Information and communication technology (ICT) has become a generic and indispensable tool for addressing and solving problems in such diverse areas as management, social and health services, transportation, security and education. As the cost of equipment drops dramatically, it also becomes widely accessible in the developing countries. However, problems of high costs for adequate training of personnel, access to state-to-the-art software and the consultancies needed to facilitate access to ICT can constitute highly dissuasive factors in the dissemination of ICT in developing countries.This volume describes a series of successful initiatives for the insertion of ICT in developing economies. It also identifies significant problems that are likely to be encountered, and suggests useful solutions to these problems. It therefore serves as a useful tool for example applications, and for the successful assimilation of these technologies in developing societies and countries./a

Penetrates the human computer interaction (HCI) field with breadth and depth of comprehensive research.

The three-volume set LNAI 7196, LNAI 7197 and LNAI 7198 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th Asian Conference on Intelligent Information and Database Systems, ACIIDS 2012, held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan in March 2012. The 161 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 472 submissions. The papers included cover the following topics: intelligent database systems, data warehouses and data mining, natural language processing and computational linguistics, semantic Web, social networks and recommendation systems, collaborative systems and applications, e-bussiness and e-commerce systems, e-learning systems, information modeling and requirements engineering, information retrieval systems, intelligent agents and multi-agent systems, intelligent information systems, intelligent internet systems, intelligent optimization techniques, object-relational DBMS, ontologies and knowledge sharing, semi-structured and XML database systems, unified modeling language and unified processes, Web services and semantic Web, computer networks and communication systems.

Because of the growing reliance on software, concerns are growing as to how reliable a system is before it is commissioned for use, how high the level of reliability is in the system, and how many vulnerabilities exist in the system before its operationalization. Equally pressing issues include how to secure the system from internal and external security threats that may exist in the face of resident vulnerabilities. These two problems are considered increasingly important because they necessitate the development of tools and techniques capable of analyzing dependability and security aspects of a system. These concerns become more pronounced in the cases of safety-critical and mission-critical systems. System Reliability and Security: Techniques and Methodologies focuses on the use of soft computing techniques and analytical techniques in the modeling and analysis of dependable and secure systems. It examines systems and applications having complex distributed or networked architectures in such fields as: Nuclear energy Ground transportation systems Air traffic control Healthcare and medicine Communications System reliability engineering is a multidisciplinary field that uses computational methods for estimating or predicting the reliability aspects of a system and analyzing failure data obtained from real-world projects. System security is a related field that ensures that even a reliable system is secure against accidental or deliberate intrusions and is free of vulnerabilities. This book covers tools and techniques, cutting-edge research topics, and methodologies in the areas of system reliability and security. It examines prediction models and methods as well as how to secure a system as it is being developed.