This is the first book to describe how Autonomous Virtual Humans and Social Robots can interact with real people, be aware of the environment around them, and react to various situations. Researchers from around the world present the main techniques for tracking and analysing humans and their behaviour and contemplate the potential for these virtual humans and robots to replace or stand in for their human counterparts, tackling areas such as awareness and reactions to real world stimuli and using the same modalities as humans do: verbal and body gestures, facial expressions and gaze to aid seamless human-computer interaction (HCI). The research presented in this volume is split into three sections: *User Understanding through Multisensory Perception: deals with the analysis and recognition of a given situation or stimuli, addressing issues of facial recognition, body gestures and sound localization. *Facial and Body Modelling Animation: presents the methods used in modelling and animating faces and bodies to generate realistic motion. *Modelling Human Behaviours: presents the behavioural aspects of virtual humans and social robots when interacting and reacting to real humans and each other. Context Aware Human-Robot and Human-Agent Interaction would be of great use to students, academics and industry specialists in areas like Robotics, HCI, and Computer Graphics.

1 Einfuhrung.- 1.1 Ausgangslage.- 1.2 Zielsetzung.- 1.3 Aufbau der Arbeit.- 2 Mobilitat.- 2.1 Vorbemerkungen zum Verstandnis von Mobilitat.- 2.2 Mikro- oder Individualebene.- 2.3 Systemansatze.- 2.4 Telekommunikationsgestutzte Mobilitat.- 3 Delphi.- 3.1 Mobilitat der Zukunft: Welchen Weg weist das Orakel?.- 3.2 Zum Stellenwert IuK-basierter Innovationen fur die Mobilitat der Zukunft.- 3.3 Typisierung unterschiedlicher Mobilitatsfelder.- 3.4 Mobilitatseffekte IuK-basierter Anwendungen.- 3.5 Realisierungszeitraume mobilitasbezogenener Innovationen.- 3.6 Resumee fur den weiteren Gang der Untersuchung.- 4 Online-Reisen.- 4.1 Nutzermerkmale.- 4.1.1 Demographie.- 4.1.1.1 Geschlecht.- 4.1.1.2 Alter.- 4.1.1.3 Haushalte mit Kindern unter 14 Jahren.- 4.1.1.4 Bildung.- 4.1.1.5 Berufstatigkeit.- 4.1.1.6 Tatigkeit nichtberufstatiger Personen.- 4.1.1.7 Berufsstellung berufstatiger Personen.- 4.1.1.8 Nettohaushaltseinkommen.- 4.1.1.9 Zwischenresumee.- 4.1.2 Internetnutzungsmerkmale.- 4.1.2.1 Nutzung eines privaten Internetanschlusses.- 4.1.2.2 Erfahrung mit dem Internet (Nutzungszeitraum).- 4.1.2.3 Internetnutzung in Tagen pro Woche (beruflich und privat).- 4.1.2.4 Private Internetnutzung unter der Woche (Mo-Fr) und am Wochenende (Sa-So).- 4.1.2.5 Zwischenresumee.- 4.1.3 Reisemerkmale.- 4.1.3.1 Anzahl der Reisen in den letzten 3 Jahren mit Dauer von mindestens 13 Tagen.- 4.1.3.2 Anzahl der privaten Reisen in den letzten 12 Monaten.- 4.1.3.3 Dauer der langsten privaten Reise in den letzen 12 Monaten (Tage).- 4.1.3.4 Ziele der langsten Reise innerhalb der letzten 12 Monate.- 4.1.3.5 Benutzte Verkehrsmittel bei der langsten privaten Reise innerhalb der letzten 12 Monate.- 4.1.4 Bindung an Stammreiseburo.- 4.1.4.1 Anzahl der Besuche eines Reiseburos.- 4.1.4.2 Reisebuchungen.- 4.1.4.3 Zwischenresumee.- 4.2 Nutzungsmotivation.- 4.2.1 Anlasse der Nutzung.- 4.2.2 Wahrnehmung moeglicher Vorteile von Online-Reiseangeboten.- 4.2.3 Wahrnehmung moeglicher Nachteile von Online-Reiseangeboten.- 4.2.4 Zwischenresumee.- 4.3 Hinweise auf zukunftige Nutzung.- 4.3.1 Nutzung von Online-Reiseangeboten unter Idealbedingungen.- 4.3.1.1 Nutzungspotenziale und gegenwartiger Auslastungsgrad.- 4.3.1.2 Veranderung der Nutzungshaufigkeit.- 4.3.2 Zwischenresumee.- 4.4 Mobilitatseffekte.- 4.4.1 Motivationssteigerung.- 4.4.2 Gunstige Reisen gefunden/Geld gespart.- 4.4.3 Anregung zur AEnderung des Reisemittels.- 4.4.4 Reduzierung der Besuche im Reiseburo.- 4.4.5 AEnderung des ursprunglichen Reiseziels.- 4.4.6 Induzierung von Reiseverkehr (spontane Kurzreisen).- 4.4.7 Induzierung von Reiseverkehr (mehr Reisen unternommen).- 4.4.8 Haufiger unternommene Reisetypen bei idealem Angebot.- 4.4.9 Zwischenresumee.- 5 Online-Banking.- 5.1 Nutzermerkmale.- 5.1.1 Demographie.- 5.1.1.1 Geschlecht.- 5.1.1.2 Alter.- 5.1.1.3 Haushalte mit Kindern unter 14 Jahren.- 5.1.1.4 Bildung.- 5.1.1.5 Berufstatigkeit.- 5.1.1.6 Tatigkeit nicht-berufstatiger Personen.- 5.1.1.7 Berufsstellung berufstatiger Personen.- 5.1.1.8 Nettohaushaltseinkommen.- 5.1.1.9 Zwischenresumee.- 5.1.2 Internetnutzungsmerkmale.- 5.1.2.1 Nutzung eines privaten Internetanschlusses.- 5.1.2.1 Erfahrung mit dem Internet (Nutzungszeitraum).- 5.1.2.2 Internetnutzung pro Woche (beruflichund privat).- 5.1.2.3 Private Internetnutzung unter der Woche (Mo-Fr) und am Wochenende (Sa-So).- 5.1.2.4 Hinweise auf Nutzungsmuster von Online-Bankkunden.- 5.1.2.5 Zwischenresumee.- 5.2 Nutzungsmotivation.- 5.2.1 Bewertung der Bankservices.- 5.2.2 Bedeutung der Vorteile von Online-Banking fur die Befragten.- 5.2.2.1 Raumliche Nahe zur Bank.- 5.2.3 Motivationshemmende Faktoren: Einschatzung der Probleme von Online-Banking.- 5.2.4 Nutzungsbarrieren.- 5.2.5 Zwischenresumee.- 5.3 Hinweise auf zukunftige Nutzung.- 5.3.1 Online-Banking unter "ldealbedingungen".- 5.3.1.1 Nutzungspotenziale und gegenwartiger Auslastungsgrad.- 5.3.1.2 Veranderung der Nutzungshaufigkeit.- 5.3.1.3 Internet-Nutzung in Jah

This book introduces four waves of upsurge in digital activism and cyberconflict. The rise of digital activism started in 1994, was transformed by the events of 9/11, culminated in 2011 with the Arab Spring uprisings, and entered a transformative phase of control and mainstreaming since 2013 with the Snowden affair.

This is a review of the current and future consequences of the information revolution. It draws on an international authorship, as well as members of the Georgia Faculty Program on the Information Revolution. Porter and Read look at the implications of the revolution in five areas of human activity: business and financial capital; the workplace and human capital; academia and publishing; politics, internationalism and citizenship; and the "information society", public and private. In a final section, predictions are offered as to how the information technology revolution will evolve in the future and how human society might continue to ride the IT wave and adapt in its wake.

The essays in this book clarify the technical, legal, ethical, and social aspects of the interaction between eHealth technologies and surveillance practices. The book starts out by presenting a theoretical framework on eHealth and surveillance, followed by an introduction to the various ideas on eHealth and surveillance explored in the subsequent chapters. Issues addressed in the chapters include privacy and data protection, social acceptance of eHealth, cost-effective and innovative healthcare, as well as the privacy aspects of employee wellness programs using eHealth, the use of mobile health app data by insurance companies, advertising industry and law enforcement, and the ethics of Big Data use in healthcare. A closing chapter draws on the previous content to explore the notion that people are 'under observation', bringing together two hitherto unrelated streams of scholarship interested in observation: eHealth and surveillance studies. In short, the book represents a first essential step towards cross-fertilization and offers new insights into the legal, ethical and social significance of being 'under observation'.

Over the last few decades information and communication technology has come to play an increasingly prominent role in our dealings with other people. Computers, in particular, have made available a host of new ways of interacting, which we have increasingly made use of. In the wake of this development a number of ethical questions have been raised and debated. Ethics in Cyberspace focuses on the consequences for ethical agency of mediating interaction by means of computers, seeking to clarify how the conditions of certain kinds of interaction in cyberspace (for example, in chat-rooms and virtual worlds) differ from the conditions of interaction face-to-face and how these differences may come to affect the behaviour of interacting agents in terms of ethics.

This reference book shows how the Zero Outage method leads to more stability in operations, more reliability in projects and, ultimately, to greater customer satisfaction. It explains why clear standards for platforms, processes and personnel are essential for ensuring high ICT quality from end to end and what to look out for during changes - the most common cause of IT outages. Readers also learn how to resolve errors as quickly as possible and permanently eliminate them, and why industry-wide collaboration will only be possible with a shared standard of quality. This book is a practical introduction to making your ICT world even more failsafe and efficient. The authors share key knowledge in quality management and offer an exclusive insight into their extensively tested and continually enhanced formula for success: the Zero Outage approach.

"Exposes the vast gap between the actual science underlying AI and the dramatic claims being made for it." -John Horgan "If you want to know about AI, read this book...It shows how a supposedly futuristic reverence for Artificial Intelligence retards progress when it denigrates our most irreplaceable resource for any future progress: our own human intelligence." -Peter Thiel Ever since Alan Turing, AI enthusiasts have equated artificial intelligence with human intelligence. A computer scientist working at the forefront of natural language processing, Erik Larson takes us on a tour of the landscape of AI to reveal why this is a profound mistake. AI works on inductive reasoning, crunching data sets to predict outcomes. But humans don't correlate data sets. We make conjectures, informed by context and experience. And we haven't a clue how to program that kind of intuitive reasoning, which lies at the heart of common sense. Futurists insist AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most gifted mind, but Larson shows how far we are from superintelligence-and what it would take to get there. "Larson worries that we're making two mistakes at once, defining human intelligence down while overestimating what AI is likely to achieve...Another concern is learned passivity: our tendency to assume that AI will solve problems and our failure, as a result, to cultivate human ingenuity." -David A. Shaywitz, Wall Street Journal "A convincing case that artificial general intelligence-machine-based intelligence that matches our own-is beyond the capacity of algorithmic machine learning because there is a mismatch between how humans and machines know what they know." -Sue Halpern, New York Review of Books

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 11th IFIP WG 6.11 Conference on e-Business, e-Services and e-Society, I3E 2011, held in Kaunas, Lithuania, in October 2011. The 25 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: e-government and e-governance, e-services, digital goods and products, e-business process modeling and re-engineering, innovative e-business models and implementation, e-health and e-education, and innovative e-business models.

Applying multimodal textual analysis to the languages and images of online communication forms, Kay Richardson shows, from an applied linguistic perspective, how the Internet is being used for global, interactive communication about public health risks. Detailed case studies of the possible risks posed by SARS, by mobile phones and by the vaccination of babies against childhood diseases are situated within the context of research on computer-mediated communication, as well as within the broader social context of globalization and discourses of risk and trust.

This book brings together formally disparate literatures and debates on disability and technology in a way that captures the complex interplay between the two. Drawing on disability studies, technology studies and clinical studies, the book argues that interdisciplinary insights together provide a more nuanced and less stylized picture of the benefits and barriers in disability and technology. Drawing on a breadth of empirical studies from across the globe, a picture emerges of the complex and multi-directional interplay of technology and disability. Technology is neither inherently enabling or disabling but fundamentally shaped by the social dynamics that shape their design, use and impact.

Electric Dreams turns to the past to trace the cultural history of computers. Ted Friedman charts the struggles to define the meanings of these powerful machines over more than a century, from the failure of Charles Babbage's "difference engine" in the nineteenth century to contemporary struggles over file swapping, open source software, and the future of online journalism. To reveal the hopes and fears inspired by computers, Electric Dreams examines a wide range of texts, including films, advertisements, novels, magazines, computer games, blogs, and even operating systems.

Electric Dreams argues that the debates over computers are critically important because they are how Americans talk about the future. In a society that in so many ways has given up on imagining anything better than multinational capitalism, cyberculture offers room to dream of different kinds of tomorrow.

This edited book presents point of view and the work being undertaken by active researchers in the domain of IOT and its applications with societal impact. The book is useful to other researchers for the understanding of the research domain and different points of views expressed by the experts in their contributed chapters. The contributions are from both industry and academia; hence, it provides a rich source of both theoretical and practical work going on in the research domain of IOT.

This book gathers visionary ideas from leading academics and scientists to predict the future of wireless communication and enabling technologies in 2050 and beyond. The content combines a wealth of illustrations, tables, business models, and novel approaches to the evolution of wireless communication. The book also provides glimpses into the future of emerging technologies, end-to-end systems, and entrepreneurial and business models, broadening readers' understanding of potential future advances in the field and their influence on society at large

As the computer industry moves into the 21st century, the long-running Advances in Computers is ready to tackle the challenges of the new century with insightful articles on new technology, just as it has since 1960 in chronicling the advances in computer technology from the last century. As the longest-running continuing series on computers, Advances in Computers presents those technologies that will affect the industry in the years to come.
In this volume, the 53rd in the series, we present 8 relevant topics. The first three represent a common theme on distributed computing systems -using more than one processor to allow for parallel execution, and hence completion of a complex computing task in a minimal amount of time. The other 5 chapters describe other relevant advances from the late 1990s with an emphasis on software development, topics of vital importance to developers today- process improvement, measurement and legal liabilities.
Key Features
* Longest running series on computers
* Contains eight insightful chapters on new technology
* Gives comprehensive treatment of distributed systems
* Shows how to evaluate measurements
* Details how to evaluate software process improvement models
* Examines how to expand e-commerce on the Web
* Discusses legal liabilities in developing software" a must-read for developers

This book explores how new communication and information technologies combine with transportation to modify human spatial and temporal relationships in everyday life. It targets the need to differentiate accessibility levels among a broad range of social groupings, the need to study disparities in electronic accessibility, and the need to investigate new measures and means of representing the geography of opportunity in the information age. It explores how models based on physical notions of distance and connectivity are insufficient for understanding the new structures and behaviors that characterize current regional realities, with examples drawn from Europe, New Zealand, and North America. While traditional notions of accessibility and spatial interaction remain important, information technologies are dramatically modifying and expanding the scope of these core geographical concepts.

What is well-being? Is it a stable income, comfortable home, and time shared with family and friends? Is it clean drinking water and freedom from political oppression? Is it finding Aristotle's Golden Mean by living a life of reason and moderation? Scholars have sought to define well-being for centuries, teasing out nuances among Aristotle's writings and posing new theories of their own. With each major technological shift this question of well-being arises with new purpose, spurring scholars to re-examine the challenge of living the good life in light of significantly altered conditions. Social media comprise the latest technological shift, and in this book leading scholars in the philosophy and communication disciplines bring together their knowledge and expertise in an attempt to define what well-being means in this perpetually connected environment. From its blog prototype in the mid-to-late-2000s to its microblogging reality of today, users have been both invigorated and perplexed by social media's seemingly near-instant propagation. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn have been hailed as everything from revolutionary to personally and societally destructive. In an exploration of the role social media play in affecting well-being, whether among individuals or society as a whole, this book offers something unique among academic tomes, an opening essay by an executive in the social media industry who shares his observations of the ways in which social communication conventions have changed since the introduction of social media. His essay is followed by an interdisciplinary academic exploration of the potential contributions and detractions of social media to well-being. Authors investigate social media's potential influence on friendship, and on individuals' physical, emotional, social, economic, and political needs. They consider the morality of online deception, how memes and the very structure of the internet inhibit rational social discourse, and how social media facilitate our living a very public life, whether through consent or coercion. Social media networks serve as gathering places for the exchange of information, inspiration, and support, but whether these exchanges are helpful or harmful to well-being is a question whose answer is necessary to living a good life.

Collaborative Networks for a Sustainable World Aiming to reach a sustainable world calls for a wider collaboration among multiple stakeholders from different origins, as the changes needed for sustainability exceed the capacity and capability of any individual actor. In recent years there has been a growing awareness both in the political sphere and in civil society including the bu- ness sectors, on the importance of sustainability. Therefore, this is an important and timely research issue, not only in terms of systems design but also as an effort to b- row and integrate contributions from different disciplines when designing and/or g- erning those systems. The discipline of collaborative networks especially, which has already emerged in many application sectors, shall play a key role in the implemen- tion of effective sustainability strategies. PRO-VE 2010 focused on sharing knowledge and experiences as well as identi- ing directions for further research and development in this area. The conference - dressed models, infrastructures, support tools, and governance principles developed for collaborative networks, as important resources to support multi-stakeholder s- tainable developments. Furthermore, the challenges of this theme open new research directions for CNs. PRO-VE 2010 held in St.

"Bridging the Digital Divide" investigates problems of unequal access to information technology. The author redefines this problem, examines its severity, and lays out what the future implications might be if the digital divide continues to exist. This is also the first book to assess empirically the policies in the United States designed to address the social problems arising from the digital divide. It analyzes policies at both federal and local level, as well as looking at the success of community-based initiatives. The analysis is supported by empirical data resulting from extensive fieldwork in several US cities. The book concludes with the author's recommendations for future public policy on the digital divide.

We are extremely pleased to present a comprehensive book comprising a collection of research papers which is basically an outcome of the Second IFIP TC 13.6 Working Group conference on Human Work Interaction Design, HWID2009. The conference was held in Pune, India during October 7-8, 2009. It was hosted by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, India, and jointly organized with Copenhagen Business School, Denmark; Aarhus University, Denmark; and Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India. The theme of HWID2009 was Usability in Social, C- tural and Organizational Contexts. The conference was held under the auspices of IFIP TC 13 on Human-Computer Interaction. 1 Technical Committee TC13 on Human-Computer Interaction The committees under IFIP include the Technical Committee TC13 on Human-Computer Interaction within which the work of this volume has been conducted. TC13 on Human-Computer Interaction has as its aim to encourage theoretical and empirical human science research to promote the design and evaluation of human-oriented ICT. Within TC13 there are different working groups concerned with different aspects of human- computer interaction. The flagship event of TC13 is the bi-annual international conference called INTERACT at which both invited and contributed papers are presented. Contributed papers are rigorously refereed and the rejection rate is high.

The essays in this volume explore the new power struggles created in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong through information technology. The contributors analyze the interaction between the development of information technologies and social logic on the one hand and processes of unification and fragmentation on the other. They seek to highlight the strategies of public and private actors aimed at monopolizing the benefits created by the information society-whether for monetary gain or bureaucratic consolidation-as well as the new loci of power now emerging. The book is organized around two main themes: one exploring societal change and power relations, the second examining the restructuring of Greater China's space. In so doing, the book seeks to shed light on both the state formation process as well as international relations theory.

Advice involves recommendations on what to think; through thought, on what to choose; and via choices, on how to act. Advice is information that moves by communication, from advisors to the recipient of advice. Ivan Jureta offers a general way to analyze advice. The analysis applies regardless of what the advice is about and from whom it comes or to whom it needs to be given, and it concentrates on the production and consumption of advice independent of the field of application. It is made up of two intertwined parts, a conceptual analysis and an analysis of the rationale of advice. He premises that giving advice is a design problem and he treats advice as an artifact designed and used to influence decisions. What is unusual is the theoretical backdrop against which the author's discussions are set: ontology engineering, conceptual analysis, and artificial intelligence. While classical decision theory would be expected to play a key role, this is not the case here for one principal reason: the difficulty of having relevant numerical, quantitative estimates of probability and utility in most practical situations. Instead conceptual models and mathematical logic are the author's tools of choice. The book is primarily intended for graduate students and researchers of management science. They are offered a general method of analysis that applies to giving and receiving advice when the decision problems are not well structured, and when there is imprecise, unclear, incomplete, or conflicting qualitative information.

'Entertainment media' are entertainment products and services that rely on digital technology and include traditional media (such as movies, TV, computer animation etc) as well as emerging services for wireless and broadband, electronic toys, video games, edutainment, and location-based entertainment (from PC game rooms to theme parks). Whilst most of the digital entertainment industry is found in the developed countries such as USA, Europe, and Japan, the decreasing costs of computer and programming technologies enables developing countries to really benefit from entertainment media in two ways: as creators and producers of games and entertainment for the global market and as a way to increase creativity and learning among the youth of the developing world. Focusing specifically on initiatives that use entertainment technologies to promote economic development, education, creativity and cultural dissemination, this book explores how current technology and the use of off-the-shelf technologies (such as cheap sensors, Kinect, Arduino and others) can be exploited to achieve more innovative and affordable ways to harness the entertainment power of creating. It poses questions such as 'How can we convert consumers of entertainment into creators of entertainment?' 'How can digital entertainment make a contribution to the emerging world?'. Academic researchers and students in human-computer interaction, entertainment computing, learning technologies will find the content thought-provoking, and companies and professionals in game and entertainment technology, mobile applications, social networking etc. will find this a valuable resource in developing new products and new markets.

This book is a valuable resource for the increasing body of researchers and practitioners in the field of geospatial technologies. Written by leading researchers and experts it is designed in such a way that technical achievements and challenges of geospatial computing applications are followed by various applications developed for society. As such, they serve as a bridge between technologists and solution developers, which is critical in the context of developing countries. There have been significant advances in geospatial technologies in India in the last decade, including advances in spatial data infrastructures, geocomputation and spatial databases, and innovative applications in natural resource development. Ranging from LIDAR standards, to data integration using ontologies, and mobile computing, such progress enhances the utility of the technology for both urban and rural development. This book discusses these achievements and considers the way forward.

The path for developing an internationally usable product with a human-machine interface is described in this textbook, from theory to conception and from design to practical implementation. The most important concepts in the fields of philosophy, communication, culture and Ethnocomputing as the basis of intercultural user interface design are explained. The book presents directly usable and implementable knowledge that is relevant for the processes of internationalization and localization of software. Aspects of software ergonomics, software engineering and human-centered design are presented in an intercultural context; general and concrete recommendations and checklists for immediate use in product design are also provided. Each chapter includes the target message, its motivation and theoretical justification as well as the practical methods to achieve the intended benefit from the respective topic. The book opens with an introduction illuminating the background necessary for taking culture into account in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) design. Definitions of concepts are followed by a historical overview of the importance of taking culture into account in HCI design. Subsequently, the structures, processes, methods, models, and approaches concerning the relationship between culture and HCI design are illustrated to cover the most important questions in practice.