Latest Titles

• Interfaces on Trial 2.0 Band, Jonathan; Katoh, Masanobu Interfaces on Trial 2.0
  Abstract:

  We live in an interoperable world. Computer hardware and software products from different manufacturers can exchange data within local networks and around the world using the Internet. The competition enabled by this compatibility between devices has led to fast-paced innovation and prices low enough to allow ordinary users to command extraordinary computing capacity.
  
  In Interfaces on Trial 2.0, Jonathan Band and Masanobu Katoh investigate an often overlooked factor in the development of today’s interoperabilty: the evolution of copyright law. Because software is copyrightable, copyright law determines the rules for competition in the information technology industry. This book—a follow-up to Band and Katoh’s successful 1995 book Interfaces on Trial—examines the debates surrounding the use of copyright law to prevent competition and interoperability in the global software industry in the last fifteen years.
  
  Band and Katoh are longtime advocates for interoperable devices but present a reasoned view of contentious issues related to interoperability issues in the United States, the European Union, and the Pacific Rim. They discuss such topics as the protectability of interface specifications, the permissibility of reverse engineering (and legislative and executive endorsement of pro-interoperability case law), the interoperability exception to the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the interoperability cases decided under it, the enforceability of contractural restrictions on reverse engineering; and recent legal developments affecting the future of interoperability, including those related to open source-software and software patents.

  Authors: Band, Jonathan; Katoh, Masanobu
  Keywords: Computer Science and Intelligent Systems; Interoperability; Copyright; Business and Technology; Law; Information Technology; Open Source; Telecommunications
• Everyday Information Hayes, Barbara M.; Aspray, William Everyday Information
  Abstract:

  All day, every day, Americans seek information. We research major purchases. We check news and sports. We visit government Web sites for public information and turn to friends for advice about our everyday lives. Although the Internet influences our information-seeking behavior, we gather information from many sources: family and friends, television and radio, books and magazines, experts and community leaders. Patterns of information seeking have evolved throughout American history and are shaped by a number of forces, including war, modern media, the state of the economy, and government regulation. This book examines the evolution of information seeking in nine areas of everyday American life.
  
  Chapters offer an information perspective on car buying, from the days of the Model T to the present; philanthropic and charitable activities; airline travel and the complex layers of information available to passengers; genealogy, from the family Bible to Ancestry.com; sports statistics, as well as fantasy sports leagues and their fans’ obsession with them; the multimedia universe of gourmet cooking; governmental and publicly available information; reading, sharing, and creating comics; and text messaging among young people as a way to exchange information and manage relationships. Taken together, these case studies provide a fascinating window on the importance of information in the past century of American life.

  Authors: Aspray, William; Hayes, Barbara M.
  Keywords: Information Science; History, Philosophy, & Sociology of Technology; Library & Information Technology
• Social Modeling for Requirements Engineering Giorgini, Paolo; Maiden, Neil; Yu, Eric; Mylopoulos, John Social Modeling for Requirements Engineering
  Abstract:

  Much of the difficulty in creating information technology systems that truly meet people's needs lies in the problem of pinning down system requirements. This book offers a new approach to the requirements challenge, based on modeling and analyzing the relationships among stakeholders. Although the importance of the system-environment relationship has long been recognized in the requirements engineering field, most requirements modeling techniques express the relationship in mechanistic and behavioral terms. This book describes a modeling approach (called the i* framework) that conceives of software-based information systems as being situated in environments in which social actors relate to each other in terms of goals to be achieved, tasks to be performed, and resources to be furnished.
  
  Social perspectives on computing have provided much insight for many years. The i* framework aims to offer a modeling approach to the relationships embedded in computer systems that is part of an engineering method that offers systematic techniques and tools providing smooth linkages to the rest of the system development process, including system design and implementation. The book includes Eric Yu's original proposal for the i* framework as well as research that applies, adapts, extends, or evaluates the social modeling concepts and approach.

  Authors: Yu, Eric; Giorgini, Paolo; Maiden, Neil; Mylopoulos, John
  Keywords: Human-Computer Interaction; Information Technology
• America Identified Nelson, Lisa S. America Identified
  Abstract:

  The use of biometric technology for identification has gone from Orwellian fantasy to everyday reality. This technology, which verifies or recognizes a person's identity based on physiological, anatomical, or behavioral patterns (including fingerprints, retina, handwriting, and keystrokes) has been deployed for such purposes as combating welfare fraud, screening airplane passengers, and identifying terrorists. The accompanying controversy has pitted those who praise the technology's accuracy and efficiency against advocates for privacy and civil liberties. In America Identified, Lisa Nelson investigates the complex public responses to biometric technology. She uses societal perceptions of this particular identification technology to explore the values, beliefs, and ideologies that influence public acceptance of technology.
  
  Drawing on her own extensive research with focus groups and a national survey, Nelson finds that considerations of privacy, anonymity, trust and confidence in institutions, and the legitimacy of paternalistic government interventions are extremely important to users and potential users of the technology. She examines the long history of government systems of identification and the controversies they have inspired; the effect of the information technology revolution and the events of September 11, 2001; the normative value of privacy (as opposed to its merely legal definition); the place of surveillance technologies in a civil society; trust in government and distrust in the expanded role of government; and the balance between the need for government to act to prevent harm and the possible threat to liberty in government's actions.

  Authors: Nelson, Lisa S.
  Keywords: Science, Technology, and Society; Political Science; biometrics; Law
• Wirelessness Mackenzie, Adrian Wirelessness
  Abstract:

  How has wirelessness—being connected to objects and infrastructures without knowing exactly how or where—become a key form of contemporary experience? Stretching across routers, smart phones, netbooks, cities, towers, Guangzhou workshops, service agreements, toys, and states, wireless technologies have brought with them sensations of change, proximity, movement, and divergence. In Wirelessness, Adrian Mackenzie draws on philosophical techniques from a century ago to make sense of this most contemporary postnetwork condition. The radical empiricism associated with the pragmatist philosopher William James, Mackenzie argues, offers fresh ways for matching the disordered flow of wireless networks, meshes, patches, and connections with felt sensations.
  
  For Mackenzie, entanglements with things, gadgets, infrastructures, and services—tendencies, fleeting nuances, and peripheral shades of often barely registered feeling that cannot be easily codified, symbolized, or quantified—mark the experience of wirelessness, and this links directly to James's expanded conception of experience. "Wirelessness" designates a tendency to make network connections in different times and places using these devices and services. Equally, it embodies a sensibility attuned to the proliferation of devices and services that carry information through radio signals. Above all, it means heightened awareness of ongoing change and movement associated with networks, infrastructures, location, and information.
  
  The experience of wirelessness spans several strands of media-technological change, and Mackenzie moves from wireless cities through signals, devices, networks, maps, and products, to the global belief in the expansion of wireless worlds.

  Authors: Mackenzie, Adrian
  Keywords: New Media; Science, Technology, and Society
• Korea's Online Gaming Empire Jin, Dal Yong Korea's Online Gaming Empire
  Abstract:

  In South Korea, online gaming is a cultural phenomenon. Games are broadcast on television, professional gamers are celebrities, and youth culture is often identified with online gaming. Uniquely in the online games market, Korea not only dominates the local market but has also made its mark globally. In Korea's Online Gaming Empire, Dal Yong Jin examines the rapid growth of this industry from a political economy perspective, discussing it in social, cultural, and economic terms.
  
  Korea has the largest percentage of broadband subscribers of any country in the world, and Koreans spend increasing amounts of time and money on Internet-based games. Online gaming has become a mode of socializing—a channel for human relationships. The Korean online game industry has been a pioneer in software development and eSports (electronic sports and leagues). Jin discusses the policies of the Korean government that encouraged the development of online gaming both as a cutting-edge business and as a cultural touchstone; the impact of economic globalization; the relationship between online games and Korean society; and the future of the industry. He examines the rise of Korean online games in the global marketplace, the emergence of eSport as a youth culture phenomenon, the working conditions of professional gamers, the role of game fans as consumers, how Korea's local online game industry has become global, and whether these emerging firms have challenged the West's dominance in global markets.

  Authors: Jin, Dal Yong
  Keywords: Game Studies; Science, Technology, and Society
• Artificial Intelligence and Learning Environments Soloway, Elliot; Clancey, William J. Artificial Intelligence and Learning Environments
  Abstract:

  New perspectives and techniques are shaping the field of computer-aided instruction. These essays explore cognitively oriented empirical trials that use AI programming as a modeling methodology and that can provide valuable insight into a variety of learning problems. Drawing on work in cognitive theory, plan-based program recognition, qualitative reasoning, and cognitive models of learning and teaching, this exciting research covers a wide range of alternatives to tutoring dialogues.
  
  William J. Clancey is Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Research on Learning, Palo Alto. Elliot Soloway is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan.
  
  Contents: Artificial Intelligence and Learning Environments, William J. Clancey, Elliot Soloway. Cognitive Modeling and Intelligence Tutoring, John R. Anderson, C. Franklin Boyle, Albert T. Corbett, Matthew W. Lewis. Understanding and Debugging Novice Programs, W. Lewis Johnson. Causal Model Progressions as a Foundation for Intelligent Learning Environments, Barbara Y. White and John R. Frederiksen.

  Authors: Clancey, William J.; Soloway, Elliot
  Keywords: AI
• Good Faith Collaboration Reagle, Joseph Michael , Jr. Good Faith Collaboration
  Abstract:

  Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is built by a community—a community of Wikipedians who are expected to "assume good faith" when interacting with one another. In Good Faith Collaboration, Joseph Reagle examines this unique collaborative culture.
  
  Wikipedia, says Reagle, is not the first effort to create a freely shared, universal encyclopedia; its early twentieth-century ancestors include Paul Otlet's Universal Repository and H. G. Wells's proposal for a World Brain. Both these projects, like Wikipedia, were fuelled by new technology—which at the time included index cards and microfilm. What distinguishes Wikipedia from these and other more recent ventures is Wikipedia's good-faith collaborative culture, as seen not only in the writing and editing of articles but also in their discussion pages and edit histories. Keeping an open perspective on both knowledge claims and other contributors, Reagle argues, creates an extraordinary collaborative potential.
  
  Wikipedia is famously an encyclopedia "anyone can edit," and Reagle examines Wikipedia's openness and several challenges to it: technical features that limit vandalism to articles; private actions to mitigate potential legal problems; and Wikipedia's own internal bureaucratization. He explores Wikipedia's process of consensus (reviewing a dispute over naming articles on television shows) and examines the way leadership and authority work in an open-content community.
  
  Wikipedia's style of collaborative production has been imitated, analyzed, and satirized. Despite the social unease over its implications for individual autonomy, institutional authority, and the character (and quality) of cultural products, Wikipedia's good-faith collaborative culture has brought us closer than ever to a realization of the century-old pursuit of a universal encyclopedia.

  Authors: Reagle, Joseph Michael , Jr.
  Keywords: Wikipedia; Computer Science and Intelligent Systems; Information Science; History, Philosophy, & Sociology of Technology; Information Technology; Internet