Human-Computer Interaction Books

Published at a time of waning euphoria about the dotcom boom, this hefty tome offers new perspectives on the importance of knowledge assets and intellectual capital for unleashing business model innovation.

The 25 chapters are drawn from 34 contributors in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Latin America; the compiled material is divided into four sections: KM frameworks, knowledge work, knowledge assets valuation, and organizational aspects of business model innovation. The writing styles are varied, and differing perspectives are offered at the cutting edge of the KM curve.

IT investments have not always been in lock-step with productivity increases, Malhotra rightly begins. For instance, ERP implementations led to an unprecedented level of information sharing across organisational functions - but straitjacketed the information flexibility of information processing for each of the locked-in functions.

And despite contributions of IT via phases like automation, streamlining of procedures, and process re-engineering, there has been little emphasis on business model innovation or rethinking the overall business, argues Malhotra.

Increasing empowerment of online customers, suppliers, partners and other intermediaries have led to a greater impact of external environments on internal logistics of a company, a trend well-exploited by Net pioneers like Amazon.com.

"It is not that traditional brick and mortar companies were not leading users of IT; however, the new Net-based companies have fundamentally redefined the value equations related to their internal value chains and supply chains," says Malhotra.

In such a hyperturbulent and discontinuous environment, he identifies shortcomings in much of the current KM thinking, whose simplistic assumptions may inadvertently make yesterday's archived best practices tomorrow's core rigidities.

"The new business model of the Information Age is marked by fundamental, not incremental, change," he argues. Current KM approaches haven't dealt adequately with the "creative abrasion and creative conflict" that are necessary for business model innovation today.

KM should embody the organisational processes that seek synergistic combination of data and information-processing capacity of information technologies on the one hand, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings on the other, Malhotra advocates.

Management strategies need to shift from command and control - to sense and respond. KM processes should be focused on doing the right thing (effectiveness), not just doing the thing right (efficiency). KM is not merely about bottling water from rivers of data, but about giving people canoes and compasses to navigate in these rivers of data. Instead of just codified best practices and enterprise portals, the emphasis should be on unlearning ineffective best practices and the continuous refinement and pursuit of better practices.

Other KM framework writers in the book also agree with some of these positions. Dealing with complexity, equivocality, uncertainty, and ambiguity in today's environment can lead to information overload and collapse of sense-making in a company.

Tools like the knowledge matrix can be used for knowledge accounting and management in a company, especially for managing fuzzy boundaries between external entities where decisions about outsourcing and alliancing need to be made (particularly in the case of global operators).

KM practices can differ according to the nature of the organization: project-based (eg. construction industry), umbrella corporations (eg. GE), virtual business communities (eg. the Linux movement on the Internet), and the multi-directional network (eg. lobbies of SMEs in Taiwan).

In terms of new approaches to knowledge work, Malhotra advocates a movement away from hi-tech hidebound KM systems to one of more creative chaos, greater social interaction, playfulness in organisational choices, and strategic planning as anticipation of surprise.

Care should be taken to ensure that IT-driven KM strategy does not become mechanistic and objectify and calcify knowledge into static, inert information, thus disregarding the role of tacit knowledge.

A useful way of planning for increased information flows among mobile workers is via a two-dimensional grid for different/same time/place interactions, with tools like Intranet-based email, videoconferencing, and meetings. Challenges can arise in virtual organizations which allow tele-work, due to possibility of overwork, stress, and isolation among its knowledge workers.

New kinds of `knowledge toolboxes' are called for to effectively measure human capital and organisational culture elements like trust, and to actually use these measures. Stakeholder knowledge values lie at different levels: employee (self-actualisation), customer (product adoption capability), and top management (cohesiveness, motivation).

A very interesting chapter offers an example of assessing knowledge capital at the national economic level, while planning for growth and performance for the entire country.

Going beyond measures of GDP, a joint Swedish-Israeli study assessed Israel's intellectual assets in 1997 in terms of financial capital (productivity, exports), market capital (diffusion of new products, participation in international events, openness to different cultures, language skills), process capital (computerization and communications infrastructure, Internet usage, newspaper circulation, student-teacher ratio, innovation, top management international experience, entrepreneurship, VC funds, immigration), human capital (equal employment opportunities, percentage of book distribution, health rates), and renewal and development capital (civilian R&D expenditures, scientific publications, patents, startups).

Another chapter extends such valuation considerations to public-private partnerships, involving academia, industry and government, which are becoming increasingly necessary as no organization or country can on its own generate all the knowledge it may need.

Priorities, timelines, domains and financial expectations for each sector vary, and these in turn influence the nature of knowledge assets generated by a country and their monetary attachments, eg. financing of new research for the industry or for citizens at large.

At the KM tool level, researchers and entrepreneurs are racing to create the next generation of effective KM applications and infrastructure, including communication, storage, gathering, dissemination, and synthesis. Ernst&Young predicts that KM has the potential to exceed ERP as an application opportunity.

CKOs play a key role in organizations, in managing corporate knowledge capital and championing knowledge-centric cultures; they require a blend of technical, human and financial skills.

In sum, this is a comprehensive collection of case studies and analysis at the cutting edge of KM practice. The diverse range of material makes for an interesting and informative for advanced KM professionals.

On reading Downey's book, I was hard-pressed to tell exactly what kind of audience _The Machine In Me_ was aiming for. Too technical for most anthropologists and too loaded with anthropological jargon for most technology types, _The Machine In Me_ seems to fit only the narrow field of anthropological technology studies, thus depriving related audiences (general cultural anthropologists and techies) of its many interesting insights. Downey's examination of how a class of engineering students struggled, interacted, and in some ways became part of the CAD/CAM software with which they worked was fascinating. His success in communicating his sometimes complex observations about the social dynamics of technological fields and the nature of the students' relationships with the software, however, are obscured by unnecessarily complex and roundabout prose. Downey is left talking about "transcribing human agency into technology" without ever employing the clearly appropriate term "cyborg." In fact, Downey's book is unmistakably a work in the burgeoning field of cyborg anthropology, yet the book avoids all mention of the term. The end result, I think, is a book without a clearly defined audience, one that refuses to position itself inside a discipline and therefore is likely to be passed over by those who would benefit most from it.

Often people think of cyberspace in solely technological terms. This book attempts to look at the bigger picture of how it effects society. A good and thought provoking read. I would say that it is something that should be read to better understand the pervasive effect of what we call cyberspace today.

This book might be good for someone without health care or hospital experience, but after I looked through it and read its intended use, I realized that my 7 years of health care experience were probably much better than what the CDs could provide. I didn't even open the CDs.

It�s hard to predict the future, especially when it comes to technology. Consider the prognosticators of the early 20th century who forecast personal space travel, the end of disease, and other wonders; yet largely missed the invention of computers. Consequently, Clabby�s vision for the next generation internet should be read with equal doses of skepticism and optimism.

The premise is simple but intriguing: How will current technology trends shape the evolution of the internet? Clabby�s answer is the Sensory Virtual Internet. SVI is an environment where keyboard interface with computers has been replaced by voice recognition, coupled with the ability of users to receive both tactile and scent stimuli as well. SVI is driven by advances in these particular technologies, as well as infrastructure development � advances in graphics, solution of last-mile problems, and back-end systems.

The subtitle of the book is �Collaboration, communication, and commerce in the 21st century�. One of the main drawbacks of the book is that not enough attention is given to embellishing his vision of the SVI. Rather, the discussion of individual components � immersive video, body suits, and so on � is neither very original nor very detailed. So, while Clabby talks about revolutionizing e-learning or spatially dispersed teams, the discussion of how this will happen is very superficial.

Instead, Clabby spends much of his time describing how the core technologies needed for the SVI are advancing. As a result, much of the book is spent describing tech trends as they relate to AI, broadband penetration, network and server capabilities, and so on. I expect that Clabby�s purpose is to convince the reader that these technologies needed for the SVI are not pie-in-the-sky. Unfortunately, the book is short on facts and figures, and much of these trends have been better described elsewhere. Clabby also has a tendency to pull occasional material from company websites to illustrate these trends. I checked a number of these at random, and a significant number have disappeared (e.g., virtualcharacters.com or snortal.com). Start-ups come and go, but this book has just been published, and many of the exemplars of tomorrow�s technology are already defunct � not an encouraging sign.

Two other issues are a cause for concern. First, Clabby focuses almost entirely on computers as the conduit to the internet. There are projections that non-PC devices will soon outnumber PCs, as the success of Pocket PCs and other handheld devices continues to grow. I have internet access on my iPAQ, and new cell phones offer similar capabilities. Tablet computers also lurk in the near-term future. I was hoping that Clabby would have discussed the implications of these type of appliance for the SVI, and vice versa.

The second limitation is his US-centric focus. There are many developments outside North America which are salient to the future of the internet. As one example, consider China. At one extreme, metropolitan Hong Kong has a residential broadband penetration rate well above that of the US. Concurrently, mainland China has surpassed Europe as the #2 market worldwide for residential internet users. In contrast to Hong Kong, these users typically rely on much slower connectivity and older infrastructure. As the geographic scope of the web expands, so will the variance of hardware and software profiles. What are the implications of this for broad SVI adoption? Separately, internet cafes and kiosks are springing up in many Third World nations. The pool of potential users would change substantially if literacy and keyboarding skills were no longer needed to access the web. Again, however, this interesting question is not addressed.

So, how realistic is Clabby�s vision of the future? Ultimately, the question depends on the ability of these technologies to improve our lives. SVI could be the next big thing, or simply a passing fad � does anyone remember the Three Stooges episodes in 3D, or the movies that were shown using �Smell-O-Rama�?

If the publisher had used softer paper, there would be a real use for this book

I got both books as a gift when a relative met the author and he suggested that they would make a good birthday present for me (some objective referral).

Both books are horrible, but this one is by far the worst.

I might just cut the spine and cover off this book and glue it to a different one. This way if my relative stops over she sees the title on my bookshelf and think it's not in the dumpster where it belongs.

I worked at one of the companies mentioned in the book and worked with or knew several of the characters personally. A co-worker actually turned me onto the book after she recognized my old company's name mentioned. I borrowed it and proceeded to catch up with what happened to these folks for the few years after Worldesign shut down.

While the few facts I can personally relate to are accurate, they do focus a great deal on emotion and bitterness and seem to take one person's accounts as gospel without balance from others. It does state many of the hidden trials of startups.

The writing style is weak. I found the plot disjoint and with too much coverage in some areas, and mostly too little development/depth in others. If I were to have read the book without personal knowledge of the people mentioned, I would have screamed for more character development.

I agree with the other reviewer that this is something you borrow from the library. It was a quick read.

Moody accurately captures the confusion, competition and corruption of the VRD circle -- as a VRD inventor myself I found the comments about Rutkowski as corrupt accurate -- was a bit surprised that he missed a few characters -- the MIT circle in particular. It provides an excellent lesson in Shakespearean intrigue and corporate politics.

This book is not badly written - I wouldn't say it's well written by any means but it's not bad. The thing that really galls one about the book are the characters - and unfortunately they're not fictitious. I hit rock bottom with the cast when I read about one "dreamer" who when presented with an opportunity to contribute a technological innovation to oceanographic research responded with the gushing realization that he could "make millions." Not that he might contribute something to humanity - but he might "make millions." It's a little hard to picture people primarily driven by a desire for money as "dreamers." Maybe the book should have been subtitled "The Digital Greedbags who are Hyping VR to Death."

If the point of the book is to lampoon the crass nature of the people in Seattle working on VR, it succeeds admirably. Somehow, however, I don't think that was intended to be the point. Read it only if you have a strong stomach for brainless greed, hype, and outright BS.

As with other Taschen books I've seen, this book is more high style photo essay on the rise of the computer age than a hard core "history". When viewed as a photo essay or cultural documentary of a particular subject (computers, in this case), it is very successful...and a bargain. Most other computer history books are mainly text and often lack photographs of early systems, particularly the early mainframes and minis. This book is packed with lavish photos well organized by computer type (mainframes, minicomputers, micros, etc.) While errors are unacceptable in any book, I feel the other negative reviews of this book are way too harsh, and probably result more from expectations being incorrectly set by the book's title. For a highly detailed history of the subject, readers should look elsewhere. But for a beautiful and rare look at the early systems, this book will be a welcome addition to your library. Or, have the best of both worlds....get a thorough history book for the details and facts, and this book to see what things looked like!

The book is easy to read. It has great illustrations. It is not an in-depth reading. If you want more information, you can look at Ceruzzi's (without illustrations), or, even better, Augarten's book. Augarten has done a great research effort. His books is enjoyable, and has lots of photographs. On the other hand, he begins his history from primitive calculators.

Wurster's book has very good hardback binding, and uses high quality gloss paper inside. I would redommend it for the price.

There are so many factual errors in this book that I simply threw the book in the garbage.

I first started working on both mainframes and personal computers in the 1970s, and have worked on a wide variety of machines.

The book has a number of errors, but is a wonderful buy for those of us who grew up with computers. It generally follows the right flow of creation, but is so superficial that there are errors. Those people looking to learn about the history of computers should avoid this. However, those of you looking to take a walk down memory lane will love the book and its pictures.

If you know the real stories, the pictures bring back lots of fun memories. If you don't know the real story, get some other books, you won't understand the pictures and the text isn't good enough.

Most books on the history of computing are dry treatises without a lot of good illustrations, but this one is different. More of an art book than serious history (see the other reviews) it presents the history of computing with a wonderful collection of large color illustrations, such as fantastic close-up shots of Engelbart's original mouse from 1968, hilariously weird UNIVAC ads from the '50s, rare & hard to find screen shots of early applications, as well as images from popular culture that reflected the computing mentality of the era. There are better books for the facts, but not many in league with this one for pure style.

I've just started reading this book for a university course and though I've only finished one chapter, I have to say that the writing is so poor that I would not recommend this book to anyone. I find myself continually having to re-read sentences because they are oddly worded. The omission of serial commas and the lack of semicolons in many lists containing the word "and" merely add to the confusion. There are many HCI books out there, so save yourself a headache and find one that's well written.

I really liked this book!

If you've been using this book (1994) and you want a revised edition, then take a look at our new book (2002) "Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction", jointly authored by Jenny Preece, Yvonne Rogers and Helen Sharp, published by John Wiley & Sons.

IMO great for undergrad intro course on usability, and Human factors for CIS. Unlike many Usability books out there instead of why, it presents how and what.

This book is an apology for bad science. Design must be a serious issue, but this book handles it in an amateur manner for soft-scientists. Imagine writing down your opinions in prose and casting it as facts: now imagine these opinions being set as examinable for students who could have better spent their time watching grass grow. As the Oscars cliche goes "Half an hour of the best entertainment spread over the next four hours".

This is by far the worst book I've ever read in my college career. Throughout the entire book only two to three main examples are used. Many times the examples are not carried along through the text appropriately and the reader is referred back to previous pages with information that doesn't really help. And, I've found at least one instance where the reader is referred back to an example and then referred back yet again to a different page. Not good.

I would give this book less than one star if I could.

This book takes a logical approach to artificial intelligence and it does a good and comprehensive job. Some of the criticism that it focuses on logic is, therefore, unfounded.

Everything in this book used to be classified as artificial intelligence, but the authors have chosen to call it computational intelligence, arguing that it is the computational aspects of the subject that they want to emphasize. The book is very well written, and students and those interested in A.I. research and development will find it a helpful step to more involved studies.

The emphasis in the book is on intelligent agents, which the authors characterize in chapter one. Agents are viewed as black boxes that take in knowledge, past experiences, goals/values, and observations and output actions. They define what they call a representation and reasoning system consisting of a language to communicate to a computer, a methodology for giving meaning to this language, and a collection of procedures for computation. They also outline the three applications domains they will be developing in the book: an autonomous delivery robot, a diagnostic assistant, and an infobot.

The authors expand upon the representation and reasoning system in chapter 2 in terms that are familiar from mathematical logic and computer science. A formal language, a semantics, and a proof procedure are the three essentials of an RRS. All of these elements are discussed in great detail, and concrete examples are given for all the main concepts. Readers without any background in logic may find the reading difficult, but with some effort it could be read profitably. The authors do a good job of presenting material that is usually delegated to texts on formal computer science.

In chapter three, the authors show how representational knowledge can be used for domain representation, querying, and problem solving. This is done via an example of electrical house wiring and the PROLOG-astute reader will find the presentation very straightforward. But LISP programmers will also see its influence and the discussion on lists. An application is given in computational linguistics, namely that of definite clauses for context-free grammars.

A discussion of searching is given in chapter 4, in the context of potential partial solutions to a problem, with the hope that these will truly be real solutions for the problem at hand. Graph searching, blind search strategies, heuristic searching, and refinements of these are all discussed with great clarity. And, because of their importance in applications, dynamic programming and constraint classification problems are overviewed, albeit very briefly.

Chapter 5 turns to the topic of how to choose a representation langauge for knowledge. The authors detail the criteria for comparing different languages or logics in terms of expressiveness, worse-case complexity, and naturalness. Most important in this chapter is the discussion on qualitative versus quantitative representations.

This is followed in chapter 6 by a discussion of the user interactions to a knowledge-based system in terms of a meta-interpreter that produces knowledge acquistion, debugging, etc.

The next chapter shows how definite clause representation and reasoning systems can be extended to include the relation of equality and negation, and quantification of variables. This sets up naturally a discussion of first-order predicate calculus, but only a brief overview is given. A very short treatment of modal logic is given.

Chapter 8 considers agents that act and reason in time, with three representations given for reasoning about time. These are the STRIPS representation (developed at Stanford University), the situation calculus, and the event calculus. It is then shown how these can be used to reason and produce plans to achieve goals. Although brief, the discussion is very interesting, and the authors give good references for further reading.

The authors generalize their discussions to assumption-based reasoning in chapter 9, which up until this chapter has been restricted to reasoning from knowledge bases. Nonmonotonic reasoning is defined, along with abduction, which is a form of reasoning different from both deduction and induction, and which emphasizes hypothesis formation.

Chapter 10 considers the more realistic situation whre the agents have incomplete or uncertain knowledge. This naturally brings up a discussion of probability, which the authors define as the study of how knowledge affects belief. They distinguish between evidence and background knowledge, the latter which is stated in terms of conditional probabilities, the former characterized by what is true in the situation being studied. Belief networks are introduced as a graphical representation of conditional independence, these graphs being directed and also acyclic (the latter for reasons of causality). An algorithm for determining the posterior distribution of belief networks is given, and is based on the idea that a belief network specifies a factorization of the joint probability distribution. A brief overview of decision networks is also given.

The important topic of learning theory is overviewed in chapter 11. And, naturally, neural networks make their appearance here, although the discussion is very brief. PAC learning is also treated, as well as Bayesian learning. Unfortunately, the important field of inductive logic programming is not discussed, but some references are given.

The last chapter covers artificial purposive agents, otherwise known as robots. This is a vast subject, and only a general overview is given here, but the authors do a good job of showing how robots can be characterized within the concepts outlined in the book. Dynamical systems are used to represent the agent function for a robot. Readers familiar with the theory of dynamical systems will see the state transition function appear here in a more general context. The states of an agent at time t encode all of the information about its history. The state transition functions acts on the states and percepts, with the percepts playing the role of time in the usual dynamical system.

The appendices include a terminology list and a short introduction to PROLOG, along with a few examples of PROLOG code applied to some of the concepts in the book. Although very general, the inclusion of these examples are of further help in understanding the material in the book.

The text is cretenous. Videlicet:

- Many critical concepts have their wording arranged in a rather obscure fashions. So many things could have been explained using a far simpler description.

- Almost all of the examples given use the exact same retarded office delivery robot context.

- There are no solutions provided to any of the problems at the end of each chapter. Thus, the problems serve absolutely no functional value whatsoever as training aids because they are unable to advise when the student errs.

- As the title suggests, the text only covers the logical approach to computational intelligence using Prolog and its various flavours. There are no examples of imperative implementations using, say, a genetic algorithm. While I have heard some say that having the theory will allow you to implement in any manner, I dismiss this as nonsense. If that was the case, it would be more rational to learn the material via languages like C and C++ that most are already familiar with, and then, if necessary, implement in Prolog or some other obscure language.

- This text would be fine if it were used only in survey courses where an intimate understanding of every detail was unnecessary. Sadly, it is used in upper level university AI courses.

- There is typically but one example provided for each concept. If the example doesn't make sense, the concept won't either unless you search in other books or on the internet for other examples using the same concepts.

- This book is far too expensive for what it is worth. I would suggest picking up a copy of "AI Techniques for Game Programmers". It doesn't waste any time with Prolog or any other purely academic radical development paradigms, but remains mindful of the real world.

I was a student of Dr. Poole's ( one of the co-authors ) at the University of British Columbia and was forced to use this textbook for two semesters. It is without doubt the worst textbook on any subject in Computer Science that I have ever read. The book is extremely vague and confusing on many important subjects. The book also uses unnecessarily complex wording to describe simple concepts .. at some times it is much like reading code.

This book is really, really and I mean really slim. Taking away the introduction, general considerations etc etc there really isn't much beef left. Not step-to-step and ample enough to be a real introduction and tutorial, and too basic (and still too slim) to be of any help to the already advanced programmer. The last drop is the outrageous price. I think the author would do well to write a real, useful, detailed, tutorial-like book with opengl-es code in Java and in C, the market is quite hungry for it.

The book basically teaches a standard course on how to code 3d graphics, using OpenGL as the programming language, and the ES variant. Ideally, you have already done 3d programming, but in an environment relatively unconstrained. Like a desktop computer, that has ample screen size, memory and disk.

The problem dealt with in the book is how to code graphics effectively on something like the screen of a cellphone. Much smaller than the PC's screen. Probably still in colour, these days, at least. And with a slower CPU and less memory. Unsurprisingly, coding can seem really awkward. But one virtue is that the book forces you to be far more efficient in your use of resources for the mobile device. On the desktop, things can be very slack.

Malizia has wisely given examples in both C and Java. For the cellphone, Java has a strong presence, if only because the cellphone makers see Java as a way to stay independent of Microsoft.

This book is really disappointing. I was looking forward reading this book since there isn't much printed material on this topic. The book is written badly, does not go into depth at all and the bad layout is a shame for a springer book. With the extremely high price for such a short book (170 pages in Springer format) I can not recommend it to anyone. Hopefully there will be something better on this topic soon.