PLACE Events 2016-2017

This document describes PLACE events at Linfield College for 2016-2017

A collective intelligence approach for building student's trustworthiness profile in online learning

(c) 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Information and communication technologies have been widely adopted in most of educational institutions to support e-Learning through different learning methodologies such as computer supported collaborative learning, which has become one of the most influencing learning paradigms. In this context, e-Learning stakeholders, are increasingly demanding new requirements, among them, information security is considered as a critical factor involved in on-line collaborative processes. Information security determines the accurate development of learning activities, especially when a group of students carries out on-line assessment, which conducts to grades or certificates, in these cases, IS is an essential issue that has to be considered. To date, even most advances security technological solutions have drawbacks that impede the development of overall security e-Learning frameworks. For this reason, this paper suggests enhancing technological security models with functional approaches, namely, we propose a functional security model based on trustworthiness and collective intelligence. Both of these topics are closely related to on-line collaborative learning and on-line assessment models. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to discover how security can be enhanced with trustworthiness in an on-line collaborative learning scenario through the study of the collective intelligence processes that occur on on-line assessment activities. To this end, a peer-to-peer public student's profile model, based on trustworthiness is proposed, and the main collective intelligence processes involved in the collaborative on-line assessments activities, are presented.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The BioS4You European Project: An Innovative Way to Effectively Engage Z-Generation Students in STEM Disciplines

In this contribution, we present the BioS4You project and analyse the results obtained in the first 18 months of its activity. The “Bio-Inspired STEM topics for engaging young generations” (BioS4You) Erasmus+ KA2 Innovation project aims to bridge the gap between STEM national curricula (which include Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and the needs of Z-generation students, uninterested to basic themes, but enthusiastic in issues related to environmental, social, and health concerns. The BioS4You project engages young learners in STEM subjects, starting with current issues of interest for them, as the social and environmental impact of new technologies, connecting STEM concepts to real-world technologies that are supporting on facing environmental, social, and health current challenges. Novel fields such as Bioengineering, Bioscience, Biotechnology can be implemented into classroom teaching, integrating academic disciplines, and stimulating the academic and social growth of young people. The knowledge of new STEM contents makes the students feel an active part of the technological innovation (and not just passive users) and help them to build a better future, bringing them closer to the STEM world and enabling them to make more informed choices for their future careers

The BioS4You European project: An innovative way to effectively engage Z-generation students in STEM disciplines

In this contribution, we present the BioS4You project and analyse the results obtained in the first 18 months of its activity. The “Bio-Inspired STEM topics for engaging young generations” (BioS4You) Erasmus+ KA2 Innovation project aims to bridge the gap between STEM national curricula (which include Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and the needs of Z-generation students, uninterested to basic themes, but enthusiastic in issues related to environmental, social, and health concerns. The BioS4You project engages young learners in STEM subjects, starting with current issues of interest for them, as the social and environmental impact of new technologies, connecting STEM concepts to real-world technologies that are supporting on facing environmental, social, and health current challenges. Novel fields such as Bioengineering, Bioscience, Biotechnology can be implemented into classroom teaching, integrating academic disciplines, and stimulating the academic and social growth of young people. The knowledge of new STEM contents makes the students feel an active part of the technological innovation (and not just passive users) and help them to build a better future, bringing them closer to the STEM world and enabling them to make more informed choices for their future careers

Classification of confidential documents by using adaptive neurofuzzy inference systems

AbstractDetecting the security level of a confidential document is a vital task for organizations to protect the confidential information encapsulated in. Diverse classification rules and techniques are being applied by human experts. Increasing number of confidential information in organizations are making difficult to classify all the documents carefully with human effort. A hybrid approach involving support vector classifier and adaptive neuro-fuzzy classifier is proposed in this study. Also states preprocessing tasks required for document classification with natural language processing. To represent term-document relations a recommended metric TF-IDF was chosen to construct a weight matrix. Agglutinative nature of Turkish documents is handled by Turkish stemming algorithms. At the end of the article some experimental results and success metrics are projected with accuracy rates

Cryptographic Tools for Privacy Preservation

Data permeates every aspect of our daily life and it is the backbone of our digitalized society. Smartphones, smartwatches and many more smart devices measure, collect, modify and share data in what is known as the Internet of Things.Often, these devices don’t have enough computation power/storage space thus out-sourcing some aspects of the data management to the Cloud. Outsourcing computation/storage to a third party poses natural questions regarding the security and privacy of the shared sensitive data.Intuitively, Cryptography is a toolset of primitives/protocols of which security prop- erties are formally proven while Privacy typically captures additional social/legislative requirements that relate more to the concept of “trust” between people, “how” data is used and/or “who” has access to data. This thesis separates the concepts by introducing an abstract model that classifies data leaks into different types of breaches. Each class represents a specific requirement/goal related to cryptography, e.g. confidentiality or integrity, or related to privacy, e.g. liability, sensitive data management and more.The thesis contains cryptographic tools designed to provide privacy guarantees for different application scenarios. In more details, the thesis:(a) defines new encryption schemes that provide formal privacy guarantees such as theoretical privacy definitions like Differential Privacy (DP), or concrete privacy-oriented applications covered by existing regulations such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR);(b) proposes new tools and procedures for providing verifiable computation’s guarantees in concrete scenarios for post-quantum cryptography or generalisation of signature schemes;(c) proposes a methodology for utilising Machine Learning (ML) for analysing the effective security and privacy of a crypto-tool and, dually, proposes a secure primitive that allows computing specific ML algorithm in a privacy-preserving way;(d) provides an alternative protocol for secure communication between two parties, based on the idea of communicating in a periodically timed fashion

NEW SECURE SOLUTIONS FOR PRIVACY AND ACCESS CONTROL IN HEALTH INFORMATION EXCHANGE

In the current digital age, almost every healthcare organization (HCO) has moved from storing patient health records on paper to storing them electronically. Health Information Exchange (HIE) is the ability to share (or transfer) patients’ health information between different HCOs while maintaining national security standards like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996. Over the past few years, research has been conducted to develop privacy and access control frameworks for HIE systems. The goal of this dissertation is to address the privacy and access control concerns by building practical and efficient HIE frameworks to secure the sharing of patients’ health information. The first solution allows secure HIE among different healthcare providers while focusing primarily on the privacy of patients’ information. It allows patients to authorize a certain type of health information to be retrieved, which helps prevent any unintentional leakage of information. The privacy solution also provides healthcare providers with the capability of mutual authentication and patient authentication. It also ensures the integrity and auditability of health information being exchanged. The security and performance study for the first protocol shows that it is efficient for the purpose of HIE and offers a high level of security for such exchanges. The second framework presents a new cloud-based protocol for access control to facilitate HIE across different HCOs, employing a trapdoor hash-based proxy signature in a novel manner to enable secure (authenticated and authorized) on-demand access to patient records. The proposed proxy signature-based scheme provides an explicit mechanism for patients to authorize the sharing of specific medical information with specific HCOs, which helps prevent any undesired or unintentional leakage of health information. The scheme also ensures that such authorizations are authentic with respect to both the HCOs and the patient. Moreover, the use of proxy signatures simplifies security auditing and the ability to obtain support for investigations by providing non-repudiation. Formal definitions, security specifications, and a detailed theoretical analysis, including correctness, security, and performance of both frameworks are provided which demonstrate the improvements upon other existing HIE systems

Digital certificates and threshold cryptography

This dissertation discusses the use of secret sharing cryptographic protocols for distributing and sharing of secret documents, in our case PDF documents. We discuss the advantages and uses of such a system in the context of collaborative environments. Description of the cryptographic protocol involved and the necessary Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) shall be presented. We also provide an implementation of this framework as a “proof of concept” and fundament the use of a certificate extension as the basis for threshold cryptography. Details of the shared secret distribution protocol and shared secret recovery protocol shall be given as well as the associated technical implementation details. The actual secret sharing algorithm implemented at this stage is based on an existing well known secret sharing scheme that uses polynomial interpolation over a finite field. Finally we conclude with a practical assessment of our prototype

Using Offline Activities to Enhance Online Cybersecurity Education

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the United States has experienced the impact of a technological revolution. One effect of this technological revolution is the creation of entirely new careers related to the field of technology, including cybersecurity. Continued growth in the cybersecurity industry means a greater number of jobs will be created, adding to the existing number of jobs that are challenging an under-educated and under-trained workforce. The goal of this thesis is to increase the effectiveness of cybersecurity education. This thesis studies whether an online course in cybersecurity can be enhanced by offline, in-person activities that mirror traditional classroom methods. To validate the research, two groups of high school students participated in an online course with only one group participating in offline activities. The results showed that the group that participated in both the online and offline portions of the course had a higher percentage of student retention, a more positive mindset towards cybersecurity, and an improved performance in the course