Information Communication Technologies (ICT) have become an increasingly prevalent part of everyday life. Today, there are many cases in which ICT assist the elderly and people with disabilities to complete tasks once thought impossible. Enhancing the Human Experience through Assistive Technologies and E-Accessibility discusses trends in ICT in relation to assistive technologies and their impact on everyday tasks for those with disabilities. This reference work provides different perspectives on upcoming technologies and their impact on e-accessibility and e-inclusion, essential topics for researchers, businesses, and ICT product developers in the field of assistive technologies.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post conference proceedings of the 6th IFIP WG 9.2, 9.6/11.7, 11.4, 11.6/PrimeLife International Summer School, held in Helsingborg, Sweden, in August 2010. The 27 revised papers were carefully selected from numerous submissions during two rounds of reviewing. They are organized in topical sections on terminology, privacy metrics, ethical, social, and legal aspects, data protection and identity management, eID cards and eID interoperability, emerging technologies, privacy for eGovernment and AAL applications, social networks and privacy, privacy policies, and usable privacy.

This book presents a new approach to examining the perceived quality of audiovisual sequences. It uses electroencephalography (EEG) to explain in detail how user quality judgments are formed within a test participant, and what the physiological implications might be when subjects are exposed to lower quality media. The book redefines the experimental paradigms of using EEG in the area of quality assessment so that they better suit the requirements of standard subjective quality testing, and presents experimental protocols and stimuli that have been adjusted accordingly.

Motivation for the Book This book aims to describe a comprehensive methodology for service-oriented inf- mation systems planning, considered in particular, in eGovernment initiatives. The methodology is based on the research results produced by the Italian project "eG- ernment for Mediterranean Countries (eG4M)," granted by the Italian Ministry of University and Research from 2005 to 2008. The concept of service is at the center of the book. The methodology is focused on quality of services as a key factor for eGovernment initiatives. Since its grou- ing is in a project whose goal has been to develop a methodology for eGove- ment in Mediterranean countries it is called eG4M. Furthermore, eG4M aims at encompassing the relationships existing between ICT technologies and social c- texts of service provision, organizational issues, and juridical framework, looking at ICT technologies more as a means than an end. eG4M satis es a real need of constituencies and stakeholders involved in eGovernment projects, con rmed in the eG4M experimentations and in previous preliminary experiences in the Italian P- lic Administrations. A structured process is needed that provides a clear perspective on the different facets that eGovernment initiatives usually have to challenge and disciplines the complex set of decisions to be taken. The available approaches to eGovernment usually provide only one perspective to public managers and local authorities on the domain of intervention, either te- nological, organizational, legal, economic, or social.

For generations, humans have fantasized about the ability to create devices that can see into a person's mind and thoughts, or to communicate and interact with machines through thought alone. Such ideas have long captured the imagination of humankind in the form of ancient myths and modern science fiction stories. Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging technologies have started to turn these myths into a reality, and are providing us with the ability to interface directly with the human brain. This ability is made possible through the use of sensors that monitor physical processes within the brain which correspond with certain forms of thought. Brain-Computer Interfaces: Applying our Minds to Human-Computer Interaction broadly surveys research in the Brain-Computer Interface domain. More specifically, each chapter articulates some of the challenges and opportunities for using brain sensing in Human-Computer Interaction work, as well as applying Human-Computer Interaction solutions to brain sensing work. For researchers with little or no expertise in neuroscience or brain sensing, the book provides background information to equip them to not only appreciate the state-of-the-art, but also ideally to engage in novel research. For expert Brain-Computer Interface researchers, the book introduces ideas that can help in the quest to interpret intentional brain control and develop the ultimate input device. It challenges researchers to further explore passive brain sensing to evaluate interfaces and feed into adaptive computing systems. Most importantly, the book will connect multiple communities allowing research to leverage their work and expertise and blaze into the future.

This book explains aspects of social networks, varying from development and application of new artificial intelligence and computational intelligence techniques for social networks to understanding the impact of social networks. Chapters 1 and 2 deal with the basic strategies towards social networks such as mining text from such networks and applying social network metrics using a hybrid approach; Chaps. 3 to 8 focus on the prime research areas in social networks: community detection, influence maximization and opinion mining. Chapter 9 to 13 concentrate on studying the impact and use of social networks in society, primarily in education, commerce, and crowd sourcing. The contributions provide a multidimensional approach, and the book will serve graduate students and researchers as a reference in computer science, electronics engineering, communications, and information technology.

This book will help researchers and engineers in the design of ethical systems for robots, addressing the philosophical questions that arise and exploring modern applications such as assistive robots and self-driving cars. The contributing authors are among the leading academic and industrial researchers on this topic and the book will be of value to researchers, graduate students and practitioners engaged with robot design, artificial intelligence and ethics.

In 1969 Herbert Simon wrote a book, The Science of the Artificial, in which he argued that cognitive science should have its area of application in the design of devices. He proposed the foundation of a science of the artificial related with cognitive science in the sense in which we have traditionally understood the relationship between the engineering disciplines and the basic sciences. Such a science has been called cognitive ergonomics or cognitive engineering (Norman 1986). Simon's cognitive ergonomics (1969), would be independent of cognitive science, its basic science, although both would be closely related. Cognitive science would contribute knowledge on human cognitive processes, and cognitive ergonomics would contribute concrete problems of design that should be solved in the context of the creation of devices. Norman (1986), the author that coined the term cognitive engineering, conceived it as an applied cognitive science where the knowledge of cognitive science is combined with that of engineering to solve design problems. According to Norman, its objectives would be: (1) to understand the fundamental principles of human actions important for the development of the engineering of design principles, and (2) to build systems that are pleasant in their use.

Confronting the digital revolution in academia, this book examines the application of new computational techniques and visualisation technologies in the Arts & Humanities. Uniting differing perspectives, leading and emerging scholars discuss the theoretical and practical challenges that computation raises for these disciplines.

User Engagement (UE) is a complex concept to investigate. The purpose of this book is not to constrain UE to one perspective, but to offer a well-rounded appreciation for UE across various domains and disciplines. The text begins with two foundational chapters that describe theoretical and methodological approaches to user engagement; the remaining contributions examine UE from different disciplinary perspectives and across a range of computer-mediated environments, including social and communications media, online search, eLearning, games, and eHealth. The book concludes by bringing together the cross-disciplinary perspectives presented in each chapter and proposing an agenda for future research in this area. The book will appeal to established and emerging academic and industry researchers looking to pursue research and its challenges. This includes scholars at all levels with an interest in user engagement with digital media, from students to experienced researchers, and professionals in the fields of computer science, web technology, information science, museum studies, learning and health sciences, human-computer interaction, information architecture and design, and creative arts.

A software architecture manifests the major early design decisions, which determine the system's development, deployment and evolution. Thus, making better architectural decisions is one of the large challenges in software engineering. Software architecture knowledge management is about capturing practical experience and translating it into generalized architectural knowledge, and using this knowledge in the communication with stakeholders during all phases of the software lifecycle.

This book presents a concise description of knowledge management in the software architecture discipline. It explains the importance of sound knowledge management practices for improving software architecture processes and products, and makes clear the role of knowledge management in software architecture and software development processes. It presents many approaches that are in use in software companies today, approaches that have been used in other domains, and approaches under development in academia. After an initial introduction by the editors, the contributions are grouped in three parts on "Architecture Knowledge Management," "Strategies and Approaches for Managing Architectural Knowledge," and "Tools and Techniques for Managing Architectural Knowledge."

The presentation aims at information technology and software engineering professionals, in particular software architects and software architecture researchers. For the industrial audience, the book gives a broad and concise understanding of the importance of knowledge management for improving software architecture process and building capabilities in designing and evaluating better architectures for their mission- and business-critical systems. For researchers, the book will help to understand the applications of various knowledge management approaches in an industrial setting and to identify research challenges and opportunities.

The IFIP World Computer Congress (WCC) is one of the most important conferences in the area of computer science and a number of related Human and Social Science disciplines at the worldwide level and it has a federated structure, which takes into account the rapidly growing and expanding interests in this area. Human-Computer Interaction is now a mature and still dynamically evolving part of this area, which is represented in IFIP by the Technical Committee 13 on HCI. We are convinced that in this edition of WCC, which takes place for the first time in Italy, it will be interesting and useful to have a Symposium on Human- Computer Interaction in order to present and discuss a number of contributions in this field. There has been increasing awareness among designers of interactive systems of the importance of designing for usability, but we are still far from having products that are really usable, and usability can mean different things depending on the application domain. We are all aware that too many users of current technology feel often frustrated because computer systems are not compatible with their abilities and needs with existing work practices. As designers of tomorrow technology, we have the responsibility of creating computer artefacts that would permit better user experience with the various computing devices, so that users may enjoy more satisfying experiences with information and communications technologies.

This edited book adopts a cognitive perspective to provide breadth and depth to state-of-the-art research related to understanding, analyzing, predicting and improving one of the most prominent and important classes of behavior of modern humans, information search. It is timely as the broader research area of cognitive computing and cognitive technology have recently attracted much attention, and there has been a surge in interest to develop systems and technology that are more compatible with human cognitive abilities. Divided into three interlocking sections, the first introduces the foundational concepts of information search from a cognitive computing perspective to highlight the research questions and approaches that are shared among the contributing authors. Relevant concepts from psychology, information and computing sciences are addressed. The second section discusses methods and tools that are used to understand and predict information search behavior and how the cognitive perspective can provide unique insights into the complexities of the behavior in various contexts. The final part highlights a number of areas of applications of which education and training, collaboration and conversational search interfaces are important ones. Understanding and Improving Information Search - A Cognitive Approach includes contributions from cognitive psychologists, information and computing scientists around the globe, including researchers from Europe (France, Netherlands, Germany), the US, and Asia (India, Japan), providing their unique but coherent perspectives to the core issues and questions most relevant to our current understanding of information search behavior and improving information search.

As science advances, more and more emphasis is being placed on the human user of the computer-based system. Instead of humans learning how to interact with these systems, the systems must learn how to interact with humans. ""Cognitively Informed Systems: Utilizing Practical Approaches to Enrich Information Presentation and Transfer"" covers all the main areas of focus of cognitive science research that may influence the design of computer-based systems. It offers a number of practically-implemented designs to support the claim that it is possible to directly benefit from that field of study. It presents several projects from different parts of the world, which offer a variety of applications as examples to show the scope of the benefit is not at all limited to a particular target, like learning. This book is a guide for researchers who wish to know which areas to focus on depending on their application's goals.

This book is about enforcing privacy and data protection. It demonstrates different approaches - regulatory, legal and technological - to enforcing privacy. If regulators do not enforce laws or regulations or codes or do not have the resources, political support or wherewithal to enforce them, they effectively eviscerate and make meaningless such laws or regulations or codes, no matter how laudable or well-intentioned. In some cases, however, the mere existence of such laws or regulations, combined with a credible threat to invoke them, is sufficient for regulatory purposes. But the threat has to be credible. As some of the authors in this book make clear - it is a theme that runs throughout this book - "carrots" and "soft law" need to be backed up by "sticks" and "hard law". The authors of this book view privacy enforcement as an activity that goes beyond regulatory enforcement, however. In some sense, enforcing privacy is a task that befalls to all of us. Privacy advocates and members of the public can play an important role in combatting the continuing intrusions upon privacy by governments, intelligence agencies and big companies. Contributors to this book - including regulators, privacy advocates, academics, SMEs, a Member of the European Parliament, lawyers and a technology researcher - share their views in the one and only book on Enforcing Privacy.

This book offers a novel approach to data privacy by unifying side-channel attacks within a general conceptual framework. This book then applies the framework in three concrete domains. First, the book examines privacy-preserving data publishing with publicly-known algorithms, studying a generic strategy independent of data utility measures and syntactic privacy properties before discussing an extended approach to improve the efficiency. Next, the book explores privacy-preserving traffic padding in Web applications, first via a model to quantify privacy and cost and then by introducing randomness to provide background knowledge-resistant privacy guarantee. Finally, the book considers privacy-preserving smart metering by proposing a light-weight approach to simultaneously preserving users' privacy and ensuring billing accuracy. Designed for researchers and professionals, this book is also suitable for advanced-level students interested in privacy, algorithms, or web applications.

This book applies a new analytical framework to the study of the evolution of large Internet companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Samsung. It sheds light on the dynamics of business groups, which are approached as 'business ecosystems,' and introduces the concept of Epigenetic Economic Dynamics (EED), which is defined as the study of the epigenetic dynamics generated as a result of the adaptation of organizations to major changes in their respective environments. The book augments the existing literature on evolutionary economic thinking with findings from epigenetics, which are proving increasingly useful in analyzing the workings of large organizations. It also details the theoretical and conceptual nature of recent work based on evolutionary economics, mainly from the perspective of generalized Darwinism, resilience and related variety, and complements the work conducted on evolutionary economics by applying the analytical framework of EED. It makes it easier to forecast future dynamics on the Internet by proving that a sizable number of big business groups are veering from their initial paths to take unprecedented new directions as a result of competition pressure, and as such is a valuable resource for postgraduates and researchers as well as those involved in economics and innovation studies.

This edited book presents point of view and the work being undertaken by active researchers in the domain of IOT and its applications with societal impact. The book is useful to other researchers for the understanding of the research domain and different points of views expressed by the experts in their contributed chapters. The contributions are from both industry and academia; hence, it provides a rich source of both theoretical and practical work going on in the research domain of IOT.

What exactly do policymakers and journalists mean when they refer to the "information age"? What bearing do the "problems" they describe and the "solutions" they offer have on current global realities? Specifically, what does the Euro-American concept of intellectual property mean in a global context? Why is the idea of electronic commerce so difficult to "export"? These questions which clearly identify issues of crucial importance for the coming decades of human history are given full weight, stripped of ideology, in this book, based on the papers presented at a seminar sponsored by the Macau Institute of European Studies (IEEM) in June 2000. Although there are no clear answers, the accounts and analyses presented here provide a wealth of detail that comes as close as we can expect at this date to the facts of the case. The focus is on East Asia, Greater China in particular, an area which (most social theorists agree) offers the most revealing social context for the examination of emerging global trends in this field.

This volume honors the professional life of Jacques Berleur known for his extensive work within the IFIP community to expose the nature of the ethical dilemmas of a society increasingly reliant on complex ICT infrastructures, to raise awareness of the social challenges this poses, and to influence action compatible with the ethical values of western democracy.

This volume is composed of five sections, and covers the following topics in detail:

• Technology and Democracy: Views on the IS
• Ethics and Democracy into the ICT
• Governance of IS: From Economic Regulation to a New Social Contract
• Applied Issues: Health, Profession and Education
• For an Ethical and Democratic Governance of the IS: Lessons from WSIS

The Social Web (including services such as MySpace, Flickr, last.fm, and WordPress) has captured the attention of millions of users as well as billions of dollars in investment and acquisition. Social websites, evolving around the connections between people and their objects of interest, are encountering boundaries in the areas of information integration, dissemination, reuse, portability, searchability, automation and demanding tasks like querying. The Semantic Web is an ideal platform for interlinking and performing operations on diverse person- and object-related data available from the Social Web, and has produced a variety of approaches to overcome the boundaries being experienced in Social Web application areas.

After a short overview of both the Social Web and the Semantic Web, Breslin et al. describe some popular social media and social networking applications, list their strengths and limitations, and describe some applications of Semantic Web technology to address their current shortcomings by enhancing them with semantics. Across these social websites, they demonstrate a twofold approach for interconnecting the islands that are social websites with semantic technologies, and for powering semantic applications with rich community-created content. They conclude with observations on how the application of Semantic Web technologies to the Social Web is leading towards the "Social Semantic Web" (sometimes also called "Web 3.0"), forming a network of interlinked and semantically-rich content and knowledge.

The book is intended for computer science professionals, researchers, and graduates interested in understanding the technologies and research issues involved in applying Semantic Web technologies to social software. Practitioners and developers interested in applications such as blogs, social networks or wikis will also learn about methods for increasing the levels of automation in these forms of Web communication.

Information visualization is not only about creating graphical displays of complex and latent information structures; it contributes to a broader range of cognitive, social, and collaborative activities. This is the first book to examine information visualization from this perspective.

This 2nd edition continues the unique and ambitious quest for setting information visualization and virtual environments in a unifying framework. Information Visualization: Beyond the Horizon pays special attention to the advances made over the last 5 years and potentially fruitful directions to pursue. It is particularly updated to meet the need for practitioners. The book is a valuable source for researchers and graduate students. This new edition is forwarded by Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland.

Key features:

• Latest advances in information visualization.
• Applications of information visualization, including knowledge domain visualization, knowledge diffusion, and social networks.
• Detecting topics, emergent trends, and abrupt changes.
• Empirical findings concerning information visualization.
• Virtual environments and collaborative virtual environments.

Chaomei Chen is an Associate Professor in the College of Information Science and Technology at Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA. He is the author of Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization (Springer, 2003).

Most contemporary accounts of the role of technology in world culture are alarmist and, at times, condemn many uses of technology without much effort to get beyond the surface of this worldwide phenomenon. Technological innovations that might rightly be critiqued are taken as representative of the entire field of technology. On the other hand, there are those, including some scientists, for whom technology and its uses pose no questions at all and who seem to delight in predictions of a future totally dominated by technology. They prey on the human delight in newness and innovation and on our readiness to be surprised by what may someday come to be. Gotz takes the position that so-called technology problems are really "our" problems, not the fault of technology.

Technology is an integral part of what we are as human beings, a significant aspect of our evolution. Gotz also advances the thesis that technology may be viewed from the perspective of the human capacity to grow, and that when we do so, we are, in effect, spiritualizing technology and rendering it more meaningful to ourselves. Gotz suggests several models that may be employed to achieve this spiritualization. This provocative analysis will be of interest to general readers as well as scholars, students, and researchers concerned with contemporary social and religious issues.