Mining Sport Activities

For many people, sport is one of the stress-relieving activities. People being involved with sport wish to achieve attractive shape, healthy lifestyle, lose weight, and so on. However, there are also people who deal with sport because of competition goals. In order to fulfill their competition goals, they need to train properly. Even for professionals, it is very hard to perform a serious training. On the other hand, recent expansion of smart sport watches and even smart phones allow athletes to train smarter. During the months and years, they produce dozens of activity files. These files offer thousands of opportunities for data mining approaches, where athletes gained a deep insight into their training data. Data mining approaches are able to extract habits of athletes, help to prevent over-training syndrome and injuries, clustering similar activities together, and much more. In this chapter, the authors show opportunities for data mining, enumerate recent applications, and outline future potential for research and applications in the real world.

Social Networking and Knowledge Sharing in Organizations

Knowledge sharing in organizational context is facilitated by communicative process affected by varied social dynamics. It can be a difficult process in case of distributed organizations as employees may not be aware of the right source of getting advice and expertise. In such a scenario, social networking tools provide the required functionality for such sharing and lead to better social ties among knowledge providers and seekers across the organization. The chapter brings out some factors that affect knowledge-sharing behavior in the context of organizations using social networking tools as a communicative media.

The NetLab Network

The authors discuss the NetLab Network – an interdisciplinary network studying the intersection of social networks, communication networks, and computer networks. It has developed since 2000 from an informal network of collaborators into a far flung virtual laboratory with members from across Canada and the United States as well as from Chile, Hungary, Israel, Japan, Norway, Portugal, and the United Kingdom. Connecting them is a shared sensibility of interpreting behavior from a social network perspective rather than seeing the world as composed of bounded groups, tree-like hierarchies, or aggregates of disconnected individuals. NetLab's researchers focus on the interplay between social and technological links, social capital in job searches and business settings, new media and community, internet and personal relations, social media, households, networked organizations, and knowledge transfer. NetLab has had two main achievements: first, its researchers make substantive contributions to the issues they study, and second, they demonstrate that this model of scholarly collaboration works.

Issues and Challenges in Enterprise Social Media

Contemporary organizations face the challenge of collaboration among the widely dispersed workforce. Information technology is an enabler and a facilitator of organizational processes. One such application of information technology is enterprise social media (ESM) platform which serves as an effective medium for organizational communication and exchange of ideas among peers in a workplace. The chapter describes the structural and functional aspects of ESM with a focus on knowledge sharing activities supported by its usage. Issues and challenges in respect of its design and adoption have been discussed.

Aspects of Various Community Detection Algorithms in Social Network Analysis

One of the most important aspects of social network analysis is community detection, which is used to categorize related individuals in a social network into groups or communities. The approach is quite similar to graph partitioning, and in fact, most detection algorithms rely on concepts from graph theory and sociology. The aim of this chapter is to aid a novice in the field of community detection by providing a wider perspective on some of the different detection algorithms available, including the more recent developments in this field. Five popular algorithms have been studied and explained, and a recent novel approach that was proposed by the authors has also been included. The chapter concludes by highlighting areas suitable for further research, specifically targeting overlapping community detection algorithms.

Group Synchronization for Multimedia Systems

Group or inter-destination media synchronization (IDMS) addresses the presentation of a stream at all the receivers of a group, simultaneously. To ensure synchronized delivery of multimedia information, intelligent synchronization protocols/techniques are required. This chapter illustrates various issues on intra- and inter-media synchronization and presents the basic schemes for inter-destination media synchronization (IDMS). It presents in short IDMS standardization efforts and novel solutions for new multimedia applications. Finally, it outlines future research directions for multimedia group synchronization.

Adaptive Hypermedia Systems

Adaptive hypermedia systems are systems that modify the different visible aspects based on the user profile. To provide this adaptation, the system is modeled according to a user model, which stores the information about each user. This information can include knowledge, interests, goals and tasks, background and skills, behavior, interaction preferences, individual traits, and context of the user. This chapter's goal is to introduce adaptive hypermedia systems fundamentals and trends. In this context, this chapter identifies some methods and techniques used to adapt the content, the presentation, and the navigation of the system. In the end, some applications (ELM-ART, Interbook, AHA!, AdaptWeb®) and trends (standardization, data mining, social web, device adaptation, and gamification) are exposed. As a result, this chapter highlights the importance of the improvement and the use of adaptive systems.

Towards Modelling Effective Educational Games Using Multi-Domain Framework

Game-based learning (GBL) has dominantly become an emerging teaching industry in 21st century. To provide an effective development of educational games (EG) with assurance of effectiveness, modelling and design methods are highlighted. To model EG, game developers must understand existing elements' interaction and relationships. The elements of EG have been documented in literature; however, the relationships are not well documented. Hence, this research has established these relationships by conducting a literature survey and identifying the relationships between different elements. Consequently, they are validated by eight game-based learning experts via qualitative methods and the validation results are interpreted using the hermeneutics method of the interpretivism paradigm. In this chapter, the authors present the relationships that they found most crucial to validate since they have the least literature evidence. With the relationships identified and documented, game developers will have better understanding of the interaction between each element and can produce better models of EG.

Exposure to Video Games and Decision Making

In the last years, it is ever more frequent to read popular press stories about the effects of video and/or computer games on the brain and on the behavior. In some cases, we can read something claiming that video games “damage the brain,” while in others these activities can “boost brain power,” and such conflicting proclamation create confusion about the real or potential effects of this activity on human beings. Thus, it is very interesting to deeply understand the effect that exposure to video games (VGs) can have on cognitive processes, with particular attention to decision making. Only a few studies have been carried out on this issue: the main aim of this contribution is to clarify these aspects, critically reviewing the existing scientific literature. Particular attention has been dedicated to normal and pathological players, different types of VGs, and moral aspects of decision making vulnerable to VGs. It has been concluded that research in this area is still in its early days, and this short review aims at discussing several issues and challenges that should be addressed to forward this research field.

Leveraging the Arduino Platform to Develop Information Technology Devices

Arduino is a famous board, which incorporates serial communication interfaces, including universal serial bus (USB) and an integrated development environment (IDE) based on Processing, a programming language that supports C and C++. It consists of a microcontroller with several other components that provide easy interconnections with other devices. Arduino and its components have been studied during the class of Computer Architecture for the degree in Computer Science at the University of Cagliari in 2016. At the end of the class, seven groups of students have been selected and chosen to carry out a device prototype on top of Arduino and show their methodology, the sensors they embedded on top, how data could be extracted, collected, stored in database for further processing and analytics. The development has been performed following the open source best practices; documentation and codes of these projects have been made online for free downloading and sharing in order to further contribute to the advancement and widespread usage of the Arduino platform.