Urbanizing the Ambient

The purpose of this chapter is to develop and explore the ambient urbanizing concept as a way to shed light on what happens at the urban level when people become more aware and attuned to smartness and ambience in everyday city spaces. The research design for this work includes a case study approach and multiple methods of quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis. In parallel with this study, anecdotal evidence gathered from individuals across the city through informal individual and group discussions enabled further analysis, comparison, and triangulation of data. This chapter makes a contribution to the research literature across multiple domains; sheds light on the emerging relationships of awareness in the people – technologies – cities dynamic, highlighting the critical role of people, in their everyday urban activities, interactions, and experiences; and offers a proposed ambient urbanizing framework for enriching spaces, things, and designs in smart cities.

Visualising Data for Smart Cities

This chapter introduces a range of analytics being used to understand the smart city, which depends on data that can primarily be understood using new kinds of scientific visualisation. We focus on short term routine functions that take place in cities which are being rapidly automated through various kinds of sensors, embedded into the physical fabric of the city itself or being accessed from mobile devices. We first outline a concept of the smart city, arguing that there is a major distinction between the ways in which technologies are being used to look at the short and long terms structure of cities, and we then focus on the shorter term, first examining the immediate visualisation of data through dashboards, then examining data infrastructures such as map portals, and finally introducing new ways of visualising social media which enable us to elicit the power of the crowd in providing and supplying data. We conclude with a brief focus on how new urban analytics is emerging to make sense of these developments.

Integration of Wireless Technologies in Smart University Campus Environment

In this paper, the authors are particularly interested in enhancing the education process by integrating new tools to the teaching environments. This enhancement is part of an emerging concept, called smart campus. Smart University Campus will come up with a new ubiquitous computing and communication field and change people's lives radically by providing systems and devices supported with smart technologies that have the capabilities of rapid respond to changes and circumstances without human interference, and it will be able to learn from these circumstances. This paper presents framework architecture for integrating various types of wireless networks into a smart university campus to enhance communication among students, instructors, and administration. Moreover, the authors study two possible applications to utilize the proposed networking framework: smart identification and social collaboration applications. An essential part to achieve the main principles of smart university campus is the deployment and usage of smart card technologies for identification and payment. Nowadays, there are several types of smart identification cards that support wireless technologies such as RFIDs and NFC. In both types, a card reader can read the card information from a distance. Moreover, in NFC cards, the card is integrated with the user's cellular phone. Social networking services (such as Facebook) facilitate online communication and provide a suitable environment for collaboration among students. As a part of future work, the proposed framework is deployed in the authors' university campus to find out the end-end performance and system usability.

Upgrading Society With Smart Government

This paper aims to explore the goals and motives of electronic government utilization among the citizens, the motives of their preference as well as the extent of use of these smart applications in the UAE. Also, it investigates the basic element of Smart Government uses within the federal authorities, response times, and recommendations for improving smart government. This study answers the following questions: What is the purpose of creating smart government? What are the users' aims in using smart government and what level of satisfaction do they experience? To augment this research, 450 questionnaires were distributed among federal authorities' users in all 7 emirates in the UAE. In addition, 18 interviews were conducted with managers in the federal government. The users reported high levels of satisfaction using smart government technologies, indicating a high level of usage and trust. The results also show that higher service speed contributes to higher levels of satisfaction. Managers are very optimistic about Smart Government, but some challenges remain, such as the existence of a lack of information or guidelines for using smart government. There is currently no central government department for applying smart government, and no clear vision or philosophies regarding smart government.

Hybrid Intelligence for Smarter Networking Operations

The ever-growing and ever-evolved Internet targets supporting billions of networked entities to provide a wide variety of services and resources. Such complexity results in network-data from different sources with special characteristics, such as widely diverse users, multiple media, high-dimensionality and various dynamic concerns. With huge amounts of network-data with such characteristics, there are significant challenges to a) recognize emergent and anomalous behavior in network-traffic and b) make intelligent decisions for efficient network operations. Endowing the semantically-oblivious Internet with Intelligence would advance the Internet capability to learn traffic behavior and to predict future events. In this chapter, the authors discuss and evaluate the hybridization of monolithic intelligence techniques in order to achieve smarter and enhanced networking operations. Additionally, the authors provide systematic application-agnostic semantics management methodology with efficient processes for extracting and classifying high-level features and reasoning about rich semantics.

Usability Evaluation of Dialogue Designs for Voiceprint Authentication in Automated Telephone Banking

This paper describes an empirical investigation of the usability of different dialogue designs for voiceprint authentication in automated telephone banking. Three strategies for voice authentication were evaluated in an experiment with 120 telephone banking end-users: 1-Factor (voiceprint authentication based on customers' utterances of their account number and sort code); 1-Factor with Challenge (1-Factor plus a randomly generated digit string); and 2-Factor (1-Factor plus secret information known only to the caller). The research suggests the 2-Factor approach is the most effective strategy in this context: results from a Likert questionnaire show it to be highly usable and it is rated highest in terms of both security and overall quality. Participants welcome the option to use voiceprint technology but the majority would prefer it to augment rather than replace existing security methods.

PRHOLO

In the globalized world, possessing good products may not be enough to reach potential clients unless creative marketing strategies are well delineated. In this context, public relations are also important when it comes to capture the client's attention, making the first contact between the clients and the company's products, while being persuasive enough to make them confident that the company has the right products to fit their needs. Three virtual public relations installations were purposed in this chapter, combining technology with a human like public relations ability, capable of interacting with potential clients located in front of the installation, at angles of up to 57º (degrees), 180º and 360º, respectively. From one to several Microsoft Kinects were used to develop the three interaction models, which allows tracking and recognition of users' gestures and positions (heat map), sound sources, voice commands and face and body extraction of the user interacting with the installation.

Emerging Technologies for Dementia Patient Monitoring

In this chapter, the author explores the available technologies that can enhance the Quality of Life of individuals with dementia. He investigates the foundations of telemetry, different sensor technologies, Context-Aware Systems, and the use of the Internet of Thing in supporting those to live an independent life. The author reviews the use of Smart Homes in supporting individuals with dementia. He then discusses the role of social networking sites in keeping this group connected. In addition to that, the author examines the use of Global Poisoning System (GPS) technology in management of wandering behaviour and the possible use of the currently available technologies in the detection, diagnosing the cause, assessing the response to treatment, as well as prevention of Behavioural and Psychological Symptoms in Dementia (BPSD). This is followed by a brief discussion of the acceptability and the ethical issues that surround the use of these technologies.

Gaze-Based Assistive Technologies

The eyes play an important role both in perception and communication. Technical interfaces that make use of their versatility can bring significant improvements to those who are unable to speak or to handle selection tasks elsewise such as with their hands, feet, noses or tools handled with the mouth. Using the eyes to enter texts into a computer system, which is called gaze-typing, is the most prominent gaze-based assistive technology. The article reviews the principles of eye movements, presents an overview of current eye-tracking systems, and discusses several approaches to gaze-typing. With the recent advent of mobile eye-tracking systems, gaze-based assistive technology is no longer restricted to interactions with desktop-computers. Gaze-based assistive technology is ready to expand its application into other areas of everyday life. The second part of the article thus discusses the use of gaze-based assistive technology in the household, or “the wild,” outside one's own four walls.

Second Language Learners' Spoken Discourse

This chapter examines the use of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology in the context of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and language learning and teaching research. A brief introduction to ASR is first provided, to make it clear why and how this technology can be used to the benefit of learning and development in second language (L2) spoken discourse. This is followed by an overview of the state of the art in research on ASR-based CALL. Subsequently, a number of relevant projects on ASR-based CALL conducted at the Centre for Language and Speech Technology of the Radboud University in Nijmegen (the Netherlands) are presented. Possible solutions and recommendations are discussed given the current state of the technology with an explanation of how such systems can be used to the benefit of Discourse Analysis research. The chapter concludes with a discussion of possible perspectives for future research and development.