What we say and what we mean

The general problem of natural language processing has not been solved, and may never be. Nonetheless, there are now a number of well-known techniques for certain aspects of the task; and there is a certain amount of agreement about what other problems need to be tackled, if not about how to tackle them. The current paper gives a survey of what we do know, and indicates the areas in which further progress remains to be made.     

Revisiting IS business value research: what we already know,what we still need to know,and how we can get there

The business value of investments in Information Systems (IS) has been, and is predicted to remain, one of the major research topics for IS researchers. While the vast majority of research papers on IS business value find empirical evidence in favour of both the operational and strategic relevance of IS, the fundamental question of the causal relationship between IS investments and business value remains partly unexplained. Three research tasks are essential requisites on the path towards addressing this epistemological question: the synthesis of existing knowledge, the identification of a lack of knowledge and the proposition of paths for closing the knowledge gaps. This paper considers each of these tasks. Research findings include that correlations between IS investments and productivity vary widely among companies and that the mismeasurement of IS investment impact may be rooted in delayed effects. Key limitations of current research are based on the ambiguity and fuzziness of IS business value, the neglected disaggregation of IS investments, and the unexplained process of creating internal and competitive value. Addressing the limitations we suggest research paths, such as the identification of synergy opportunities of IS assets, and the explanation of relationships between IS innovation and change in IS capabilities.     

Detecting privacy leaks in the RATP App: how we proceeded and what we found

We analyzed the RATP App, both Android and iOS versions, using our instrumented versions of these mobile OSs. Our analysis reveals that both versions of this App leak private data to third-party servers, which is in total contradiction to the In-App privacy policy. The iOS version of this App doesn’t even respect Apple guidelines on cross-App user tracking for advertising purposes and employs various other cross-App tracking mechanisms that are not supposed to be used by Apps. Even if this work is illustrated with a single App, we describe an approach that is generic and can be used to detect privacy leaks from other Apps. In addition, our findings are representative of a trend in Advertising and Analytics (A&A) libraries that try to collect as much information as possible regarding the smartphone and its user to have a better profile of the user’s interests and behaviors. In fact, in case of iOS, these libraries even generate their own persistent identifiers and share it with other Apps through covert channels to better track the user, and this happens even if the user has opted-out of device tracking for advertising purposes. Above all, this happens without the user knowledge, and sometimes even without the App developer’s knowledge who might have naively included these libraries during the App development. Therefore this article raises many questions concerning both the bad practices employed in the world of smartphones and the limitations of the privacy control features proposed by Android/iOS Mobile OSs.     

Fifteen years of constraint-based tutors: what we have achieved and where we are going

Fifteen years ago, research started on SQL-Tutor, the first constraint-based tutor. The initial efforts were focused on evaluating Constraint-Based Modeling (CBM), its effectiveness and applicability to various instructional domains. Since then, we extended CBM in a number of ways, and developed many constraint-based tutors. Our tutors teach both well- and ill-defined domains and tasks, and deal with domain- and meta-level skills. We have supported mainly individual learning, but also the acquisition of collaborative skills. Authoring support for constraint-based tutors is now available, as well as mature, well-tested deployment environments. Our current research focuses on building affect-sensitive and motivational tutors. Over the period of fifteen years, CBM has progressed from a theoretical idea to a mature, reliable and effective methodology for developing effective tutors.     

Enough about process: what we need are heroes

All software managers are faced with three P's when software is to be built: people, problem, and process. Should each of the three P's be given equal weight? Should one be elevated to a more important role than the others? Are managers focusing too much attention on the wrong P? The author offers answers to these questions and argues in favour of software heroism     

RoboCup: Today and tomorrow—What we have learned

RoboCup is an increasingly successful attempt to promote the full integration of AI and robotics research. The most prominent feature of RoboCup is that it provides the researchers with the opportunity to demonstrate their research results as a form of competition in a dynamically changing hostile environment, defined as the international standard game definition, which the gamut of intelligent robotics research issues are naturally involved. This article describes what we have learned from the past RoboCup activities, mainly the first and the second RoboCups, and overviews the future perspectives of RoboCup in the next century. First, the issue on what and why RoboCup is addressed, and a wide range of research issues are explained. Next, the current leagues are introduced and the research achievements are reviewed from a viewpoint of system architecture. Some of these achievements are included in this special issue. Finally, prospects for future activities are discussed.     

Secure mobile communication via identity-based cryptography and server-aided computations

In this paper, an identity-based key agreement protocol for securing mobile telephony in GSM and UMTS networks is presented. The approach allows two mobile phones to perform a session key agreement over an unsecured channel and between different providers using telephone numbers as public keys. Using the created session key, a symmetric encryption of all call data can be performed. Solutions to the problems of multi-domain key generation, key distribution, multi-domain public parameter distribution and inter-domain key agreement are presented. Furthermore, the proposed approach can be speeded up using server-aided cryptography, by outsourcing computationally expensive cryptographic operations to a high-performance backend computing server. The feasibility of the approach is illustrated by presenting experimental results based on a Symbian implementation running on N95-1 and N82-1 Nokia smartphones.     

What we know about dyslexia and Web accessibility: a research review

Compared to the online interaction behavior of other users, little is known about the difficulties dyslexic Web users encounter online. This paper reviews existing literature at the intersection of dyslexia and accessibility research to determine what useful knowledge exists regarding this important and relatively large group of users. This review uncovers that, although there are few published usability tests with dyslexic users, there is a considerable body of knowledge on dyslexia as well as many design guidelines for authoring dyslexic-accessible interfaces. Through a comparison of existing accessibility guidelines for dyslexic and non-dyslexic users and discussion of the plain language movement, it is argued that dyslexic-accessible practices may redress difficulties encountered by all Internet users. This conclusion suggests that usability testing yielding a clearer profile of the dyslexic user would further inform the practice of universal design, but also that enough knowledge is already available to allow doing more to increase accessibility for dyslexic Internet users.     

Innovations in Time: What can we learn from history?

Failure to move with customer wants and/or adopt technical improvements led to the decline and fall of the British Watch making industry. The lessons learned by the 19th century entrepreneurs has many ramifications for business today. British manufacturers were pioneers in watch-making. They invented, developed and marketed all the improvements associated with watches and yet they fell victim to the shadow of obsolescence for they failed to implement all of their own inventions. Invention is not enough of itself it must be linked to the demands in the market place and marketed as and when the occasion demands. Firms with the best notion of what the customer really wants can turn inventions into real innovations. There is a need to monitor closely market drivers and to assess the impact they have on innovation.     

What was,what is and what should have been: A critical evaluation of the chilton multi-access system

The Chilton multi-access system has been running for about three years, and it is now possible in the light of experience to look back critically at the decisions taken during its definition. No system is entirely perfect and, by considering the highlights and shortcomings of this one (which may be described as being of the ‘support system’ type), similar designs in the future can benefit.     

Backplane bus standards—why we need them,what we have got and who makes them

Into every tidy scheme for arranging the pattern of human life, it is necessary to inject a certain dose of anarchism—enough to prevent immobility leading to decay, but not enough to bring about disruption Bertrand Russel Skeptical Essays     

CITRIS and data and knowledge engineering: What is old and what is new?

We survey the issues involved in knowledge capture and representation for the humanities and outline the design of a modern information system, which will permit humanities researchers to easily publish, share, view and process data. This system takes advantage of recent advances in the capture, representation, indexing and search of text and media data, including representations of three-dimensional images and three-dimensional enhancements of two-dimensional images. We suggest the exploitation of modern networking technologies to make electronic publication accessible to non-technologists. Finally, we discuss the problem of privacy in data mining and outline possible solutions from the recent literature.     

What you think and what I think: Studying intersubjectivity in knowledge artifacts evaluation

Miscalibration, the failure to accurately evaluate one’s own work relative to others' evaluation, is a common concern in social systems of knowledge creation where participants act as both creators and evaluators. Theories of social norming hold that individual’s self-evaluation miscalibration diminishes over multiple iterations of creator-evaluator interactions and shared understanding emerges. This paper explores intersubjectivity and the longitudinal dynamics of miscalibration between creators' and evaluators' assessments in IT-enabled social knowledge creation and refinement systems. Using Latent Growth Modeling, we investigated dynamics of creator’s assessments of their own knowledge artifacts compared to peer evaluators' to determine whether miscalibration attenuates over multiple interactions. Contrary to theory, we found that creator’s self-assessment miscalibration does not attenuate over repeated interactions. Moreover, depending on the degree of difference, we found self-assessment miscalibration to amplify over time with knowledge artifact creators' diverging farther from their peers' collective opinion. Deeper analysis found no significant evidence of the influence of bias and controversy on miscalibration. Therefore, relying on social norming to correct miscalibration in knowledge creation environments (e.g., social media interactions) may not function as expected.     

Requirements triage: what can we learn from a "medical" approach?

New-product development is commonly risky, judging by the number of high-profile failures that continue to occur-especially in software engineering. We can trace many of these failures back to requirements-related issues. Triage is a technique that the medical profession uses to prioritize treatment to patients on the basis of their symptoms' severity. Trauma triage provides some tantalizing insights into how we might measure risk of failure early, quickly, and accurately. For projects at significant risk, we could activate a "requirements trauma system" to include specialists, processes, and tools designed to correct the issues and improve the probability that the project ends successfully. We explain these techniques and suggest how we can adapt them to help identify and quantify requirements-related risks.     

Why context matters - and what can we do about it?

Context is everything else that's relevant to the given software design problem, including the obvious, the subtle, the invisible, and the unknowable - the design's environment. Because the software design environment contains limitless numbers of ill-defined factors, the key to our success is determining and incorporating "just the right number" of design-relevant factors.     

From contextual inquiry to designable futures: what do we need to get there?

Human-centered systems result when software engineers or developers give attention to the orientations, expectations, and understandings of the people who will be part of the sociotechnical system. Human factors researchers often take certain agendas, terms, and theories for granted or rely on them out of habit. This paper takes a special look at contextual enquiry as a putatively (and indeed potentially) superior way of giving end users a serious say in the procurement process of complex cognitive systems.