Humanitarian services seek to promote welfare to save lives, maintain human dignity, alleviate suffering, strengthen preparedness, and provide material and logistical assistance in response to humanitarian crises. They are thus different from development aids that address underlying socioeconomic factors and provides support for the social, economic and political developments of developing nations. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are becoming the backbone technologies for providing quality and efficient services and are playing an increasingly important and sophisticated role in humanitarian-service activities. Many ICT-based solutions exist such as tools to support the work of humanitarian organizations, mobile applications and solutions to provide health services, open source web portals for disaster management systems, and mobile and autonomous devices to provide assistance.

This book describes the stage-by-stage creation and development, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, of the remarkable global communications technologies that have profoundly transformed the way that people live and work.

This book explains how intelligence can be introduced into digital telephone networks. Beginning by outlining the basic principles of Intelligent Networks (IN), it tracks the application of the IN principle of separation of the service logic for advanced telephony services from the underlying call control infrastructures. The book explains how large public networks are updated to incorporate IN principles for advanced telephony services. This is illustrated using many practical examples which are set against a background of following the ETSI standards within the overall ITU-T framework of recommendations. This book is targeted at postgraduate telecommunications students, or engineers requiring a concise and practical introduction to IN.

In the Spring of 1996, hundreds of international leaders in business, law, government, and education gathered at Harvard University to discuss the growing and future impact of the Internet: one of the most potent technological innovations of this century. This volume, which includes the writings, discussion transcripts, and computer demonstrations from this ground-breaking forum, provides an expert assessment of the impact of this rapidly changing technology on business, government, media, and education for the next decade and into the new millennium.

CEOs and leaders of Microsoft, Apple Computer, Sun Microsystems, and Digital Equipment Corporation join dozens of business leaders in providing both first-hand accounts of current revolutionary changes in the computer industry, as well as their attending influence on the future of the organization, its workers, its customer relations, and the creation and ownership of products themselves. While these pieces serve as an excellent source for understanding today's hottest Internet technologies, they also explore the important issues regarding precisely what is at stake for a society with greater and growing ties to cyberspace.

Topics in this timely collection include privacy and security, property rights, censorship, telecommunications regulation, and the global impact of emerging Internet technologies.

After a half-century of glacial creep, television technology has begun to change at the same dizzying pace as computer software. What this will mean--for television, for computers, and for the popular culture where these video media reign supreme--is the subject of this timely book. A noted communications economist, Bruce Owen supplies the essential background: a grasp of the economic history of the television industry and of the effects of technology and government regulation on its organization. He also explores recent developments associated with the growth of the Internet. With this history as a basis, his book allows readers to peer into the future--at the likely effects of television and the Internet on each other, for instance, and at the possibility of a convergence of the TV set, computer, and telephone.

The digital world that Owen shows us is one in which communication titans jockey to survive what Joseph Schumpeter called the "gales of creative destruction." While the rest of us simply struggle to follow the new moves, believing that technology will settle the outcome, Owen warns us that this is a game in which Washington regulators and media hyperbole figure as broadly as innovation and investment. His book explains the game as one involving interactions among all the players, including consumers and advertisers, each with a particular goal. And he discusses the economic principles that govern this game and that can serve as powerful predictive tools.

This report examines the portfolio of tools funded by the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor that help support Internet freedom and assesses the impact of these tools in promoting U.S. interests (such as freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and the free flow of information) without enabling criminal activity.

Broadband networks, such as asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), frame relay, and leased lines, allow us to easily access multimedia services (data, voice, and video) in one package. Exploring why broadband networks are important in modern-day telecommunications, Introduction to Broadband Communication Systems covers the concepts and components of both standard and emerging broadband communication network systems.

The aim of this book is to give a clear and concise exposition of the principles and practice of satellite communications by describing the development of communications-satellite services. It will be useful both to engineers who have worked in other fields of telecommunication and to students.

Ionospheric Radio replaces an earlier publication Ionospheric Propogation and is aimed at professional scientists, engineers, and students who need an intermediate-level reference and/or text. Students of aeronomy and radio wave propogation are introduced to basic wave theory in absorbing, anisotropic and dispersive media, and to the physics of production, loss and movement of plasma in the ionosphere in the presence of the geomagnetic field. Various radio techniques are described, and applications to the interpretation of ionospheric structures and dynamics are presented. The application of ionospheric data to radio communications problems includes the use of numerical and physical models and prediction techniques, and methods for calculating signal strengths are presented. Topics include Earth-space propagation, ionospheric modification, ionospheric disturbances, propagation by scattering from plasma irregularities, topside sounding, and propagation on frequencies from the extremely low to the super high. Reference lists are extensive and a section of questions tests the reader's understanding of the material.

Smart City and sensing platforms are considered some of the most significant topics in the Internet of Things (IoT). Sensors are at the heart of the IoT, and their development is a key issue if such concepts are to achieve their full potential.

Iris recognition technologies for identity management are already deployed globally in several large-scale nationwide biometric projects and are currently entering the mobile market. More recently, periocular recognition has been employed to augment the biometric performance of the iris in unconstrained environments where only the ocular region is present in the image.

ISDN presents a new challenge for educators and trainers. This book provides an introduction to the technology for educators interested firstly in whether to use it and secondly in how to use it. The first three chapters discuss practical, educational and strategic issues related to these two questions. The following ten chapters provide case studies of education and training uses of ISDN technologies in Europe, the US and Australia. These involve videoconferencing, audiographics, desktop conferencing and image banks. The book concludes with a large glossary of explanatory material.