This book introduces a number of recent developments on connectivity of communication networks, ranging from connectivity of large static networks and connectivity of highly dynamic networks to connectivity of small to medium sized networks. This book also introduces some applications of connectivity studies in network optimization, in network localization, and in estimating distances between nodes. The book starts with an overview of the fundamental concepts, models, tools, and methodologies used for connectivity studies. The rest of the chapters are divided into four parts: connectivity of large static networks, connectivity of highly dynamic networks, connectivity of small to medium sized networks, and applications of connectivity studies.

Computing is transforming how we interact with music. New theories and new technologies have emerged that present fresh challenges and novel perspectives for researchers and practitioners in music and human-computer interaction (HCI). In this collection, the interdisciplinary field of music interaction is considered from multiple viewpoints: designers, interaction researchers, performers, composers, audiences, teachers and learners, dancers and gamers. The book comprises both original research in music interaction and reflections from leading researchers and practitioners in the field. It explores a breadth of HCI perspectives and methodologies: from universal approaches to situated research within particular cultural and aesthetic contexts. Likewise, it is musically diverse, from experimental to popular, classical to folk, including tango, laptop orchestras, composition and free improvisation.

"Kawaii" is a Japanese word that denotes "cute," "lovable," or "charming" although it does not have exactly the same meaning as those adjectives. This book proposes engineering methodologies for systematic measurement of the affective perception of kawaii, by using virtual reality and biological signals, and discusses the effectiveness of kawaii engineering for designing industrial products and services. Kawaii can draw sympathy from people and can embody a special kind of cute design, which reduces fear and makes dull information more acceptable and appealing. Following the introduction of the background of kawaii engineering in Chapter 1, Chapters 2 and 3 describe experiments on the systematic measurement and evaluation methods for kawaii products and affective evaluation experiments. Chapter 4 proposes a mathematical model to identify the physical attributes that determine kawaii in motion. Chapters 5 and 6 explain research that uses biological signals and eye-tracking. After a brief survey of psychological research on kawaii and cuteness in Chapter 7, Chapters 8 and 9 introduce the use of spoons designed to stimulate the appetite of the elderly and the practical implementation of an emotion-driven camera. Chapters 10-14 explain experimental research that examines kawaii perception of people from various cultural backgrounds. Kawaii Engineering will appeal to those who work on affective computing, product design, user experience design, virtual reality, and biological signals.

This anthology brings together multiple viewpoints on the social dimensions of the revolution in information technology. The chapters cover social, political, educational, personal, and international dimensions of information technology impacts. Each chapter focuses on different aspects of the effects of computing and the new information technologies that have accelerated every area of human life. Social Dimensions of Information Technology: Issues for the New Millennium raises important issues with profound implications for public policy and societal development.

This book offers a compendium of best practices in game dynamics. It covers a wide range of dynamic game elements ranging from player behavior over artificial intelligence to procedural content generation. Such dynamics make virtual worlds more lively and realistic and they also create the potential for moments of amazement and surprise. In many cases, game dynamics are driven by a combination of random seeds, player records and procedural algorithms. Games can even incorporate the player's real-world behavior to create dynamic responses. The best practices illustrate how dynamic elements improve the user experience and increase the replay value. The book draws upon interdisciplinary approaches; researchers and practitioners from Game Studies, Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, Psychology and other disciplines will find this book to be an exceptional resource of both creative inspiration and hands-on process knowledge.

This handbook provides comprehensive knowledge and includes an overview of the current state-of-the-art of Big Data Privacy, with chapters written by international world leaders from academia and industry working in this field. The first part of this book offers a review of security challenges in critical infrastructure and offers methods that utilize acritical intelligence (AI) techniques to overcome those issues. It then focuses on big data security and privacy issues in relation to developments in the Industry 4.0. Internet of Things (IoT) devices are becoming a major source of security and privacy concern in big data platforms. Multiple solutions that leverage machine learning for addressing security and privacy issues in IoT environments are also discussed this handbook. The second part of this handbook is focused on privacy and security issues in different layers of big data systems. It discusses about methods for evaluating security and privacy of big data systems on network, application and physical layers. This handbook elaborates on existing methods to use data analytic and AI techniques at different layers of big data platforms to identify privacy and security attacks. The final part of this handbook is focused on analyzing cyber threats applicable to the big data environments. It offers an in-depth review of attacks applicable to big data platforms in smart grids, smart farming, FinTech, and health sectors. Multiple solutions are presented to detect, prevent and analyze cyber-attacks and assess the impact of malicious payloads to those environments. This handbook provides information for security and privacy experts in most areas of big data including; FinTech, Industry 4.0, Internet of Things, Smart Grids, Smart Farming and more. Experts working in big data, privacy, security, forensics, malware analysis, machine learning and data analysts will find this handbook useful as a reference. Researchers and advanced-level computer science students focused on computer systems, Internet of Things, Smart Grid, Smart Farming, Industry 4.0 and network analysts will also find this handbook useful as a reference.

"Softwars: The Legal Battles for Control of the Global Software Industry" explains why the future of the computer industry depends on the nature and extent of intellectual property protection for the software that controls computer hardware. The softwars it discusses are the confrontations taking place in the courtroom, in the legislative chambers and in professional symposia around the world in which the scope of intellectual property protection for computer software is being debated and, in some cases, determined. In a highly readable and entertaining series of essays, the author explains the influences of clones, hackers, vendors of proprietary systems, vendors of open systems, software patents, copyrights and trade secrets on the evolution of the industry. No other book to date has provided either as lucid a description of the major litigation involving software protection or as cogent an analysis of the economic and strategic consequences of that litigation.

"SoftwarS" is divided into five parts, each consisting of two or more essays. In Part I, the author discusses the nature of computer programs and the history of intellectual property protection for computer programs. Part II deals with the look and feel issue; it explains what constitutes infringement of rights in screen displays and other aspects of user interfaces, and the importance of the issue. Part III concerns the practice known as reverse engineering of software; who does it, why, and what the legal and economic consequences are. In Part IV, the reader is led to the boundaries of the legal debate, where the limits of the law are being tested. Part V is the author's conclusion and prognostications for the future of the computer industry and the law. Anyone interested in the intersection of law and technology, and particularly those involved in the computer industry, will find Softwars valuable and compelling reading.

This book provides probabilistic, deterministic and geolocation-aware approaches for adaptive connectivity, robust security and privacy-aware communications for vehicular cyber physical systems (CPS). It presents mathematical models and numerical results obtained from experiments and simulations, and a trade-off between connectivity, security and privacy for vehicular communications. Connectivity between vehicles is crucial for vehicular CPS. Intelligent vehicular CPS provides not only road safety and traffic efficiency by exchanging information among vehicles, but also offers infotainment services to passengers using a variety of wireless technologies to forward the traffic/trajectory information with Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), and Vehicle-to-Roadside-to-Vehicle (V2R2V) communications. The book covers how to ensure that the message received from other vehicles is secure and trustworthy, rather than malicious. Further, it reveals how to make sure that the privacy of participants is not revealed while validating the received message. Researchers and professionals working with vehicular networks, smart systems, cyber physical systems, and mobile privacy will find this book valuable.

How Journalists Use Twitter: The Changing Landscape of U.S. Newsrooms shows how leading reporters and editors at four major metropolitan newspapers are embracing Twitter as a key tool in their daily routines and how the social media platform influences coverage. This book builds on social media research by analyzing newsroom work through the lens of four different communications theories-diffusion of innovation, boundary, social capital and agenda-setting theories. This book will be of interest to scholars of communication, journalism, and new media.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th IFIP WG 2.13 International Conference on Open Source Systems, OSS 2018, held in Athens, Greece, in June 2018. The 14 revised full papers and 2 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics in the field of free/libre open source software (FLOSS) and are organized in the following thematic sections: organizational aspects of OSS projects, OSS projects validity, mining OSS data, OSS in public administration, OSS governance, and OSS reusability.

This monograph presents an application of concepts and methods from algebraic topology to models of concurrent processes in computer science and their analysis. Taking well-known discrete models for concurrent processes in resource management as a point of departure, the book goes on to refine combinatorial and topological models. In the process, it develops tools and invariants for the new discipline directed algebraic topology, which is driven by fundamental research interests as well as by applications, primarily in the static analysis of concurrent programs. The state space of a concurrent program is described as a higher-dimensional space, the topology of which encodes the essential properties of the system. In order to analyse all possible executions in the state space, more than "just" the topological properties have to be considered: Execution paths need to respect a partial order given by the time flow. As a result, tools and concepts from topology have to be extended to take privileged directions into account. The target audience for this book consists of graduate students, researchers and practitioners in the field, mathematicians and computer scientists alike.

This book presents a series of high performance product design (PD) and development best practices that can create or improve product development organization. In contrast to other books that focus only on Toyota or other individual companies applying lean IPD, this book explains the lean philosophy more broadly and includes discussions of systems engineering, design for X (DFX), agile development, integrated product development, and project management. The "Lean Journey" proposed here takes a value-centric approach, where the lean principles are applied to PD to allow the tools and methods selected to emerge from observation of the individual characteristics of each enterprise. This means that understanding lean product development (LPD) is not about knowing which tools are available but knowing how to apply the philosophy. The book comes with an accompanying manual with problems and solutions available on Springer Extras.

Technology in the world today impacts every aspect of society and has infiltrated every industry, affecting communication, management, security, etc. With the emergence of such technologies as IoT, big data, cloud computing, AI, and virtual reality, organizations have had to adjust the way they conduct business to account for changing consumer behaviors and increasing data protection awareness. The Handbook of Research on Social and Organizational Dynamics in the Digital Era provides relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings on all aspects of social issues impacted by information technology in organizations and inter-organizational structures and presents the conceptualization of specific social issues and their associated constructs. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as business management, knowledge management, and consumer behavior, this publication seeks to advance the practice and understanding of technology and the impacts of technology on social behaviors and norms in the workplace and society. It is intended for business professionals, executives, IT practitioners, policymakers, students, and researchers.

This book reports on an outstanding thesis that has significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in the automated analysis and classification of speech and music. It defines several standard acoustic parameter sets and describes their implementation in a novel, open-source, audio analysis framework called openSMILE, which has been accepted and intensively used worldwide. The book offers extensive descriptions of key methods for the automatic classification of speech and music signals in real-life conditions and reports on the evaluation of the framework developed and the acoustic parameter sets that were selected. It is not only intended as a manual for openSMILE users, but also and primarily as a guide and source of inspiration for students and scientists involved in the design of speech and music analysis methods that can robustly handle real-life conditions.

This book explores several branches of the social sciences and their perspectives regarding their relations with decision-making processes: computer science, education, linguistics, sociology, and management. The decision-making process in social contexts is based on the analysis of sound alternatives using evaluative criteria. Therefore, this process is one that can be rational or irrational, and can be based on knowledge and/or beliefs. A decision-making process always produces a final decision, which may or may not imply prompt action, and increases the chances of choosing the best possible alternative. The book is divided into four main parts. The concepts covered in the first part, on computer science, explore how the rise of algorithms and the growth in computing power over the years can influence decision-making processes. In the second part, some traditional and innovative ideas and methods used in education are presented: compulsory schooling, inclusive schools, higher education, etc. In turn, the third part focuses on linguistics aspects, and examines how progress is manifested in language. The fourth part, on sociology, explores how society can be influenced by social norms, human interactions, culture, and religion. Management, regarded as a science of the decision-making process, is explored in the last part of this book. Selected organizations' strategies, objectives and resources are presented, e.g., human resources, financial resources, and technological resources. The book gathers and presents, in a concise format, a broad range of aspects regarding the decision-making process in social contexts, making it a valuable and unique resource for the scientific community.

Right now is the time for new opinions and new ideas to be generated and be presented as a solution. With the ever changing economic status of society, prosperity depends on the ability to run and maintain an active equilibrium between society and individuals. Therefore, it is essential for both parties to promote innovation and creativity in order to enable a proper and valuable lifestyle. Digital Economy Innovations and Impacts on Society provides theoretical and practical approaches about digital economy, increasing people s awareness on what the digital economy is and exactly what competitive advantages exist to provide information technology and innovation as its main resources. This publication focuses on rethinking the classical economic theory in the context of new technology, information, and innovation, making it a publication that brings the best research to the forefront for economics and social researchers, academicians, professionals and practitioners.

This book is inspired by the contemporary fascination with virtual reality and growing presence of this type of technology in everyday life. It explores the ways in which virtual reality evokes illusory transformation responses. The power of virtual reality is in making the mediation by technology in these experiences appear irrelevant to cognitive processes, so much so that it is often assumed that skills acquired in virtual environments are generally transferable to the physical world. However, cognition is affected by virtual reality technology, which is reflected in issues related to virtual embodiment, choice of spatial strategies, differences in neural and electrophysiological patterns associated with movement processing when navigating virtual vs. physical environments, and, at least to some extent, in virtual proxemics. In addition to spatial cognition, the book explores the sense of self in virtual reality, social interaction and virtual togetherness, action and motor cognition, calling to mind debates from philosophy, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience.

This is the first book to explore how Semantic Web technologies (SWTs) can be used to create intelligent engineering applications (IEAs). Technology-specific chapters reflect the state of the art in relevant SWTs and offer guidelines on how they can be applied in multi-disciplinary engineering settings characteristic of engineering production systems. In addition, a selection of case studies from various engineering domains demonstrate how SWTs can be used to create IEAs that enable, for example, defect detection or constraint checking. Part I "Background and Requirements of Industrie 4.0 for Semantic Web Solutions" provides the background information needed to understand the book and addresses questions concerning the semantic challenges and requirements of Industrie 4.0, and which key SWT capabilities may be suitable for implementing engineering applications. In turn, Part II "Semantic Web-Enabled Data Integration in Multi-Disciplinary Engineering" focuses on how SWTs can be used for data integration in heterogeneous, multi-disciplinary engineering settings typically encountered in the creation of flexible production systems. Part III "Creating Intelligent Applications for Multi-Disciplinary Engineering" demonstrates how the integrated engineering data can be used to support the creation of IEAs, while Part IV "Related and Emerging Trends in the Use of Semantic Web in Engineering" presents an overview of the broader spectrum of approaches that make use of SWTs to support engineering settings. A final chapter then rounds out the book with an assessment of the strengths, weaknesses and compatibilities of SWTs and an outlook on future opportunities for applying SWTs to create IEAs in flexible industrial production systems. This book seeks to build a bridge between two communities: industrial production on one hand and Semantic Web on the other. Accordingly, stakeholders from both communities should find this book useful in their work. Semantic Web researchers will gain a better understanding of the challenges and requirements of the industrial production domain, offering them guidance in the development of new technologies and solutions for this important application area. In turn, engineers and managers from engineering domains will arrive at a firmer grasp of the benefits and limitations of using SWTs, helping them to select and adopt appropriate SWTs more effectively. In addition, researchers and students interested in industrial production-related issues will gain valuable insights into how and to what extent SWTs can help to address those issues.

This book presents the proceedings of the 8th Cambridge Workshop on Universal Access and Assistive Technology (CWUAAT '16), incorporating the 11th Cambridge Workshop on Rehabilitation Robotics, held in Cambridge, England in March 2016. It presents novel and state-of-the-art research from an international group of leaders in the fields of universal access and assistive technology. It explores various issues including the reconciliation of usability, accessibility and inclusive design, the design of inclusive assistive and rehabilitation systems, measuring product demand and human capabilities, data mining and visualizing inclusion, legislation in inclusive design, and situational inclusive interfaces (automotive and aerospace). This book provides an invaluable resource to researchers, postgraduates, design practitioners, therapists and clinical practitioners, as well as design teachers.

Every day we are bombarded with new technology products that are confusing and difficult to use. For example, the new touch-screen voting machines in Florida are so difficult to use that some elections have been nullified due to all of the errors voters made while using the machines. There has to be a way to make things easy-to-use. There is-and it is found inside the covers of this book.

When researchers in computer-mediated communications discuss digital textuality, they rarely venture beyond the now commonplace notion that computer textuality embodies contemporary post-structuralist theories. Written for students and faculty of contemporary literature and composition theories, this book is the first to move from general to specific considerations. Advancing from general considerations of how computers are changing literacy, Digital Fictions moves on to a specific consideration of how computers are altering one particular set of literature practices: reading and writing fiction. Suffused through the sensibility of a creative writer, this book includes an historical overview of writing stories on computers. In addition, Sloane conducts interviews with the makers of hypertext fictions (including Stuart Moulthrop, Michael Joyce, and Carolyn Guyer) and offers close reading of digital fictions. Making careful analyses of the meaning-making activities of both readers and writers of this emerging genre, this work is embedded in a perspective both feminist and semiotic. Digital Fictions explores and distinguishes among four distinct iterations of text-based digital fictions; text adventures, Carnegie Mellon University Oz Project, hypertext fictions, and MUDs. Ultimately, Sloane revises the rhetorical triangle and proposes a new rhetorical theory, one that attends to the materials, processes, and locations of stories told on-line.

Extensive research conducted by the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Program at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, USA, and the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, has yielded valuable insights on why and how design thinking works. The participating researchers have identified metrics, developed models, and conducted studies, which are featured in this book, and in the previous volumes of this series. Offering readers a closer look at design thinking, and its innovation processes and methods, this volume addresses the new and growing field of neurodesign, which applies insights from the neurosciences in order to improve design team performance. Thinking and devising innovations are inherently human activities - and so is design thinking. Accordingly, design thinking is not merely the result of special courses or of being gifted or trained: it is a way of dealing with our environment and improving techniques, technologies and life in general. As such, the research outcomes compiled in this book are intended to inform and provide inspiration for all those seeking to drive innovation - be they experienced design thinkers or newcomers.

This volume offers a general overview on the handling and regulating electronic evidence in Europe, presenting a standard for the exchange process. Chapters explore the nature of electronic evidence and readers will learn of the challenges involved in upholding the necessary standards and maintaining the integrity of information. Challenges particularly occur when European Union member states collaborate and evidence is exchanged, as may be the case when solving a cybercrime. One such challenge is that the variety of possible evidences is so wide that potentially anything may become the evidence of a crime. Moreover, the introduction and the extensive use of information and communications technology (ICT) has generated new forms of crimes or new ways of perpetrating them, as well as a new type of evidence. Contributing authors examine the legal framework in place in various EU member states when dealing with electronic evidence, with prominence given to data protection and privacy issues. Readers may learn about the state of the art tools and standards utilized for treating and exchanging evidence, and existing platforms and environments run by different Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) at local and central level. Readers will also discover the operational point of view of LEAs when dealing with electronic evidence, and their requirements and expectations for the future. Finally, readers may consider a proposal for realizing a unique legal framework for governing in a uniform and aligned way the treatment and cross border exchange of electronic evidence in Europe. The use, collection and exchange of electronic evidence in the European Union context and the rules, practises, operational guidelines, standards and tools utilized by LEAs, judges, Public prosecutors and other relevant stakeholders are all covered in this comprehensive work. It will appeal to researchers in both law and computer science, as well as those with an interest in privacy, digital forensics, electronic evidence, legal frameworks and law enforcement.