Information Systems Security Countermeasures: An Assessment of Older Workers in Indonesian Small and Medium-Sized Businesses

Information Systems (IS) misuse can result in cyberattacks such as denial-of-service, phishing, malware, and business email compromise. The study of factors that contribute to the misuse of IS resources is well-documented and empirical research has supported the value of approaches that can be used to deter IS misuse among employees; however, age and cultural nuances exist. Research focusing on older workers and how they can help to deter IS misuse among employees and support cybersecurity countermeasures within developing countries is in its nascent stages. The goal of this study was two-fold. The first goal was to assess what older workers within Indonesian Small to Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs) do to acquire, apply, and share information security countermeasures aimed at mitigating cyberattacks. The second goal was to assess if and how younger workers share information security countermeasures with their older colleagues. Using a qualitative case study approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with five dyads of older (50-55 years) and younger (25-45 years) workers from five SMBs in Jakarta, Indonesia. A thematic analysis approach was used to analyze the interview data, where each dyad represented a unit of analysis. The data were organized into three main themes including 1) Indonesian government IS policy and oversight, which included one topic (stronger government IS oversight needed); 2) SMB IS practices, which included three topics (SMB management issues, SMB budget constraints, SMB diligent IS practices, and IS insider threat); and 3) SMB worker IS practices, which included three topics (younger worker job performance, IS worker compliance issues, older worker IS practices) and five sub-topics under older worker IS practices (older worker diligent in IS, older worker IS challenged, older worker riskier IS practices, older worker more IS dependent, and older worker more forgetful on IS practices). Results indicated that older and younger workers at Indonesian SMBs acquire, apply, and share information security countermeasures in a similar manner: through IS information dissemination from the SMB and through communication from co-workers. Also, while younger workers share IS countermeasures freely with their older co-workers, some have negative perceptions that older co-workers are slower and less proficient in IS. Overall, participants reported positive and cohesive teamwork between older and younger workers at SMBs through strong IS collaboration and transparent information sharing. The contribution of this research is that it provides valuable empirical data on older worker behavior and social dynamics in Indonesian organizations. This was a context-specific study aimed at better understanding the situationalities of older workers within organizations in the developing country of Indonesia and how knowledge is shared within the organization. This assessment of cybersecurity knowledge acquisition, skill implementation, and knowledge sharing contributes to the development of organization-wide cybersecurity practices that can be used to strengthen Indonesian SMBs and other organizations in developing countries. This study also provides a blueprint for researchers to replicate and extend this line of inquiry. Finally, the results could shed light on how older workers can be a productive part of the solution to information security issues in the workplace

Rule-based shielding for Partially Observable Monte-Carlo Planning

Partially Observable Monte-Carlo Planning (POMCP) is a powerful online algorithm able to generate approximate policies for large Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes. The online nature of this method supports scalability by avoiding complete policy representation. The lack of an explicit representation however hinders policy interpretability and makes policy verification very complex. In this work, we propose two contributions. The first is a method for identifying unexpected actions selected by POMCP with respect to expert prior knowledge of the task. The second is a shielding approach that prevents POMCP from selecting unexpected actions. The first method is based on Satisfiability Modulo Theory (SMT). It inspects traces (i.e., sequences of belief-action-observation triplets) generated by POMCP to compute the parameters of logical formulas about policy properties defined by the expert. The second contribution is a module that uses online the logical formulas to identify anomalous actions selected by POMCP and substitutes those actions with actions that satisfy the logical formulas fulfilling expert knowledge. We evaluate our approach on Tiger, a standard benchmark for POMDPs, and a real-world problem related to velocity regulation in mobile robot navigation. Results show that the shielded POMCP outperforms the standard POMCP in a case study in which a wrong parameter of POMCP makes it select wrong actions from time to time. Moreover, we show that the approach keeps good performance also if the parameters of the logical formula are optimized using trajectories containing some wrong actions

CE 651 Appendix Diagnosis and Psychopathology of Children and Adolescents

Appendix I: Race and Intersectionality Mental Health Article Review and Presentation/Discussion Leade

Blind children's understanding of vision

This thesis explores the effects of congenital blindness upon the development of understanding of vision, and draws on the theoretical frameworks of understanding of aspectuality and visual perspective-taking. Six studies investigated how blind children demonstrated their understanding of vision. Where appropriate, their performance was compared to a control group of sighted children. The views of parents and educators of congenitally blind children were sought in order to gain insight into social influences upon the development of blind children’s understanding of vision. Sixteen congenitally blind children aged from 3;6 to 14;8, 168 typically developing sighted children aged from 3;6 to 14;8 and 58 sighted adults took part in the studies. There were three main findings. First, the associative stage in understanding of the aspectuality of knowledge for blind children may be manifest in the relationship between touching and knowing. Second, when utilising a more naturalistic setting than has commonly been used, blind children aged between three and 11 years were able to hide successfully, raising questions about the position that Level 1 perspective-taking is not present in blind children until the age of at least six or seven years, and possibly not until ten years. Third, blind participants demonstrated an understanding of mind earlier than has been found in other studies, suggesting that the development of theory of mind in congenitally blind children may not be as delayed as was previously thought. Several educational issues were raised, including the manner in which blind children are taught about vision, and their placement in ability-groups in mainstream classrooms