Using trust assumptions with security requirements

Assumptions are frequently made during requirements analysis of a system about the trustworthiness of its various components (including human components). These trust assumptions, whether implicit or explicit, affect the scope of the analysis, derivation of security requirements, and in some cases how functionality is realized. This paper presents trust assumptions in the context of analysis of security requirements. A running example shows how trust assumptions can be used by a requirements engineer to help define and limit the scope of analysis and to document the decisions made during the process. The paper concludes with a case study examining the impact of trust assumptions on software that uses the secure electronic transaction specification.

---

Methods for quantitative usability requirements: a case study on the development of the user interface of a mobile phone

Quantitative usability requirements are a critical but challenging, and hence an often neglected aspect of a usability engineering process. A case study is described where quantitative usability requirements played a key role in the development of a new user interface of a mobile phone. Within the practical constraints of the project, existing methods for determining usability requirements and evaluating the extent to which these are met, could not be applied as such, therefore tailored methods had to be developed. These methods and their applications are discussed.

---

Designing socio-technical systems: from stakeholder goals to social networks

Software systems are becoming an integral part of everyday life influencing organizational and social activities. This aggravates the need for a socio-technical perspective for requirements engineering, which allows for modelling and analyzing the composition and interaction of hardware and software components with human and organizational actors. In this setting, alternative requirements models have to be evaluated and selected finding a right trade-off between the technical and social dimensions. To address this problem, we propose a tool-supported process of requirements analysis for socio-technical systems, which adopts planning techniques for exploring the space of requirements alternatives and a number of social criteria for their evaluation. We illustrate the proposed approach with the help of a case study, conducted within the context of an EU project.

Connecting the family with awareness systems

Awareness systems have attracted significant research interest for their potential to support interpersonal relationships. Investigations of awareness systems for the domestic environment have suggested that such systems can help individuals stay in touch with dear friends or family and provide affective benefits to their users. Our research provides empirical evidence to refine and substantiate such suggestions. We report our experience with designing and evaluating the ASTRA awareness system, for connecting households and mobile family members. We introduce the concept of connectedness and its measurement through the Affective Benefits and Costs of communication questionnaire (ABC-Q). We inform results that testify the benefits of sharing experiences at the moment they happen without interrupting potential receivers. Finally, we document the role that lightweight, picture-based communication can play in the range of communication media available.

---

The 2007 IEEE CEC simulated car racing competition

This paper describes the simulated car racing competition that was arranged as part of the 2007 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation. Both the game that was used as the domain for the competition, the controllers submitted as entries to the competition and its results are presented. With this paper, we hope to provide some insight into the efficacy of various computational intelligence methods on a well-defined game task, as well as an example of one way of running a competition. In the process, we provide a set of reference results for those who wish to use the simplerace game to benchmark their own algorithms. The paper is co-authored by the organizers and participants of the competition.

---

Evolution of 3D mobile games development

3D computer graphics have been an important feature in games development since it was first introduced in the early 80s and there is no doubt that 3D based content is often viewed as more attractive in games than the more abstract 2D graphics. Many games publishers are keen to leverage their success in the console market into the mobile phone platform. However, the resource constraints of mobile phones and the fragmented nature of the environment present considerable challenges for games developers. In this paper we consider some of the current constraints together with current and, probable, future developments both in the software and hardware of mobile phones. As part of this process we benchmark some of the latest and most prevalent software and hardware devices to ascertain both the quality of the graphics produced and the effects upon battery life. Whilst our test results highlight that the current market does indeed present challenges, our research into the future developments highlights the fact we are approaching greater standardization, which will be an important factor for the successful development of 3D mobile games.

---

Is emotion relevant to requirements engineering?

This viewpoint argues that the introduction of most computer-based system to an organization transforms the organization and changes the work patterns of the system’s users in the organization. These changes interact with the users’ values and beliefs and trigger emotional responses which are sometimes directed against the software system and its proponents. A requirements engineer must be aware of these emotions.

---

Active audition using the parameter-less self-organising map

This paper presents a novel method for enabling a robot to determine the position of a sound source in three dimensions using just two microphones and interaction with its environment. The method uses the Parameter-Less Self-Organising Map (PLSOM) algorithm and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to achieve rapid, accurate response. We also introduce a method for directional filtering using the PLSOM. The presented system is compared to a similar system to evaluate its performance.

Adaptation and application of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms for rule reduction and parameter tuning of fuzzy rule-based systems

Recently, multi-objective evolutionary algorithms have been applied to improve the difficult tradeoff between interpretability and accuracy of fuzzy rule-based systems. It is known that both requirements are usually contradictory, however, these kinds of algorithms can obtain a set of solutions with different trade-offs. This contribution analyzes different application alternatives in order to attain the desired accuracy/interpr-etability balance by maintaining the improved accuracy that a tuning of membership functions could give but trying to obtain more compact models. In this way, we propose the use of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms as a tool to get almost one improved solution with respect to a classic single objective approach (a solution that could dominate the one obtained by such algorithm in terms of the system error and number of rules). To do that, this work presents and analyzes the application of six different multi-objective evolutionary algorithms to obtain simpler and still accurate linguistic fuzzy models by performing rule selection and a tuning of the membership functions. The results on two different scenarios show that the use of expert knowledge in the algorithm design process significantly improves the search ability of these algorithms and that they are able to improve both objectives together, obtaining more accurate and at the same time simpler models with respect to the single objective based approach.

---

Experiment in social intelligence design

In this paper we present recent research into computer-mediated communication with special emphasis on the use of collaborative tools in shared task environment. In order to explain the regularities and uniformities in people’s behaviour obtained through quantitative study of interaction among groups of students engaged in structured debates, we have developed an experimental approach that enables us to measure and quantify several key aspects of computer-mediated communication in this context.

---

Situated play in a tangible interface and adaptive audio museum guide

This paper explores the design issues of situated play within a museum through the study of a museum guide prototype that integrates a tangible interface, audio display, and adaptive modeling. We discuss our use of design ethnography in order to situate our interaction and to investigate the liminal and engagement qualities of a museum visit. The paper provides an overview of our case study and analysis of our user evaluation. We discuss the implications including degrees of balance in the experience design of play in interaction; the challenge in developing a discovery-based information model, and the need for a better understanding of the contextual aspects of tangible user interfaces (TUIs). We conclude that learning effectiveness and functionality can be balanced productively with playful interaction through an adaptive audio and TUI if designers balance the engagement between play and the environment, and the space between imagination and interpretation that links the audio content to the artifacts.

---

Supporting ordering and consistency in a distributed Event Heap for Ubiquitous Computing

The Stanford Event Heap has been shown to provide appropriate support for constructing interactive workspace applications. Given this success it is natural to consider the Event Heap as a platform to support other classes of Ubiquitous Computing applications. In this paper we argue that the distributed, spontaneous nature of these applications places additional demands on the Event Heap that require extensions to both the engineering and API. Suitable extensions are described and their use to support a typical Ubicomp application is discussed.

---

Deployment and dynamic reconfiguration planning for distributed software systems

The quality of software systems are determined in part by their optimal configurations. Optimal configurations are desired when the software is being deployed and during its lifetime. However, initial deployment and subsequent dynamic reconfiguration of a software system is difficult because of the interplay of many interdependent factors, including cost, time, application state, and system resources. As the size and complexity of software systems increases, procedures (manual or automated) that assume a static software architecture and environment are becoming untenable. We have developed a novel technique for carrying out the deployment and reconfiguration planning processes that leverages recent advances in the field of temporal planning. We describe a tool called Planit, which manages the deployment and reconfiguration of a software system utilizing a temporal planner. Given a model of the structure of a software system, the network upon which the system should be hosted, and a goal configuration, Planit will use the temporal planner to devise possible deployments of the system. Given information about changes in the state of the system, network and a revised goal, Planit will use the temporal planner to devise possible reconfigurations of the system. We present the results of a case study in which Planit is applied to a system consisting of various components that communicate across an application-level overlay network. An earlier version of this paper was presented at ICTAI’03.

---

Legal safeguards for privacy and data protection in ambient intelligence

To get the maximum benefit from ambient intelligence (AmI), we need to anticipate and react to possible drawbacks and threats emerging from the new technologies in order to devise appropriate safeguards. The SWAMI project took a precautionary approach in its exploration of the privacy risks in AmI and sought ways to reduce them. It constructed four “dark scenarios” showing possible negative implications of AmI, notably for privacy protection. Legal analysis of the depicted futures showed the shortcomings of the current legal framework in being able to provide adequate privacy protection in the AmI environment. In this paper, the authors, building upon their involvement in SWAMI research as well as the further advancement of EU privacy analysis, identify various outstanding issues regarding the legal framework that still need to be resolved in order to deal with AmI in an equitable and efficacious way. This article points out some of the lacunae in the legal framework and postulates several privacy-specific safeguards aimed at overcoming them.

---

ONTRACK: Dynamically adapting music playback to support navigation

Listening to music on personal, digital devices whilst mobile is an enjoyable, everyday activity. We explore a scheme for exploiting this practice to immerse listeners in navigation cues. Our prototype, ONTRACK, continuously adapts audio, modifying the spatial balance and volume to lead listeners to their target destination. First we report on an initial lab-based evaluation that demonstrated the approach’s efficacy: users were able to complete tasks within a reasonable time and their subjective feedback was positive. Encouraged by these results we constructed a handheld prototype. Here, we discuss this implementation and the results of field-trials. These indicate that even with a low-fidelity realisation of the concept, users can quite effectively navigate complicated routes.

---

Multimodal support to group dynamics

The complexity of group dynamics occurring in small group interactions often hinders the performance of teams. The availability of rich multimodal information about what is going on during the meeting makes it possible to explore the possibility of providing support to dysfunctional teams from facilitation to training sessions addressing both the individuals and the group as a whole. A necessary step in this direction is that of capturing and understanding group dynamics. In this paper, we discuss a particular scenario, in which meeting participants receive multimedia feedback on their relational behaviour, as a first step towards increasing self-awareness. We describe the background and the motivation for a coding scheme for annotating meeting recordings partially inspired by the Bales’ Interaction Process Analysis. This coding scheme was aimed at identifying suitable observable behavioural sequences. The study is complemented with an experimental investigation on the acceptability of such a service.

---

Multi-robot deployment and coordination with Embedded Graph Grammars

This paper presents a framework for going from specifications to implementations of decentralized control strategies for multi-robot systems. In particular, we show how the use of Embedded Graph Grammars (EGGs) provides a tool for characterizing local interaction and control laws. This paper highlights some key implementation aspects of the EGG formalism, and develops and discusses experimental results for a hexapod-based multi-robot system, as well as a multi-robot system of wheeled robots.

Interacting with mobile services: an evaluation of camera-phones and visual tags

We present a study of using camera-phones and visual-tags to access mobile services. Firstly, a user-experience study is described in which participants were both observed learning to interact with a prototype mobile service and interviewed about their experiences. Secondly, a pointing-device task is presented in which quantitative data was gathered regarding the speed and accuracy with which participants aimed and clicked on visual-tags using camera-phones. We found that participants’ attitudes to visual-tag-based applications were broadly positive, although they had several important reservations about camera-phone technology more generally. Data from our pointing-device task demonstrated that novice users were able to aim and click on visual-tags quickly (well under 3 s per pointing-device trial on average) and accurately (almost all meeting our defined speed/accuracy tradeoff of 6% error-rate). Based on our findings, design lessons for camera-phone and visual-tag applications are presented.

---

Information systems design: through adaptivity to ubiquity

In a globalised economy the accessibility of services becomes increasingly important for businesses. This has led to a demand that information systems should be ubiquitous in the sense that they are available to all users under all circumstances, everywhere and at all times, and independent of the access devices and channels used. The authors believe the key to meeting that demand is existence of an omnipresent media of interaction and existence of information systems that within that media adapt themselves to context parameters at run-time. The World Wide Web is considered as that omnipresent media. Thus, the task is left to design adaptive information systems in a way that avoids unnecessary replication. In this article it will be shown how context parameters can be utilised to enable system adaptivity. The latter is supposed to increase usability and targets the quality of use, the content, and the functionality. We propose using an algebraic approach that aids in providing the leanest appropriate interface via user typing and story boarding. Our approach furthermore limits the content delivered to a user to the amount that can be dealt with in a usage scenario. The latter is based on defining hyphenation points within the content.

---