Human-Computer Interaction Books

It has been over ten years since the Internet became more than a means of sharing ideas between college professors of science. Early developers of the Internet attempted to control the emerging market for communication and information by limiting access to other providers and to limit direct access to the Internet itself. Today the Internet is a democratic free for all with few rules and little censorship. Anyone with access to the Internet desiring information or requiring communication turns first to the Internet. Most of what has been written to this point in time focuses on the technical aspects of the Internet. Most jokes deal with the computer nerd communicating with a "normal" human being. However, the momentum is shifting and significant research, business and communication now occurs using the Internet. This communication involves every aspect of human virtue and vice. "The Social Net," edited by Yair Amichai-Hamburger, is one of the first books to address the impact of the Internet on social behavior. It is necessary reading for computer professionals desiring to remain on the cutting edge of effectiveness in presenting information and enhancing communication using the Internet. It is just as important for the rest of us who just want to be aware of the impact that the Internet is having on our communities, our families and us.

This book is an interesting collection of essays on the soft elements of software engineering. Most of the essays deal with organizational and process aspects from a cross-functional perspective, and there is an emphasis on requirements and business/IT alignment in the overall theme of this collection.

Each of the five parts and 21 essays are grouped by a book structure that aligns to cross-functional cooperation from a software engineering point of view:
Part I Deconstructing
Chapter 1 -Developing and Embedding Autooperational Form Chapter 2 -On Foundational Categories in Software Development Chapter 3 -Making Use of Social Thinking: The Challenge of Bridging Activity Systems Chapter 4 -Challenging Traditions of Inquiry in Software Practice
Part II Informing
Chapter 5 -On Retrieving Skilled Practices: The Contribution of Ethnography to Software Development Chapter 6 -Representing and Modeling Collaborative Practices for Systems Development Chapter 7 -The Locales Framework: Making Social Thinking Accessible for Software Practitioners Chapter 8 -What Doesn't Fit: The "Residual Category" as Analytic Resource
Part III Grounding
Chapter 9 -On the Intertwining of Social and Technical Factors in Software Development Projects Chapter 10 -Software Practice is Social Practice Chapter 11 -"Yes-What Does That Mean?" Understanding Distributed Requirements Handling Chapter 12 -Doing Empirical Research on Software Development: Finding a Path between Understanding, Intervention, and Method Development
Part IV Organizing
Chapter 13 -Changing Work Practices in Design Chapter 14 -Information Systems Research and Information Systems Practice in a Network of Activities Chapter 15 -Reaching out for Commitments: Systems Development as Networking Chapter 16 -Participatory Organizational and Technological Innovation in Fragmented Work Environments Chapter 17 -Large-Scale Requirements Analysis as Heterogeneous Engineering
Part V Reorienting
Chapter 18 -Useware Design and Evolution: Bridging Social Thinking and Software Construction Chapter 19 -Discontinuities Chapter 20 -Localizing Self on the Internet: Designing for "Genius Loci" in a Global Context Chapter 21 -Intent, Form, and Materiality in the Design of Interaction Technology

Anyone who is concerned about business/IT alignment and software process improvement, especially readers who are working in a CMM Level 3 or above environment or in an IT or consulting organization that is a profit center will benefit from the many (if not all) of the ideas in this book. Even if some of the information is not actionable in your organization, it will cause you to view software engineering from multiple perspectives.

This is a highly recommendable book. A must for everyone interested in how human-comupter interaction is studied or conceived or debated.

Read about those topics, that are hot or ever-greens for the usability-interested.

Maybe you don't know all of those names in the title, but you will surely see why THEY've been chosen for the interviews.

The topics are presented the way they were raised with the interviewed persons - as dialogues, interviews.

This is a great way of approaching and exploring the thoughts and concepts that go across the entire field of software and internet development, and not through just one or two writers.

It's a lot of food for thought.

Is the spiritual wisdom of the ages materializing itself via the internet? Maybe so.

The world is changing rapidly today, and the internet is a driving force. The author attempts to explain the changes humanity is going though by expanding on a 1938 theory by a Jesuit priest, Teilhard de Chardin, of a of a "sphere of consciousness" enveloping the earth. In Chardin's opinion, the density of the information underlying a mass of complexity is what creates self-awareness. In Haggerty's follow-up to that thesis, he postulates that as information continues to become more dense and more widely available, a further expansion of human consciousness will follow. In the process he discusses chaos theory, the implications of ever-increasing computer power, conscious evolution, the importance of freedom (especially cognitive freedom) and the power and responsibility of every individual. Ultimately he suggests that the internet may be a stepping stone to a higher state of consciousness for all of humanity.

It's really an easy read, and I found the book to be quite fascinating and thought provoking.

UNDERSTANDING NEW MEDIA: AUGMENTED KNOWLEDGE AND CULTURE surveys an area most commonly discussed in relation to the Internet's developments, but offers much more depth than most. Here are surveys of networked environments which blend technology with organizational and philosophical issues and changes, along with considerations of computing world evolution and how it reflects profound changes in other realms. Here also are surveys of cross-cultural effects of these advancements, which delves into world nations and their reactions and changing roles to such technology. A 'must' for any college-level audience interested in the digital revolution's long-ranging impact on society as a whole.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

I purchased and read "Understanding the IBM WebFacing Tool" by Claus Weiss before attending a WebFacing seminar by Mr. Weiss at our Philadelphia PA computer users group.
Mr. Weiss is very effective and impressive in both his presentation and in his book in leading legacy programmers, like me, into the world of GUI and the Web in easy and understandable steps.
I learned much from from the book, particularly how RPG and COBOL legacy programs can be easily modernized, along with the legacy programmers who still prefer to write in those languages.
A user group associate, Joe Mariani, borrowed my WebFacing book four months ago to guide him in actually implementing the WebFacing Tool at his company. Each month, Joe explains to me how he is still actively using the book and benefiting from the code and concepts illustrated in Claus's book.

Paul H. Harkins

Thiis is a comprehensive presentation of the topics around universal access in HCI. Being the proceedings of HCII conference they contain a lot of views for everyone to find what they might be looking for.

I got the slide of this book at this address http://www.itu.dk/%7Eslauesen/UID/UID_course.pps. It was so helpful for my team to develop consistent, user friendly, (also programmer friendly) user interface. Following the guide, we have cut a lot of cost to maintain our GUI screens and support our customers to use softwares.

I would like to give this book based 5 stars.

Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-to-Speech Translation

This exceptionally readable (in English) account of the German Verbmobil project (1992-2000) is comprised of 47 contributions from the principal participants in the project. These contributions cover all aspects of this major effort in natural language processing under the headings:

- Introduction (Overview by editor) - From Speech Input to Augmented Word Lattices - Lexical and Syntactic Processing - Semantic Processing - Dialogue Translation - Dialogue Processing and Context Evaluation - Language Generation and Speech Synthesis - Data Collection and Evaluation - System Architecture and Software Integration.

The project culminated in a working prototype which allows bi-directional telephone dialogues in three discourse domains: Appointment Scheduling, Travel Planning and Remote PC Maintenance,- between German, Japanese and American-English speakers.

The work reported,

- represents the state of the art in Speaker-Independent Spontaneous Dialogue Recognition, Translation and Speech Synthesis, - provides quantitative data which illustrate the strength and weaknesses of symbolic and statistical approaches to translation in this context. - illuminates the tradeoffs in various approaches to deep linguistic analysis - illustrates the important role of acoustical and lexical data collection and processing. - gives insight into the interaction between the many modules as reflected in the detailed End-to-End evaluation of the system and its components - demonstrates the role of the underlying system and software architecture in providing both, a test-bed development environment and the basis for a near-real-time demonstration system. - reflects upon some of the management issues encountered in a project of this scope

The reported work includes a number of advances, including

- a speech controlled telephone dialogue system including speaker-language identification - integration of deep and shallow processing: results from concurrent translation threads. - systematic use of (multilingual) prosodic information at all processing stages, - Parsing, Dialog Understanding, Translation, Generation and Speech Synthesis - understanding of spontaneous speech repair - generation of dialogue summaries

The people responsible for editing this volume have raised the bar for technical writing. The result is an unusually lucid, concise and consistent exposition of work from several disciplines, generally only accessible to the specialists. Limiting the length of the individual contributions, has confined the reporting to what was accomplished in the course of the project., without compromising scientific rigor. If I have any criticism at all, it is the lack of a subject and author index and the occasional use of abbreviations not spelled out, at first use, within an article.

To those interested in speech recognition and machine translation, this is essential reading; - they'll be surprised to find it satisfying as well.

Those concerned with large-scale, distributed software development will find several new benchmarks in this project.

See also for a project overview. .

This book is essential to understand the concept of persona in cybersociety. It is based on many articles that take examples of exchanges among people on one chat or in one forum, and how these exchanges can be effective as for changing the points of view of the cybernauts, to elaborate a common interest among the participants of the site who may have come together haphazardly or out of mere chance. It also shows how arguments can be effective on others and even push some negative topics into some straits, such as racist points of view that are confronted to arguments the standard racist paticipants have little chance to get across in real society, due to the ghettoisation of ideological groups. This book also shows how one gets onto the Internet, into these forums and chats by deciding on what personae they want to have, persona that may have little to do with the real selves of the persons behind : a male becomes a female, etc. This leads to a serious discussion of crime in such an environment. A crime is the result of the non-respect of a rule set by the webmasters of the site. But it cannot be dealt with as if it were the same « crime » in society. Hence a sexual crime in such an environment has little to do with the same sexual crime in society because it is a virtual crime, a crime that has no reality, no real direct consequences. Anyone can anyway protect themselves against such « agressions » by the personae they choose (some kind of shield that keeps the anonymity of the individuals), and by always being able to log-off, get out of the site. So what is a proper punishment for such « virtual crimes » ? The question is at least extremely complex and such crimes cannot be dealt with by normal courts. So what procedures and what « courts » can exist on the Internet. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Paris Universities II and IX.