The central concept of browser fingerprinting is the collection of device-specific information for identification or security purposes. This chapter provides an overview of the research conducted in the field of browser fingerprinting and presents an entry point for newcomers. Relevant literature is examined to understand the current research in the field of browser fingerprinting. Both research in the field of crafting browser fingerprints and protection against it is included. Finally, current research challenges and future research directions are presented and discussed.

In this chapter, we investigate the complex process of analyzing and understanding the factors that influence individuals’ access to and participation in digital education within the Higher Education context. While the digital transformation in Higher Education Institutions (HEI) has produced numerous benefits for both students and educators, it has also brought forth challenges, particularly for students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). A literature review was conducted, to gain insight into the specific requirements of this student demographic. This review aimed to identify the multifaceted factors that impact e-inclusion within Higher Education. Our research resulted in the identification of 24 different factors that should be considered when evaluating e-inclusion within HEI. These factors serve as essential indicators in the assessment of the accessibility and inclusivity of digital education, allowing for a more multifaceted understanding of the dynamics in the Higher Education landscape.

The paper presents the results of an experimental study, which examined the effectiveness of learning database fundamentals depending on students' educational background as an influencing factor. In addition, a students' knowledge perception and their actual knowledge were analyzed regarding their educational background. The results demonstrate that students' educational background did not have an effect on the overall learning process. We also found that the background does not have the same influence on students' self-assessment throughout the entire learning process.

The paper addresses the field of Process Optimization in Slovenian companies, and their attitude toward optimization approaches. A survey was conducted, including professionals from companies, as well as students, examining approaches to assure business process quality, its validation and optimization, containing several methods. Survey results, both in companies (24 participants) and among students (24 participants) indicate that, although a combination of methods provides the best results, modeling, KPI identification and simulation are the best indicators of process strengths and weaknesses, as well as optimization potentials. Therefore, the research was complemented with a review of 5 available modeling and simulation tools, providing evaluation and comparison. To get insight into which of the tools best supports the optimization process, a comparative analysis was conducted, identifying key differences between them, and providing suggestions for optimization enhancement in companies.

In the paper, we explore the topic of mobile user experience and we focus on native mobile applications. The goal of this paper is to research what mobile user experience is, identify important mobile patterns, and define processes and guidelines for the design and measurement of the mobile user experience and the identified mobile patterns. Based on the literature review, there are several elements or factors affecting the mobile user experience. We established a big advantage of native applications, which are designed for a specific platform, where there is more time to create a specific customer experience. The main findings of the paper showed that the mobile user experience differs from the desktop user experience, and that there are many mobile patterns, which may significantly improve or degrade the mobile user experience for various target groups.

Organizations in the publishing field accumulate large amounts of data and store it in different forms of knowledge databases. In the publishing field specifically, various multimedia content presentation is involved, requiring support for contemporary e-book standard formats (e-Pub) as well as traditional standard formats such as HTML, PDF, and others. Publishing organizations must support the same content presentation in various formats in order to meet the needs of their increasingly demanding clients. However, business (and organizational) processes in publishing in the presented case study have little IT support and almost no automation. Successful business flow and a competitive advantage for publishing organizations, especially for SMEs, requires a holistic solution for the optimization of publishing processes, including data/knowledge acquisition, data/knowledge aggregation and the creation of new knowledge based on existing data. Although partial IT solutions are available and can be used to support individual steps in the publishing process, they do not come in an out-of-the box solutions, suitable for adequate publishing processes automation and optimization. Two basic challenges regarding existing solutions available on the market are: (1) they do not provide support for automation or semi automation in the publishing processes, and (2) they are expensive and consequently not acceptable for SMEs. This paper is focused on analyzing publishing work processes and its quality aspects, addressing the automation of all possible process steps: especially the optimization of acquisition, aggregation and building of multimedia content for any device. In addition, a solution built on open source components is proposed as well, supporting the presentation of content in different published formats. Based on a case study, we present the solution's architectural design and analyze standards and technologies, providing an acceptable solution for SME's from an economical point of view, optimizing its work processes to the largest possible extent. A renewed publishing process is proposed and future research directions are also discussed.

Conceptual modelling education is often a part of any Informatics and Computer Science curricula but is also included in other study programs where conceptual modelling knowledge is needed. Conceptual modelling is well defined and numerous sources are available in existing literature. The steps to develop conceptual models are easy to learn and support is possible also via different tools, based on a theoretical background, mostly through the Peter Chen approach. In general, such an educational approach can be described as a standard conceptual modelling education. But, unfortunately, standard conceptual modeling education does not inform culturally-aware developers of conceptual models. The confidence and assurance that cross cultural issues and cultural awareness will be considered in the phase of conceptual modelling could be reached on one side by upgrading the conceptual modeling approach with a cultural point of view, as well as by introducing cultural issues into conceptual modelling education. Students need to be aware of basic cultural issues and concepts and their influence on conceptual modeling. In the long term, the mentioned content should become part of standard conceptual modeling education. This means changes in the content of curricula as well as a change in thinking by students and teachers.

For successful collaboration, global communication systems are of critical importance, especially those which are enabled by information and communication technology as partners in the process. It seems that partners do not need to know each other personally, but it is enough that they have a good technical support in computerized collaborative tools and software. This also means that collaboration (cooperation) does not depend on geographical location and can be spread all around the world. Establishing a virtual environment means establishing surroundings in which partners have to work and communicate. From a technical point of view, such an environment seems to be quite easy to organise and manage. However, difficulties can be expected in the collaboration of people, even when cooperation is based on a common business culture. In spite of belong to the same business culture, participants can belong to different language and culture groups, which can have an important influence on collaboration of all involved parties. While the language differences can be overcome with the use of English as a lingua franca, we do not have a Culture as a culture franca. This means that attention should be paid to intercultural collaboration in a virtual environment. Education in cultural studies, cultural awareness and appropriate tools are all necessary. In this paper, we will point out all the important components for international collaboration in a virtual environment, from definitions of interculture and collaboration up to methodologies, that supports work in a virtual environment and virtual centres itself.

Present computer science and informatics have to produce IT solutions that are user friendly and in general global appropriate while we are nowadays much more connected to each other as in the past. We are living in multicultural and multilingual societies where the intercultural dialog and cultural awareness are more and more important. With increased mobility, small societies are more multicultural and international, while in the past mostly only big societies with a lot of immigrants have been described as multicultural and multilingual. Internationalization and mobility pushed us to take care about the global conceptual modeling. This entire means that our partners in the modeling process (users and customers) are/could coming from different organizational, cultural and language environments. Consecutive, this can influence theirs way of understanding conceptual modeling, as well as methods, expectations, results and other activities in the process. Even more, this can influence also their understanding of expert topics independent to the fact that we have to do with the common, everyday used topics like counting and banking, known all around the world.

Cultural computing is an emerging field of multidisciplinary computer science. In the near future, cultural computing will have several important applications in the fields of business, knowledge society, environmental issues, health care, education and research. Our paper is written in collaboration with the authors, who are also participants in the collaborative research project “Ubiquitous Cross-Cultural Multimedia Systems for Mobile Computing Societies/Ubiquitous Cross-Cultural Knowledge Space”. The issues discussed in our paper cover background knowledge related to cultural computing, general discussion of culture as a concept, an introduction to the concept and basic design of the Electronic Assistant for Cross-Cultural Communication, and an introduction to the design and implementation of the 3D Cross-Cultural Multimedia Museum" system and its applications. The 3D Cross-Cultural Multimedia Museum has been implemented as a prototype system of Cross-Cultural Cyber Space. The global changes caused not only by scientific and technological development, but by environmental issues as well, are our driving forces towards the era of cultural computing. Our paper is based on the presentations of the panel discussion at the EJC 2009 Conference.

Clinical Algorithms (CAs) are obtained from Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) using all the healthcare knowledge available to assist patients that suffer from one or several diseases. For some diseases CAs can be explicitly given, while for others we have to use other mechanisms for their generation. Explicitly given CAs use to be atemporal. To provide the time dimension of CAs it is necessary to obtain temporal knowledge from physicians or by some other mechanism. Often, physicians have difficulties in providing temporal knowledge or the knowledge engineering mechanism and tools used are difficult to apply or extremely time consuming. However, as data saved in clinical databases are time dependent, they can be used to implicitly obtain temporal constraints for CAs. We have identified two sorts of temporal constraints (micro- and macro-temporality) and have proposed an approach to generate micro-temporalities that complements previous works. We have decided to use the SDA (state-decision-action) formalism for CA representation. The generated micro-temporality constraints are introduced in the SDA representation of a particular CA. As the final CAs have a time dimension, they are no longer atemporal, which helps physicians making temporal predictions in healthcare procedures.