This book integrates a wide range of research topics related to and necessary for the development of proactive, smart, computers in the human interaction loop, including the development of audio-visual perceptual components for such environments; the design, implementation and analysis of novel proactive perceptive services supporting humans; the development of software architectures, ontologies and tools necessary for building such environments and services, as well as approaches for the evaluation of such technologies and services.

The book is based on a major European Integrated Project, CHLI (Computers in the Human Interaction Loop), and throws light on the paradigm shift in the area of HCI that rather than humans interactive directly with machines, computers should observe and understand human interaction, and support humans during their work and interaction in an implicit and proactive manner.

This book explores how our lives and social interactions have become split between two intertwined, but not integrated, realities: the physical and the digital. Our sense of presence in the here and now has become fragmented, and yet earlier design approaches reinforced the problem, rather than leading to improvements. The authors address these issues by laying out a new human computer interaction (HCI) design approach - human-experiential design - rooted in a return to first principles of how people understand the world, both consciously and unconsciously. The application of this approach to the design of blended reality spaces is described in detail. Examples and scenarios of designing them to overcome the problems inherent in a variety of mixed reality settings are provided. Human-Experiential Design of Presence in Everyday Blended Reality will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students and researchers in interaction design, psychology, HCI and computer application studies, as well as practicing interaction designers and computer professionals. It will also be of interest to communication, media and urban design students, and to all readers with an interest in the technology-mediated future.

Advancing technologies are rapidly modifying the current state of business and society causing an expansion of possible career opportunities. In order to stay competitive, institutions of education must provide an emphasis on the wide-range of skills and experiences needed to contribute to a 21st century workforce. As new technologies emerge and even disrupt, there will be a demand for new forms of education and deeper learning. Disruptive and Emerging Technology Trends Across Education and the Workplace is a collection of innovative research on the latest instructive methods being utilized in classrooms and organizations as well as the benefits and challenges of adopting these technologies. While highlighting topics including mobile learning, augmented reality, and cryptocurrencies, this book is ideally designed for developers, professionals, educators, managers, researchers, scientists, stakeholders, strategists, practitioners, and students seeking current research on new forms of educational techniques in relation to the continued application of new technologies in the workplace.

The focus of this ninth volume is on human/technology issues that arise from the design, development, application, operation, evaluation, and maintenance of advanced systems with regard to training in complex environments. Areas covered include: a user-oriented design analysis of a virtual environment training system, a cognitive task analysis technique for virtual environment training, advanced embedded team training, human centered automation for air traffic control, human performance modelling in system design, and scenario-based training.

This book presents a variant of UML that is especially suitable for agile development of high-quality software. It adjusts the language UML profile, called UML/P, for optimal assistance for the design, implementation, and agile evolution to facilitate its use especially in agile, yet model based development methods for data intensive or control driven systems. After a general introduction to UML and the choices made in the development of UML/P in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 includes a definition of the language elements of class diagrams and their forms of use as views and representations. Next, Chapter 3 introduces the design and semantic facets of the Object Constraint Language (OCL), which is conceptually improved and syntactically adjusted to Java for better comfort. Subsequently, Chapter 4 introduces object diagrams as an independent, exemplary notation in UML/P, and Chapter 5 offers a detailed introduction to UML/P Statecharts. Lastly, Chapter 6 presents a simplified form of sequence diagrams for exemplary descriptions of object interactions. For completeness, appendixes A-C describe the full syntax of UML/P, and appendix D explains a sample application from the E-commerce domain, which is used in all chapters. This book is ideal for introductory courses for students and practitioners alike.

The book reports on advanced topics in the areas of wearable robotics research and practice. It focuses on new technologies, including neural interfaces, soft wearable robots, sensors and actuators technologies, and discusses important regulatory challenges, as well as clinical and ethical issues. Based on the 2nd International Symposium on Wearable Robotics, WeRob2016, held October 18-21, 2016, in Segovia, Spain, the book addresses a large audience of academics and professionals working in government, industry, and medical centers, and end-users alike. It provides them with specialized information and with a source of inspiration for new ideas and collaborations. It discusses exemplary case studies highlighting practical challenges related to the implementation of wearable robots in a number of fields. One of the focus is on clinical applications, which was encouraged by the colocation of WeRob2016 with the International Conference on Neurorehabilitation, INCR2016. Additional topics include space applications and assistive technologies in the industry. The book merges together the engineering, medical, ethical and political perspectives, thus offering a multidisciplinary, timely snapshot of the field of wearable technologies.

This book describes the important role of emotion in a hyper-connected society and how product development and manufacture change. It explores how our work and lifestyle may be affected by forthcoming technologies and presents key research on multisensory informatics, one of the most important tools for making the most of emotion. This fourth volume of the Emotional Engineering Series focuses on the human issues relating to Cyber Physical Systems, or Industrie 4.0, and discusses the important role emotion plays in these smart environments. Introducing related works in the field of multisensory research, which provide the basic tools for becoming context- and situation aware in this imminent revolutionary society, it discusses not only the changes in production and product development this new revolution will bring about, but also highlights how emotion plays a crucial role in making us happy in such a connected society and in bringing about harmonization between human and human, between human and machine and, last but not least, in maintaining a good work-life balance.

This book attempts to create awareness about the UN-MDGs and how various ICT can be harnessed to appeal to different demographics. Current empirical evidence suggests that MDG awareness is relatively low particularly in developed countries, and that the levels of MDG awareness vary considerable across socioeconomic variables or demographics from United Nations perspective. It also examines how ICT can be used to bring about technical and social innovations strengthen livelihoods, support economic development, water and climate resilience and improve the education and health sectors and enhance development opportunities. Several studies are highlighted that reinforce the view that government support and private sector expertise and funding are important factors in ICT-based e-government solutions in developing countries. The book also builds on the thesis that a strong connection between competencies in mathematics, science, and information communication/technology is required to build logical concepts and critical thinking skills. It also examines the opportunities and barriers of promoting students' learning skills, including communication, cooperation, collaboration and connection using the Wiki tool under the blackboard platform. Finally, the book also highlights the challenges involved in application of ICT in education. This is significant for educators in order to surmount these obstacles and consequently successfully incorporate ICT into the educational system. The chapters present the relevant literature on ICTs and the perceived barriers to ICT integration in basic education. They also focus on the implications of incorporating ICT in the basic educational system. The challenges confronting the integration of ICT in education are equally identified with a view to ensuring a more efficient application of ICT in attaining education for all.

This book redefines community discovery in the new world of Online Social Networks and Web 2.0 applications, through real-world problems and applications in the context of the Web, pointing out the current and future challenges of the field. Particular emphasis is placed on the issues of community representation, efficiency and scalability, detection of communities in hypergraphs, such as multi-mode and multi-relational networks, characterization of social media communities and online privacy aspects of online communities. User Community Discovery is for computer scientists, data scientists, social scientists and complex systems researchers, as well as students within these disciplines, while the connections to real-world problem settings and applications makes the book appealing for engineers and practitioners in the industry, in particular those interested in the highly attractive fields of data science and big data analytics.

Intelligent agents are one of the most promising business tools in our information rich world. An intelligent agent consists of a software system capable of performing intelligent tasks within a dynamic and unpredictable environment. They can be characterised by various attributes including: autonomous, adaptive, collaborative, communicative, mobile, and reactive. Many problems are not well defined and the information needed to make decisions is not available. These problems are not easy to solve using conventional computing approaches. Here, the intelligent agent paradigm may play a major role in helping to solve these problems. This book, written for application researchers, covers a broad selection of research results that demonstrate, in an authoritative and clear manner, the applications of agents within our information society.

The Design, Experience and Practice of Networked Learning

Edited by: Vivien Hodgson, Maarten de Laat, David McConnell and Thomas Ryberg

"This book brings together a wealth of new research that opens up the meaning of connectivity as embodied and promised in the term networked learning . Chapters explore how contexts, groups and environments can be connected rather than just learners; how messy, unexpected and emergent connections can be made rather than structured and predefined ones; and how technology connects us to learning and each other, but also shapes our identity. These exciting new perspectives ask us to look again at what we are connecting and to revel in new and emergent possibilities arising from the interplay of social actors, contexts, technologies, and learning."

"Caroline Haythornthwaite, University of British Columbia"

"Despite creating fundamentally new educational economics and greatly increasing access - teaching and learning in networks is a tricky business. These chapters illuminate the complex interactions amongst tools, pedagogy, educational institutions and personal net presences helping us design and redesign our own networks. In the process, they take (or extract) network theory from the practice of real teaching and learning contexts, making this collection an important contribution to Networked Learning."

"Terry Anderson, Athabasca University"

"What kinds of learning can social networking platforms really enable? Digging well beneath the hype, this book provides a timely, incisive analysis of why and how learning emerges (or fails to) in networked spaces. The editors do a fine job in guiding the reader through the rich array of theories and methods for tackling this question, and the diverse contexts in which networked learning is now being studied. This is a book for reflective practitioners as well as academics: the book's close attention to the political, pedagogical and organisational complexity of effective practice, and the lived experience of educators and learners, helps explain why networked learning has such disruptive potential but equally, why it draws resistance from the establishment."

"Simon Buckingham Shum, The Open University"

"The networked learning conference, a biannual institution since 1998, celebrates its 14th year in this volume. Here a range of studies, reflecting networked learning experiments across Europe and other global contexts, show important shifts away from a conservative tradition of e-learning research and unpeel dilemmas of promoting learning as an elusive practice in virtual environments. The authors point towards important futures in online learning research, where notions of knowledge, connectivity and community become increasingly elastic, and engagements slide across material and virtual domains in new practices whose emergence is increasingly difficult to apprehend."

""

"Tara Fenwick University of Stirling."

The chapters in this volume explore new and innovative ways of thinking about the nature of networked learning and its pedagogical values and beliefs. They pose a challenge to us to reflect on what we thought networked learning was 15 year ago, where it is today and where it is likely to be headed.

Each chapter brings a particular perspective to the themes of design, experience and practice of networked learning, the chosen focus of the book. The chapters in the book embrace a wide field of educational areas including those of higher education, informal learning, work-based learning, continuing professional development, academic staff development, and management learning.

The Design, Experience and Practice of Networked Learning will prove indispensable reading for researchers, teachers, consultants, and instructional designers in higher and continuing education; for those involved in staff and educational development, and for those studying post graduate qualifications in learning and teaching.

This, the second volume in the Springer Book Series on Researching Networked Learning, is based on a selection of papers presented at the 2012 Networked Learning Conference held in Maastricht, The Netherlands."

This book discusses the advancements in artificial intelligent techniques used in the well-being of human healthcare. It details the techniques used in collection, storage and analysis of data and their usage in different healthcare solutions. It also discusses the techniques of predictive analysis in early diagnosis of critical diseases. The edited book is divided into four parts - part A discusses introduction to artificial intelligence and machine learning in healthcare; part B highlights different analytical techniques used in healthcare; part C provides various security and privacy mechanisms used in healthcare; and finally, part D exemplifies different tools used in visualization and data analytics.

This book discusses the implementation of privacy by design in Europe, a principle that has been codified within the European Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). While privacy by design inspires hope for future privacy-sensitive designs, it also introduces the need for a common understanding of the legal and technical concepts of privacy and data protection. By pursuing an interdisciplinary approach and comparing the problem definitions and objectives of both disciplines, this book bridges the gap between the legal and technical fields in order to enhance the regulatory and academic discourse. The research presented reveals the scope of legal principles and technical tools for privacy protection, and shows that the concept of privacy by design goes beyond the principle of the GDPR. The book presents an analysis of how current regulations delegate the implementation of technical privacy and data protection measures to developers and describes how policy design must evolve in order to implement privacy by design and default principles.

Wikipedia, Flickr, You Tube, Facebook, LinkedIn are all examples of large community-built databases, although with quite diverse purposes and collaboration patterns. Their usage and dissemination will further grow introducing e.g. new semantics, personalization, or interactive media.

Pardede delivers the first comprehensive research reference on community-built databases. The contributions discuss various technical and social aspects of research in and development in areas like in Web science, social networks, and collaborative information systems.

Pardede delivers the first comprehensive research reference on community-built databases. The contributions discuss various technical and social aspects of research in and development in areas like in Web science, social networks, and collaborative information systems.

This volume brings together papers that offer conceptual analyses, highlight issues, propose solutions, and discuss practices regarding privacy and data protection. The first section of the book provides an overview of developments in data protection in different parts of the world. The second section focuses on one of the most captivating innovations of the data protection package: how to forget, and the right to be forgotten in a digital world. The third section presents studies on a recurring, and still important and much disputed, theme of the Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) conferences : the surveillance, control and steering of individuals and groups of people and the increasing number of performing tools (data mining, profiling, convergence) to achieve those objectives. This part is illustrated by examples from the domain of law enforcement and smart surveillance. The book concludes with five chapters that advance our understanding of the changing nature of privacy (concerns) and data protection.

This book provides readers with a valuable reference on cyber weapons and, in particular, viruses, software and hardware Trojans. The authors discuss in detail the most dangerous computer viruses, software Trojans and spyware, models of computer Trojans affecting computers, methods of implementation and mechanisms of their interaction with an attacker - a hacker, an intruder or an intelligence agent. Coverage includes Trojans in electronic equipment such as telecommunication systems, computers, mobile communication systems, cars and even consumer electronics. The evolutionary path of development of hardware Trojans from "cabinets", "crates" and "boxes" to the microcircuits (IC) is also discussed. Readers will benefit from the detailed review of the major known types of hardware Trojans in chips, principles of their design, mechanisms of their functioning, methods of their introduction, means of camouflaging and detecting, as well as methods of protection and counteraction.

This book comprises a variety of breakthroughs and recent advances on Human- Computer Interaction (HCI) intended for both researchers and practitioners. Topics addressed here can be of interest for those people searching for last trends involving such a growing discipline. Important issues concerning this book includes cutti- edge topics such as Semantic Web Interfaces, Natural Language Processing and - bile Interaction, as well as new methodological trends such as Interface-Engineering techniques, User-Centred Design, Usability, Accessibility, Development Meth- ologiesandEmotionalUserInterfaces. Theideabehindthisbookistobringtogether relevant and novel research on diverse interaction paradigms. New trends are gu- anteedaccordingtothedemandingclaimsofbothHCIresearchersandpractitioners, which encourage the explicit arrangement of new industrial and technological topics such as the previously cited Interfaces for the Semantic Web, and Mobile Interfaces, but also Multimodal Interaction, Collaborative Interfaces, End-User Development, Usability and User Interface Engineering. Chapters included in this book comprise a selection of top high-quality papers from Interaccion 2007, which is the most important HCI conference sponsored by AIPO (the Spanish HCI Association). Papers were selected from a ranking - tained through double-blind peer review and later meta-review processes, cons- ering the best evaluated paper from both the review and presentation session. Such a paper selection constitutes only 33% of the papers published in the conference proceedings. We would like to thank the reviewers for their effort in revising the chapters included in this publication, namely Silvia T. Acuna, ~ Sandra Baldasarri, Crescencio Bravo, Cesar A.

This book records one of the continuous attempts of the IFIP Working Group 8. 2, studying the interaction of information systems and the organization, to explore and understand the shifting boundaries and dependencies between organizational activities and their computer support. The book marks the result of the IFIP WG 8. 2 conference on "Designing Ubiquitous Information Environments: Socio-Technical Issues and Challenges. " Since its inception in the late 1970s, IFIP WG 8. 2 has sought to understand how computer-based information systems interact and must be designed as an integrated part of the organizational design. At that time, information systems handled repetitive and remote back-office functions and the main concern was work task design for repetitive input tasks and the potential impact of improved information support on organizational decision-making and structure. The focus of the information system design shifted in the 1980s when computers became part of the furniture and moved into the office. Reflecting this significant change, IFIP WG 8. 2 in 1989 organized a conference dedicated to the design and impact of desktop technology in order to examine how organizational processes and the locus of action changed when the computer was moved into the office. Sixteen years later, we are experiencing another significant change. Computers are now becoming part of our body and sensory system and will move out of the traditional office locations and into the wilderness. Again, IFIP WG 8.

This work approaches the modern phenomenon of online dating, examining the ways people make use of its technical and social potential. In particular, the users' mate preferences, choices, strategies, and interactions are analyzed using the innovative method of click-stream observations and web-questionnaire data. For the purpose of these analyses, two major theories are used - an explicit theory of individual mate choice, and the more general relational theory developed by Pierre Bourdieu, which helps to highlight the social structures both underlying and resulting from mating online. Results show that online dating is not a partner marker free from social structure, but that the traditional social conditions found offline are also reproduced in this virtual setting. In contrast to the picture drawn by media discourse and advertising, online dating represents a partner market which fulfills the promise of happiness in a socially differential way.