Human-computer interaction (HCI) is one of the most promising topics in modern computational engineering. Human-human communication is natural, effective, and simple. Researchers have sought to mimic those features in HCI for over a decade. A number of fields such as machine learning, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and user interface design contribute to the development of both theory and practice of HCI. Though HCI has a number of practical applications and commercial products, the theoretical boundaries of HCI are not yet well defined.

This edited book on HCI, which looks like a good conference proceedings volume, contributes greatly to practical aspects rather than theoretical background. The editors have tried their level best to organize the diverse papers under three parts. However, a few of them could be placed in any part of the book. It contains 29 papers written by about 100 authors. Most are well written and will help readers gain practical knowledge. This volume mostly focuses on HCI pertaining to healthcare and information processing. Though the quality of most of the papers is good, I found the reading somewhat difficult due to issues with typesetting, image resolution, usage of notations, and quality of color printing.

Though most of the papers are nicely written, I would like to highlight a couple that were particularly attractive. First, the paper titled “Emotion Recognition and Its Applications.” Recognizing emotion is one of the most promising elements in providing live feeling in HCI. This paper focuses on emotion recognition in critical fields such as software engineering, website customization, education, and gaming. In software engineering, user experience is very vital and improvised by considering users’ emotions in surveys and usability; the authors present various interesting scenarios in this regard. Similar to this, all possible interesting scenarios are presented in the other fields, namely website customization, education, and gaming. Another interesting paper is “Evaluation of Team-Sport Training Effort Control Systems.” The use of computerized training and control systems in sports is one of the hottest fields. This paper beautifully addresses this topic. I am very much impressed by it because (a) it has the right blend of theory and mathematics, (b) the experimental results presented are interesting, and (c) the authors consider real-time data and apply this concept to their university’s volleyball team.

I learned from the editors’ preface that this is the third volume of their compilation in HCI. It will be useful to post-graduate students and researchers working in the field.