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Morgan Kaufmann

Understanding Your Users
A Practical Guide to User Requirements Methods, Tools, and Techniques
1st Edition
Kathy Baxter + 1 more
English
Today many companies are employing a user-centered design (UCD) process, but for most companies, usability begins and ends with the usability test. Although usability testing is a critical part of an effective user-centered life cycle, it is only one component of the UCD process. This book is focused on the requirements gathering stage, which often receives less attention than usability testing, but is equally as important. Understanding user requirements is critical to the development of a successful product. Understanding Your Users is an easy to read, easy to implement, how-to guide on usability in the real world. It focuses on the "user requirements gathering" stage of product development and it provides a variety of techniques, many of which may be new to usability professionals. For each technique, readers will learn how to prepare for and conduct the activity, as well as analyze and present the data —all in a practical and hands-on way. In addition, each method presented provides different information about the user and their requirements (e.g., functional requirements, information architecture, task flows). The techniques can be used together to form a complete picture of the users’ requirements or they can be used separately to address specific product questions. These techniques have helped product teams understand the value of user requirements gathering by providing insight into how users work and what they need to be successful at their tasks. Case studies from industry-leading companies demonstrate each method in action. In addition, readers are provided with the foundation to conduct any usability activity (e.g., getting buy-in from management, legal and ethical considerations, setting up your facilities, recruiting, moderating activities) and to ensure the incorporation of the results into their products.
Machine Vision
Theory, Algorithms, Practicalities
3rd Edition
E. R. Davies
English
In the last 40 years, machine vision has evolved into a mature field embracing a wide range of applications including surveillance, automated inspection, robot assembly, vehicle guidance, traffic monitoring and control, signature verification, biometric measurement, and analysis of remotely sensed images. While researchers and industry specialists continue to document their work in this area, it has become increasingly difficult for professionals and graduate students to understand the essential theory and practicalities well enough to design their own algorithms and systems. This book directly addresses this need.As in earlier editions, E.R. Davies clearly and systematically presents the basic concepts of the field in highly accessible prose and images, covering essential elements of the theory while emphasizing algorithmic and practical design constraints. In this thoroughly updated edition, he divides the material into horizontal levels of a complete machine vision system. Application case studies demonstrate specific techniques and illustrate key constraints for designing real-world machine vision systems.
Embedded Computing
A VLIW Approach to Architecture, Compilers and Tools
1st Edition
Joseph A. Fisher + 2 more
English
The fact that there are more embedded computers than general-purpose computers and that we are impacted by hundreds of them every day is no longer news. What is news is that their increasing performance requirements, complexity and capabilities demand a new approach to their design. Fisher, Faraboschi, and Young describe a new age of embedded computing design, in which the processor is central, making the approach radically distinct from contemporary practices of embedded systems design. They demonstrate why it is essential to take a computing-centric and system-design approach to the traditional elements of nonprogrammable components, peripherals, interconnects and buses. These elements must be unified in a system design with high-performance processor architectures, microarchitectures and compilers, and with the compilation tools, debuggers and simulators needed for application development. In this landmark text, the authors apply their expertise in highly interdisciplinary hardware/software development and VLIW processors to illustrate this change in embedded computing. VLIW architectures have long been a popular choice in embedded systems design, and while VLIW is a running theme throughout the book, embedded computing is the core topic. Embedded Computing examines both in a book filled with fact and opinion based on the authors many years of R&D experience.
Mobile Agents
Basic Concepts, Mobility Models, and the Tracy Toolkit
1st Edition
Peter Braun + 1 more
English
Mobile agents are software nomads that act as your personal representative, working autonomously through networks. They are able to visit network nodes directly using available computing power and are not limited by platform. This emerging field is now poised to become a cornerstone for new Web-based ubiquitous computing environments. Mobile Agents provides a practical introduction to mobile agent technology and surveys the state of the art in mobile agent research. Students and researchers can use the book as an introduction to the concepts and possibilities of this field and as an overview of ongoing research. Developers can use it to identify the capabilities of the technology to decide if mobile agents are the right solution for them. Practioners can also gain hands-on experience in programming mobile agents through exploration of the source code for a complete mobile agent environment available through the companion website.
Network Algorithmics
An Interdisciplinary Approach to Designing Fast Networked Devices
1st Edition
George Varghese
English
In designing a network device, you make dozens of decisions that affect the speed with which it will perform—sometimes for better, but sometimes for worse. Network Algorithmics provides a complete, coherent methodology for maximizing speed while meeting your other design goals. Author George Varghese begins by laying out the implementation bottlenecks that are most often encountered at four disparate levels of implementation: protocol, OS, hardware, and architecture. He then derives 15 solid principles—ranging from the commonly recognized to the groundbreaking—that are key to breaking these bottlenecks. The rest of the book is devoted to a systematic application of these principles to bottlenecks found specifically in endnodes, interconnect devices, and specialty functions such as security and measurement that can be located anywhere along the network. This immensely practical, clearly presented information will benefit anyone involved with network implementation, as well as students who have made this work their goal. FOR INSTRUCTORS: To obtain access to the solutions manual for this title simply register on our textbook website (textbooks.elsevier.... request access to the Computer Science subject area. Once approved (usually within one business day) you will be able to access all of the instructor-only materials through the "Instructor Manual" link on this book's academic web page at textbooks.elsevier.c...
Rapid Contextual Design
A How-to Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design
1st Edition
Karen Holtzblatt + 2 more
English
Is it impossible to schedule enough time to include users in your design process? Is it difficult to incorporate elaborate user-centered design techniques into your own standard design practices? Do the resources needed seem overwhelming? This handbook introduces Rapid CD, a fast-paced, adaptive form of Contextual Design. Rapid CD is a hands-on guide for anyone who needs practical guidance on how to use the Contextual Design process and adapt it to tactical projects with tight timelines and resources. Rapid Contextual Design provides detailed suggestions on structuring the project and customer interviews, conducting interviews, and running interpretation sessions. The handbook walks you step-by-step through organizing the data so you can see your key issues, along with visioning new solutions, storyboarding to work out the details, and paper prototype interviewing to iterate the design—all with as little as a two-person team with only a few weeks to spare!
Voice Interaction Design
Crafting the New Conversational Speech Systems
1st Edition
Randy Allen Harris
English
From the voice on the phone, to the voice on the computer, to the voice from the toaster, speech user interfaces are coming into the mainstream and are here to stay forever. Soundly anchored in HCI, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and social psychology, this supremely practical book is loaded with examples, how-to advice, and design templates. Drawing widely on decades of research—in lexicography, conversation analysis, computational linguistics, and social psychology—author Randy Allen Harris outlines the principles of how people use language interactively, and illustrates every aspect of design work.In the first part of the book, Harris provides a thorough conceptual basis of language in all its relevant aspects, from speech sounds to conversational principles. The second part takes you patiently through the entire process of designing an interactive speech system: from team building to user profiles, to agent design, scripting, and evaluation. This book provides interaction designers with the knowledge and strategies to craft language-based applications the way users will expect them to behave.
Understanding Digital Libraries
2nd Edition
Michael Lesk
English
This fully revised and updated second edition of Understanding Digital Libraries focuses on the challenges faced by both librarians and computer scientists in a field that has been dramatically altered by the growth of the Web. At every turn, the goal is practical: to show you how things you might need to do are already being done, or how they can be done. The first part of the book is devoted to technology and examines issues such as varying media requirements, indexing and classification, networks and distribution, and presentation. The second part of the book is concerned with the human contexts in which digital libraries function. Here you’ll find specific and useful information on usability, preservation, scientific applications, and thorny legal and economic questions.
Visualizing Quaternions
1st Edition
Steve Cunningham + 1 more
English
Introduced 160 years ago as an attempt to generalize complex numbers to higher dimensions, quaternions are now recognized as one of the most important concepts in modern computer graphics. They offer a powerful way to represent rotations and compared to rotation matrices they use less memory, compose faster, and are naturally suited for efficient interpolation of rotations. Despite this, many practitioners have avoided quaternions because of the mathematics used to understand them, hoping that some day a more intuitive description will be available.The wait is over. Andrew Hanson's new book is a fresh perspective on quaternions. The first part of the book focuses on visualizing quaternions to provide the intuition necessary to use them, and includes many illustrative examples to motivate why they are important—a beautiful introduction to those wanting to explore quaternions unencumbered by their mathematical aspects. The second part covers the all-important advanced applications, including quaternion curves, surfaces, and volumes. Finally, for those wanting the full story of the mathematics behind quaternions, there is a gentle introduction to their four-dimensional nature and to Clifford Algebras, the all-encompassing framework for vectors and quaternions.
Data Modeling Essentials
3rd Edition
Graeme Simsion + 1 more
English
Data Modeling Essentials, Third Edition, covers the basics of data modeling while focusing on developing a facility in techniques, rather than a simple familiarization with "the rules". In order to enable students to apply the basics of data modeling to real models, the book addresses the realities of developing systems in real-world situations by assessing the merits of a variety of possible solutions as well as using language and diagramming methods that represent industry practice. This revised edition has been given significantly expanded coverage and reorganized for greater reader comprehension even as it retains its distinctive hallmarks of readability and usefulness. Beginning with the basics, the book provides a thorough grounding in theory before guiding the reader through the various stages of applied data modeling and database design. Later chapters address advanced subjects, including business rules, data warehousing, enterprise-wide modeling and data management. It includes an entirely new section discussing the development of logical and physical modeling, along with new material describing a powerful technique for model verification. It also provides an excellent resource for additional lectures and exercises. This text is the ideal reference for data modelers, data architects, database designers, DBAs, and systems analysts, as well as undergraduate and graduate-level students looking for a real-world perspective.

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