The mainstream framework of computer-interaction research of cognitive psychology has come under increasing criticism lately because of the gap between research results and practical design. According to Kuutti [8], the main criticism is that traditional cognitive psychology of design is not able to penetrate the human side of the interface. To overcome these limitations, an alternative approac...

The brain is considered as a complex, physical, and open system that exhibits spatiotemporal behavior at various time and length scales. A necessary condition for this pattern forming character of the brain is a nonlinear dynamics and a spatial interconnection of its elements, the neurons. The functional behavior of the brain is encoded in these spatiotemporal structures and can, at least partl...

Email is the most common collaborative tool in use today. Although originally designed as an asynchronous communication tool, it is being used increasingly for information management, coordination and collaboration tasks. For effective collaborative work, email must be designed that meets users’ needs and their experience. The traditional approach to designing interfaces has been increasingly c...

Optical activities such as circular dichroism (CD) and optical rotatory dispersion (ORD) are manifested by almost all natural products. However, the CD is an extremely weak effect so that time-resolved CD spectroscopy has been found to be experimentally difficult and even impossible for vibrational CD with current technology. Here, we show that the weak-signal and nonzero background problems ca...

The purpose of this study was to describe how four teachers in four different cities in Missouri implemented a constructivist-based learning environment (CBLE) that included an innovation cluster that paired an emerging online technology with a unit design framework. The motivating question for the study originated from prior research on teacher reform efforts including the adoption of technolo...

The ability to identify the behavior of people in a home is at the core of Smart Home functionality. Such environments are equipped with sensors that unobtrusively capture information about the occupants. Reasoning mechanisms transform the technical, frequently noisy data of sensors into meaningful interpretations of occupant activities. Time is a natural human way to reason place at distinct t...

One of the cornerstones of any intelligent entity is the ability to understand how occurrences in the surrounding world influence its own behaviour. Different states, or situations, in its environment should be taken into account when reasoning or acting. When dealing with different situations, context is the key element used to infer possible actions and information needs. The activities of th...

Recently interest has grown in applying activity theory, the leading theoretical approach in Russian psychology, to issues of human-computer interaction. This chapter analyzes why experts in the field are looking for an alternative to the currently dominant cognitive approach. The basic principles of activity theory are presented and their implications for human-computer interaction are discuss...

A set of non-linear continuum field equations are presented which describe the macroscopic dynamics of neural activity in cortex. Numerical solutions of the coupled non-linear system of partial differential equations show properties analogous to cortical evoked potentials, oscillations at the frequency of the mammalian alpha rhythm and non-stationary epileptic spikes.

An obvious goal of a Web site today is to dynamically acquire content and make it available. A portal is a group of services provided electronically, through the Web, to a set of users. The items that are typically included in the portals consist of business intelligence, content and document management, enterprise resource planning systems, data warehouses, data-management applications, search...