Here we use the term "field" to refer to a sphere of practical operation, and correspondingly the term "field informatics" describes informatics tools and methodologies that arise in the field. The components of field informatics are description, prediction, design and transfer, and the methods for those components vary widely. For example, we consider the social goal of revitalizing a mountainous area experiencing depopulation and we show how the tools and methodologies of field informatics may be used to describe such situations using remote sensing, biologging, human sensing and ethnography; the effects of various solutions can be predicted using system dynamics and multiagent simulations; the solutions can be designed using inclusive design or participatory design methods; and finally the experience gained can be transferred using case writing and outreach communication.The authors are specialists in diverse areas such as informatics, engineering, agriculture, sociology and pedagogy, and their areas of interest range from environment conservation to social education for international cooperation. They have a particular focus on the environment in southeast Asia and related topics such as large-scale traffic simulations, participatory workshops, inclusive design workshops, distance learning, and intercultural collaboration.This book targets graduate students seeking tools and methodologies for natural observation, field workers engaged in social participation, and researchers and engineers pursuing innovation. The techniques described in the book could also be exploited by government officials to form consensus and develop activities or by non-profit organizations to undertake more effective social programs.

There is increasing interaction among communities with multiple languages, thus we need services that can effectively support multilingual communication. The Language Grid is an initiative to build an infrastructure that allows end users to create composite language services for intercultural collaboration. The aim is to support communities to create customized multilingual environments by using language services to overcome local language barriers. The stakeholders of the Language Grid are the language resource providers, the language service users, and the language grid operators who coordinate the former.This book includes 18 chapters in six parts that summarize various research results and associated development activities on the Language Grid. The chapters in Part I describe the framework of the Language Grid, i.e., service-oriented collective intelligence, used to bridge providers, users and operators. Two kinds of software are introduced, the service grid server software and the Language Grid Toolbox, and code for both is available via open source licenses. Part II describes technologies for service workflows that compose atomic language services. Part III reports on research work and activities relating to sharing and using language services. Part IV describes various applications of language services as applicable to intercultural collaboration. Part V contains reports on applying the Language Grid for translation activities, including localization of industrial documents and Wikipedia articles. Finally, Part VI illustrates how the Language Grid can be connected to other service grids, such as DFKI's Heart of Gold and smart classroom services in Tsinghua University in Beijing.The book will be valuable for researchers in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, services computing and human--computer interaction, particularly those who are interested in bridging technologies and user communities. 

Product Description: Autonomous agents or multiagent systems are computational systems in which several computational agents interact or work together to perform some set of tasks. These systems may involve computational agents having common goals or distinct goals...read more

Product Description: In the light of upcoming global issues, concerning population, energy, the environment, and food, information and communication technologies are required to overcome difficulties in communication among cultures. In this context, the First International Conference on Culture and Computing, which was held in Kyoto, Japan, in February 2010, was conceived as a collection of symposia, panels, workshops, exhibitions, and guided tours intended to share issues, activities, and research results regarding culture and computing...read more

Product Description: In the era of ubiquitous computing and networking, millions of electronic devices with computing facilities in the public space are connected with each other in ad hoc ways, but are required to behave coherently. Massively multi-agent systems, MMAS can be a major design paradigm or an implementation method for ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence...read more

Product Description: On the way towards the Information Society, global networks such as the Internet, together with mobile computing, have made wide-area computing over virtual communities a reality. Digital city projects, with the goal of building platforms to support community networking, are going on worldwide...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Autonomousagents andmultiagentsystems are computationalsystems inwhich several (semi-)autonomous agents interact each other or work together to p- form some set of tasks or satisfy some set of goals. These systems may involve computationalagents that are homogeneous or heterogeneous, they may involve activities on the part of agents having common goals or distinct goals, and they may involve participation on the part of humans and intelligent agents...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This article discusses the community metaphor as the next stage of network computing. The first meeting in Kyoto was blessed with lovely weather. Though we did not organize a formal committee for this meeting, a number of social and computer scientists joined...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Community Computing Collaboration Over Global Information Networks Edited by Toru Ishida Kyoto University, Japan With the success of network software suites, groupware has rapidly acquired a high level of commercial interest. Drawing together the various origins of this technology from distributed computing, communication networks, autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, this book opens an important new avenue of research into global collaboration systems for a wide variety of people...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

This monograph coherently presents a series of research results on concurrent production systems recently contributed by the author and several co-authors.Before going into the details of concurrent production systems the performance of a single system is discussed. Based on these considerations it is explained how to estimate the efficiency of production systems programs and how to automatically determine efficient join structures. Parallel systems, including algorithms for parallel rule firings, distributed systems under distributed control, and particularly multiagent production systems and the related control issues are investigated. Finally a meta-level control architecture is applied to the construction of the multiagent system CoCo for public telecommunication network control.