Human interaction with technology for working, communicating, and learning: advancements

The way humans interact with technology is undergoing a tremendous change. It is hard to imagine the lives we live today without the benefits of technology that we take for granted. Applying research in computer science, engineering, and information systems to non-technical descriptions of technology, such as human interaction, has shaped and continues to shape our lives. Human Interaction with Technology for Working, Communicating, and Learning: Advancements provides a framework for conceptual, theoretical, and applied research in regards to the relationship between technology and humans. This book is unique in the sense that it does not only cover technology, but also science, research, and the relationship between these fields and individuals' experience. This book is a must have for anyone interested in this research area, as it provides a voice for all users and a look into our future.

A quest for the right word enhancing reflexivity and technology in terminology training

INTED2010, the 4th International Technology, Education and Development Conference was held in Valencia (Spain), on March 8, 9 and 10, 2010.

Nanoparticles based Permeable Reactive Barriers as an Eco-efficient Technology for nitrate remediation in soil and groundwater

The need to increase agricultural yield led, among others, to an increase in the consumption of nitrogen based fertilizers. As a consequence, there are excessive concentrations of nitrates, the most abundant of the reactive nitrogen (Nr) species, in several areas of the world. The demographic changes and projected population growth for the next decades, and the economic shifts which are already shaping the near future are powerful drivers for a further intensification in the use of fertilizers, with a predicted increase of the nitrogen loads in soils. Nitrate easily diffuses in the subsurface environments, portraying high mobility in soils. Moreover, the presence of high nitrate loads in water has the potential to cause an array of health dysfunctions, such as methemoglobinemia and several cancers. Permeable Reactive Barriers (PRB) placed strategically relatively to the nitrate source constitute an effective technology to tackle nitrate pollution. Ergo, PRB avoid various adverse impacts resulting from the displacement of reactive nitrogen downstream along water bodies. A four stages literature review was carried out in 34 databases. Initially, a set of pertinent key words were identified to perform the initial databases searches. Then, the synonyms of those initial key words were used to carry out a second set of databases searches. The third stage comprised the identification of other additional relevant terms from the research papers identified in the previous two stages. Again, databases searches were performed with this third set of key words. The final step consisted of the identification of relevant papers from the bibliography of the relevant papers identified in the previous three stages of the literature review process. The set of papers identified as relevant for in-depth analysis were assessed considering a set of relevant characterization variables.

Marketing for future: Eddmi – Pass Platform

In a highly competitive market companies know that having quality products or provide good services is not enough to keep customers "faithful". Currently, quality of products/services, location and price are fundamental aspects customers expect to get on every purchase, so they look for ways to distinguish companies. This can happen either in a strictly materialistic way or by evaluation of intangible metrics such as having his opinion appreciated or being part of a selected group of "premium" customers. Therefore, companies must find ways to value and reward its customers in order to keep them "faithful" to their products or services. Loyalty systems are one means to achieve this goal, however, due to its nature and how they are implemented, often companies end up having low acceptance, without achieving intended objectives. In an era of technological revolution, where global average adoption of smartphones and tablets is 74% and 40% [Our Mobile Planet, 2014], the opportunity to reinvent loyalty systems reappears. Throughout this thesis a new tool, relying on the latest technologies and aiming to fulfill this market opportunity, will be presented. The main idea is to use ancient loyalty concepts, such as stamps or pointscards, and transforms them into digital cards, to be used in digital wallets, introducing an innovative technology component based on Apple's Passbook technology. The main goal is to create a platform for managing the card’s life cycle, allowing anyone to create, edit, distribute and analyze the data, and also create a new communication channel with customers, improving the customer-­‐supplier relationship and enhancing the mobile-­‐marketing.

Speech as the basic interface for assistive technology

Speech interfaces for Assistive Technologies are not common and are usually replaced by others. The market they are targeting is not considered attractive and speech technologies are still not well spread. Industry still thinks they present some performance risks, especially Speech Recognition systems. As speech is the most elemental and natural way for communication, it has strong potential for enhancing inclusion and quality of life for broader groups of users with special needs, such as people with cerebral palsy and elderly staying at their homes. This work is a position paper in which the authors argue for the need to make speech become the basic interface in assistive technologies. Among the main arguments, we can state: speech is the easiest way to interact with machines; there is a growing market for embedded speech in assistive technologies, since the number of disabled and elderly people is expanding; speech technology is already mature to be used but needs adaptation to people with special needs; there is still a lot of R&D to be done in this area, especially when thinking about the Portuguese market. The main challenges are presented and future directions are proposed.

Technology strategies in the process of student retention and efficiency of academic management

This article discusses the application of Information and Communication Technologies and strategies for best practices in order to capture and maintain faculty students' attention. It is based on a case study of ten years, using a complete information system. This system, in addition to be considered an ERP, to support the activities of academic management, also has a strong component of SRM that provides support to academic and administrative activities. It describes the extent to which the presented system facilitates the interaction and communication between members of the academic community, using the Internet, with services available on the Web complementing them with email, SMS and CTI. Through a perception, backed by empirical analysis and results of investigations, it demonstrates how this type of practice may raise the level of satisfaction of the community. In particular, it is possible to combat failure at school, avoid that students leave their course before its completion and also that they recommend them to potential students. In addition, such a strategy also allows strong economies in the management of the institution, increasing its value. As future work, we present the new phase of the project towards implementation of Business Intelligence to optimize the management process, making it proactive. The technological vision that guides new developments to a construction based on Web services and procedural languages is also presented.

Enhancing reflexivity and technology in translation learning: case study on the use of ePortfolio as a training environment

In this paper we describe a casestudy of an experiment on how reflexivity and technology can enhance learning, by using ePorfolios as a training environment to develop translation skills. Translation is today a multiskilled job and translators need to assure their clients a good performance and quality, both in language and in technology domains. In order to accomplish it, for the translator all the tasks and processes he develops appear as crucial, being pretranslation and posttranslation processes equally important as the translation itself, namely as far as autonomy, reflexive and critical skills are concerned. Finally, the need and relevance for collaborative tasks and networks amongst virtual translation communities, led us to the decision of implementing ePortfolios as a tool to develop the requested skills and extend the use of Internet in translation, namely in terminology management phases, for the completion of each task, by helping students in the management of the projects deadlines, improving their knowledge on the construction and management of translation resources and deepening their awareness about the concepts related to the development and usability of ePorfolios.

User perception and influencing factors of technology in everyday life

An increasing amount of research is being developed in the area where technology and humans meet. The success or failure of technologies and the question whether technology helps humans to fulfill their goals or whether it hinders them is in most cases not a technical one. User Perception and Influencing Factors of Technology in Everyday Life addresses issues of human and technology interaction. The research in this work is interdisciplinary, ranging from more technical subjects such as computer science, engineering, and information systems, to non-technical descriptions of technology and human interaction from the point of view of sociology or philosophy. This book is perfect for academics, researchers, and professionals alike as it presents a set of theories that allow us to understand the interaction of technology and humans and to put it to practical use.

Technology for creativity and innovation: tools, techniques and applications

It is widely accepted that organizations and individuals must be innovative and continually create new knowledge and ideas to deal with rapid change. Innovation plays an important role in not only the development of new business, process and products, but also in competitiveness and success of any organization. Technology for Creativity and Innovation: Tools, Techniques and Applications provides empirical research findings and best practices on creativity and innovation in business, organizational, and social environments. It is written for educators, academics and professionals who want to improve their understanding of creativity and innovation as well as the role technology has in shaping this discipline.

Sociological and philosophical aspects of human interaction with technology: advancing concepts

It is not possible to imagine our lives today without technology. From the moment we get up in the morning until the time that we go to bed at night, technology is present in almost every moment, even if we are not aware of it. Some of the most basic activities we need to perform regularly could not be carried out without technology. Sociological and Philosophical Aspects of Human Interaction with Technology: Advancing Concepts presents a careful blend of conceptual, theoretical and applied research in regards to the relationship between technology and humans. This book explores the importance of these interactions, aspects related with trust, communication, data protection, usability concerning organizational change, and e-learning. The advancement of these theories and practices will benefit from this publication as it provides a voice for the users.

Computational intelligence applications for future power systems

Power system planning, control and operation require an adequate use of existing resources as to increase system efficiency. The use of optimal solutions in power systems allows huge savings stressing the need of adequate optimization and control methods. These must be able to solve the envisaged optimization problems in time scales compatible with operational requirements. Power systems are complex, uncertain and changing environments that make the use of traditional optimization methodologies impracticable in most real situations. Computational intelligence methods present good characteristics to address this kind of problems and have already proved to be efficient for very diverse power system optimization problems. Evolutionary computation, fuzzy systems, swarm intelligence, artificial immune systems, neural networks, and hybrid approaches are presently seen as the most adequate methodologies to address several planning, control and operation problems in power systems. Future power systems, with intensive use of distributed generation and electricity market liberalization increase power systems complexity and bring huge challenges to the forefront of the power industry. Decentralized intelligence and decision making requires more effective optimization and control techniques techniques so that the involved players can make the most adequate use of existing resources in the new context. The application of computational intelligence methods to deal with several problems of future power systems is presented in this chapter. Four different applications are presented to illustrate the promises of computational intelligence, and illustrate their potentials.

Virtual power producers simulation - negotiating renewable distributed generation in competitive electricity markets

Sustainable development concerns made renewable energy sources to be increasingly used for electricity distributed generation. However, this is mainly due to incentives or mandatory targets determined by energy policies as in European Union. Assuring a sustainable future requires distributed generation to be able to participate in competitive electricity markets. To get more negotiation power in the market and to get advantages of scale economy, distributed generators can be aggregated giving place to a new concept: the Virtual Power Producer (VPP). VPPs are multi-technology and multisite heterogeneous entities that should adopt organization and management methodologies so that they can make distributed generation a really profitable activity, able to participate in the market. This paper presents ViProd, a simulation tool that allows simulating VPPs operation, in the context of MASCEM, a multi-agent based eletricity market simulator.

Towards a future SCADA

Currently, Power Systems (PS) already accommodate a substantial penetration of DG and operate in competitive environments. In the future PS will have to deal with largescale integration of DG and other distributed energy resources (DER), such as storage means, and provide to market agents the means to ensure a flexible and secure operation. This cannot be done with the traditional PS operation. SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) is a vital infrastructure for PS. Current SCADA adaptation to accommodate the new needs of future PS does not allow to address all the requirements. In this paper we present a new conceptual design of an intelligent SCADA, with a more decentralized, flexible, and intelligent approach, adaptive to the context (context awareness). Once a situation is characterized, data and control options available to each entity are re-defined according to this context, taking into account operation normative and a priori established contracts. The paper includes a case-study of using future SCADA features to use DER to deal with incident situations, preventing blackouts.

The role of demand response in future power systems

Power systems are planed and operated according to the optimization of the available resources. Traditionally these tasks were mostly undertaken in a centralized way which is no longer adequate in a competitive environment. Demand response can play a very relevant role in this context but adequate tools to negotiate this kind of resources are required. This paper presents an approach to deal with these issues, by using a multi-agent simulator able to model demand side players and simulate their strategic behavior. The paper includes an illustrative case study that considers an incident situation. The distribution company is able to reduce load curtailment due to load flexibility contracts previously established with demand side players.

Data mining applications in power systems - case-studies and future trends

Presently power system operation produces huge volumes of data that is still treated in a very limited way. Knowledge discovery and machine learning can make use of these data resulting in relevant knowledge with very positive impact. In the context of competitive electricity markets these data is of even higher value making clear the trend to make data mining techniques application in power systems more relevant. This paper presents two cases based on real data, showing the importance of the use of data mining for supporting demand response and for supporting player strategic behavior.