What happens when a new social technology is imposed on the established social technology of the school? This book presents an unusual application of critical cultural analysis to a series of empirical case studies of educational uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Drawing on research conducted over a ten-year period in three different regions of the Anglo-American “developed” world, it examines themes arising from the struggle for the social spaces and emerging cyber spaces of schooling; the role of identity projects in educational change; and the paradoxes which arise from these processes. The resulting analysis offers a rich--and sobering--perspective on the rush to technologize classrooms.

This book is about enforcing privacy and data protection. It demonstrates different approaches - regulatory, legal and technological - to enforcing privacy. If regulators do not enforce laws or regulations or codes or do not have the resources, political support or wherewithal to enforce them, they effectively eviscerate and make meaningless such laws or regulations or codes, no matter how laudable or well-intentioned. In some cases, however, the mere existence of such laws or regulations, combined with a credible threat to invoke them, is sufficient for regulatory purposes. But the threat has to be credible. As some of the authors in this book make clear - it is a theme that runs throughout this book - "carrots" and "soft law" need to be backed up by "sticks" and "hard law". The authors of this book view privacy enforcement as an activity that goes beyond regulatory enforcement, however. In some sense, enforcing privacy is a task that befalls to all of us. Privacy advocates and members of the public can play an important role in combatting the continuing intrusions upon privacy by governments, intelligence agencies and big companies. Contributors to this book - including regulators, privacy advocates, academics, SMEs, a Member of the European Parliament, lawyers and a technology researcher - share their views in the one and only book on Enforcing Privacy.

Information visualization is not only about creating graphical displays of complex and latent information structures; it contributes to a broader range of cognitive, social, and collaborative activities. This is the first book to examine information visualization from this perspective.

This 2nd edition continues the unique and ambitious quest for setting information visualization and virtual environments in a unifying framework. Information Visualization: Beyond the Horizon pays special attention to the advances made over the last 5 years and potentially fruitful directions to pursue. It is particularly updated to meet the need for practitioners. The book is a valuable source for researchers and graduate students. This new edition is forwarded by Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland.

Key features:

• Latest advances in information visualization.
• Applications of information visualization, including knowledge domain visualization, knowledge diffusion, and social networks.
• Detecting topics, emergent trends, and abrupt changes.
• Empirical findings concerning information visualization.
• Virtual environments and collaborative virtual environments.

Chaomei Chen is an Associate Professor in the College of Information Science and Technology at Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA. He is the author of Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization (Springer, 2003).

This book offers a novel approach to data privacy by unifying side-channel attacks within a general conceptual framework. This book then applies the framework in three concrete domains. First, the book examines privacy-preserving data publishing with publicly-known algorithms, studying a generic strategy independent of data utility measures and syntactic privacy properties before discussing an extended approach to improve the efficiency. Next, the book explores privacy-preserving traffic padding in Web applications, first via a model to quantify privacy and cost and then by introducing randomness to provide background knowledge-resistant privacy guarantee. Finally, the book considers privacy-preserving smart metering by proposing a light-weight approach to simultaneously preserving users' privacy and ensuring billing accuracy. Designed for researchers and professionals, this book is also suitable for advanced-level students interested in privacy, algorithms, or web applications.

The information infrastructure---comprising computers, embedded devices, networks and software systems---is vital to day-to-day operations in every sector: information and telecommunications, banking and finance, energy, chemicals and hazardous materials, agriculture, food, water, public health, emergency services, transportation, postal and shipping, government and defense. Global business and industry, governments, indeed society itself, cannot function effectively if major components of the critical information infrastructure are degraded, disabled or destroyed. Critical Infrastructure Protection V describes original research results and innovative applications in the interdisciplinary field of critical infrastructure protection. Also, it highlights the importance of weaving science, technology and policy in crafting sophisticated, yet practical, solutions that will help secure information, computer and network assets in the various critical infrastructure sectors. Areas of coverage include: Themes and Issues, Control Systems Security, Infrastructure Security, and Infrastructure Modeling and Simulation. This book is the 5th volume in the annual series produced by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 11.10 on Critical Infrastructure Protection, an international community of scientists, engineers, practitioners and policy makers dedicated to advancing research, development and implementation efforts focused on infrastructure protection. The book contains a selection of 14 edited papers from the 5th Annual IFIP WG 11.10 International Conference on Critical Infrastructure Protection, held at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA in the spring of 2011. Critical Infrastructure Protection V is an important resource for researchers, faculty members and graduate students, as well as for policy makers, practitioners and other individuals with interests in homeland security. Jonathan Butts is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Air Force Institute of Technology, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, USA. Sujeet Shenoi is the F.P. Walter Professor of Computer Science at the University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA.

Since the beginning of the computer age, researchers from many disciplines have sought to facilitate people's use of computers and to provide ways for scientists to make sense of the immense quantities of data coming out of them. One gainful result of these efforts has been the field of information visualization, whose technology is increasingly applied in scientific research, digital libraries, data mining, financial data analysis, market studies, manufacturing production control, and data discovery.
This book collects 38 of the key papers on information visualization from a leading and prominent research lab, the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL). Celebrating HCIL's 20th anniversary, this book presents a coherent body of work from a respected community that has had many success stories with its research and commercial spin-offs.
Each chapter contains an introduction specifically written for this volume by two leading HCI researchers, to describe the connections among those papers and reveal HCIL's individual approach to developing innovations.
*Presents key ideas, novel interfaces, and major applications of information visualization tools, embedded in inspirational prototypes.
*Techniques can be widely applied in scientific research, digital libraries, data mining, financial data analysis, business market studies, manufacturing production control, drug discovery, and genomic studies.
*Provides an "insider" view to the scientific process and evolution of innovation, as told by the researchers themselves.
*This work comes from the prominent and high profile University of Maryland's Human Computer Interaction Lab

The Social Web (including services such as MySpace, Flickr, last.fm, and WordPress) has captured the attention of millions of users as well as billions of dollars in investment and acquisition. Social websites, evolving around the connections between people and their objects of interest, are encountering boundaries in the areas of information integration, dissemination, reuse, portability, searchability, automation and demanding tasks like querying. The Semantic Web is an ideal platform for interlinking and performing operations on diverse person- and object-related data available from the Social Web, and has produced a variety of approaches to overcome the boundaries being experienced in Social Web application areas.

After a short overview of both the Social Web and the Semantic Web, Breslin et al. describe some popular social media and social networking applications, list their strengths and limitations, and describe some applications of Semantic Web technology to address their current shortcomings by enhancing them with semantics. Across these social websites, they demonstrate a twofold approach for interconnecting the islands that are social websites with semantic technologies, and for powering semantic applications with rich community-created content. They conclude with observations on how the application of Semantic Web technologies to the Social Web is leading towards the "Social Semantic Web" (sometimes also called "Web 3.0"), forming a network of interlinked and semantically-rich content and knowledge.

The book is intended for computer science professionals, researchers, and graduates interested in understanding the technologies and research issues involved in applying Semantic Web technologies to social software. Practitioners and developers interested in applications such as blogs, social networks or wikis will also learn about methods for increasing the levels of automation in these forms of Web communication.

The year 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic marked a huge change globally, both in working and home environments. They posed major challenges for organisations around the world, which were forced to use technological tools to help employees work remotely, while in self-isolation and/or total lockdown. Though the positive outcomes of using these technologies are clear, doing so also comes with its fair share of potential issues, including risks regarding data and its use, such as privacy, transparency, exploitation and ownership. COVID-19 also led to a certain amount of paranoia, and the widespread uncertainty and fear of change represented a golden opportunity for threat actors. This book discusses and explains innovative technologies such as blockchain and methods to defend from Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), some of the key legal and ethical data challenges to data privacy and security presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, and their potential consequences. It then turns to improved decision making in cyber security, also known as cyber situational awareness, by analysing security events and comparing data mining techniques, specifically classification techniques, when applied to cyber security data. In addition, the book illustrates the importance of cyber security, particularly information integrity and surveillance, in dealing with an on-going, infectious crisis. Aspects addressed range from the spread of misinformation, which can lead people to actively work against measures designed to ensure public safety and minimise the spread of the virus, to concerns over the approaches taken to monitor, track, trace and isolate infectious cases through the use of technology. In closing, the book considers the legal, social and ethical cyber and information security implications of the pandemic and responses to it from the perspectives of confidentiality, integrity and availability.

Law on the Web is ideal for anyone who wants to access Law Internet resources quickly and efficiently without becoming an IT expert. The emphasis throughout is on the location of high quality law Internet resources for learning, teaching and research, from among the billions of publicly accessible Web pages. The book is structured so that it will be found useful by both beginners and intermediate level users, and be of continuing use over the course of higher education studies. In addition to extensive coverage on locating files and Web sites, Part III provides a substantial and annotated list of high quality resources for law students.

This book discusses recent developments and contemporary research in mathematics, statistics and their applications in computing. All contributing authors are eminent academicians, scientists, researchers and scholars in their respective fields, hailing from around the world. The conference has emerged as a powerful forum, offering researchers a venue to discuss, interact and collaborate and stimulating the advancement of mathematics and its applications in computer science. The book will allow aspiring researchers to update their knowledge of cryptography, algebra, frame theory, optimizations, stochastic processes, compressive sensing, functional analysis, complex variables, etc. Educating future consumers, users, producers, developers and researchers in mathematics and computing is a challenging task and essential to the development of modern society. Hence, mathematics and its applications in computer science are of vital importance to a broad range of communities, including mathematicians and computing professionals across different educational levels and disciplines.

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.

Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems - BICS 2010 aims to bring together leading scientists and engineers who use analytic and synthetic methods both to understand the astonishing processing properties of biological systems and specifically of the brain, and to exploit such knowledge to advance engineering methods to build artificial systems with higher levels of cognitive competence.

BICS is a meeting point of brain scientists and cognitive systems engineers where cross-domain ideas are fostered in the hope of getting emerging insights on the nature, operation and extractable capabilities of brains. This multiple approach is necessary because the progressively more accurate data about the brain is producing a growing need of a quantitative understanding and an associated capacity to manipulate this data and translate it into engineering applications rooted in sound theories.

BICS 2010 is intended for both researchers that aim to build brain inspired systems with higher cognitive competences, and for life scientists who use and develop mathematical and engineering approaches for a better understanding of complex biological systems like the brain.

Four major interlaced focal symposia are planned for this conference and these are organized into patterns that encourage cross-fertilization across the symposia topics. This emphasizes the role of BICS as a major meeting point for researchers and practitioners in the areas of biological and artificial cognitive systems. Debates across disciplines will enrich researchers with complementary perspectives from diverse scientific fields.

BICS 2010 will take place July 14-16, 2010, in Madrid, Spain.

This book applies a new analytical framework to the study of the evolution of large Internet companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Samsung. It sheds light on the dynamics of business groups, which are approached as 'business ecosystems,' and introduces the concept of Epigenetic Economic Dynamics (EED), which is defined as the study of the epigenetic dynamics generated as a result of the adaptation of organizations to major changes in their respective environments. The book augments the existing literature on evolutionary economic thinking with findings from epigenetics, which are proving increasingly useful in analyzing the workings of large organizations. It also details the theoretical and conceptual nature of recent work based on evolutionary economics, mainly from the perspective of generalized Darwinism, resilience and related variety, and complements the work conducted on evolutionary economics by applying the analytical framework of EED. It makes it easier to forecast future dynamics on the Internet by proving that a sizable number of big business groups are veering from their initial paths to take unprecedented new directions as a result of competition pressure, and as such is a valuable resource for postgraduates and researchers as well as those involved in economics and innovation studies.

Over the next few decades, millions of people, with varying backgrounds and levels of technical expertise, will have to effectively interact with robotic technologies on a daily basis. This means it will have to be possible to modify robot behavior without explicitly writing code, but instead via a small number of wearable devices or visual demonstrations. At the same time, robots will need to infer and predict humans' intentions and internal objectives on the basis of past interactions in order to provide assistance before it is explicitly requested; this is the basis of imitation learning for robotics. This book introduces readers to robotic imitation learning based on human demonstration with wearable devices. It presents an advanced calibration method for wearable sensors and fusion approaches under the Kalman filter framework, as well as a novel wearable device for capturing gestures and other motions. Furthermore it describes the wearable-device-based and vision-based imitation learning method for robotic manipulation, making it a valuable reference guide for graduate students with a basic knowledge of machine learning, and for researchers interested in wearable computing and robotic learning.

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.

This edited book adopts a cognitive perspective to provide breadth and depth to state-of-the-art research related to understanding, analyzing, predicting and improving one of the most prominent and important classes of behavior of modern humans, information search. It is timely as the broader research area of cognitive computing and cognitive technology have recently attracted much attention, and there has been a surge in interest to develop systems and technology that are more compatible with human cognitive abilities. Divided into three interlocking sections, the first introduces the foundational concepts of information search from a cognitive computing perspective to highlight the research questions and approaches that are shared among the contributing authors. Relevant concepts from psychology, information and computing sciences are addressed. The second section discusses methods and tools that are used to understand and predict information search behavior and how the cognitive perspective can provide unique insights into the complexities of the behavior in various contexts. The final part highlights a number of areas of applications of which education and training, collaboration and conversational search interfaces are important ones. Understanding and Improving Information Search - A Cognitive Approach includes contributions from cognitive psychologists, information and computing scientists around the globe, including researchers from Europe (France, Netherlands, Germany), the US, and Asia (India, Japan), providing their unique but coherent perspectives to the core issues and questions most relevant to our current understanding of information search behavior and improving information search.

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'.

Ever since its inception, the Web has changed the landscape of human experiences on how we interact with one another and data through service infrastructures via various computing devices. This interweaving environment is now becoming ever more embedded into devices and systems that integrate seamlessly on how we live, both in our working or leisure time. For this volume, King and Baeza-Yates selected some pioneering and cutting-edge research work that is pointing to the future of the Web. Based on the Workshop Track of the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008) in Beijing, they selected the top contributions and asked the authors to resubmit their work with a minimum of one third of additional material from their original workshop manuscripts to be considered for this volume. After a second-round of reviews and selection, 16 contributions were finally accepted. The work within this volume represents the tip of an iceberg of the many exciting advancements on the WWW. It covers topics like semantic web services, location-based and mobile applications, personalized and context-dependent user interfaces, social networks, and folksonomies. The presentations aim at researchers in academia and industry by showcasing latest research findings. Overall they deliver an excellent picture of the current state-of-the-art, and will also serve as the basis for ongoing research discussions and point to new directions.

This book presents works detailing the application of processing and visualization techniques for analyzing the Earth's subsurface. The topic of the book is interactive data processing and interactive 3D visualization techniques used on subsurface data. Interactive processing of data together with interactive visualization is a powerful combination which has in the recent years become possible due to hardware and algorithm advances in. The combination enables the user to perform interactive exploration and filtering of datasets while simultaneously visualizing the results so that insights can be made immediately. This makes it possible to quickly form hypotheses and draw conclusions. Case studies from the geosciences are not as often presented in the scientific visualization and computer graphics community as e.g., studies on medical, biological or chemical data. This book will give researchers in the field of visualization and computer graphics valuable insight into the open visualization challenges in the geosciences, and how certain problems are currently solved using domain specific processing and visualization techniques. Conversely, readers from the geosciences will gain valuable insight into relevant visualization and interactive processing techniques. Subsurface data has interesting characteristics such as its solid nature, large range of scales and high degree of uncertainty, which makes it challenging to visualize with standard methods. It is also noteworthy that parallel fields of research have taken place in geosciences and in computer graphics, with different terminology when it comes to representing geometry, describing terrains, interpolating data and (example-based) synthesis of data. The domains covered in this book are geology, digital terrains, seismic data, reservoir visualization and CO2 storage. The technologies covered are 3D visualization, visualization of large datasets, 3D modelling, machine learning, virtual reality, seismic interpretation and multidisciplinary collaboration. People within any of these domains and technologies are potential readers of the book.

The combination of high-resolution visual and depth sensing, supported by machine learning, opens up new opportunities to solve real-world problems in computer vision.

This authoritative text/reference presents an interdisciplinary selection of important, cutting-edge research on RGB-D based computer vision. Divided into four sections, the book opens with a detailed survey of the field, followed by a focused examination of RGB-D based 3D reconstruction, mapping and synthesis. The work continues with a section devoted to novel techniques that employ depth data for object detection, segmentation and tracking, and concludes with examples of accurate human action interpretation aided by depth sensors.

Topics and features: discusses the calibration of color and depth cameras, the reduction of noise on depth maps, and methods for capturing human performance in 3D; reviews a selection of applications which use RGB-D information to reconstruct human figures, evaluate energy consumption, and obtain accurate action classification; presents an innovative approach for 3D object retrieval, and for the reconstruction of gas flow from multiple Kinect cameras; describes an RGB-D computer vision system designed to assist the visually impaired, and another for smart-environment sensing to assist elderly and disabled people; examines the effective features that characterize static hand poses, and introduces a unified framework to enforce both temporal and spatial constraints for hand parsing; proposes a new classifier architecture for real-time hand pose recognition, and a novel hand segmentation and gesture recognition system.

Researchers and practitioners working in computer vision, HCI and machine learning will find this to be a must-read text. The book also serves as a useful reference for graduate students studying computer vision, pattern recognition or multimedia.

Achieving enterprise success necessitates addressing enterprises in ways that match the complexity and dynamics of the modern enterprise environment. However, since the majority of enterprise strategic initiatives appear to fail - among which those regarding information technology - the currently often practiced approaches to strategy development and implementation seem more an obstacle than an enabler for strategic enterprise success.

Two themes underpin the fundamentally different views outlined in this book. First, the competence-based perspective on governance, whereby employees are viewed as the crucial core for effectively addressing the complex, dynamic and uncertain enterprise reality, as well as for successfully defining and operationalizing strategic choices. Second, enterprise engineering as the formal conceptual framework and methodology for arranging a unified and integrated enterprise design, which is a necessary condition for enterprise success.

Jan Hoogervorst's presentation, which is based on both research and his professional background at Sogeti B.V., aims at professionals in management and consulting as well as students in management science and business information systems.

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.