Trust between Cooperating Technical Systems


Book Description

Researchers from social sciences and economics consider trust a requirement for successful cooperation between people. It helps to judge the risk in situations, in which a person has the choice to rely on another one. In the future, technical systems will face similar situations. Assume, for example, self-organised robots, which reload some goods at a large logistics centre together. For this, they will need a mechanism like trust. This book gives the reader tools to understand trust and to introduce a trust mechnism into own applications. The tools include generic requirements for own trust mechanisms and the Enfident Model - a conceptual, implementation-independent model of trust. These theoretical tools are complemented with state-of-the-art algorithms from statistical relational learning. Finally, as an example, all this is applied to cooperating cognitive vehicles. As trust is a social phenomenon, this evaluation features a virtual society of vehicles, which cooperate in a vehicular network. It shows that the postulated requirements and the Enfident Model lead to intuitive and consistent results.




Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work


Book Description

This book is the first to directly address the question of how to bridge what has been termed the "great divide" between the approaches of systems developers and those of social scientists to computer supported cooperative work--a question that has been vigorously debated in the systems development literature. Traditionally, developers have been trained in formal methods and oriented to engineering and formal theoretical problems; many social scientists in the CSCW field come from humanistic traditions in which results are reported in a narrative mode. In spite of their differences in style, the two groups have been cooperating more and more in the last decade, as the "people problems" associated with computing become increasingly evident to everyone. The authors have been encouraged to examine, rigorously and in depth, the theoretical basis of CSCW. With contributions from field leaders in the United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia, Mexico, and the United States, this volume offers an exciting overview of the cutting edge of research and theory. It constitutes a solid foundation for the rapidly coalescing field of social informatics. Divided into three parts, this volume covers social theory, design theory, and the sociotechnical system with respect to CSCW. The first set of chapters looks at ways of rethinking basic social categories with the development of distributed collaborative computing technology--concepts of the group, technology, information, user, and text. The next section concentrates more on the lessons that can be learned at the design stage given that one wants to build a CSCW system incorporating these insights--what kind of work does one need to do and how is understanding of design affected? The final part looks at the integration of social and technical in the operation of working sociotechnical systems. Collectively the contributors make the argument that the social and technical are irremediably linked in practice and so the "great divide" not only should be a thing of the past, it should never have existed in the first place.







Organic Computing – Technical Systems for Survival in the Real World


Book Description

This book is a comprehensive introduction into Organic Computing (OC), presenting systematically the current state-of-the-art in OC. It starts with motivating examples of self-organising, self-adaptive and emergent systems, derives their common characteristics and explains the fundamental ideas for a formal characterisation of such systems. Special emphasis is given to a quantitative treatment of concepts like self-organisation, emergence, autonomy, robustness, and adaptivity. The book shows practical examples of architectures for OC systems and their applications in traffic control, grid computing, sensor networks, robotics, and smart camera systems. The extension of single OC systems into collective systems consisting of social agents based on concepts like trust and reputation is explained. OC makes heavy use of learning and optimisation technologies; a compact overview of these technologies and related approaches to self-organising systems is provided. So far, OC literature has been published with the researcher in mind. Although the existing books have tried to follow a didactical concept, they remain basically collections of scientific papers. A comprehensive and systematic account of the OC ideas, methods, and achievements in the form of a textbook which lends itself to the newcomer in this field has been missing so far. The targeted reader of this book is the master student in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or Electrical Engineering - or any other newcomer to the field of Organic Computing with some technical or Computer Science background. Readers can seek access to OC ideas from different perspectives: OC can be viewed (1) as a „philosophy“ of adaptive and self-organising - life-like - technical systems, (2) as an approach to a more quantitative and formal understanding of such systems, and finally (3) a construction method for the practitioner who wants to build such systems. In this book, we first try to convey to the reader a feeling of the special character of natural and technical self-organising and adaptive systems through a large number of illustrative examples. Then we discuss quantitative aspects of such forms of organisation, and finally we turn to methods of how to build such systems for practical applications.




Human-Computer Interaction: Users and Contexts of Use


Book Description

The five-volume set LNCS 8004--8008 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2013, held in Las Vegas, NV, USA in July 2013. The total of 1666 papers and 303 posters presented at the HCII 2013 conferences was carefully reviewed and selected from 5210 submissions. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of human-computer Interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas. This volume contains papers in the thematic area of human-computer interaction, addressing the following major topics: identity, privacy and trust; user studies; interaction for society and community; HCI for business and innovation.




Integrated Management Systems


Book Description

Examining the challenges of integrated management, this book explores the importance and potential benefits of using an integrated approach as a cross-functional concept of management. It covers not only standardized management systems (e.g. International Organization for Standardization), but also models of self-assessment, as well as different types of integration. Furthermore, it demonstrates how processes and systems can be integrated, and how management efficiency can be increased. The major part of this book focuses on management concepts which use integration as a key tool of management processes (e.g. the systematic approach, supply chain management, virtual and network organizations, processes management and total quality management). Case studies, illustrations, and tables are also provided to exemplify and illuminate the content, as well as examples of successful and failed integrations. Providing a particularly useful resource to managers and specialists involved in the improvement of organizational performance, this book is also intended for top managers, functional managers, project managers, specialists, consultants, and those who wish to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of management. It also offers a helpful guide to academics and students interested in quality and risk management.




Issues & Trends of Information Technology Management in Contemporary Organizations


Book Description

As the field of information technology continues to grow and expand, it impacts more and more organizations worldwide. The leaders within these organizations are challenged on a continuous basis to develop and implement programs that successfully apply information technology applications. This is a collection of unique perspectives on the issues surrounding IT in organizations and the ways in which these issues are addressed. This valuable book is a compilation of the latest research in the area of IT utilization and management.




Rapid Integration of Software Engineering Techniques


Book Description

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the Third International Workshop on Rapid Integration of Software Engineering Techniques, RISE 2006, held in Geneva, Switzerland, September 2006. It covers a wide spectrum in software engineering, including software and system architectures, software reuse, software testing, extreme programming, agile software development, and software dependability and trustworthiness.




Blockchain and Trustworthy Systems


Book Description

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post conference papers of the Third International Conference on Blockchain and Trustworthy Systems, Blocksys 2021, held in Guangzhou, China, in August 2021.*The 38 full papers and the 12 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 98 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections: Contents Blockchain and Data Mining; Performance Optimization of Blockchain; Blockchain Security and Privacy; Theories and Algorithms for Blockchain; Blockchain and Internet of Things; Blockchain and Smart Contracts; Blockchain Services and Applications; Trustworthy System Development.*