Protecting Personal Private Information in Collaborative Environments

The ability to collaborate has always been vitally important to businesses and enterprises. With the availability of current networking and computing power, the creation of Collaborative Working Environments (CWEs) has allowed for this process to occur anytime over any geographical distance. Sharing information between individuals through collaborative environments creates new challenges in privacy protection for organizations and the members of organizations. This thesis confronts the problems when attempting to protect the personal private information of collaborating individuals. In this thesis, a privacy-by-policy approach is taken to addressing the issue of protecting private information within collaborative environments. A privacy-by-policy approach to privacy protection provides collaborating individuals with notice and choice surrounding their private information, in order to provide an individual with a level of control over how their information is to be used. To this end, a collaborative privacy architecture for providing privacy within a collaborative environment is presented. This architecture uses ontologies to express the static concept and relation definitions required for privacy and collaboration. The collaborative privacy architecture also contains a Collaborative Privacy Manager (CPM) service which handles changes in dynamic collaborative environments. The goals of this thesis are to provide privacy mechanisms for the non-client centric situation of collaborative working environments. This thesis also strives to provide privacy through technically enforceable and customizable privacy policies. To this end, individual collaborators are provided with access, modification rights, and transparency through the use of ontologies built into the architecture. Finally, individual collaborators are provided these privacy protections in a way that is easy to use and understand and use. A collaborative scenario as a test case is described to present how this architecture would benefit individuals and organizations when they are engaged in collaborative work. In this case study a university and hospital are engaged in collaborative research which involves the use of private information belonging to collaborators and patients from the hospital. This case study also highlights how different organizations can be under different sets of legislative guidelines and how these guidelines can be incorporated into the privacy architecture. Through this collaboration scenario an implementation of the collaborative privacy architecture is provided, along with results from semantic and privacy rule executions, and measurements of how actions carried out by the architecture perform under various conditions

Open plan and academe: pre- and post-hoc conversations

There now exists a strong body of evidence that creative workplaces can, in certain circumstances, exert beneficial influences on organisational cultures and outputs. Academia tends to resist such spaces and faculty buildings. The reasons are explored but the reactions of staff are not found to be different from those reported in the literature on general creative spaces. The success or failure of team oriented workspaces is in large part a socially constructed perception influenced by the manner of implementation and management. As elsewhere new workplaces are about new conversations. The cases studied lead to a model of the tensions inherent in workplace redesign.</p

Open-TEE - An Open Virtual Trusted Execution Environment

Hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are widely deployed in mobile devices. Yet their use has been limited primarily to applications developed by the device vendors. Recent standardization of TEE interfaces by GlobalPlatform (GP) promises to partially address this problem by enabling GP-compliant trusted applications to run on TEEs from different vendors. Nevertheless ordinary developers wishing to develop trusted applications face significant challenges. Access to hardware TEE interfaces are difficult to obtain without support from vendors. Tools and software needed to develop and debug trusted applications may be expensive or non-existent. In this paper, we describe Open-TEE, a virtual, hardware-independent TEE implemented in software. Open-TEE conforms to GP specifications. It allows developers to develop and debug trusted applications with the same tools they use for developing software in general. Once a trusted application is fully debugged, it can be compiled for any actual hardware TEE. Through performance measurements and a user study we demonstrate that Open-TEE is efficient and easy to use. We have made Open- TEE freely available as open source.Comment: Author's version of article to appear in 14th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, TrustCom 2015, Helsinki, Finland, August 20-22, 201

EU - Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and e-learning in Education Project - Phase II

The training needs analysis was conducted beteeen February and April 2015 for the EU funded project: ICT in Education in Kosovo. The processes required to perform the traning needs analysis have been. The design of a framework of competences; The identification of target groups; The creation and implementation of an online survey to assess the competence of education sector personnel against the competences contained in the framework; The collation, preparation and analysis of the survey data; and Reporting the research findings.European Union Office in KosovoEuropeAid/133846/C/SER/X

Office design for the multi-generational knowledge workforce

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact the workplace can have on knowledge working for a multi-generational workforce. Design/methodology/approach – A case study analysis is undertaken of Leeds City Council (LCC) workplace in the UK. Findings – The findings from the study show that in the context of LCC there are some key differences between the generations regarding knowledge working preferences for formal/informal meeting spaces. In other aspects, such as knowledge sharing, the generations appear to agree on key aspects such as mentoring and team-based working environments. Practical implications – Corporate real estate managers can use the research findings to assist them in providing a range of workplace settings to enhance multi-generational interaction. Originality/value – This paper fills a gap in current research by evaluating workplace preferences based on generational differences.</p

MOSAIC vision and scenarios for mobile collaborative work related to health and wellbeing

The main objective of the MOSAIC project is to accelerate innovation in Mobile Worker Support Environments by shaping future research and innovation activities in Europe. The modus operandi of MOSAIC is to develop visions and illustrative scenarios for future collaborative workspaces involving mobile and location-aware working. Analysis of the scenarios is input to the process of road mapping with the purpose of developing strategies for R&D leading to deployment of innovative mobile work technologies and applications across different domains. This paper relates to one specific domain, that of Health and Wellbeing. The focus is therefore is on mobile working environments which enable mobile collaborative working related to the domain of healthcare and wellbeing services for citizens. This paper reports the work of MOSAIC T2.2 on the vision and scenarios for mobile collaborative work related to this domain. This work was also an input to the activity of developing the MOSAIC roadmap for future research and development targeted at realization of the future Health and Wellbeing vision. The MOSAIC validation process for the Health and Wellbeing scenarios is described and one scenario – the Major Incident Scenario - is presented in detail

ePortfolios: Mediating the minefield of inherent risks and tensions

The ePortfolio Project at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) exemplifies an innovative and flexible harnessing of current portfolio thinking and design that has achieved substantial buy-in across the institution with over 23000 active portfolios. Robust infrastructure support, curriculum integration and training have facilitated widespread take-up, while QUT’s early adoption of ePortfolio technology has enabled the concomitant development of a strong policy and systems approach to deal explicitly with legal and design responsibilities. In the light of that experience, this paper will highlight the risks and tensions inherent in ePortfolio policy, design and implementation. In many ways, both the strengths and weaknesses of ePortfolios lie in their ability to be accessed by a wider, less secure audience – either internally (e.g. other students and staff) or externally (e.g. potential employees and referees). How do we balance the obvious requirement to safeguard students from the potential for institutionally-facilitated cyber-harm and privacy breaches, with this generation’s instinctive personal and professional desires for reflections, private details, information and intellectual property to be available freely and with minimal restriction? How can we promote collaboration and freeform expression in the blog and wiki world but also manage the institutional risk that unauthorised use of student information and work so palpably carries with it? For ePortfolios to flourish and to develop and for students to remain engaged in current reflective processes, holistic guidelines and sensible boundaries are required to help safeguard personal details and journaling without overly restricting students’ emotional, collaborative and creative engagement with the ePortfolio experience. This paper will discuss such issues and suggest possible ways forward