Readers seeking to gain a handle on the internet's global expansion will find this book rich in scholarly foundations combined with cutting-edge discussion of emerging ICTs and services and the complex societal contexts in which they are embedded. To explore possibilities to the fullest extent, a sociotechnical systems approach is employed, focusing on the interplay of technical, social, cultural, political, and economic dynamics to explore alternative futures (ones that are not part of the dominant discourse about the internet). These shared perspectives are not well addressed elsewhere in current discussions. Awareness of these dynamics, and the fluidity of the future, is important, as humankind moves forward into the uncertain future. Due to the sociotechnical complexity of the Internet, policymakers, businesspeople, and academics worldwide have struggled to keep abreast of developments. This volume's approach is intended to stimulate dialogue between academics and practitioners on a topic that will affect most aspects of human life in the near-term future.

This book brings together the expertise of two authors involved in initiating the development of Online Family Dispute Resolution (OFDR), while also examining the unique Australian system. The family arena generally comprises property or child-related disputes arising between parents, whether married or not, and whether the parties have lived together or not. A special feature of Australia's OFDR system is that it deals with children's issues rather than focusing on property distribution. The book first discusses how technological innovations have transformed dispute resolution services to families. It explores the need for OFDR and how such systems can potentially be implemented. In turn, the coverage shifts to screening tools used prior to a Family Dispute Resolution session to ensure that online systems are appropriate for the case under dispute and the people involved. Readers will then learn about the necessary training required - for administrators, practitioners and clients alike - for OFDR to be successful. In addition, the book offers a comprehensive evaluation of the system and reflects on the lessons learned to date. In closing, it suggests ways in which OFDR could be further developed and applied to family disputes around the world.

This book presents an overview of the emerging field of emotion in videogame soundtracking. The emotional impact of music has been well-documented, particularly when used to enhance the impact of a multimodal experience, such as combining images with audio as found in the videogames industry. Soundtracking videogames presents a unique challenge compared to traditional composition (for example film music) in that the narrative of gameplay is non-linear - Player dependent actions can change the narrative and thus the emotional characteristics required in the soundtrack. Historical approaches to emotion measurement, and the musical feature mapping and music selection that might be used in video game soundtracking are outlined, before a series of cutting edge examples are given. These examples include algorithmic composition techniques, automated emotion matching from biosensors, motion capture techniques, emotionally-targeted speech synthesis and signal processing, and automated repurposing of existing music (for example from a players own library). The book concludes with some possibilities for the future.

As the growing relationship between individuals and technology continue to play a vital role in our society and work place, the progress and execution of information technology communication systems is important in maintaining our current way of life. Knowledge and Technological Development Effects on Organizational and Social Structures provides a wide ranging discussion on the exchanging of research ideas and practices in an effort to bring together the social and technical aspects within organizations and society. This collection focuses on new ideas and studies for research, students, and practitioners.

This book presents the key technology of electronic noses, and systematically describes how e-noses can be used to automatically analyse odours. Appealing to readers from the fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, electrical engineering, electronics, and instrumentation science, it addresses three main areas: First, readers will learn how to apply machine learning, pattern recognition and signal processing algorithms to real perception tasks. Second, they will be shown how to make their algorithms match their systems once the algorithms don't work because of the limitation of hardware resources. Third, readers will learn how to make schemes and solutions when the acquired data from their systems is not stable due to the fundamental issues affecting perceptron devices (e.g. sensors). In brief, the book presents and discusses the key technologies and new algorithmic challenges in electronic noses and artificial olfaction. The goal is to promote the industrial application of electronic nose technology in environmental detection, medical diagnosis, food quality control, explosive detection, etc. and to highlight the scientific advances in artificial olfaction and artificial intelligence. The book offers a good reference guide for newcomers to the topic of electronic noses, because it refers to the basic principles and algorithms. At the same time, it clearly presents the key challenges - such as long-term drift, signal uniqueness, and disturbance - and effective and efficient solutions, making it equally valuable for researchers engaged in the science and engineering of sensors, instruments, chemometrics, etc.

This book presents perspectives for and by teachers, school and university administrators and educational researchers regarding the great impact pen and tablet technology can have on classrooms and education. presents three distinctly valuable threads of research: Emerging technologies and cutting-edge software invented by researchers and evaluated through real classroom deployments. First-hand perspectives of instructors and administrators who actively implement pen or tablet technologies in their classrooms. Up-and-coming systems that provide insight into the future of pen, touch, and sketch recognition technologies in the classrooms and the curriculums of tomorrow. The Impact of Pen and Touch Technology on Education is an essential read for educators who wish get to grips with ink-based computing and bring their teaching methods into the twenty-first century, as well as for researchers in the areas of education, human-computer interaction and intelligent systems for pedagogical advancement.

This book introduces the concept of the wise home. Whilst smart homes focus on automation technologies, forcing users to deal with complex and incomprehensible control and programming procedures, the wise home is different. By going beyond intelligence (or smartness) the wise home puts technology in the background and supports explicit (enhanced user-experience) as well as implicit (artificial intelligence) interaction adequate to the end-user's needs. The theoretical basis of the wise home is explored and examples for its application for future living are presented based on empirical studies and field work carried out by the author. Principles of HCI and the meaning of the home from differing scientific perspective are discussed and a research model (based on the concept of user experience (UX)) and iterations is introduced. This has resulted in field deployment guides being produced through a systematic development process. The Future Home is Wise, not Smart will be essential reading to home system developers, designers and researchers, responsible for smart home deployment or Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) who will get insights on how to follow a novel approach in developing and adapting smart home systems to their users' needs. Students with an interest in software design for pervasive systems will benefit by receiving information on how to develop and customise systems for the specific needs of living environments.

The world of Internet law is constantly changing and is difficult to follow, even for those for whom doing so is a full-time job. This updated, everything-you-need-to-know reference removes the uncertainty. Internet and the Law: Technology, Society, and Compromises, Second Edition is the go-to source for anyone who needs clear explanations of complex legal concepts related to online practices and content. This wide-ranging, alphabetical reference explores diverse areas of law, including territorial jurisdiction and taxation, that are relevant to or affected by advances in information technology and the rise of the Internet. Particular emphasis is placed on intellectual property law and laws regarding freedom of expression. The Internet, as this book shows, raises questions not only about how to protect intellectual creations, but about what should be protected. Entries also discuss how the Web has brought First Amendment rights and free expression into question as society grapples with attempts to control "leaks" and to restrict content such as pornography, spam, defamation, and criminal speech. Explains complex legal and technical concepts clearly and understandably through entries that range from 500 to 5,000 words Covers a wide range of topics, including censorship, copyright, domain name disputes, file-sharing, hacking, patents, spam, malware, international law, tax issues, trademarks, and viruses Features an introductory guide to the U.S. legal system, including how to find, read, and understand sources of law Includes cases, statutes, and international treaties relevant to the law of information technology and the Internet

Everything we do online, and increasingly in the real world, is tracked, logged, analyzed, and often packaged and sold on to the highest bidder. Every time you visit a website, use a credit card, drive on the freeway, or go past a CCTV camera, you are logged and tracked. Every day billions of people choose to share their details on social media, which are then sold to advertisers. The Edward Snowden revelations that governments - including those of the US and UK - have been snooping on their citizens, have rocked the world. But nobody seems to realize that this has already been happening for years, with firms such as Google capturing everything you type into a browser and selling it to the highest bidder. Apps take information about where you go, and your contact book details, harvest them and sell them on - and people just click the EULA without caring. No one is revealing the dirty secret that is the tech firms harvesting customers' personal data and selling it for vast profits - and people are totally unaware of the dangers. You: For Sale is for anyone who is concerned about what corporate and government invasion of privacy means now and down the road. The book sets the scene by spelling out exactly what most users of the Internet and smart phones are exposing themselves to via commonly used sites and apps such as facebook and Google, and then tells you what you can do to protect yourself. The book also covers legal and government issues as well as future trends. With interviews of leading security experts, black market data traders, law enforcement and privacy groups, You: For Sale will help you view your personal data in a new light, and understand both its value, and its danger.

This thesis focuses on the problem of optimizing the quality of network multimedia services. This problem spans multiple domains, from subjective perception of multimedia quality to computer networks management. The work done in this thesis approaches the problem at different levels, developing methods for modeling the subjective perception of quality based on objectively measurable parameters of the multimedia coding process as well as the transport over computer networks. The modeling of subjective perception is motivated by work done in psychophysics, while using Machine Learning techniques to map network conditions to the human perception of video services. Furthermore, the work develops models for efficient control of multimedia systems operating in dynamic networked environments with the goal of delivering optimized Quality of Experience. Overall this thesis delivers a set of methods for monitoring and optimizing the quality of multimedia services that adapt to the dynamic environment of computer networks in which they operate.

Focusing on the vision-based and sensor-based recognition and analysis of human activity and behavior, this book gathers extended versions of selected papers presented at the International Conference on Activity and Behavior Computing (ABC 2020), held in Kitakyushu, Japan on August 26 - 29, 2020. The respective chapters cover action recognition, action understanding, gait analysis, gesture recognition, behavior analysis, emotion and affective computing, and related areas. The book addresses various challenges and aspects of human activity recognition in both the sensor-based and vision-based domains, making it a unique guide to the field.

The book gives an introduction into the theory and practice of the transdisciplinary field of Character Computing, introduced by Alia El Bolock. The latest scientific findings indicate that "One size DOES NOT fit all" in terms of how to design interactive systems and predict behavior to tailor the interaction experience. Emotions are one of the essential factors that influence people's daily experiences; they influence decision making and how different emotions are interpreted by different individuals. For example, some people may perform better under stress and others may break. Building upon Rosalind Picard's vision, if we want computers to be genuinely intelligent and to interact naturally with us, we must give computers the ability to recognize, understand, even to have and express emotions and how different characters perceive and react to these emotions, hence having richer and truly tailored interaction experiences. Psychological processes or personality traits are embedded in the existing fields of Affective and Personality Computing. However, this book is the first that systematically addresses this including the whole human character; namely our stable personality traits, our variable affective, cognitive and motivational states as well as our morals, beliefs and socio-cultural embedding. The book gives an introduction into the theory and practice of the transdisciplinary field of Character Computing. The emerging field leverages Computer Science and Psychology to extend technology to include the whole character of humans and thus paves the way for researchers to truly place humans at the center of any technological development. Character Computing is presented from three main perspectives: Profiling and sensing the character Leveraging characters to build ubiquitous character-aware systems Investigating how to extend Artificial Intelligence to create artificial characters

This invaluable text/reference investigates the state of the art in approaches to building, monitoring, managing, and governing smart cities. A particular focus is placed on the distributed computing environments within the infrastructure of such cities, including issues of device connectivity, communication, security, and interoperability. A selection of experts of international repute offer their perspectives on current trends and best practices, and their suggestions for future developments, together with case studies supporting the vision of smart cities based on the Internet of Things (IoT). Topics and features: examines the various methodologies relating to next-level urbanization, including approaches to security and privacy relating to social and legal aspects; describes a recursive and layered approach to modeling large-scale resource management systems for self-sustainable cities; proposes a novel architecture for hybrid vehicular wireless sensor networks, and a pricing mechanism for the management of natural resources; discusses the challenges and potential solutions to building smart city surveillance systems, applying knowledge-based governance, and adopting electric vehicles; covers topics on intelligent distributed systems, IoT, fog computing paradigms, big data management and analytics, and smart grids; reviews issues of sustainability in the design of smart cities and healthcare services, illustrated by case studies taken from cities in Japan, India, and Brazil. This illuminating volume offers a comprehensive reference for researchers investigating smart cities and the IoT, students interested in the distributed computing technologies used by smart living systems, and practitioners wishing to adopt the latest security and connectivity techniques in smart city environments.

This book introduces a Digital Social System Praxis Framework (DSSPF) integrating Computational Media, Evolutionary Systems Thinking and Design Thinking approaches to E-transformation practice, also called Community Informatics Design (CID). The DSSPF framework is intended to create communication spaces dedicated to knowledge production and sharing for social and organizational change. It allows social systems researchers and practitioners to recognize their synergistic roles in the praxis process to shape their future through social innovation projects. This transdisciplinary text provides potential students and practitioners fundamental concepts and tools for such design. It offers resources from the Pragmatic and Systemic philosophy of science for the co-construction of social architectures and infrastructures, and multi-aspectual design methodologies by which government, organizations and civil society can learn to ethically co-design common ground. This approach provides complementary and common patterns from known methods, models, and theories of social systems interventions that could support a generic framing of large scale sociotechnical systems: digital social innovation ecosystem, living Labs, Fab Labs, enterprise collaborative networks. There will be a particular focus on understanding and addressing the dimensions that make people from different communities of practice able to communicate and collaborate through multiple digital media, design platforms, worldviews and modeling approaches.

This book provides a multidisciplinary view into how individuals and groups interact with the information environments that surround them. The book discusses how informational environments shape our daily lives, and how digital technologies can improve the ways in which people make use of informational environments. It presents the research and outcomes of a seven-year multidisciplinary research initiative, the Leibniz-WissenschaftsCampus Tubingen Informational Environments, jointly conducted by the Leibniz-Institut fur Wissensmedien (IWM) and the Eberhard Karls Universitat Tubingen. Book chapters from leading international experts in psychology, education, computer science, sociology, and medicine provide a multi-layered and multidisciplinary view on how the interplay between individuals and their informational environments unfolds. Featured topics include: Managing obesity prevention using digital media. Using digital media to assess and promote school teacher competence. Informational environments and their effect on college student dropout. Web-Platforms for game-based learning of orthography and numeracy. How to design adaptive information environments to support self-regulated learning with multimedia. Informational Environments will be of interest to advanced undergraduate students, postgraduate students, researchers and practitioners in various fields of educational psychology, social psychology, education, computer science, communication science, sociology, and medicine.

This book presents different perspectives of online business education - how it is designed, delivered and how it supports advances in management disciplines. The authors describe online platforms in their provision of timely, excellent and relevant business education. The book starts by examining the emergence of online business education. It offers insights for use to business educators in design and implementation of online learning. It presents and discusses technologies for class facilitation and collaboration including tools used to bring content and issues to life. Disruptive approaches and new directions in online business education are examined. The book is ideal for business educators, administrators, as well as business practitioners that have an interest in delivering high quality business education using online platforms and tools. On the Line: Business Education in the Digital Age is divided into three sections. Section 1 presents papers on "why" business education is viable and sustainable in today's context. Treating education as a service, this section describes new techniques for creating a better online business education experience. It also looks at the role advanced data analytics can play in enhancing the quality of online business education. Section 2 delves into "how" online business education works. It presents conceptual models for teaching in specific disciplines, learning design that describes what business educators do and how programs work. This section also addresses performance assessments and quality assurance measures that help to demonstrate the efficacy of online pedagogy. Practical applied papers are used in this section to highlight the use of learning platforms, tools and their application specific to businesses that build knowledge and skills and make students 'work ready'. Finally Section 3 of the book addresses the "so what?" or the outcomes and impacts of online business education. This section targets where business education needs to take learning next, for example to support sustainable business, ethical decision making and inclusive and collaborative leadership. Chapters deal with topics such as how distributed online environments may work better to support knowledge and soft skill building directly relevant for organizations today. Other learning outcomes showing the value of online business education are discussed. Academics, alumni and consultants from over fifteen institutions and organizations around the world contributed to this book.

Clear communication requires understanding readers from perspectives of technical communication, cognitive psychology, usability, human-computer interaction, information design, and information science. Designing and clearly communicating information involves understanding multiple perspectives of the readers experiences and understanding their motivations and rationale that drives their behavior. The research in diverse areas has all examined the issue though different lenses. However, there has not been an attempt at transforming the academic studies into a form accessible to technical communication students or to practitioners charged with designing and creating the content. Human-Information Interaction and Technical Communication: Concepts and Frameworks focuses on communicating information, not creating information. Developing information which clearly communicates and fits people s needs requires understanding how people think and what drives their decision processes. To help achieve that goal, this book works to provide practical knowledge based on a sound theoretical foundation for allowing people to engage in a meaningful dialogue as they make decisions with respect to designing that communication. Besides being a reference for the academic researcher or practicing technical communicator, it is written so it can be used as a reference for either a foundational or theories of technical communication course.

The rapid evolution of technology continuously changes the way people interact, work, and learn. By examining these advances, researchers can further optimize the various opportunities that technology provides. The Handbook of Research on Human Development in the Digital Age is a pivotal reference source presenting the latest scholarly research on the impact of technology on the population through different theories and perspectives. Featuring extensive coverage on a broad range of topics such as cyberbullying, mobile technology, and social skills development, this publication is ideally designed for academicians, researchers, and practitioners seeking current research on new trends in technology that impact society.

This handbook provides a unique and in-depth survey of the current state-of-the-art in software engineering, covering its major topics, the conceptual genealogy of each subfield, and discussing future research directions. Subjects include foundational areas of software engineering (e.g. software processes, requirements engineering, software architecture, software testing, formal methods, software maintenance) as well as emerging areas (e.g., self-adaptive systems, software engineering in the cloud, coordination technology). Each chapter includes an introduction to central concepts and principles, a guided tour of seminal papers and key contributions, and promising future research directions. The authors of the individual chapters are all acknowledged experts in their field and include many who have pioneered the techniques and technologies discussed. Readers will find an authoritative and concise review of each subject, and will also learn how software engineering technologies have evolved and are likely to develop in the years to come. This book will be especially useful for researchers who are new to software engineering, and for practitioners seeking to enhance their skills and knowledge.

This book examines the principles of and advances in personalized task recommendation in crowdsourcing systems, with the aim of improving their overall efficiency. It discusses the challenges faced by personalized task recommendation when crowdsourcing systems channel human workforces, knowledge, skills and perspectives beyond traditional organizational boundaries. The solutions presented help interested individuals find tasks that closely match their personal interests and capabilities in a context of ever-increasing opportunities of participating in crowdsourcing activities. In order to explore the design of mechanisms that generate task recommendations based on individual preferences, the book first lays out a conceptual framework that guides the analysis and design of crowdsourcing systems. Based on a comprehensive review of existing research, it then develops and evaluates a new kind of task recommendation service that integrates with existing systems. The resulting prototype provides a platform for both the field study and the practical implementation of task recommendation in productive environments.

This book deepens the understanding of people through smartphone data obtained via mobile sensing and applies psychological insights for social networking applications. The author first introduces TYDR, an application for researching smartphone data and user personality. A novel, structured privacy model for mobile sensing applications is developed and the obtained empirical results help researchers gauge what data they can expect users to share in daily-life studies. The new research findings, the concept of mobile sensing, and psychological insights about the formation and structure of real-life social networks are integrated into the field of social networking. Finally, for this novel integration, the author presents concepts, decentralized software architectures, and fully realized prototypes that recommend new contacts, media, and locations to individual users and groups of users.

This book summarizes the results of Design Thinking Research carried out at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, USA and at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. Offering readers a closer look at Design Thinking, its innovation processes and methods, the book covers topics ranging from how to design ideas, methods and technologies, to creativity experiments and wicked problem solutions, to creative collaboration in the real world, and the interplay of designers and engineers. But the topics go beyond this in their detailed exploration of Design Thinking and its use in IT systems engineering fields, or even from a management perspective. The authors show how these methods and strategies actually work in companies, introduce new technologies and their functions, and demonstrate how Design Thinking can influence such unexpected topics as marriage. Furthermore, readers will learn how special-purpose Design Thinking can be used to solve wicked problems in complex fields. Thinking and devising innovations are fundamentally and inherently human activities - so is Design Thinking. Accordingly, Design Thinking is not merely the result of special courses nor of being gifted or trained: it's a way of dealing with our environment and improving techniques, technologies and life.