This SpringerBrief provides an overview of contemporary innovative technologies and discusses their impact on our daily lives. Written from a technical perspective, and yet using language and terminology accessible to non-experts, it describes the technologies, the key players in each area, the most popular apps and services (and their pros and cons), as well as relevant usage statistics. It is targeted at a broad audience, ranging from young gadget enthusiasts to senior citizens trying to get used to new devices and associated apps. By offering a structured overview of some of the most useful technologies current available, putting them in perspective, and suggesting numerous resources for further exploration, the book gives its readers a clear path for learning new topics through apps and web-based resources, making better choices of apps and websites for frequent use, using social networks effectively, protecting their privacy and staying safe online, and enjoying the opportunities brought about by these technological advances without being completely consumed by them.

This book interrogates the global utopian vision for smart energy technologies and the new energy consumer intended to realise it. It enriches and extends the possibilities of four residential smart strategies: energy feedback, dynamic pricing, home automation and micro-generation, focusing on how they are being integrated into everyday practice.

In 1909 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, on his way back to South Africa from London, wrote his now celebrated tract Hind Swaraj, laying out his vision for the future of India and famously rejecting the technological innovations of Western civilization. Despite his protestations, Western technology endured and helped to make India one of the leading economies in our globalized world. Few would question the dominant role that technology plays in modern life, but to fully understand how India first advanced into technological modernity, argues David Arnold, we must consider the technology of the everyday. Everyday Technology is a pioneering account of how small machines and consumer goods that originated in Europe and North America became objects of everyday use in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than investigate “big” technologies such as railways and irrigation projects, Arnold examines the assimilation and appropriation of bicycles, rice mills, sewing machines, and typewriters in India, and follows their impact on the ways in which people worked and traveled, the clothes they wore, and the kind of food they ate. But the effects of these machines were not limited to the daily rituals of Indian society, and Arnold demonstrates how such small-scale technologies became integral to new ways of thinking about class, race, and gender, as well as about the politics of colonial rule and Indian nationhood. Arnold’s fascinating book offers new perspectives on the globalization of modern technologies and shows us that to truly understand what modernity became, we need to look at the everyday experiences of people in all walks of life, taking stock of how they repurposed small technologies to reinvent their world and themselves.

A field manual to the technologies that are transforming our lives Everywhere we turn, a startling new device promises to transfigure our lives. But at what cost? In this urgent and revelatory excavation of our Information Age, leading technology thinker Adam Greenfield forces us to reconsider our relationship with the networked objects, services and spaces that define us. It is time to re-evaluate the Silicon Valley consensus determining the future. We already depend on the smartphone to navigate every aspect of our existence. We’re told that innovations—from augmented-reality interfaces and virtual assistants to autonomous delivery drones and self-driving cars—will make life easier, more convenient and more productive. 3D printing promises unprecedented control over the form and distribution of matter, while the blockchain stands to revolutionize everything from the recording and exchange of value to the way we organize the mundane realities of the day to day. And, all the while, fiendishly complex algorithms are operating quietly in the background, reshaping the economy, transforming the fundamental terms of our politics and even redefining what it means to be human. Having successfully colonized everyday life, these radical technologies are now conditioning the choices available to us in the years to come. How do they work? What challenges do they present to us, as individuals and societies? Who benefits from their adoption? In answering these questions, Greenfield’s timely guide clarifies the scale and nature of the crisis we now confront —and offers ways to reclaim our stake in the future.

***BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS - FINALIST 2021*** Discover how 25 powerful technology trends are transforming 21st century businesses How will the latest technologies transform your business? Future Tech Trends in Practice will give you the knowledge of today’s most important technology trends, and how to take full advantage of them to grow your business. The book presents25 real-world technology trends along with their potential contributions to organisational success. You’ll learn how to integrate existing advancements and plan for those that are on the way. In this book, best-selling author, strategic business advisor, and respected futurist Bernard Marr explains the role of technology in providing innovative businesses solutions for companies of varying sizes and across different industries. He covers wide-ranging trends and provides an overview of how companies are using these new and emerging technologies in practice. You, too, can prepare your company for the potential and power of trending technology by examining these and other areas of innovation described in Future Tech Trends in Practice: Artificial intelligence, including machine and deep learning The Internet of Things and the rise of smart devices Self-driving cars and autonomous drones 3D printing and additive manufacturing Blockchain technology Genomics and gene editing Augmented, virtual and mixed reality When you understand the technology trends that are driving success, now and into the future, you’ll be better positioned to address and solve problems within your organisation.

A pressing challenge in the modern health care system is the gap between education and clinical practice. Emerging technologies have the potential to bridge this gap by creating the kind of team-based learning environments and clinical approaches that are increasingly necessary in the modern health care system both in the United States and around the world. To explore these technologies and their potential for improving education and practice, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine hosted a workshop in November 2017. Participants explored effective use of technologies as tools for bridging identified gaps within and between health professions education and practice in order to optimize learning, performance and access in high-, middle-, and low-income areas while ensuring the well-being of the formal and informal health workforce. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

As of January 2023, there are 5 billion users of the internet. People who use technology and want to know about it—in simple language, without jargon. Many of those nurture dreams and aspirations to be quicker, smarter and ‘be the change.’ We bring to them relatable stories of everyday users, understood by consumers and gadget freaks alike. We start with the Internet of Things (IoT) and show how consumers are using smart devices that teach them to manage their homes, travel and lifestyle through their smartphones. We see how cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) are enabling them to give feedback to IoT devices, and extracting multiple services from household products like the humble LED light, or the refrigerator, or sophisticated jet engines, or combined harvesters. As devices turn smart and AI and robots enter our workspace they run the risk of being hacked. So techies developed the Blockchain, with encrypted text that would secure digital assets. But with it arrived cryptocurrencies that threaten to bring unprecedented speculation, money laundering and cyber crimes. We also explore new opportunities in telehealth, distant education and metaworld, and the strides made in digital transformation that has, in less than five years, empowered over 2 billion people across the world, giving them access to cost effective banking, education, travel, energy, food and health services. But the same technologies are used to fight wars and disrupt supply chains that cause acute distress and worldwide recessions. The book is relevant because the changes happening now are not incremental but tectonic. This opens the door to a future that is more fascinating and threatening than fiction. Read on to find out more.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Innovative Technologies and Learning, ICITL 2022, held in Porto, Portugal, in August 2022. The 53 full papers presented together with 3 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 123 submissions. ICITL focuses on artificial intelligence in education, VR/AR/MR/XR in education, design and framework of learning systems, pedagogies to innovative technologies and learning, application and design of innovative learning.

UP-TO-DATE, TECHNICALLY ACCURATE COVERAGE OF ESSENTIAL TOPICS IN IMAGE AND VIDEO PROCESSING This is the first book to combine image and video processing with a practical MATLAB®-oriented approach in order to demonstrate the most important image and video techniques and algorithms. Utilizing minimal math, the contents are presented in a clear, objective manner, emphasizing and encouraging experimentation. The book has been organized into two parts. Part I: Image Processing begins with an overview of the field, then introduces the fundamental concepts, notation, and terminology associated with image representation and basic image processing operations. Next, it discusses MATLAB® and its Image Processing Toolbox with the start of a series of chapters with hands-on activities and step-by-step tutorials. These chapters cover image acquisition and digitization; arithmetic, logic, and geometric operations; point-based, histogram-based, and neighborhood-based image enhancement techniques; the Fourier Transform and relevant frequency-domain image filtering techniques; image restoration; mathematical morphology; edge detection techniques; image segmentation; image compression and coding; and feature extraction and representation. Part II: Video Processing presents the main concepts and terminology associated with analog video signals and systems, as well as digital video formats and standards. It then describes the technically involved problem of standards conversion, discusses motion estimation and compensation techniques, shows how video sequences can be filtered, and concludes with an example of a solution to object detection and tracking in video sequences using MATLAB®. Extra features of this book include: More than 30 MATLAB® tutorials, which consist of step-by-step guides toexploring image and video processing techniques using MATLAB® Chapters supported by figures, examples, illustrative problems, and exercises Useful websites and an extensive list of bibliographical references This accessible text is ideal for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in digital image and video processing courses, as well as for engineers, researchers, software developers, practitioners, and anyone who wishes to learn about these increasingly popular topics on their own.

A how-to-guide to get others in your organization to accept new technologies, processes, regulations, management, etc.