Learning Outcomes for Cyber Defense Competitions

Cyber defense competitions (CDCs) simulate a real-world environment, where the competitors must protect the information assets of a fictional organization. These competitions are becoming popular at the high school and college levels, as well as in industry and governmental settings. However, there is little research to date on the learning outcomes associated with CDCs or the long-term benefits to the participants as they pursue future educational, employment or military goals. For this exploratory research project, we surveyed 11 judges and mentors participating in a well-established high school CDC held in the southeastern United States. Then we developed a set of recommended learning outcomes for CDCs, based on importance of the topic and participant preparedness for future information-security related endeavors. While most previous research has focused on technology issues, we analyzed technological, human, and social topics, to develop a comprehensive set of recommendations for future CDCs

An Event-Ontology-Based Approach to Constructing Episodic Knowledge from Unstructured Text Documents

Document summarization is an important function for knowledge management when a digital library of text documents grows. It allows documents to be presented in a concise manner for easy reading and understanding. Traditionally, document summarization adopts sentence-based mechanisms that identify and extract key sentences from long documents and assemble them together. Although that approach is useful in providing an abstract of documents, it cannot extract the relationship or sequence of a set of related events (also called episodes). This paper proposes an event-oriented ontology approach to constructing episodic knowledge to facilitate the understanding of documents. We also empirically evaluated the proposed approach by using instruments developed based on Bloom’s Taxonomy. The result reveals that the approach based on proposed event-oriented ontology outperformed the traditional text summarization approach in capturing conceptual and procedural knowledge, but the latter was still better in delivering factual knowledge

Survival of the Fittest? The Rebranding of West Virginia Higher Education

During the years 1996 to 2005, West Virginia produced the greatest proportion (56.25%) of regionally accredited institutional rebrandings. In addition, the state experienced the greatest proportion (25%) of the specific “college-to-university” rebranding strategy than any other state. This study set out to discover the reasons why West Virginia produced such a high percentage of “college-to-university” changes. Using a mixed method approach of analysis, the researcher used quantitative and qualitative methods to determine the rationale, strategies, and implications of the college-to-university change. As West Virginia was viewed as a nested population in Appalachia, a population of 51 institutions that experienced the college-to-university change located in 10 states containing Appalachian counties was generated. Administrators from these schools were surveyed and the returns provided a basis for interviews of West Virginia administrators. Additionally, 103 institutions in the United States that rebranded as universities were analyzed in regard to effects of the rebranding five years following the change. The variables studied included the following: enrollment, tuition, Carnegie Classifications, the numbers and types of graduate programs, and undergraduate selectivity. The study focused on the rebrandings at the following West Virginia institutions: The University of Charleston (1979), Salem Teikyo University (1989), Wheeling Jesuit University (1996), West Virginia University Institute of Technology (1996), Mountain State University (2001), Concord University (2004), Fairmont State University (2004), Shepherd University (2004), West Virginia State University (2004), Ohio Valley University (2005), and the planned changes at West Liberty State College. This dissertation features information concerning the rationale for change, how the change was realized, the relationship of the change to regulatory bodies, reactions by stakeholders to the change, the effect of the change on enrollment, the implications of institutional prestige, and administrative advice regarding the change. In addition, a case study on retaining an institutional brand was conducted of the “Allegheny” higher education brand and its usage among institutions in Appalachia was included. This case study examined how Allegheny College has protected its brand and gained brand dominance in the wake of the rebranding efforts of other institutions. To understand the rebranding phenomenon, a total of 22 individuals were interviewed, 34 administrators returned surveys, and an additional 48 individuals provided information specific responses. A total of 102 unduplicated respondents participated in this study and these included: past and present university administrators, institutional staff, researchers, governmental representatives, alumni, accreditation liaisons, and educational consortia staff

Do You Mind? User Perceptions of Machine Consciousness

The prospect of machine consciousness cultivates controversy across media, academia, and industry. Assessing whether non-experts perceive technologies as conscious, and exploring the consequences of this perception, are yet unaddressed challenges in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). To address them, we surveyed 100 people, exploring their conceptualisations of consciousness and if and how they perceive consciousness in currently available interactive technologies. We show that many people already perceive a degree of consciousness in GPT-3, a voice chat bot, and a robot vacuum cleaner. Within participant responses we identified dynamic tensions between denial and speculation, thinking and feeling, interaction and experience, control and independence, and rigidity and spontaneity. These tensions can inform future research into perceptions of machine consciousness and the challenges it represents for HCI. With both empirical and theoretical contributions, this paper emphasises the importance of HCI in an era of machine consciousness, real, perceived or denied

Do You Mind? User Perceptions of Machine Consciousness

The prospect of machine consciousness cultivates controversy across media, academia, and industry. Assessing whether non-experts perceive technologies as conscious, and exploring the consequences of this perception, are yet unaddressed challenges in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). To address them, we surveyed 100 people, exploring their conceptualisations of consciousness and if and how they perceive consciousness in currently available interactive technologies. We show that many people already perceive a degree of consciousness in GPT-3, a voice chat bot, and a robot vacuum cleaner. Within participant responses we identified dynamic tensions between denial and speculation, thinking and feeling, interaction and experience, control and independence, and rigidity and spontaneity. These tensions can inform future research into perceptions of machine consciousness and the challenges it represents for HCI. With both empirical and theoretical contributions, this paper emphasises the importance of HCI in an era of machine consciousness, real, perceived or denied

Influence factors for local comprehensibility of process models

The main aim of this study is to investigate human understanding of process models and to develop an improved understanding of its relevant influence factors. Aided by assumptions from cognitive psychology, this article attempts to address specific deductive reasoning difficulties based on process models. The authors developed a research model to capture the influence of two effects on the cognitive difficulty of reasoning tasks: (i) the presence of different control-flow patterns (such as conditional or parallel execution) in a process model and (ii) the interactivity of model elements. Based on solutions to 61 different reasoning tasks by 155 modelers, the results from this study indicate that the presence of certain control-flow patterns influences the cognitive difficulty of reasoning tasks. In particular, sequence is relatively easy, while loops in a model proved difficult. Modelers with higher process modeling knowledge performed better and rated subjective difficulty of loops lower than modelers with lower process modeling knowledge. The findings additionally support the prediction that interactivity between model elements is positively related to the cognitive difficulty of reasoning. Our research contributes to both academic literature on the comprehension of process models and practitioner literature focusing on cognitive difficulties when using process models

AUTOMATED DISCOVERY AND INSTALLATION OF NETWORK-ATTACHED PERIPHERAL DEVICES

ABSTRACT Networks today are pervasive and numerous. They are accessed using a variety of client devices such as traditional laptop and desktop computers, phones, tablets, music players, and video game consoles. Networks may contain many categories of services, of which an increasingly common one is the network attached peripheral device. Network attached peripheral devices, such as printers, fax machines, and video projectors, are available to client devices that have installed and configured the associated device driver software. Practically, this means that network attached peripheral devices are hidden from or unavailable to client devices until a user performs the manual discovery of the network attached peripheral device and the installation of the requisite device driver software. This paper presents a system architecture that allows for the automatic discovery and installation of network attached peripheral devices with no user intervention

Decision Problems in Information Security: Methodologies and Quantitative Models

In the present dissertation, decision problems in information security are covered and methodologies and quantitative models are developed to address open issues in academia and to provide insights for practitioners. Framed in an adaptation of the process theory of Soh and Markus (1995) - from a thematic point of view - the dissertation comprises papers that cover decision problems in each phase of the adapted theory. The structure of the thesis is as follows: Part I comprises a presentation of and introduction to the dissertation with the underlying theoretical framing. In Part II, metadata of the papers of which the dissertation is composed of, are presented. Part III lists additional papers that have been developed during the course of this dissertation. Part IV includes a discussion of the findings and concludes with an outline of future research