From the Back Cover
The concept of quality and usability has gained importance in information and communication technology as well as in computer science. In all phases of planning, designing, implementing, and optimizing technical systems and services, quality aspects must be taken into account so that users can experience optimal quality and usability.
In this book, the quality and usability of communication systems is addressed on a fundamental level. To this end, the necessary terms are first introduced, and the basics of psychophysics and psychometrics are established. Based on this, the cycle of human-oriented system development is presented. The measurement and prediction of quality and usability are then illustrated by practical examples of communication systems. In particular, systems for information transmission (telephony, VoIP, IP-TV), spoken dialog systems, and multimodal dialog systems are discussed. Finally, models for estimating quality and usability in the development phase of such systems are presented.
The book is primarily aimed at readers with a technical background, for example in computer science, information technology, or electrical engineering. In addition, however, readers from linguistics and communication sciences, acoustics, sociology, human factors, and other fields of knowledge are equally addressed. It does not presuppose any special previous knowledge.
This book is a translation of the original German 2nd edition Quality Engineering by Sebastian Möller, published by Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2017. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.
Sebastian Möller (*1968) is an expert in quality and speech technology. He studied electrical engineering at the universities of Bochum, Orléans (France) and Bologna (Italy). From 1994 to 2005, he was a research associate and later a university lecturer at the Institute for Communication Acoustics (IKA) at the Ruhr University in Bochum, where he worked on speech signal transmission, speech technology, and communication acoustics, as well as on aspects of the quality of speech-based systems. He habilitated at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at Ruhr University Bochum in 2004, and from 2005 to 2015 he headed the Strategic Research Lab Quality and Usability at Telekom Innovation Laboratories. In April 2007, he was appointed Professor at TU Berlin for Quality and Usability, and has been Dean of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at TU Berlin since 2017. He worked as Visiting Fellow or Visiting Professor at MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney in Australia, at Universidad de Granada (Spain), at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Be'er Sheva (Israel), and at NTNU in Trondheim (Norway). Since 2012, he has been an Adjunct Professor at the University of Canberra (Australia).
