Social Computing

Broadly speaking, social computing encapsulates the idea of making technologies more aware of, and more in alignment with, the social needs of their users. This allows for the introduction of new modes of communication and collaboration among users, the ability to establish and grow communities of various constitutions, as well as for more dynamic and large-scale content creation, dissemination, and evaluation. This chapter serves the ternary purpose of establishing a broad definition of social computing as it stands today and as it is expected to evolve in the near future, providing an overview of the practical applications of social computing, and examining the present and historic research themes that have made an impression on social computing as an area of academic intrigue. The chapter is intended to be accessible to casual readers, practitioners, and academicians alike, with little technical depth and broad focus throughout, for the purpose of establishing an initial acquaintance with the field.

From General Services to Pervasive and Sensitive Services

Ubiquitous computing and pervasive technology represent enabling technologies which have conditioned the evolution of the current information society. These ICT are transforming society and particularly changing the interfacing methods between services and user as well as their expectations from services. Such changes are related to arising of new kind of pervasive and sensitive service such as new healthcare and wellbeing personalized services. In this chapter, these services are defined in a comprehensive manner. This sense, sensitive services refers to new IS services that manage data that is not only based on the physical disposition of the user in regards to the environment but also related to more personal aspects. On its part, pervasive services are those developed by using pervasive technology and therefore can be defined as a delocalized and persistent ICT service. These definitions will be supported by an analysis of the evolution of services of the information society both from a socio-economic and industrial focus.

Energy Conservation in the Era of Ubiquitous Computing

Widespread availability and affordability of devices and easy accessibility of internet has accelerated the pace of ubiquitous computing. Connectivity to the internet has resulted in an exponential growth in terms of content and traffic available on the internet. When the barriers such as type of devices, location, time, and format have become meaningless in the era of ubiquitous computing; the issue of energy consumption and resultant carbon emission is a matter of concern. Energy consumption is an issue in ubiquitous computing, as the majority of the devices involved will be mobile devices that depend on the limited power offered by the battery inside the device. Carbon emission is a concern due to the combined impact made by the devices hooked over to the internet. This chapter discusses the issues related to energy consumption for various activities when the services offered by the internet are availed. The chapter also discusses the challenges to be overcome to achieve conservation of energy consumed by the internet and devices.

State of the Art and Key Design Challenges of Telesurgical Robotics

Telesurgical robotic systems allow surgeons to perform surgical operations from remote locations with enhanced comfort and dexterity. Introduction of robotic technology has revolutionized operation theaters but its multidisciplinary nature and high associated costs pose significant challenges. This chapter provides a comprehensive survey of the current progress in the field of surgical robotics with a detailed discussion on various state-of-the-art telesurgical robotic systems. The key design approaches and challenges are identified, and their solutions are recommended. A set of parameters that can be used to assess usefulness of a telesurgical robot are discussed. Finally, guidelines for selection of a suitable surgical system and the future research directions are described.

Improving Dependability of Robotics Systems

The use of robotics systems is increasingly widespread and spans a variety of application areas. From healthcare to manufacturing to space missions, these systems are typically conceived to perform dangerous or critical tasks. The nature of such tasks (e.g., surgery operations or radioactive waste clean-up) places high demands on the dependability of robotics systems. Fault tree analysis is among the most often used dependability assessment techniques in various domains of robotics. However, fault tree analysis of cost-effective fault tolerant robotics systems requires compositional synthesis of fault trees extended with the expressive power to allow analyzing the sequential dependencies among the components. Thereafter, a relevant experience from the automotive domain is presented. This consists mainly of a suitable synthesis approach that computes expressions of global failure conditions from the dysfunctional behavior local to the components. The benefits of the approach to dependability analysis of robotics architectures are highlighted by using a fault-tolerant example system.

Artificial Neural Networks and Their Applications in Business

Despite the natural advantage humans have for recognizing and interpreting patterns, large and complex datasets, as in big data, preclude efficient human analysis. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) provide a family of pattern recognition approaches for prediction, clustering, and classification applicable to KDD with ANN model complexity ranging from simple (for small problems) to highly complex (for large issues). To provide a starting point for readers, this chapter first describes foundational concepts that relate to ANNs. A listing of commonly used ANN methods, heuristics, and criteria for initializing ANNs are then discussed. Common pre- and post-data processing methods for dimensionality reduction and data quality issues are then described. The authors then provide a tutorial example of ANN analysis. Finally, the authors list and describe applications of ANNs to specific business-related endeavors for further reading.

Understanding and Assessing Quality of Models and Modeling Languages

An important challenge for organizational activity is to effectively represent and transfer knowledge. One reason why humans have excelled as a species is our ability to create common stories and represent, reuse, and transfer this as knowledge across time and space. Whereas in most areas of human conduct one-dimensional natural language texts are the main way of expressing and sharing knowledge, the authors see the need for and use of two and many-dimensional forms of knowledge representational to be on the rise. This will also enable users to capture contextual dependencies between roles, tasks, information elements, and the views required for performing work without having to go through traditional systems developers to have enhanced support for their work. The importance on supporting judgment on the quality of these models will thus increase along with the usefulness of frameworks for quality of models and modeling languages such as SEQUAL.

Methods for Improving Alias Rejections in Comb Filters

Downsampling is the process of decreasing the sampling rate of signal by an integer. This process may introduce the unwanted spectrum replica called aliasing. To avoid aliasing, the signal must be filtered by decimation filter prior to downsampling. Decimation consists of filtering and downsampling. The simplest decimation filter is comb filter usually used in the first stage of decimation. However, comb filter does not provide a good aliasing rejection. This chapter presents methods for improving alias rejection of comb filters. The methods are based on comb zero rotation, cosine filters, Chebyshev polynomials, and cascade of combs with different parameters.

Digital Divide

Since 1991, when the world wide web (WWW) was first made available to the public, it has revolutionized the way the global community engages each other economically, politically, and socially. Its impact has been historically unprecedented. While the availability of and access to the WWW appears to be ubiquitous, it is not. The expansion of this marvelous information communication technology (ICT) has not penetrated certain areas of the world resulting in a “digital divide.” This chapter discusses this digital divide. It first defines the term and then it moves to discuss the origins of the term. From there, the chapter moves to present concrete evidence of how the digital divide has negatively impacted the global community. Finally, it names and evaluates the efforts of different organizations and agencies to resolve the digital divide. It concludes with a prospectus on the future challenges of information communication technology vis-à-vis the digital divide.

Decimal Hardware Multiplier

IEEE-754 2008 has extended the standard with decimal floating-point arithmetic. Human-centric applications, like financial and commercial, depend on decimal arithmetic since the results must match exactly those obtained by human calculations without being subject to errors caused by decimal to binary conversions. Decimal multiplication is a fundamental operation utilized in many algorithms, and it is referred in the standard IEEE-754 2008. Decimal multiplication has an inherent difficulty associated with the representation of decimal numbers using a binary number system. Both bit and digit carries, as well as invalid results, must be considered in decimal multiplication in order to produce the correct result. This chapter focuses on algorithms for hardware implementation of decimal multiplication. Both decimal fixed-point and floating-point multiplication are described, including iterative and parallel solutions.