Learn all about the major trends and future advancements in ICT! ICT Futures provides an insightful introduction to the major technology trends in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), and to the economic, commercial and societal environment which is shaping them. The experienced author-team, consisting of experts from both industry and academia, addresses: The interaction between people and technology - how ICT affects every day social practices; the rise of social computing; how the way we interact with information and the devices we use are changing; and how trust can be assured over the Internet. The underlying ICT infrastructure - the semantic web and the semantic intranet; the real-time service-oriented infrastructure; the future optical network; self-managing networks and agents; P2P technologies; pervasiveness; mobility and wireless technology; and how all this infrastructure can be made secure. ICT technology and how it is affecting industries as diverse as health, finance, retail and law. The book covers a vast wealth of material, with a strong focus upon the impending changes to the way ICT operates.This reference is a valuable tool for people in managerial roles, CIOs, CTOs, business and technology strategists, and students undertaking technology MBAs, or technology modules in general MBAs. Professionals working in ICT will also find this book valuable.

This Festschrift, Unimagined Futures – ICT Opportunities and Challenges, is the first Festschrift in the IFIP AICT series. It examines key challenges facing the ICT community today. While addressing the contemporary challenges, the book provides the opportunity to look back to help understand the contemporary scene and identify appropriate future responses to them. Experts in different areas of the ICT scene have contributed to this IFIP 60th anniversary book, which will be a key input to the ICT community worldwide on setting policy priorities and agendas for the coming decade. In addition, a number of contributions look specifically at the role of professionals and of national, regional, and global organizations in disseminating the benefits of ICT to humanity worldwide.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IFIP WG 8.2 Working Conference "Researching the Future", Future IS 2011, held in Turku, Finland, in June 2011. The 17 revised full papers presented together with 4 panels and workshops were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized into 6 topical sections: how the future and the past are connected and inter-related; critical view of the future; technological futures; the future of information technology and work-related practices in health care; the future of industrial and institutional practices and outcomes through information technology; and the future of critical realism in IS research.

This book is intended to help explore the field of smart sustainable cities in its complexity, heterogeneity, and breadth, the many faces of a topical subject of major importance for the future that encompasses so much of modern urban life in an increasingly computerized and urbanized world. Indeed, sustainable urban development is currently at the center of debate in light of several ICT visions becoming achievable and deployable computing paradigms, and shaping the way cities will evolve in the future and thus tackle complex challenges. This book integrates computer science, data science, complexity science, sustainability science, system thinking, and urban planning and design. As such, it contains innovative computer–based and data–analytic research on smart sustainable cities as complex and dynamic systems. It provides applied theoretical contributions fostering a better understanding of such systems and the synergistic relationships between the underlying physical and informational landscapes. It offers contributions pertaining to the ongoing development of computer–based and data science technologies for the processing, analysis, management, modeling, and simulation of big and context data and the associated applicability to urban systems that will advance different aspects of sustainability. This book seeks to explicitly bring together the smart city and sustainable city endeavors, and to focus on big data analytics and context-aware computing specifically. In doing so, it amalgamates the design concepts and planning principles of sustainable urban forms with the novel applications of ICT of ubiquitous computing to primarily advance sustainability. Its strength lies in combining big data and context–aware technologies and their novel applications for the sheer purpose of harnessing and leveraging the disruptive and synergetic effects of ICT on forms of city planning that are required for future forms of sustainable development. This is because the effects of such technologies reinforce one another as to their efforts for transforming urban life in a sustainable way by integrating data–centric and context–aware solutions for enhancing urban systems and facilitating coordination among urban domains. This timely and comprehensive book is aimed at a wide audience across science, academia industry, and policymaking. It provides the necessary material to inform relevant research communities of the state–of–the–art research and the latest development in the area of smart sustainable urban development, as well as a valuable reference for planners, designers, strategists, and ICT experts who are working towards the development and implementation of smart sustainable cities based on big data analytics and context–aware computing.

In this book we outline an optimistic, aspirational and unashamedly ambitious agenda for schooling. We make cautious use of the concept of ‘future proofing’ to signal the commitment of the various authors to re-thinking the purposes, content and processes of schooling with a view to ensuring that all children, from all backgrounds are prepared by their education to make a positive contribution to the futures that are ahead of them. The book focuses on issues relating to technology and social justice to re-examine the traditional relationship between schools and technology, between schools and diverse learners, and between schools, children and knowledge. Drawing from examples from around the world, the book explores practical ways that diverse schools have worked to celebrate diverse understandings of what it means to be a learner, a citizen, a worker in these changed and changing times and the ways different technologies can support this agenda.

This edition of the Global Education Monitoring Report (GEM Report) is the first in a series that will assess the progress of education under the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).