This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th IFIP TC 9 International Conference on Human Choice and Computers, HCC12 2016, held in Salford, UK, in September 2016. The 26 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 34 submissions. The papers deal with the constantly evolving intimate relationship between humans and technology. They focus on three main themes: ethics, communications, and futures.

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 considers issues of social and ecological significance through a masculinities lens. Earth – our home for aeons – is reeling. The atmosphere is heating up, causing reefs to bleach, fisheries to collapse, regions to flood and dry, vast tracts to burn, the polar ice caps to melt, ancient glaciers to retreat, biodiversity to decline exacerbated by the sixth great extinction, and more. Meanwhile, social and economic disparities are widening. Pandemics are cauterising glocal communities and altering our social mores. Nationalism is feeding divisiveness and hate, especially through men’s violence. Politically extreme individuals and groups are exalting freedom while scapegoating the marginalised. Such are the symptoms of an emerging (m)Anthropocene. This anthology contends with these alarming trends, pointing our attention towards their gendered origins. Building on our monograph Ecological Masculinities: Theoretical Foundations and Practical Guidance (2018), this collection of essays is framed as a dinner party conversation grouped into six discursive themes. Their views reflect a growing community of practice, whose combined efforts capture the most recent perspectives on masculine ecologisation. Together, they aim to help create a more caring world for all, moving the ecological masculinities conversation forward as it becomes an established, international, and pluralised field of study.

The book, presenting the proceedings of the 2018 Future Technologies Conference (FTC 2018), is a remarkable collection of chapters covering a wide range of topics, including, but not limited to computing, electronics, artificial intelligence, robotics, security and communications and their real-world applications. The conference attracted a total of 503 submissions from pioneering researchers, scientists, industrial engineers, and students from all over the world. After a double-blind peer review process, 173 submissions (including 6 poster papers) have been selected to be included in these proceedings. FTC 2018 successfully brought together technology geniuses in one venue to not only present breakthrough research in future technologies but to also promote practicality and applications and an intra- and inter-field exchange of ideas. In the future, computing technologies will play a very important role in the convergence of computing, communication, and all other computational sciences and applications. And as a result it will also influence the future of science, engineering, industry, business, law, politics, culture, and medicine. Providing state-of-the-art intelligent methods and techniques for solving real-world problems, as well as a vision of the future research, this book is a valuable resource for all those interested in this area.

This book questions the nature of the business and social information systems so ubiquitous in contemporary life. Linking positivism, individualism, and market-fundamentalist economics at the root of these systems, it critiques the philosophical ground of this triumvirate as fundamentally against nature. Connecting counter-philosophies of the subject as a natural part of existence, with more collectivist and ecological economics, it presents a historical critique of the development of the academic field of information systems and offers a complex view of the nature of Nature through which we might reshape our approach to technology and to our economies to overcome the existential threat of climate change. As such, it will appeal to philosophers, social theorists, and scholars of science and technology studies with interests in the environment and ecology, as well as those working in the field of information systems.

Modern day and technology-rich environments require a reconceptualization of how the nature of technology influences urban areas. Rethinking the way we apply these technologies will not only alter the way people communicate and interact, but it will also alter how individuals learn and explore the world around them. Ambient Urbanities as the Intersection Between the IoT and the IoP in Smart Cities offers insights about the ambient in 21st century smart cities, learning cities, responsive cities, and future cities, and highlights the importance of people as critical to the urban fabric of smart cities that are increasingly embedded with pervasive and often invisible technologies. The book, based on an urban research study, explores urbanity from multiple perspectives ranging from the cultural to the geographic. While highlighting topics including digital literacies, smarter governance, and information architectures, this book is ideally designed for students, educators, researchers, the business community, city government staff and officials, urban practitioners, and those concerned with contemporary and emerging complex urban challenges and opportunities.

The creation, accumulation, and use of copious amounts of data are driving rapid change across a wide variety of industries and academic disciplines. This ‘Big Data’ phenomenon is the result of recent developments in computational technology and improved data gathering techniques that have led to substantial innovation in the collection, storage, management, and analysis of data. Real Estate Analysis in the Information Age: Techniques for Big Data and Statistical Modeling focuses on the real estate discipline, guiding researchers and practitioners alike on the use of data-centric methods and analysis from applied and theoretical perspectives. In it, the authors detail the integration of Big Data into conventional real estate research and analysis. The book is process-oriented, not only describing Big Data and associated methods, but also showing the reader how to use these methods through case studies supported by supplemental online material. The running theme is the construction of efficient, transparent, and reproducible research through the systematic organization and application of data, both traditional and 'big'. The final chapters investigate legal issues, particularly related to those data that are publicly available, and conclude by speculating on the future of Big Data in real estate.