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Books > Computing & IT > Social & legal aspects of computing
We delegate more and more decisions and tasks to artificial agents, machine-learning mechanisms, and algorithmic procedures or, in other words, to computational systems. Not that we are driven by powerful ambitions of colonizing the Moon, replacing humans with legions of androids, creating sci-fi scenarios a la Matrix or masterminding some sort of Person of Interest-like Machine. No, the current digital revolution based on computational power is chiefly an everyday revolution. It is therefore that much more profound, unnoticed and widespread, for it affects our customary habits and routines and alters the very texture of our day-to-day lives. This opens a precise line of inquiry, which constitutes the basic thesis of the present text: our computational power is exercised by trying to adapt not just the world but also our representation of reality to how computationally based ICTs work. The impact of this technology is such that it does not leave things as they are: it changes the nature of agents, habits, objects and institutions and hence it subverts the existing order, without necessarily generating a new one. I argue that this power is often not distributed in an egalitarian manner but, on the contrary, is likely to result in concentrations of wealth, in dominant positions or in unjust competitive advantages. This opens up a struggle, with respect to which the task of reaffirming the fundamental values, the guiding principles, the priorities and the rules of the game, which can transform, or attempt to transform, a fierce confrontation between enemies in a fair competition between opponents rests on us.
Assistive technologies for the old and people with disabilities is now a very active field of research. It also constitutes a very profitable market (expected to reach US $60 billion p.a. by 2018). The book covers key aspects of this important field and provides guidelines for developing assistive technologies in smart environments. The book also presents the new paradigm of open innovation used by the most prolific research teams around the world. The latest developments in the field are given. Overall this book will be a reference for researchers, practitioners and engineers.
This book examines the contemporary era where parents complain that children today don't do their homework because they are distracted by the Internet, texting, and video games. Texting Toward Utopia presents the writings of todays children and develops the argument that this is actually a time of mass literary, in which young people write furiously, albeit often below the adult radar. Agger argues that where texting replaces textbooks, the writing may be emoticon-laden, slangy, or terse, but it is still profound, as children (and their parents) engage in resistance and write for a better world. This book is a guide to understanding the meeting point between a new generation of children and new communication technologies.
It is apparent that file sharing on the Internet has become an emerging norm of media consumption-especially among young people. This book provides a critical perspective on this phenomenon, exploring issues related to file sharing, downloading, peer-to-peer networks, "piracy," and (not least) policy issues regarding these practices. Andersson Schwartz critically engages with the justificatory discourses of the actual file-sharers, taking Sweden as a geographic focus. By focusing on the example of Sweden-home to both The Pirate Bay and Spotify-he provides a unique insight into a mentality that drives both innovation and deviance and accommodates sharing in both its unadulterated and its compliant, business-friendly forms.
Internet of Things (IoT) has become a valuable tool for connection and information exchange between devices. This book provides a brief introduction to this new field, focuses on wearable medical devices, and covers the basic concepts by providing the reader with enough information to solve various practical problems. This book provides the latest applications, experiments, fundamentals concepts, and cutting-edge topics for the ehealth and wearable devices field. The book also offers topics related to Security in IoT and Wearable Devices, Wearable Devices and Internet of Medical Devices (IoMT), IoT for Medical Applications, and Tools and study cases. The book brings new and valuable information to PhD researchers, students, professors, and professionals working in IoT and related fields.
A form of 'electronic opium' is how some people have characterised young people's internet use in China. The problem of 'internet addiction' (wangyin) is seen by some parents as so severe that they have sought psychiatric help for their children. This book, which is based on extensive original research, including discussions with psychiatrists, parents and 'internet-addicted' young people, explores the conflicting attitudes which this issue reveals. It contrasts the views of young people who see internet use, especially gaming, as a welcome escape from the dehumanising pressures of contemporary Chinese life, with the approach of those such as their parents, who medicalise internet overuse and insist that working hard for good school grades is the correct way to progress. The author shows that these contrasting attitudes lead to battles which are often fierce and violent, and argues that the greater problem may in fact lie with parents and other authority figures, who misguidedly apply high pressure to enforce young people to conform to the empty values of a modern, dehumanised consumer-oriented society.
Today, more mediated information is available to more people than at any other time in human history. New and revitalized sense-making strategies multiply in response to the challenges of "cutting through the clutter" of competing narratives and taming the avalanche of information. Data miners, "sentiment analysts," and decision markets offer to help bodies of data "speak for themselves"-making sense of their own patterns so we don't have to. Neuromarketers and body language experts promise to peer behind people's words to see what their brains are really thinking and feeling. New forms of information processing promise to displace the need for expertise and even comprehension-at least for those with access to the data. " Infoglut "explores the connections between these wide-ranging sense-making strategies for an era of information overload and "big data," and the new forms of control they enable. Andrejevic critiques the popular embrace of deconstructive debunkery, calling into question the post-truth, post-narrative, and post-comprehension politics it underwrites, and tracing a way beyond them.
Today, more mediated information is available to more people than at any other time in human history. New and revitalized sense-making strategies multiply in response to the challenges of "cutting through the clutter" of competing narratives and taming the avalanche of information. Data miners, "sentiment analysts," and decision markets offer to help bodies of data "speak for themselves"-making sense of their own patterns so we don't have to. Neuromarketers and body language experts promise to peer behind people's words to see what their brains are really thinking and feeling. New forms of information processing promise to displace the need for expertise and even comprehension-at least for those with access to the data. Infoglut explores the connections between these wide-ranging sense-making strategies for an era of information overload and "big data," and the new forms of control they enable. Andrejevic critiques the popular embrace of deconstructive debunkery, calling into question the post-truth, post-narrative, and post-comprehension politics it underwrites, and tracing a way beyond them.
Offering compelling practical and legal reasons why de-identification should be one of the main approaches to protecting patients' privacy, the Guide to the De-Identification of Personal Health Information outlines a proven, risk-based methodology for the de-identification of sensitive health information. It situates and contextualizes this risk-based methodology and provides a general overview of its steps. The book supplies a detailed case for why de-identification is important as well as best practices to help you pin point when it is necessary to apply de-identification in the disclosure of personal health information. It also: Outlines practical methods for de-identification Describes how to measure re-identification risk Explains how to reduce the risk of re-identification Includes proofs and supporting reference material Focuses only on transformations proven to work on health information-rather than covering all possible approaches, whether they work in practice or not Rated the top systems and software engineering scholar worldwide by The Journal of Systems and Software, Dr. El Emam is one of only a handful of individuals worldwide qualified to de-identify personal health information for secondary use under the HIPAA Privacy Rule Statistical Standard. In this book Dr. El Emam explains how we can make health data more accessible-while protecting patients' privacy and complying with current regulations.
We are often told that we are "living in an information society" or that we are "information workers." But what exactly do these claims mean, and how might they be verified? In this important methodological study, Alistair S. Duff cuts through the rhetoric to get to the bottom of the "information society thesis." Wide-ranging in coverage, this study will be of interest to scholars in information science, communication and media studies and social theory. It is a key text for the newly-unified specialism of information society studies, and an indispensable guide to the future of this discipline.
Provides advanced system implementation for Smart Cities using Artificial Intelligence Addresses the complete functional framework workflow in Artificial Intelligence Explores basic and high-level concepts, thus servicing as a manual for those in the industry while also helping beginners Based on the latest technologies, and covering the major challenges, issues, and advances in Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity Discusses intelligent data management and automated systems through Artificial Intelligence and Cyber Security
The world's most infamous hacker offers an insider's view of the
low-tech threats to high-tech security
accessible for readers unfamiliar with both SDGs and ESG concepts; it will enable leaders and businesses to assess deployment and development of AI more easily
Disability and New Media examines how digital design is triggering disability when it could be a solution. Video and animation now play a prominent role in the World Wide Web and new types of protocols have been developed to accommodate this increasing complexity. However, as this has happened, the potential for individual users to control how the content is displayed has been diminished. Accessibility choices are often portrayed as merely technical decisions but they are highly political and betray a disturbing trend of ableist assumption that serve to exclude people with disability. It has been argued that the Internet will not be fully accessible until disability is considered a cultural identity in the same way that class, gender and sexuality are. Kent and Ellis build on this notion using more recent Web 2.0 phenomena, social networking sites, virtual worlds and file sharing. Many of the studies on disability and the web have focused on the early web, prior to the development of social networking applications such as Facebook, YouTube and Second Life. This book discusses an array of such applications that have grown within and alongside Web 2.0, and analyzes how they both prevent and embrace the inclusion of people with disability.
Like it or not, your every move is being watched and analyzed. Consumer's identities are being stolen, and a person's every step is being tracked and stored. What once might have been dismissed as paranoia is now a hard truth, and privacy is a luxury few can afford or understand. In this explosive yet practical book, Kevin Mitnick illustrates what is happening without your knowledge--and he teaches you "the art of invisibility." Mitnick is the world's most famous--and formerly the Most Wanted--computer hacker. He has hacked into some of the country's most powerful and seemingly impenetrable agencies and companies, and at one point he was on a three-year run from the FBI. Now, though, Mitnick is reformed and is widely regarded as the expert on the subject of computer security. He knows exactly how vulnerabilities can be exploited and just what to do to prevent that from happening. In THE ART OF INVISIBILITY Mitnick provides both online and real life tactics and inexpensive methods to protect you and your family, in easy step-by-step instructions. He even talks about more advanced "elite" techniques, which, if used properly, can maximize your privacy. Invisibility isn't just for superheroes--privacy is a power you deserve and need in this modern age.
Despite increasing scholarly attention to artificial intelligence (AI), studies at the intersection of AI and communication remain ripe for exploration, including investigations of the social, political, cultural, and ethical aspects of machine intelligence, interactions among agents, and social artifacts. This book tackles these unexplored research areas with special emphasis on conditions, components, and consequences of cognitive, attitudinal, affective, and behavioural dimensions toward communication and AI. In doing so, this book epitomizes communication, journalism and media scholarship on AI and its social, political, cultural, and ethical perspectives. Topics vary widely from interactions between humans and robots through news representation of AI and AI-based news credibility to privacy and value toward AI in the public sphere. Contributors from such countries as Brazil, Netherland, South Korea, Spain, and United States discuss important issues and challenges in AI and communication studies. The collection of chapters in the book considers implications for not only theoretical and methodological approaches, but policymakers and practitioners alike. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Communication Studies.
Tackling the cybersecurity challenge is a matter of survival for society at large. Cyber attacks are rapidly increasing in sophistication and magnitude-and in their destructive potential. New threats emerge regularly, the last few years having seen a ransomware boom and distributed denial-of-service attacks leveraging the Internet of Things. For organisations, the use of cybersecurity risk management is essential in order to manage these threats. Yet current frameworks have drawbacks which can lead to the suboptimal allocation of cybersecurity resources. Cyber insurance has been touted as part of the solution - based on the idea that insurers can incentivize companies to improve their cybersecurity by offering premium discounts - but cyber insurance levels remain limited. This is because companies have difficulty determining which cyber insurance products to purchase, and insurance companies struggle to accurately assess cyber risk and thus develop cyber insurance products. To deal with these challenges, this volume presents new models for cybersecurity risk management, partly based on the use of cyber insurance. It contains: A set of mathematical models for cybersecurity risk management, including (i) a model to assist companies in determining their optimal budget allocation between security products and cyber insurance and (ii) a model to assist insurers in designing cyber insurance products. The models use adversarial risk analysis to account for the behavior of threat actors (as well as the behavior of companies and insurers). To inform these models, we draw on psychological and behavioural economics studies of decision-making by individuals regarding cybersecurity and cyber insurance. We also draw on organizational decision-making studies involving cybersecurity and cyber insurance. Its theoretical and methodological findings will appeal to researchers across a wide range of cybersecurity-related disciplines including risk and decision analysis, analytics, technology management, actuarial sciences, behavioural sciences, and economics. The practical findings will help cybersecurity professionals and insurers enhance cybersecurity and cyber insurance, thus benefiting society as a whole. This book grew out of a two-year European Union-funded project under Horizons 2020, called CYBECO (Supporting Cyber Insurance from a Behavioral Choice Perspective).
How cats became the undisputed mascot of the internet. The advertising slogan of the social news site Reddit is "Come for the cats. Stay for the empathy." Journalists and their readers seem to need no explanation for the line, "The internet is made of cats." Everyone understands the joke, but few know how it started. A Unified Theory of Cats on the Internet is the first book to explore the history of how the cat became the internet's best friend. Internet cats can differ in dramatic ways, from the goth cats of Twitter to the glamourpusses of Instagram to the giddy, nonsensical silliness of Nyan Cat. But they all share common traits and values. Bringing together fun anecdotes, thoughtful analyses, and hidden histories of the communities that built the internet, Elyse White shows how japonisme, punk culture, cute culture, and the battle among different communities for the soul of the internet informed the sensibility of online felines. Internet cats offer a playful-and useful-way to understand how culture shapes and is shaped by technology. Western culture has used cats for centuries as symbols of darkness, pathos, and alienation, and the communities that helped build the internet explicitly constructed themselves as outsiders, with snark and alienation at the core of their identity. Thus cats became the sine qua non of cultural literacy for the Extremely Online, not to mention an everyday medium of expression for the rest of us. Whatever direction the internet takes next, the "series of tubes" is likely to remain cat-shaped.
Human-Robot Interaction in Social Robotics explores important issues in designing a robot system that works with people in everyday environments. Edited by leading figures in the field of social robotics, it draws on contributions by researchers working on the Robovie project at the ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, a world leader in humanoid interactive robotics. The book brings together, in one volume, technical and empirical research that was previously scattered throughout the literature. Taking a networked robot approach, the book examines how robots work in cooperation with ubiquitous sensors and people over telecommunication networks. It considers the use of social robots in daily life, grounding the work in field studies conducted at a school, train station, shopping mall, and science museum. Critical in the development of network robots, these usability studies allow researchers to discover real issues that need to be solved and to understand what kinds of services are possible. The book tackles key areas where development is needed, namely, in sensor networks for tracking humans and robots, humanoids that can work in everyday environments, and functions for interacting with people. It introduces a sensor network developed by the authors and discusses innovations in the Robovie humanoid, including several interactive behaviors and design policies. Exploring how humans interact with robots in daily life settings, this book offers valuable insight into how robots may be used in the future. The combination of engineering, empirical, and field studies provides readers with rich information to guide in developing practical interactive robots.
It explore issues of diversity and inclusion in relation to artificial intelligence (AI). The author leads a research group on Digitalization and Robotization of Society at NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Nationwide, and indeed worldwide, there has been a growing awareness of the importance of access to information. Accordingly, information technology (IT), broadly defined and its role beyond the internal workings of businesses has leapt into the social consciousness. Diving into the Bitstream distinguishes itself by weaving together the concepts and conditions of IT. What distinguishes these trends is their focus on the impacts of IT on societies, and the responsibilities of IT s creators and users. The author pulls together important, often complex issues in the relationships among information, information technologies, and societal constructs. The text explores a synopsis of these issues that are foundations for further consideration.
What did you do before Google? The rise of Google as the dominant Internet search provider reflects a generationally-inflected notion that "everything" that matters is now on the Web, and "should," in the moral sense of the verb, be accessible through search. In this theoretically nuanced study of search technology s broader implications for knowledge production and social relations, the authors shed light on a culture of search in which our increasing reliance on search engines influences not only the way we navigate, classify, and evaluate Web content, but also how we think about ourselves and the world around us, online and off. Ken Hillis, Michael Petit, and Kylie Jarrett seek to understand the ascendancy of search and its naturalization by historicizing and contextualizing Google s dominance of the search industry, and suggest that the contemporary culture of search is inextricably bound up with a metaphysical longing to manage, order, and categorize all knowledge. Calling upon this nexus between political economy and metaphysics, "Google and the Culture of Search "explores what is at stake for an increasingly networked culture in which search technology is a site of knowledge and power.
The book gathers the chapters of Cognitive InfoCommunication research relevant to a variety of application areas, including data visualization, emotion expression, brain-computer interfaces or speech technologies. It provides an overview of the kind of cognitive capabilities that are being analyzed and developed. Based on this common ground, it may become possible to see new opportunities for synergy among disciplines that were heretofore viewed as being separate. Cognitive InfoCommunication begins by modeling human cognitive states and aptitudes in order to better understand what the user of a system is capable of comprehending and doing. The patterns of exploration and the specific tools that are described can certainly be of interest and of great relevance for all researchers who focus on modeling human states and aptitudes. This innovative research area provides answers to the latest challenges in influence of cognitive states and aptitudes in order to facilitate learning or generally improve performance in certain cognitive tasks such as decision making. Some capabilities are purely human, while others are purely artificial, but in general this distinction is rarely clear-cut. Therefore, when discussing new human cognitive capabilities, the technological background which makes them possible cannot be neglected, and indeed often plays a central role. This book highlights the synergy between various fields that are perfectly fit under the umbrella of CogInfoCom and contribute to understanding and developing new, human-artificial intelligence hybrid capabilities. These, merged capabilities are currently appearing, and the importance of the role they play in everyday life are unique to the cognitive entity generation that is currently growing up.
The growth of technology allows us to imagine entirely new ways of committing, combating and thinking about criminality, criminals, police, courts, victims and citizens. Technology offers not only new tools for committing and fighting crime, but new ways to look for, unveil, label crimes and new ways to know, watch, prosecute and punish criminals. This book attempts to disentangle the realities, the myths, the politics, the theories and the practices of our new, technology-assisted, era of crime and policing. Technocrime, policing and surveillance explores new areas of technocrime and technopolicing, such as credit card fraud, the use of DNA and fingerprint databases, the work of media in creating new crimes and new criminals, as well as the "proper" way of doing policing, and the everyday work of police investigators and intelligence officers, as seen through their own eyes. These chapters offer new avenues for studying technology, crime and control, through innovative social science methodologies. This book builds on the work of Leman-Langlois' last book Technocrime, and brings together fresh perspectives from eminent scholars to consider how our relationship with technology and institutions of social control are being reframed, with particular emphasis on policing and surveillance. Technocrime, policing and surveillance will be of interest to those studying criminal justice, policing and the sociology of surveillance as well as practitioners involved with the legal aspects of law enforcement technologies, , domestic security government departments and consumer advocacy groups.
What did you do before Google? The rise of Google as the dominant Internet search provider reflects a generationally-inflected notion that "everything" that matters is now on the Web, and "should," in the moral sense of the verb, be accessible through search. In this theoretically nuanced study of search technology s broader implications for knowledge production and social relations, the authors shed light on a culture of search in which our increasing reliance on search engines influences not only the way we navigate, classify, and evaluate Web content, but also how we think about ourselves and the world around us, online and off. Ken Hillis, Michael Petit, and Kylie Jarrett seek to understand the ascendancy of search and its naturalization by historicizing and contextualizing Google s dominance of the search industry, and suggest that the contemporary culture of search is inextricably bound up with a metaphysical longing to manage, order, and categorize all knowledge. Calling upon this nexus between political economy and metaphysics, "Google and the Culture of Search "explores what is at stake for an increasingly networked culture in which search technology is a site of knowledge and power. |
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