Peter Forbrig Books

 This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on the Design, Specification, and Verification of Interactive Systems, DSV-IS 2002, held in Rostock, Germany in June 2002. The 19 revised full papers presented have gone through two rounds of reviewing, selection, and improvement. All aspects of the design, specification, and verification of interactive systems from the human-computer interaction point of view are addressed. Particular emphasis is given to models and their role in supporting the design and development of interactive systems and user interfaces for ubiquitous computing.

The BIR (Business Informatics Research) conference series began 10 years ago in Rostock, initiated by researchers from Swedish and German universities. Its aim was to establish a global forum for collaboration and idea exchange among business informatics researchers, both senior and junior. Over the years, BIR has evolved into a series of international conferences, primarily held in the Baltic Sea region, including Norway and Iceland. A steering committee maintains the high quality of the proceedings. This year, we are excited to have a renowned international editor publishing selected conference papers. Interest in the conference has grown, with 53 contributions submitted this year, leading to the acceptance of 14 long papers and 4 short papers, alongside additional invited presentations. The selection process was conducted by an International Program Committee, resulting in a collection of engaging papers that tackle significant topics such as knowledge management, ontologies, workflow specifications, databases, and OLAP. The conference commenced with a keynote address by Dr. Klaus Brunnstein from the University of Hamburg, who presented on "The Information Society on the Way to Web 3.0: Perspectives, Opportunities and Risks," a topic that poses challenges for everyone involved.

The IFIP World Computer Congress (WCC) is one of the most important conferences in the area of computer science at the worldwide level and it has a federated structure, which takes into account the rapidly growing and expanding interests in this area. Informatics is rapidly changing and becoming more and more connected to a number of human and social science disciplines. Human–computer interaction is now a mature and still dynamically evolving part of this area, which is represented in IFIP by the Technical Committee 13 on HCI. In this WCC edition it was interesting and useful to have again a Symposium on Human–Computer Interaction in order to p- sent and discuss a number of contributions in this field. There has been increasing awareness among designers of interactive systems of the importance of designing for usability, but we are still far from having products that are really usable, and usability can mean different things depending on the app- cation domain. We are all aware that too many users of current technology often feel frustrated because computer systems are not compatible with their abilities and needs in existing work practices. As designers of tomorrow’s technology, we have the - sponsibility of creating computer artifacts that would permit better user experience with the various computing devices, so that users may enjoy more satisfying expe- ences with information and communications technologies.

Engineering Interactive Systems (EIS) 2008 was an international event combining the 2nd working conference on Human-Centred Software Engineering (HCSE 2008) and the 7th International Workshop on TAsk MOdels and DIAgrams (TAMODIA 2008). HCSE is a working conference that brings together researchers and practitioners - terested in strengthening the scientific foundations of user interface design and examining the relationship between software engineering and human-computer interaction and how to strengthen user-centred design as an essential part of so- ware engineering processes. As a working conference, substantial time is devoted to the open and lively discussion of papers. TAMODIA is an international workshop on models, such as task models and visual representations in Human-Computer Interaction (one of the most widely used notations in this area, ConcurTaskTrees, was developed in the town that hosted this year’s event). It focuses on notations used to describe user tasks ranging from textual and graphical forms to interactive, multimodal and multimedia tools.

The book „Introduction to Programming by Abstract Data Types“ addresses first year computer science students and readers interested in the basic concepts of programming. It is a reliable guide from analysing and specifying problems to implemented software. A systematic way of writing algorithms is trained and a seamless transition to modern principles like data encapsulation and object-oriented programming is shown. The CD-ROM comes with a lot of source code examples and videos showing how tools like VPascal, JBuilder, Delphi, Hope and Haskell environment can be used to understand the principles of programs and specifications. Beside the free systems VPascal (similar to Turbo Pascal), JBuilder University Edition, Hope and Haskell environment there is a Delphi trial version for 60 days available on the CD-ROM. Some exercises with solutions and a glossary are available within the computer based training tool To/ol as well.