Technology And Intimacy Choice Or Coercion

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th IFIP TC 9 International Conference on Human Choice and Computers, HCC12 2016, held in Salford, UK, in September 2016. The 26 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 34 submissions. The papers deal with the constantly evolving intimate relationship between humans and technology. They focus on three main themes: ethics, communications, and futures.

This Festschrift, Unimagined Futures – ICT Opportunities and Challenges, is the first Festschrift in the IFIP AICT series. It examines key challenges facing the ICT community today. While addressing the contemporary challenges, the book provides the opportunity to look back to help understand the contemporary scene and identify appropriate future responses to them. Experts in different areas of the ICT scene have contributed to this IFIP 60th anniversary book, which will be a key input to the ICT community worldwide on setting policy priorities and agendas for the coming decade. In addition, a number of contributions look specifically at the role of professionals and of national, regional, and global organizations in disseminating the benefits of ICT to humanity worldwide.

This book considers issues of social and ecological significance through a masculinities lens. Earth – our home for aeons – is reeling. The atmosphere is heating up, causing reefs to bleach, fisheries to collapse, regions to flood and dry, vast tracts to burn, the polar ice caps to melt, ancient glaciers to retreat, biodiversity to decline exacerbated by the sixth great extinction, and more. Meanwhile, social and economic disparities are widening. Pandemics are cauterising glocal communities and altering our social mores. Nationalism is feeding divisiveness and hate, especially through men’s violence. Politically extreme individuals and groups are exalting freedom while scapegoating the marginalised. Such are the symptoms of an emerging (m)Anthropocene. This anthology contends with these alarming trends, pointing our attention towards their gendered origins. Building on our monograph Ecological Masculinities: Theoretical Foundations and Practical Guidance (2018), this collection of essays is framed as a dinner party conversation grouped into six discursive themes. Their views reflect a growing community of practice, whose combined efforts capture the most recent perspectives on masculine ecologisation. Together, they aim to help create a more caring world for all, moving the ecological masculinities conversation forward as it becomes an established, international, and pluralised field of study.

The book, presenting the proceedings of the 2018 Future Technologies Conference (FTC 2018), is a remarkable collection of chapters covering a wide range of topics, including, but not limited to computing, electronics, artificial intelligence, robotics, security and communications and their real-world applications. The conference attracted a total of 503 submissions from pioneering researchers, scientists, industrial engineers, and students from all over the world. After a double-blind peer review process, 173 submissions (including 6 poster papers) have been selected to be included in these proceedings. FTC 2018 successfully brought together technology geniuses in one venue to not only present breakthrough research in future technologies but to also promote practicality and applications and an intra- and inter-field exchange of ideas. In the future, computing technologies will play a very important role in the convergence of computing, communication, and all other computational sciences and applications. And as a result it will also influence the future of science, engineering, industry, business, law, politics, culture, and medicine. Providing state-of-the-art intelligent methods and techniques for solving real-world problems, as well as a vision of the future research, this book is a valuable resource for all those interested in this area.

The creation, accumulation, and use of copious amounts of data are driving rapid change across a wide variety of industries and academic disciplines. This ‘Big Data’ phenomenon is the result of recent developments in computational technology and improved data gathering techniques that have led to substantial innovation in the collection, storage, management, and analysis of data. Real Estate Analysis in the Information Age: Techniques for Big Data and Statistical Modeling focuses on the real estate discipline, guiding researchers and practitioners alike on the use of data-centric methods and analysis from applied and theoretical perspectives. In it, the authors detail the integration of Big Data into conventional real estate research and analysis. The book is process-oriented, not only describing Big Data and associated methods, but also showing the reader how to use these methods through case studies supported by supplemental online material. The running theme is the construction of efficient, transparent, and reproducible research through the systematic organization and application of data, both traditional and 'big'. The final chapters investigate legal issues, particularly related to those data that are publicly available, and conclude by speculating on the future of Big Data in real estate.

This report explores how data and digital technology can help achieve policy objectives and drive positive transformation in the health sector while managing new risks such as privacy, equity and implementation costs. It examines the following topics: improving service delivery models; empowering people to take an active role in their health and their care; improving public health; managing biomedical technologies; enabling better collaboration across borders; and improving health system governance and stewardship.

This book questions the nature of the business and social information systems so ubiquitous in contemporary life. Linking positivism, individualism, and market-fundamentalist economics at the root of these systems, it critiques the philosophical ground of this triumvirate as fundamentally against nature. Connecting counter-philosophies of the subject as a natural part of existence, with more collectivist and ecological economics, it presents a historical critique of the development of the academic field of information systems and offers a complex view of the nature of Nature through which we might reshape our approach to technology and to our economies to overcome the existential threat of climate change. As such, it will appeal to philosophers, social theorists, and scholars of science and technology studies with interests in the environment and ecology, as well as those working in the field of information systems.

The information systems (IS) field represents a multidisciplinary area that links the rapidly changing technology of information (or communications and information technology, ICT) to the business and social environment. Despite the potential that the IS field has to develop its own native theories to address current issues involving ICT it has consistently borrowed theories from its “reference disciplines,” often uncritically, to legitimize its research. This volume is the first of a series intended to advance IS research beyond this form of borrowed legitimization and derivative research towards fresh and original research that naturally comes from its own theories. It is inconceivable for a field so relevant to the era of the hyper-connected society, disruptive technologies, big data, social media, "fake news" and the weaponization of information to not be brimming with its own theories. The first step in reaching the goal of developing native IS theories is to reach an agreement on the need for theory (its rationale) and its role as the most distinctive product of human intellectual activity. This volume addresses what theories are, why bother with theories and the process of theorizing itself because the process of developing theories cannot be divorced from the product of that process. It will lay out a research agenda for decades to come and will be invaluable reading for any academic in the IS field and related disciplines concerned with information, systems, technology and their management.