The languages of Aboriginal Australians have attracted a considerable amount of interest among scholars from such diverse fields as linguistics, political studies, archaeology or social history. As a result, there is a large number of studies on a variety of issues to do with Aboriginal Australian languages and the social contexts in which they are used. There is, however, no integrative reader that is easily accessible to the non-specialist in any of the areas concerned. The collection edited by Leitner and Malcolm fills this gap.

Looking at Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders...

This book introduces the concept of the wise home. Whilst smart homes focus on automation technologies, forcing users to deal with complex and incomprehensible control and programming procedures, the wise home is different. By going beyond intelligence (or smartness) the wise home puts technology in the background and supports explicit (enhanced user-experience) as well as implicit (artificial intelligence) interaction adequate to the end-user's needs.

The theoretical basis of the wise home is explored and examples for its application for future living are presented based on...

This book describes an innovative approach to the interaction between humans and a smart environment; an attempt to get a smart home to understand intuitive, multi-modal, human-centred communication. State of the art smart homes, like other -smart- technology, tend to demand that the human user must adapt herself to the needs of the system. The hunt for a truly user-centred, truly intuitive system has long proven to be beyond the grasp of current technology.

When humans speak with one another, we are multimodal. Our speech is supplemented with gestures, which serve as a parallel...