Unique selling point: Exploration of the societal and ethical issues surrounding the use and development of digital technology Core audience: IT managers and executives; academic researchers; students of IT Place in the market: Professional title with appeal to academics and students

Make your 3D world a reality Some of the dramatic visual effects you've seen in top-grossing movies and heralded television series got their start in Blender. This book helps you get your own start in creating three-dimensional characters, scenes, and animations in the popular free and open-source tool. Author Jason van Gumster shares his insight as an independent animator and digital artist to help Blender newcomers turn their ideas into three-dimensional drawings. From exporting and sharing scenes to becoming a part of the Blender community, this accessible book covers it all! Create 3D characters--no experience required Build scenes with texture and real lighting features Animate your creations and share them with the world Avoid common rookie mistakes This book is the ideal starting place for newcomers to the world of 3D modeling and animation.

This book describes how the creation of new digital services-through vertical and horizontal integration of data coming from sensors on top of existing legacy systems-that has already had a major impact on industry is now extending to healthcare. The book describes the fourth industrial revolution (i.e. Health 4.0), which is based on virtualization and service aggregation. It shows how sensors, embedded systems, and cyber-physical systems are fundamentally changing the way industrial processes work, their business models, and how we consume, while also affecting the health and care domains. Chapters describe the technology behind the shift of point of care to point of need and away from hospitals and institutions; how care will be delivered virtually outside hospitals; that services will be tailored to individuals rather than being designed as statistical averages; that data analytics will be used to help patients to manage their chronic conditions with help of smart devices; and that pharmaceuticals will be interactive to help prevent adverse reactions. The topics presented will have an impact on a variety of healthcare stakeholders in a continuously global and hyper-connected world. * Presents explanations of emerging topics as they relate to e-health, such as Industry 4.0, Precision Medicine, Mobile Health, 5G, Big Data, and Cyber-physical systems; * Provides overviews of technologies in addition to possible application scenarios and market conditions; * Features comprehensive demographic and statistic coverage of Health 4.0 presented in a graphical manner.

In this book, hierarchical structures based on neural networks are investigated for automatic speech recognition. These structures are mainly evaluated within the phoneme recognition task under the Hybrid Hidden Markov Model/Artificial Neural Network (HMM/ANN) paradigm. The baseline hierarchical scheme consists of two levels each which is based on a Multilayered Perceptron (MLP). Additionally, the output of the first level is used as an input for the second level. This system can be substantially speeded up by removing the redundant information contained at the output of the first level.

In this book, a novel approach that combines speech-based emotion recognition with adaptive human-computer dialogue modeling is described. With the robust recognition of emotions from speech signals as their goal, the authors analyze the effectiveness of using a plain emotion recognizer, a speech-emotion recognizer combining speech and emotion recognition, and multiple speech-emotion recognizers at the same time. The semi-stochastic dialogue model employed relates user emotion management to the corresponding dialogue interaction history and allows the device to adapt itself to the context, including altering the stylistic realization of its speech. This comprehensive volume begins by introducing spoken language dialogue systems and providing an overview of human emotions, theories, categorization and emotional speech. It moves on to cover the adaptive semi-stochastic dialogue model and the basic concepts of speech-emotion recognition. Finally, the authors show how speech-emotion recognizers can be optimized, and how an adaptive dialogue manager can be implemented. The book, with its novel methods to perform robust speech-based emotion recognition at low complexity, will be of interest to a variety of readers involved in human-computer interaction.

Social networks provide a powerful abstraction of the structure and dynamics of diverse kinds of people or people-to-technology interaction. Web 2.0 has enabled a new generation of web-based communities, social networks, and folksonomies to facilitate collaboration among different communities.

This unique text/reference compares and contrasts the ethological approach to social behavior in animals with web-based evidence of social interaction, perceptual learning, information granulation, the behavior of humans and affinities between web-based social networks. An international team of leading experts present the latest advances of various topics in intelligent-social-networks and illustrates how organizations can gain competitive advantages by applying the different emergent techniques in real-world scenarios. The work incorporates experience reports, survey articles, and intelligence techniques and theories with specific network technology problems.

Topics and Features: Provides an overview social network tools, and explores methods for discovering key players in social networks, designing self-organizing search systems, and clustering blog sites, surveys techniques for exploratory analysis and text mining of social networks, approaches to tracking online community interaction, and examines how the topological features of a system affects the flow of information, reviews the models of network evolution, covering scientific co-citation networks, nature-inspired frameworks, latent social networks in e-Learning systems, and compound communities, examines the relationship between the intent of web pages, their architecture and the communities who take part in their usage and creation, discusses team selection based on members' social context, presents social network applications, including music recommendation and face recognition in photographs, explores the use of social networks in web services that focus on the discovery stage in the life cycle of these web services.

This useful and comprehensive volume will be indispensible to senior undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses in Social Intelligence, as well as to researchers, developers, and postgraduates interested in intelligent-social-networks research and related areas.

Mobile context-awareness is a popular research trend in the field of ubiquitous computing. Advances in mobile device sensory hardware and the rise of 'virtual' sensors such as web application programming interfaces (APIs) mean that the mobile user is exposed to a vast range of data that can be used for new advanced applications. Mobile Context Awareness presents work from industrial and academic researchers, focusing on novel methods of context acquisition in the mobile environment - particularly through the use of physical and virtual sensors - along with research into new applications utilising this context. In addition, the book provides insights into the technical and usability challenges involved in mobile context-awareness, as well as observations on current and future trends in the field.

Databases have been designed to store large volumes of data and to provide efficient query interfaces. Semantic Web formats are geared towards capturing domain knowledge, interlinking annotations, and offering a high-level, machine-processable view of information. However, the gigantic amount of such useful information makes efficient management of it increasingly difficult, undermining the possibility of transforming it into useful knowledge.

The research presented by De Virgilio, Giunchiglia and Tanca tries to bridge the two worlds in order to leverage the efficiency and scalability of database-oriented technologies to support an ontological high-level view of data and metadata. The contributions present and analyze techniques for semantic information management, by taking advantage of the synergies between the logical basis of the Semantic Web and the logical foundations of data management. The book's leitmotif is to propose models and methods especially tailored to represent and manage data that is appropriately structured for easier machine processing on the Web.

After two introductory chapters on data management and the Semantic Web in general, the remaining contributions are grouped into five parts on Semantic Web Data Storage, Reasoning in the Semantic Web, Semantic Web Data Querying, Semantic Web Applications, and Engineering Semantic Web Systems. The handbook-like presentation makes this volume an important reference on current work and a source of inspiration for future development, targeting academic and industrial researchers as well as graduate students in Semantic Web technologies or database design.

This book offers the reader a comprehensive view of the design space of wearable computers, cutting across multiple application domains and interaction modalities. Besides providing several examples of wearable technologies, Wearable Interaction illustrates how to create and to assess interactive wearables considering human factors in design decisions related to input entry and output responses. The book also discusses the impacts of form factors and contexts of use in the design of wearable interaction. Miniaturized components, flexible materials, and sewable electronics toolkits exemplify advances in technology that facilitated the design and development of wearable technologies. Despite such advances, creating wearable interfaces that are efficient is still challenging. The new affordances of on-body interfaces require the consideration of new interaction paradigms, so that the design decisions for the user interaction take into account key limitations in the interaction surfaces of wearables concerning input entry, processing power for output responses, and in the time and attention that wearers dedicate to complete their interaction. Under such constraints, creating interfaces with high usability levels is complex. Also, because wearables are worn continuously and in close contact with the human body, on-body interfaces must be carefully designed to neither disturb nor overwhelm wearers. The context of use and the potential of wearable technologies must be both well understood to provide users with relevant information and services using appropriate approaches and without overloading them with notifications. Wearable Interaction explains thoroughly how interactive wearables have been created taking into account the needs of end users as well as the vast potential that wearable technologies offer. Readers from academia, industry or government will learn how wearables can be designed and developed to facilitate human activities and tasks across different sectors.

Virtual worlds are an area of growing interest in many sectors, including higher education. While Web-based tools have existed for years to help deliver course content, these tools have not traditionally provided means for creation of community with the embedded communication and collaboration necessary for successful teaching and learning. Teaching and Learning in 3D Immersive Worlds: Pedagogical Models and Constructivist Approaches examines successful implementation of social constructivist instructional design tenets in 3D virtual immersive environments. Authors share best practices, challenges, and advice to those working to utilize virtual environments in higher education and other venues. Readers will gain both a research background in the use of virtual worlds for teaching and learning and practical advice as they begin to design and implement these environments.

Haptics technology is being used more and more in different applications, such as in computer games for increased immersion, in surgical simulators to create a realistic environment for training of surgeons, in surgical robotics due to safety issues and in mobile phones to provide feedback from user action. The existence of these applications highlights a clear need to understand performance metrics for haptic interfaces and their implications on device design, use and application. Performance Metrics for Haptic Interfaces aims at meeting this need by establishing standard practices for the evaluation of haptic interfaces and by identifying significant performance metrics. Towards this end, a combined physical and psychophysical experimental methodology is presented. Firstly, existing physical performance measures and device characterization techniques are investigated and described in an illustrative way. Secondly, a wide range of human psychophysical experiments are reviewed and the appropriate ones are applied to haptic interactions. The psychophysical experiments are unified as a systematic and complete evaluation method for haptic interfaces. Finally, synthesis of both evaluation methods is discussed. The metrics provided in this state-of-the-art volume will guide readers in evaluating the performance of any haptic interface. The generic methodology will enable researchers to experimentally assess the suitability of a haptic interface for a specific purpose, to characterize and compare devices quantitatively and to identify possible improvement strategies in the design of a system.

By combining agent capabilities with computational linguistics, conversational agents can exploit natural language technologies to improve communication between humans and computers. Conversational Agents and Natural Language Interaction: Techniques and Effective Practices is a reference guide for researchers entering the promising field of conversational agents. It provides an introduction to fundamental concepts in the field, collects experiences of researchers working on conversational agents, and reviews techniques for the design and application of conversational agents. The book discusses the successes of and challenges faced by researchers, designers, and programmers who want to use conversational agents for e-commerce, help desks, website navigation, personalized service, and training or education applications.

The Future of Open Data flows from a multi-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Grant project that set out to explore open government geospatial data from an interdisciplinary perspective. Researchers on the grant adopted a critical social science perspective grounded in the imperative that the research should be relevant to government and civil society partners in the field. This book builds on the knowledge developed during the course of the grant and asks the question, "What is the future of open data?" The contributors' insights into the future of open data combine observations from five years of research about the Canadian open data community with a critical perspective on what could and should happen as open data efforts evolve. Each of the chapters in this book addresses different issues and each is grounded in distinct disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspectives. The opening chapter reflects on the origins of open data in Canada and how it has progressed to the present date, taking into account how the Indigenous data sovereignty movement intersects with open data. A series of chapters address some of the pitfalls and opportunities of open data and consider how the changing data context may impact sources of open data, limits on open data, and even liability for open data. Another group of chapters considers new landscapes for open data, including open data in the global South, the data priorities of local governments, and the emerging context for rural open data.

Data visualization has emerged as a serious scholarly topic, and a wide range of tools have recently been developed at an accelerated pace to aid in this research area. Examining different ways of analyzing big data can result in increased efficiency for many corporations and organizations. Data Visualization and Statistical Literacy for Open and Big Data highlights methodological developments in the way that data analytics is both learned and taught. Featuring extensive coverage on emerging relevant topics such as data complexity, statistics education, and curriculum development, this publication is geared toward teachers, academicians, students, engineers, professionals, and researchers that are interested in expanding their knowledge of data examination and analysis.

This multi-disciplinary book provides insight in how to establish consumer trust in electronic commerce. It first goes into detail on a broad variety of consumer trust criteria with regard to the security and reliability of electronic consumer transactions, what information must be provided to consumers, how to create a legally binding contract online, confidence in electronic payments, the resolution of disputes, what law applies to the electronic consumer contract, which body is entitled to settle the dispute and personal data protection. By means of these criteria it is assessed into what extent consumer trust is ensured by the application of a public-key infrastructure, which supports cryptographic services such as electronic signatures and encryption. An assessment is also made on the European Union cryptography policy and the European Union policy on consumer protection in electronic commerce. In addition, a wide range of co-regulation and self-regulation initiatives within the European Union and Northern America are assessed. Finally, this book provides a consumer trust framework which learns that various ingredients at different levels are required to build consumer trust in electronic commerce. As such, it clarifies the roles and responsibilities of government, industry and consumer organisations, businesses, as well as consumers themselves.

Key Features: This work aims to be the most approachable book about UX. Many books on the topic are highly specialized and are not easy to read for people who just want to understand it better. This book is easy to read and aims to popularize the UX mindset while debunking its main misconceptions. Small format size makes it easy to carry around. Includes content relatable and meaningful to the readers by taking many examples from everyday life with a conversational and light writing style. It tackles the psychology, design, research, process, strategy, and ethics behind offering the best experience with products, systems, or services. Includes a glossary.

E-government has emerged not merely as a specialization in public administration but as a transformative force affecting all leaves and functions in government. Digital Government: Principles and Best Practices, written by a collection of practitioners and researchers, provides an overview of the management challenges and issues involved in seeking a new form of governance - digital government.

This edited book is the first of its kind to systematically address the intersection of e-democracy and European politics. It contributes to an improved understanding of the role that new media technologies play in European politics and the potential impact that Internet-based political participation processes may have on modern-day representative democracy in Europe. A unique, holistic approach is taken to examine e-democracy's current state and prospects in Europe from three, partially overlapping and interlocking perspectives: e-public, e-participation and e-voting. The authors provide both theory-inspired reflections on e-democracy's contribution to the formation of the European public sphere, as well as rich empirical analyses of contemporary e-participation phenomena such as the European Citizens' Initiative or e-voting practices in Estonia. Based on the presented findings, the concluding chapter combines a prospective outlook with recommendations for future paths towards meaningful integration of e-democracy in European politics and governance.

This book stages a dialogue between international researchers from the broad fields of complexity science and narrative studies. It presents an edited collection of chapters on aspects of how narrative theory from the humanities may be exploited to understand, explain, describe, and communicate aspects of complex systems, such as their emergent properties, feedbacks, and downwards causation; and how ideas from complexity science can inform narrative theory, and help explain, understand, and construct new, more complex models of narrative as a cognitive faculty and as a pervasive cultural form in new and old media. The book is suitable for academics, practitioners, and professionals, and postgraduates in complex systems, narrative theory, literary and film studies, new media and game studies, and science communication.

What the book is about This book is about the theory and practice of the use of multimedia, multimodal interfaces for leaming. Yet it is not about technology as such, at least in the sense that the authors do not subscribe to the idea that one should do something just because it is technologically possible. 'Multimedia' has been adopted in some commercial quarters to mean little more than a computer with some form of audio ar (more usually) video attachment. This is a trend which ought to be resisted, as exemplified by the material in this book. Rather than merely using a new technology 'because it is there', there is a need to examine how people leam and eommunicate, and to study diverse ways in which computers ean harness text, sounds, speech, images, moving pietures, gestures, touch, etc. , to promote effective human leaming. We need to identify which media, in whieh combinations, using what mappings of domain to representation, are appropriate far which educational purposes . . The word 'multimodal ' in the title underlies this perspective. The intention is to focus attention less on the technology and more on how to strueture different kinds of information via different sensory channels in order to yield the best possible quality of communication and educational interaction. (Though the reader should refer to Chapter 1 for a discussion of the use of the word 'multimodal' . ) Historically there was little problem.

ISO/IEC 27001:2022 - An introduction to information security and the ISMS standardThe perfect introduction to the principles of information security management and ISO 27001:2022An ideal resource for anyone wanting a clear, concise and easy-to-read primer on information security, this pocket guide will ensure the ISMS (information security management system) you put in place is effective, reliable and auditable. Written by an acknowledged expert on the ISO/IEC 27001 standard, ISO/IEC 27001:2022 - An introduction to information security and the ISMS standard is an ideal primer for anyone implementing an ISMS aligned to ISO 27001:2022. This must-have resource gives a clear, concise and easy-to-read introduction to information security, providing guidance to ensure the management systems you put in place are effective, reliable and auditable. This pocket guide will help you to: Make informed decisions - Enables key employees to make better decisions before embarking on an information security project. Ensure everyone is up to speed - Gives the non-specialists on the project board and in the project team a clearer understanding of what an ISMS involves, reflecting ISO 27001:2022. Raise awareness among staff - Ensures that your staff know what is at stake with regard to information security and understand what is expected of them. Enhance your competitiveness - Gives you confidence to begin your ISO 27001:2022 implementation journey and let your customers know that the information you hold about them is managed and protected appropriately. Get up to speed with the ISO 27001:2022 updates and keep your information secure

This book presents a collection of results from the interdisciplinary research project "ELLI" published by researchers at RWTH Aachen University, the TU Dortmund and Ruhr-Universitat Bochum between 2011 and 2016. All contributions showcase essential research results, concepts and innovative teaching methods to improve engineering education. Further, they focus on a variety of areas, including virtual and remote teaching and learning environments, student mobility, support throughout the student lifecycle, and the cultivation of interdisciplinary skills.

Predictive Intelligence in Biomedical and Health Informatics focuses on imaging, computer-aided diagnosis and therapy as well as intelligent biomedical image processing and analysis. It develops computational models, methods and tools for biomedical engineering related to computer-aided diagnostics (CAD), computer-aided surgery (CAS), computational anatomy and bioinformatics. Large volumes of complex data are often a key feature of biomedical and engineering problems and computational intelligence helps to address such problems. Practical and validated solutions to hard biomedical and engineering problems can be developed by the applications of neural networks, support vector machines, reservoir computing, evolutionary optimization, biosignal processing, pattern recognition methods and other techniques to address complex problems of the real world.