Frontiers of Humancentered Computing Online Communities And Virtual Environments Frontiers of Humancentered Computing Online Communities And Virtual Environments

Inspired by the 'technologies of the self' theorized by Michel Foucault in the early 1980s, this volume investigates how contemporary individuals fashion their identity/identities using digital technologies such as ambient intelligent devices, social networking platforms and online communities (Facebook, CouchSurfing and craigslist), online gaming (SilkRoad Online, Oblivion and World of Warcraft), podcasts, etc.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference On Smart Homes and and Health Telematics, ICOST 2008, held in Ames, IA, USA, in June/July 2008.

The 24 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 54 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on assistive technology to improve quality of life for older adults and their caregivers; context awareness/autonomous computing; devices, systems and algorithms for vision/hearing/cognitive/communication impairments; home health monitoring and intervention; human-machine interface and ambient intelligence; modeling of physical and conceptual information in intelligent environments; real world deployments and experiences in smart homes, hospitals, and living communities; and social/privacy/security issues.

The 191 papers are organized in topical sections on computational statistics, social networking and computing, evolutionary computing and applications, information education and application, internet and web computing, scientific and engineering computing, system simulation computing, bio-inspired and DNA computing, internet and Web computing, multimedia networking and computing, parallel and distributed computing.