This book presents the proceedings of the 8th International Ergonomics Conference (ERGONOMICS), held in Zagreb, Croatia on December 2-5, 2020. By highlighting the latest theories and models, as well as cutting-edge technologies and applications, and by combining findings from a range of disciplines including engineering, design, robotics, healthcare, management, computer science, human biology and behavioral science, it provides researchers and practitioners alike with a comprehensive, timely guide on human factors and ergonomics. It also offers an excellent source of innovative ideas to stimulate future discussions and developments aimed at applying knowledge and techniques to optimize system performance, while at the same time promoting the health, safety and wellbeing of individuals. The proceedings include papers from researchers and practitioners, scientists and physicians, institutional leaders, managers and policy makers that contribute to constructing the Human Factors and Ergonomics approach across a variety of methodologies, domains and productive sectors.

This essay places the emerging brain-Internet interface within a broad historical context: that the Internet represents merely the next stage in a very long history of human cognition whereby the brain couples with symbolic technologies. Understanding this 'deep history' provides a way to imagine the future of brain-Internet cognition.

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. This volume provides readers with tools to bridge the gap between research and practice in design thinking with varied real world examples. Several different approaches to design thinking are presented in this volume. Acquired frameworks are leveraged to understand design thinking team dynamics. The contributing authors lead the reader through new approaches and application fields and show that design thinking can tap the potential of digital technologies in a human-centered way. In a final section, new ideas in neurodesign at Stanford University and at Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam are elaborated upon thereby challenging the reader to consider newly developed methodologies and provide discussion of how these insights can be applied to various sectors. Special emphasis is placed on understanding the mechanisms underlying design thinking at the individual and team levels. Design thinking can be learned. It has a methodology that can be observed across multiple settings and accordingly, the reader can adopt new frameworks to modify and update existing practice. 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 edited volume addresses the vast challenges of adapting Online Social Media (OSM) to developing research methods and applications. The topics cover generating realistic social network topologies, awareness of user activities, topic and trend generation, estimation of user attributes from their social content, behavior detection, mining social content for common trends, identifying and ranking social content sources, building friend-comprehension tools, and many others. Each of the ten chapters tackle one or more of these issues by proposing new analysis methods or new visualization techniques, or both, for famous OSM applications such as Twitter and Facebook. This collection of contributed chapters address these challenges. Online Social Media has become part of the daily lives of hundreds of millions of users generating an immense amount of 'social content'. Addressing the challenges that stem from this wide adaptation of OSM is what makes this book a valuable contribution to the field of social networks.

Cyber security, encompassing both information and network security, is of utmost importance in today s information age. Cyber Security Standards, Practices and Industrial Applications: Systems and Methodologies details the latest and most important advances in security standards. First, it introduces the differences between information security (covers the understanding of security requirements, classification of threats, attacks and information protection systems and methodologies) and network security (includes both security protocols as well as systems which create a security perimeter around networks for intrusion detection and avoidance). In addition, the book serves as an essential reference to students, researchers, practitioners and consultants in the area of social media, cyber security and information and communication technologies (ICT).

The book presents research that contributes to the development of intelligent dialog systems to simplify diverse aspects of everyday life, such as medical diagnosis and entertainment. Covering major thematic areas: machine learning and artificial neural networks; algorithms and models; and social and biometric data for applications in human-computer interfaces, it discusses processing of audio-visual signals for the detection of user-perceived states, the latest scientific discoveries in processing verbal (lexicon, syntax, and pragmatics), auditory (voice, intonation, vocal expressions) and visual signals (gestures, body language, facial expressions), as well as algorithms for detecting communication disorders, remote health-status monitoring, sentiment and affect analysis, social behaviors and engagement. Further, it examines neural and machine learning algorithms for the implementation of advanced telecommunication systems, communication with people with special needs, emotion modulation by computer contents, advanced sensors for tracking changes in real-life and automatic systems, as well as the development of advanced human-computer interfaces. The book does not focus on solving a particular problem, but instead describes the results of research that has positive effects in different fields and applications.

Legal and ethical issues have become a standard part of engineering and business schools' curricula. This has not been the case for computer science or management information systems programs, although there has been increasing emphasis on the social skills of these students. This leaves a frightening void in their professional development. Information systems pose unique social challenges, especially for technical professionals who have been taught to think in terms of logic, structures and flows. Social, Ethical and Policy Implications of Information Technology focuses on the human impact of information systems, including ethical challenges, social implications, legal issues, and unintended costs and consequences.

"Hacking Europe" traces the user practices of chopping games in Warsaw, hacking software in Athens, creating chaos in Hamburg, producing demos in Turku, and partying with computing in Zagreb and Amsterdam. Focusing on several European countries at the end of the Cold War, the book shows the digital development was not an exclusively American affair. Local hacker communities appropriated the computer and forged new cultures around it like the hackers in Yugoslavia, Poland and Finland, who showed off their tricks and creating distinct demoscenes. Together the essays reflect a diverse palette of cultural practices by which European users domesticated computer technologies. Each chapter explores the mediating actors instrumental in introducing and spreading the cultures of computing around Europe. More generally, the ludological element--the role of mischief, humor, and play--discussed here as crucial for analysis of hacker culture, opens new vistas for the study of the history of technology."

This research contributes to the growing body of knowledge as well as offers significant theoretical contributions and policy implications. As far as the researcher's knowledge, this is the first research of its type that investigates the relationship between digital enabled transformation of government and citizens' trust & confidence in government. The proposed conceptual model also makes a novel contribution at a conceptual level, which can be used as a frame of reference by researchers as well as practitioners when planning ICT-enabled transformation projects in government. The context of the research is the Kingdom of Bahrain, the top-ranked country in ICT adoption in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region.

This book describes pragmatic instruments and methods that enable business experts and software engineers to develop a common understanding of the software to be created, to determine their key requirements, and to manage the project in a way that fosters trust, encourages innovation and distributes risk fairly between clients and contractors. After an introduction to the fundamentals of agile software development in Part I, Part II describes the Interaction Room, an actual room where digitalization and mobilization strategies are developed, where technology potentials are evaluated, where software projects are planned and managed, and where business and technical stakeholders can communicate face to face, visualize complex relationships intuitively, and highlight value, effort and risk drivers that are keys to the project's success. After addressing these constructive aspects, the book focuses on the commercial aspects of software development: The adVANTAGE contract model described in Part III ensures that the insight-driven innovation process of software development does not just function, but is allowed to flourish in a trusted client-contractor relationship. Even though software contracting and construction may be grounded in two different academic disciplines, they are inseparable in practice, and how they interact is illustrated in the case study of developing a private health insurance benefit system in Part IV. Ultimately though, the success of every software project depends on the skills of the stakeholders. Part V therefore describes the qualification profile that software engineers and domain experts have to satisfy today. This book is aimed at CIOs, project managers and software engineers in industrial software development practice who want to learn how to effectively deal with the inevitable uncertainty of complex projects, who want to achieve higher levels of understanding and cooperation in their relationships with clients and contractors, and who want to run lower-risk software projects despite their inherent uncertainties.

During the last few years, software evolution research has explored new domains such as the study of socio-technical aspects and collaboration between different individuals contributing to a software system, the use of search-based techniques and meta-heuristics, the mining of unstructured software repositories, the evolution of software requirements, and the dynamic adaptation of software systems at runtime. Also more and more attention is being paid to the evolution of collections of inter-related and inter-dependent software projects, be it in the form of web systems, software product families, software ecosystems or systems of systems.

With this book, the editors present insightful contributions on these and other domains currently being intensively explored, written by renowned researchers in the respective fields of software evolution. Each chapter presents the state of the art in a particular topic, as well as the current research, available tool support and remaining challenges. The book is complemented by a glossary of important terms used in the community, a reference list of nearly 1,000 papers and books and tips on additional resources that may be useful to the reader (reference books, journals, standards and major scientific events in the domain of software evolution and datasets).This book is intended for all those interested in software engineering, and more particularly, software maintenance and evolution. Researchers and software practitioners alike will find in the contributed chapters an overview of the most recent findings, covering a broad spectrum of software evolution topics. In addition, it can also serve as the basis of graduate or postgraduate courses on e.g., software evolution, requirements engineering, model-driven software development or social informatics.

Describing several new biometric technologies, such as high-resolution fingerprint, finger-knuckle-print, multi-spectral backhand, 3D fingerprint, tongueprint, 3D ear, and multi-spectral iris recognition technologies, this book analyzes a number of efficient feature extraction, matching and fusion algorithms and how potential systems have been developed. Focusing on how to develop new biometric technologies based on the requirements of applications, and how to design efficient algorithms to deliver better performance, the work is based on the author's research with experimental results under different challenging conditions described in the text. The book offers a valuable resource for researchers, professionals and postgraduate students working in the fields of computer vision, pattern recognition, biometrics, and security applications, amongst others.

Spracklen explores the impact of the internet on leisure and leisure studies, examining the ways in which digital leisure spaces and activities have become part of everyday leisure. Covering a range of issues from social media and file-sharing to romance on the Internet, this book presents new theoretical directions for digital leisure.

This book presents the edited proceedings of the 16th IEEE/ACIS International Conference on Computer and Information Science (ICIS 2017), which was held on May 24-26, 2017 in Wuhan, China. The aim of this conference was to bring together researchers and scientists, businessmen and entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, computer users, and students to discuss the various fields of computer science, share their experiences and exchange new ideas and information. The research results included relate to all aspects (theory, applications and tools) of computer and information science, and discuss the practical challenges encountered and the solutions adopted to solve them. The work selected represents 17 of the most promising papers from the conference, written by authors who are certain to make further significant contributions to the field of computer and information science.

This book provides formal and informal definitions and taxonomies for self-aware computing systems, and explains how self-aware computing relates to many existing subfields of computer science, especially software engineering. It describes architectures and algorithms for self-aware systems as well as the benefits and pitfalls of self-awareness, and reviews much of the latest relevant research across a wide array of disciplines, including open research challenges. The chapters of this book are organized into five parts: Introduction, System Architectures, Methods and Algorithms, Applications and Case Studies, and Outlook. Part I offers an introduction that defines self-aware computing systems from multiple perspectives, and establishes a formal definition, a taxonomy and a set of reference scenarios that help to unify the remaining chapters. Next, Part II explores architectures for self-aware computing systems, such as generic concepts and notations that allow a wide range of self-aware system architectures to be described and compared with both isolated and interacting systems. It also reviews the current state of reference architectures, architectural frameworks, and languages for self-aware systems. Part III focuses on methods and algorithms for self-aware computing systems by addressing issues pertaining to system design, like modeling, synthesis and verification. It also examines topics such as adaptation, benchmarks and metrics. Part IV then presents applications and case studies in various domains including cloud computing, data centers, cyber-physical systems, and the degree to which self-aware computing approaches have been adopted within those domains. Lastly, Part V surveys open challenges and future research directions for self-aware computing systems. It can be used as a handbook for professionals and researchers working in areas related to self-aware computing, and can also serve as an advanced textbook for lecturers and postgraduate students studying subjects like advanced software engineering, autonomic computing, self-adaptive systems, and data-center resource management. Each chapter is largely self-contained, and offers plenty of references for anyone wishing to pursue the topic more deeply.

This book introduces the latest visual effects (VFX) techniques that can be applied to game programming. The usefulness of the physicality-based VFX techniques, such as water, fire, smoke, and wind, has been proven through active involvement and utilization in movies and images. However, they have yet to be extensively applied in the game industry, due to the high technical barriers. Readers of this book can learn not only the theories about the latest VFX techniques, but also the methodology of game programming, step by step. The practical VFX processing techniques introduced in this book will provide very helpful information to game programmers. Due to the lack of instructional books about VFX-related game programming, the demand for knowledge regarding these high-tech VFXs might be very high.

This book proposes a combination of cognitive modeling with model-based user interface development to tackle the problem of maintaining the usability of applications that target several device types at once (e.g., desktop PC, smart phone, smart TV). Model-based applications provide interesting meta-information about the elements of the user interface (UI) that are accessible through computational introspection. Cognitive user models can capitalize on this meta-information to provide improved predictions of the interaction behavior of future human users of applications under development. In order to achieve this, cognitive processes that link UI properties to usability aspects like effectiveness (user error) and efficiency (task completion time) are established empirically, are explained through cognitive modeling, and are validated in the course of this treatise. In the case of user error, the book develops an extended model of sequential action control based on the Memory for Goals theory and it is confirmed in different behavioral domains and experimental paradigms. This new model of user cognition and behavior is implemented using the MeMo workbench and integrated with the model-based application framework MASP in order to provide automated usability predictions from early software development stages on. Finally, the validity of the resulting integrated system is confirmed by empirical data from a new application, eliciting unexpected behavioral patterns.

The book is about user interfaces to applications that have been designed for social and physical interaction. The interfaces are 'playful', that is, users feel challenged to engage in social and physical interaction because that will be fun. The topics that will be present in this book are interactive playgrounds, urban games using mobiles, sensor-equipped environments for playing, child-computer interaction, tangible game interfaces, interactive tabletop technology and applications, full-body interaction, exertion games, persuasion, engagement, evaluation and user experience. Readers of the book will not only get a survey of state-of-the-art research in these areas, but the chapters in this book will also provide a vision of the future where playful interfaces will be ubiquitous, that is, present and integrated in home, office, recreational, sports and urban environments, emphasizing that in the future in these environments game elements will be integrated and welcomed.

This book focuses on a combination of theoretical advances in the Internet of Things, cloud computing and its real-life applications to serve society. The book discusses technological innovations, authentication, mobility support and security, group rekeying schemes and a range of concrete applications. The Internet has restructured not only global interrelations, but also an unbelievable number of personal characteristics. Machines are increasingly able to control innumerable autonomous gadgets via the Internet, creating the Internet of Things, which facilitates intelligent communication between humans and things, and among things. The Internet of Things is an active area of current research, and technological advances have been supported by real-life applications to establish their soundness. The material in this book includes concepts, figures, graphs, and tables to guide researchers through the Internet of Things and its applications for society.

The ""Encyclopedia of Human Computer Interaction"" is the most thorough and definitive source providing coverage of everything related to the field of human computer interaction (HCI). This encyclopedia covers a wide range of HCI related topics such as concepts, design, usability, evaluation, innovations, and applications of HCI in organizations around the globe. Hundreds of contributors and advisors from around the world have conferred their expertise to this publication, making this encyclopedia a single source of authoritative and contemporary research in field of human computer interaction. The ""Encyclopedia of Human Computer Interaction"" also includes coverage of real life experiences and cases of HCI and the lessons learned helping readers to learn extensively about this important field of study.

Ever since the first successful International Cognitive Technology (CT) Conference in Hong Kong in August 1995, a growing concern about the dehumanising potential of machines, and the machining potential of the human mind, has pervaded the organisers' thinking. When setting up the agenda for the Second International CT Conference in Aizu, Japan, in August of 1997, they were aware that a number of new approaches had seen the light, but that the need to integrate them within a human framework had become more urgent than ever, due to the accelerating pace of technological and commercialised developments in the computer related fields of industry and research

What the present book does is re-emphasize the importance of the 'human factor' - not as something that we should 'also' take into account, when doing technology, but as the primary driving force and supreme aim of our technological endeavours. Machining the human should not happen, but humanising the machine should. "La Humacha" should replace the "Hemachine" in our thinking about these matters.

The goal of this book is to close the gap between high technology and accessibility for people having lost their independence due to the loss of physical and/or cognitive capabilities. Robots and mechatronic devices bring the opportunity to improve the autonomy of disabled people and facilitate their social and professional integration by assisting them to perform daily living tasks. Technical topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Communication and learning applications in SCI an CP, Interface and Internet-based designs, Issues in human-machine interaction, Personal robotics, Hardware and control, Evaluation methods, Clinical experience, Orthotics and prosthetics, Robotics for older adults, Service robotics, Movement physiology and motor control.