Proceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Very Large Data Bases held in Toronto, Canada on August 31 - September 3 2004. Organized by the VLDB Endowment, VLDB is the premier international conference on database technology.

"Addresses the evolution of database management, technologies and applications along with the progress and endeavors of new research areas."--P. xiii.

This volume presents the proceedings of ECSCW’09, the 11th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Each conference offers an occasion to critically review our research field, which has been multidisciplinary and committed to high scientific standards, both theoretical and methodological, from its beginning. These proceedings represent discussions and contributions to ongoing challenges. One challenge comes from emerging new technologies connected to ‘social computing’, gaming, as well as applications supporting citizen participation in their communities. As boundaries between home and work erode with the increased movement of work into home environments, and new applications further blur the once separate conceptions of work and leisure, our intellectual community faces challenges in the ways we think about and study work. Other challenges result from transformations of the world of work itself and the role of IT in these. They have been taken up in in-depth studies of design practice, software development, and manufacturing, as well as in the growing body of research on health care contexts and applications. Finally, there is the question of what is the European perspective in our community and whether it is worthwhile to anchor our research more firmly in such a perspective. Of high relevance to our field is the strong grounding of technology development in an understanding of human activity. The nineteen full papers, four short papers and one discussion paper selected for this conference deal with and reflect on some of these challenges, thus representing the lively debate currently ongoing in our field of research.

This book reveals how advances in computer science and human-computer interaction impact Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) environments. The underlying theme of the contributions is the social affordances of physical objects. The collaborative situations illustrated in the book are not necessarily learning situation in a school sense. In summary, this book illustrates a turn in the field of CSCL and emphasizes an important message for a generation of CSCL users.

People rely on implicit interaction in their everyday interactions with one another to exchange queries, offers, responses, and feedback without explicit communication. A look with the eyes, a wave of the hand, the lift of the door handle—small moves can do a lot to enable joint action with elegance and economy. This work puts forward a theory that these implicit patterns of interaction with one another drive our expectations of how we should interact with devices. I introduce the Implicit Interaction Framework as a tool to map out interaction trajectories, and we use these trajectories to better understand the interactions transpiring around us. By analyzing everyday implicit interactions for patterns and tactics, designers of interactive devices can better understand how to design interactions that work or to remedy interactions that fail. This book looks at the “smart,” “automatic,” and “interactive” devices that increasingly permeate our everyday lives—doors, switches, whiteboards—and provides a close reading of how we interact with them. These vignettes add to the growing body of research targeted at teasing out the factors at play in our interactions. I take a look at current research, which indicates that our reactions to interactions are social, even if the entities we are interacting with are not human. These research insights are applied to allow us to refine and improve interactive devices so that they work better in the context of our day-to-day lives. Finally this book looks to the future, and outlines considerations that need to be taken into account in prototyping and validating devices that employ implicit interaction.

Interactive systems in the mobile, ubiquitous, and virtual environments are at a stage of development where designers and developers are keen to find out more about design, use and usability of these systems. Ubiquitous Computing: Design, Implementation and Usability highlights the emergent usability theories, techniques, tools and best practices in these environments. This book shows that usable and useful systems are able to be achieved in ways that will improve usability to enhance user experiences. Research on the usability issues for young children, teenagers, adults, and the elderly is presented, with different techniques for the mobile, ubiquitous, and virtual environments.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of five international workshops held in conjunction with PAKDD 2011 in Shenzhen, China, in May 2011: the International Workshop on Behavior Informatics (BI 2011), the Workshop on Quality Issues, Measures of Interestingness and Evaluation of Data Mining Models (QIMIE 2011), the Workshop on Biologically Inspired Techniques for Data Mining (BDM 2011), the Workshop on Advances and Issues in Traditional Chinese Medicine Clinical Data Mining (AI-TCM 2011), and the Second Workshop on Data Mining for Healthcare Management (DMGHM 2011). The book also includes papers from the First PAKDD Doctoral Symposium on Data Mining (DSDM 2011). The 42 papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics discussing emerging techniques in the field of knowledge discovery in databases and their application domains extending to previously unexplored areas such as data mining based on optimization techniques from biological behavior of animals and applications in Traditional Chinese Medicine clinical research and health care management.

"This book is a comprehensive and in-depth reference to the most recent developments in the field covering theoretical developments, techniques, technologies, among others"--Provided by publisher.

Work practices and organizational processes vary widely and evolve constantly. The technological infrastructure has to follow, allowing or even supporting these changes. Traditional approaches to software engineering reach their limits whenever the full spectrum of user requirements cannot be anticipated or the frequency of changes makes software reengineering cycles too clumsy to address all the needs of a specific field of application. Moreover, the increasing importance of ‘infrastructural’ aspects, particularly the mutual dependencies between technologies, usages, and domain competencies, calls for a differentiation of roles beyond the classical user–designer dichotomy. End user development (EUD) addresses these issues by offering lightweight, use-time support which allows users to configure, adapt, and evolve their software by themselves. EUD is understood as a set of methods, techniques, and tools that allow users of software systems who are acting as non-professional software developers to 1 create, modify, or extend a software artifact. While programming activities by non-professional actors are an essential focus, EUD also investigates related activities such as collective understanding and sense-making of use problems and solutions, the interaction among end users with regard to the introduction and diffusion of new configurations, or delegation patterns that may also partly involve professional designers.