An ontological modelling of user requirements for personalised information provision

The knowledge economy offers opportunity to a broad and diverse community of information systems users to efficiently gain information and know-how for improving qualifications and enhancing productivity in the work place. Such demand will continue and users will frequently require optimised and personalised information content. The advancement of information technology and the wide dissemination of information endorse individual users when constructing new knowledge from their experience in the real-world context. However, a design of personalised information provision is challenging because users’ requirements and information provision specifications are complex in their representation. The existing methods are not able to effectively support this analysis process. This paper presents a mechanism which can holistically facilitate customisation of information provision based on individual users’ goals, level of knowledge and cognitive styles preferences. An ontology model with embedded norms represents the domain knowledge of information provision in a specific context where users’ needs can be articulated and represented in a user profile. These formal requirements can then be transformed onto information provision specifications which are used to discover suitable information content from repositories and pedagogically organise the selected content to meet the users’ needs. The method is provided with adaptability which enables an appropriate response to changes in users’ requirements during the process of acquiring knowledge and skills.     

RFID and privacy: what consumers really want and fear

This article investigates the conflicting area of user benefits arising through item level radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging and a desire for privacy. It distinguishes between three approaches feasible to address consumer privacy concerns. One is to kill RFID tags at store exits. The second is to lock tags and have user unlock them if they want to initiate reader communication (user model). The third is to let the network access users’ RFID tags while adhering to a privacy protocol (network model). The perception and reactions of future users to these three privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) are compared in the present article and an attempt is made to understand the reasoning behind their preferences. The main conclusion is that users do not trust complex PETs as they are envisioned today. Instead, they prefer to kill RFID chips at store exits even if they appreciate after sales services. Enhancing trust through security and privacy ‘visibility’ as well as PET simplicity may be the road to take for PET engineers in UbiComp.     

Winning the Battles, Losing the War? Rethinking Methodology for Forensic Computing Research

In the last 10 years, Forensic computing (FC) has emerged in response to the challenges of illegal, criminal and other inappropriate on-line behaviours. As awareness of the need for the accurate and legally admissible collection, collation, analysis and presentation of digital data has grown, so has recognition of the challenges this requirement poses for technical, legal and organisational responses to these on-line behaviours. Despite recognition of the multi-dimensional nature of these behaviours and the challenges faced, agreement on coherent frameworks for understanding and responding to these issues, their impacts and their interrelationships appears to remain a long way off. As a consequence, while significant advances have been made within technical, organisational and legal ‘solution centred paradigms’, the net result appears to be a case of ‘winning the battles but losing the war’ on computer misuse and e-crime. This paper examines this situation and reflects on its implications for academic researchers’ methodological approach to understanding and responding to these challenges. This paper suggests the need to reconceptualise the term ‘solution’ and advocates an additional methodological step, (that it is anticipated will generate data) for the development of a framework to map the value propositions of, and interrelationships between the individual sets of responses within the dynamically evolving FC landscape. By exposing issues, responses and underlying assumptions it is anticipated that this will improve the possibility of calibrated responses that more effectively and coherently balance the interests for security, privacy and legal admissibility.     

Supporting Ubiquitous IMS-based Teleconferencing Through Discovery and Composition of IMS and Web Components

Natural communication among people happens in flexible ways and is strongly affected by the users’ situation (such as communication tools available, user’s location, and user’s preferences). This situation or context information is seldom used to initiate communication sessions among users. Current communication systems are indifferent about users’ context, often require time consuming manual configurations and often result in conferencing tools not being easily accessible when needed. This leads to lower adoption of innovative communications services. IMS SIP (IP Multimedia Subsystem, Session Initiation Protocol) sessions allow users to access the session from different points of contact (home, office, etc.), however, IMS still requires a prior knowledge of all SIP components that might be used in a SIP session. Furthermore, IMS makes limited use of context information (mainly user-defined availability). To address these issues our research approach combines techniques from pervasive computing with IMS networking principles to facilitate compositions of communication sessions based on users’ context. We propose a platform and APIs for pervasive application development support to allow greater intelligence in IMS applications. We additionally provide mechanisms for IMS applications to apply their intelligence to the configuration of physical devices and web resources used to set up a conference. The innovations proposed in this paper are: (1) A new standard for intelligent IMS-based conferencing applications. (2) Application Development Interfaces (APIs) for a platform for pervasive computing. (3) An architecture for a pervasive IMS platform.

Diversified users’ satisfaction with advanced mobile phone features

Mobile phones are widely used all over the world, and with their increasing number of value-added features, they are becoming far more than a mere mobile voice communication device. Rather, they provide a powerful platform for accessing information universally. This paper reports a study which scrutinized users’ preference levels with five new mobile phone design features facilitating universal information access through mobile phones: camera, colour screen, voice-activated dialling, Internet browsing, and wireless connectivity (e.g. Bluetooth, infrared, etc.). The survey study involved college students and investigated the degree to which each of the above features impacts the users’ overall satisfaction and enhances the potential of mobile phones to contribute to different aspects of universal access. Our results show that colour screen, voice-activated dialling, and Internet browsing feature can strongly predict users’ satisfaction level, and their preference levels together account for 22.7% of the variance of the users’ overall satisfaction. Users’ satisfaction levels are significantly different between models with colour screen feature and those without, and models with Internet browsing features and those without. Since mobile phone design needs to accommodate the needs and preferences of diversified user groups, the performed study also investigated the difference in users’ preference levels of the five new features for different ethnic groups, and difference in mobile phone owned by different genders. The result indicates that Asian female users in the U.S. market have higher preference level on colour screen feature than Caucasian female users. Significantly higher percentage of male users own phones with camera, Internet browsing, and wireless connectivity features than female users. The empirical study reported in this paper provides a comprehensive picture of how new design features can enhance the mobile phone as a universal access device, and what impact they have brought about. It can also help manufacturers adopt a universal design perspective in view of the differences in preference levels of users with different ethnicity and genders.     

HilAnchor: Location Privacy Protection in the Presence of Users’ Preferences

Location privacy receives considerable attentions in emerging location based services.Most current practices however either ignore users’ preferences or incompletely fulfill privacy preferences.In this paper,we propose a privacy protection solution to allow users’ preferences in the fundamental query of k nearest neighbors (kNN).Particularly,users are permitted to choose privacy preferences by specifying minimum inferred region.Via Hilbert curve based transformation,the additional workload from users’ preferences is alleviated.Furthermore,this transformation reduces time-expensive region queries in 2-D space to range the ones in 1-D space.Therefore,the time efficiency,as well as communication efficiency,is greatly improved due to clustering properties of Hilbert curve.Further,details of choosing anchor points are theoretically elaborated.The empirical studies demonstrate that our implementation delivers both flexibility for users’ preferences and scalability for time and communication costs.     

Exploring agent support at the user interface in e-commerce applications

In this paper, we present some of the results from our ongoing research work in the area of ‘agent support’ for electronic commerce, particularly at the user interface level. Our goal is to provide intelligent agents to assist both the consumers and the vendors in an electronic shopping environment. Users with a wide variety of different needs are expected to use the electronic shopping application and their expectations about the interface could vary a lot. Traditional studies of user interface technology have shown the existence of a ‘gap’ between what the user interface actually lets the users do and the users’ expectations. Agent technology, in the form of personalized user interface agents, can help to narrow this gap. Such agents can be used to give a personalized service to the user by knowing the user’s preferences. By doing so, they can assist in the various stages of the users’ shopping process, provide tailored product recommendations by filtering information on behalf of their users and reduce the information overload. From a vendor’s perspective, a software sales agent could be used for price negotiation with the consumer. Such agents would give the flexibility offered by negotiation without the burden of having to provide human presence to an online store to handle such negotiations. Published online: 25 July 2001     

Trust, privacy, and legal protection in the use of software with surreptitiously installed operations: An empirical evaluation

The class of software which is “surreptitiously installed on a user’s computer and monitors a user’s activity and reports back to a third party on that behavior” is referred to as spyware “(Stafford and Urbaczewski in Communications of the AIS 14:291–306, 2004)”. It is a strategic imperative that software vendors, who either embed surreptitious data collection and other operations in legitimate software applications or whose software is unwittingly used as a delivery vehicle for surreptitious operations, understand users’ perceptions of trust, privacy, and legal protection of such software to remain competitive. This paper develops and tests a research model to explore application software users’ perceptions in the use of software with embedded surreptitious operations. An experiment was undertaken to examine whether the presence of spyware in application software impacts users’ perceptions and beliefs about trustworthiness of the application software, privacy control of the software vendor, United States legal protection, and overall trust of the software vendor. The results indicate users of software with spyware, versus users of software without spyware, have lower trust perceptions of a software vendor. Further examination of trustworthiness as a multi-dimensional construct reveals a software vendor’s competence in appropriately using private user information collected and the user’s belief that the vendor will abide by acceptable principles in information exchange are important influences in gaining users’ overall trust in a vendor. User trust in software utilization is critical for a software vendor’s success because without it, users may avoid a vendor’s software should the presence of spyware be discovered. Software vendors should respond to the strategic necessity to gain users’ trust. Vendors must institute proactive and protective measures to demonstrate that their software should be trusted. These protections could take the form of technological approaches or government legislation, or both.

Gaze interaction with virtual on-line communities: levelling the playing field for disabled users

This paper introduces the concept of enabling gaze-based interaction for users with high-level motor disabilities to control an avatar in a first-person perspective on-line community. An example community, Second Life, is introduced that could offer disabled users the same virtual freedom as any other user, and so allow disabled users to be able-bodied (should they wish) within the virtual world. A survey of the control demands for Second Life and a subsequent preliminary experiment show that gaze control has inherent problems particularly for locomotion and camera movement. These problems result in a lack of effective gaze control of Second Life, such that control is not practical and show that disabled users who interact using gaze will have difficulties in controlling Second Life (and similar environments). This suggests that these users could once again become disabled in the virtual world by the difficulties in effectively controlling their avatars, and their ‘disability privacy’, or the right to control an avatar as effectively as an able bodied user, and so appear virtually able bodied, will be compromised. Methods for overcoming these difficulties such as the use of gaze aware on-screen assistive tools could overcome these problems, but games manufacturers must design inclusively, so that disabled users may have the right to disability privacy in their Second (virtual) Lives.     

Online learning with social computing based interest sharing

Communities on the Internet are highly self-organizing, dynamic, and ubiquitous. One objective of peers in such a community is sharing common interests, even when compromising privacy. This paper presents a model for peers on the Internet that allows them to discover their common interests in terms of sets of frequently visited URLs. This model assists online learning by automatically presenting users with URLs related to what they are currently browsing, thus saving users’ time searching for additional information and helping to educate them on the current topic. To implement the model and collect test data, FireShare was developed as a plugin for the popular Web browser Firefox. Data was collected and analyzed on the number of discovered frequently visited URL sets, relevancy of mined association rules, and the overhead FireShare imposes on a network. While FireShare favorably validated the proposed model, analysis of the submitted test data shows high potential for success with future versions.     

Context-dependent awareness support in open collaboration environments

The widespread adoption of online services for performing work, home and leisure tasks enables users to operate in the ubiquitous environment provided by the Internet by managing a possibly high number of parallel (private and shared) activity contexts. The provision of awareness information is a key factor for keeping users up-to-date with what happens around them; e.g., with the operations performed by their collaborators. However, the delivery of notifications describing the occurred events can interrupt the users’ activities, with a possible disruptive effect on their emotional and attentional states. As a possible solution to the trade-off between informing and interrupting users, we defined two context-dependent notification management policies which support the selection of the notifications to be delivered on the basis of the user’s current activities, at different granularity levels: general collaboration context versus task carried out. These policies are offered by the COntext depeNdent awaReness informAtion Delivery (CONRAD) framework. We tested such policies with users by applying them in a collaboration environment that includes a set of largely used Web 2.0 services. The experiments show that our policies reduce the levels of workload on users while supporting an up-to-the-moment understanding of the interaction with their shared contexts. The present paper presents the CONRAD framework and the techniques underlying the proposed notification policies.     

Dynamic mix zone: location data sanitizing in assisted environments

Pervasive technology has been widely used in assistive environments and aware homes. The issue of how to preserve the privacy of patients being monitored has been attracting more public concerns. In assistive environments, location data of patients are collected through sensors for behavior patterns analysis, and they can also be shared among researchers for further research for early disease diagnosis. However, location information, even though de-identified, also introduces the risk of privacy leakage. A series of consecutive location samples can be considered as a trajectory of a single person, and this may leak private information if obtained by malicious users. This paper discusses this problem and proposes a location randomization algorithm to protect users’ location privacy. Two privacy metrics according to location privacy are defined and used to evaluate the proposed approach. A method using dynamic mix zones is proposed to confound trajectories of two or more persons.     

On-line privacy in Europe—new regulation for cookies

The Internet has increasingly become part of our everyday lives. However, for all the many benefits that this brings, there remain legitimate concerns that the Internet poses an inherent threat to the privacy of users. The technical characteristics of the Internet provide a host of opportunities for monitoring users' activities, potentially enabling an invisible profile to be drawn up of each Internet user. In Europe, the 1995 EU Data Protection Directive provides a framework for protection of information privacy. This paper will evaluate the effectiveness of the Directive in protecting on-line privacy, and in particular consider the likely impact of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive adopted by the Commission on the 12th July 2002. For the first time, the new Directive makes specific provision for invisible data collection tools such as cookies. This paper will argue that the new Directive adds little to the protection afforded by the Data Protection Directive.     

Location privacy: going beyond K-anonymity,cloaking and anonymizers

With many location-based services, it is implicitly assumed that the location server receives actual users locations to respond to their spatial queries. Consequently, information customized to their locations, such as nearest points of interest can be provided. However, there is a major privacy concern over sharing such sensitive information with potentially malicious servers, jeopardizing users’ private information. The anonymity- and cloaking-based approaches proposed to address this problem cannot provide stringent privacy guarantees without incurring costly computation and communication overhead. Furthermore, they require a trusted intermediate anonymizer to protect user locations during query processing. This paper proposes a fundamental approach based on private information retrieval to process range and K-nearest neighbor queries, the prevalent queries used in many location-based services, with stronger privacy guarantees compared to those of the cloaking and anonymity approaches. We performed extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic datasets to confirm the effectiveness of our approaches.     

Addressing privacy requirements in system design: the PriS method

A major challenge in the field of software engineering is to make users trust the software that they use in their every day activities for professional or recreational reasons. Trusting software depends on various elements, one of which is the protection of user privacy. Protecting privacy is about complying with user’s desires when it comes to handling personal information. Users’ privacy can also be defined as the right to determine when, how and to what extend information about them is communicated to others. Current research stresses the need for addressing privacy issues during the system design rather than during the system implementation phase. To this end, this paper describes PriS, a security requirements engineering method, which incorporates privacy requirements early in the system development process. PriS considers privacy requirements as organisational goals that need to be satisfied and adopts the use of privacy-process patterns as a way to: (1) describe the effect of privacy requirements on business processes; and (2) facilitate the identification of the system architecture that best supports the privacy-related business processes. In this way, PriS provides a holistic approach from ‘high-level’ goals to ‘privacy-compliant’ IT systems. The PriS way-of-working is formally defined thus, enabling the development of automated tools for assisting its application.

CP2: Cryptographic privacy protection framework for online social networks

In Online Social Networks (OSNs), users interact with each other by sharing their personal information. One of the concerns in OSNs is how user privacy is protected since the OSN providers have full control over users’ data. The OSN providers typically store users’ information permanently; the privacy controls embedded in OSNs offer few options to users for customizing and managing the dissipation of their data over the network. In this paper, we propose an efficient privacy protection framework for OSNs that can be used to protect the privacy of users’ data and their online social relationships from third parties. The recommended framework shifts the control over data sharing back to the users by providing them with flexible and dynamic access policies. We employ a public-key broadcast encryption scheme as the cryptographic tool for managing information sharing with a subset of a user’s friends. The privacy and complexity evaluations show the superiority of our approach over previous.     

Music composition by interaction between human and computer

This paper aims at constructing a music composition system that composes music by the interaction between human and a computer. Even users without special musical knowledge can compose 16-bar musical works with one melody part and some backing parts using this system. The interactive Genetic Algorithm is introduced to music composition so that users’ feeling toward music is reflected in the composed music. One chromosome corresponds to 4-bar musical work information. Users participate in music composition by evaluating composed works after GA operators such as crossover, mutation, virus infection are applied to chromosomes based on the evaluation results. From the experimental results, it is found that the users’ evaluation values become high over the progress of generations. That is, the system can compose 16-bar musical works reflecting users’ feeling. Muneyuki Unehara: He received his M.S. in Engineering in 2002 from Institute of Science and Engineering, University of Tsukuba. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate of Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Tsukuba. His research interests include the construction of intelligent systems by considering soft computing techniques and human interface. Takehisa Onisawa, Ph.D.: He received Dr.Eng. in Systems Science in 1986 from Tokyo Institute of Technology. Currently, he is a Professor in the Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Tsukuba. His research interests include applications of soft computing techniques to human centered systems thinking. He is a member of IEEE and IFSA.     

Articulation of information requirements for personalised knowledge construction

The quality of information provision influences considerably knowledge construction driven by individual users’ needs. In the design of information systems for e-learning, personal information requirements should be incorporated to determine a selection of suitable learning content, instructive sequencing for learning content, and effective presentation of learning content. This is considered as an important part of instructional design for a personalised information package. The current research reveals that there is a lack of means by which individual users’ information requirements can be effectively incorporated to support personal knowledge construction. This paper presents a method which enables an articulation of users’ requirements based on the rooted learning theories and requirements engineering paradigms. The user’s information requirements can be systematically encapsulated in a user profile (i.e. user requirements space), and further transformed onto instructional design specifications (i.e. information space). These two spaces allow the discovering of information requirements patterns for self-maintaining and self-adapting personalisation that enhance experience in the knowledge construction process.     

Exploring the feasibility of web form adaptation to users’ cultural dimension scores

With many daily tasks now performed on the Internet, productivity and efficiency in working with web pages have become transversal necessities for all users. Many of these tasks involve the inputting of user information, obligating the user to interact with a webform. Research has demonstrated that productivity depends largely on users’ personal characteristics, implying that it will vary from user to user. The webform development process must therefore, include modeling of its intended users to ensure the interface design is appropriate. Taking all potential users into account is difficult, however, primarily because their identity is unknown, and some may be effectively excluded by the final design. Such discrimination can be avoided by incorporating rules that allow webforms to adapt automatically to the individual user’s characteristics, the principal one being the person’s culture. In this paper we report two studies that validate this option. We begin by determining the relationships between a user’s cultural dimension scores and their behavior when faced with a webform. We then validate the notion that rules based on these relationships can be established for the automatic adaptation of a webform in order to reduce the time taken to complete it. We conclude that the automatic webform adaptation to the cultural dimensions of users improves their performance.     

Considering New Privacy Laws in Australia

Like many nations, Australia is currently weighing numerous options regarding privacy legislation. The Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) has released a 2,000-page review of Australian privacy law, in which it proposes several changes that would significantly shift the balance between freedom of speech and privacy in Australia because they would extend to the media and private individuals as well as governments and businesses - especially important because Australia has no express right of free speech.