensions of noisiness, coloration, discontinuity, and loudness.

This comprehensive volume is the product of an intensive collaborative effort among researchers across the United States, Europe and Japan. The result -- a change in the way we think of humans and computers.