Animating the Ethical Demand:Exploring user dispositions in industry innovation cases through animation-based sketching

This paper addresses the challenge of attaining ethical user stances during the design process of products and services and proposes animation-based sketching as a design method, which supports elaborating and examining different ethical stances towards the user. The discussion is qualified by an empirical study of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in a Triple Helix constellation. Using a three-week long innovation workshop, UCrAc, involving 16 Danish companies and organisations and 142 students as empirical data, we discuss how animation-based sketching can explore not yet existing user dispositions, as well as create an incentive for ethical conduct in development and innovation processes. The ethical fulcrum evolves around Løgstrup's Ethical Demand and his notion of spontaneous life manifestations. From this, three ethical stances are developed; apathy, sympathy and empathy. By exploring both apathetic and sympathetic views, the ethical reflections are more nuanced as a result of actually seeing the user experience simulated through different user dispositions. Exploring the three ethical stances by visualising real use cases with the technologies simulated as already being implemented makes the life manifestations of the users in context visible. We present and discuss how animation-based sketching can support the elaboration and examination of different ethical stances towards the user in the product and service development process. Finally we present a framework for creating narrative representations of emerging technology use cases, which invite to reflection upon the ethics of the user experience.</jats:p

A multi-layer framework for personalized social tag-based applications

Recent years have seen an increasing diffusion of online communities giving their members the ability of specifying and sharing metadata concerning online resources. Such practice, also known as social or collaborative tagging, has the purpose of collecting and sharing opinions about Web resources and simplifying their retrieval. In this paper, we go one step further and show how tags can have more enhanced applications to be exploited for customizing Web content fruition. More precisely, we propose a multi-layer framework where data collected by social tagging communities are complemented with additional services. Such services provide users the ability of expressing their dis/agreement with existing tags, denoting the members they trust based on their characteristics and relationships, or specifying policies on which "quality" assessment of resources should be returned. Besides providing the formal specification of the proposed framework, we illustrate two case studies we have implemented and the experiments we have carried out in order to verify the feasibility of our approach

Social capital and collective efficacy for disaster resilience: connecting individuals with communities and vulnerability with resilience in hurricane-prone communities in Florida

2013 Summer.Includes bibliographical references.To view the abstract, please see the full text of the document

On reputation evaluation in 2.0 communities.

Current technology has disappointed many members of WEB2.0 communities by its slow and tough adaptability to specific users\u2bc skills and competences. Most of the largest WEB2.0 communities rely on the work of their members to create the resources they are built on, a business model known under the acronym UGC (User Generated Contents), which is today very popular yet still very simple and immature. Presently the vast majority of the communities that relay on UGCs lack an accurate ranking system for their most proficient members and almost none of them provide an effective rewarding mechanism. Sometimes they do provide means to cooperatively evaluate and classify the available resources, but very few of these mechanisms take in account the competence of the voters. Although rough, the current technology seems sufficient to confer to some cooperative web communities a discrete success, which for the most part is due to their core-members passion and commitment. Unfortunately deficiencies like the ones described can involve that, over time, only a small amount of the members keep committed and willing to produce resources of a certain quality. This tendency leads to the situation in which, although the community grows in terms of numbers, in proportion its value decreases. Considering the fast diffusion of web2.0 communities and the new emerging Enterprise2.0 communities phenomena, this problem needs no longer to be underestimated. 2.0 communities should start thinking about new means to raise their quality standards in order to stay effective and successful over time. Providing communities with concrete rewarding systems like remunerative ones could fix the problem, nevertheless this approach rarely and loosely has been implemented so far. The reason is that the task involves several and not trivial side problems, such as the necessity of an advanced ranking mechanisms to evaluate the members. This method should be able to consider complex factors like competence and commitment, but at the same time it should be easily understandable and shared by the members of the community. In order to make sure that the members share and agree with the rating system it must involve their collaboration, which is a non trivial problem, especially in Entrprise2.0 communities. For the aforementioned reasons I propose as a means to overcome the problem a method based on reputation rather than competence and commitment, which is named Reputation Community Evaluation (RCE). This new approach is not based solely on quantitative measurements but relies on an algorithm which exploits the community member reputations to evaluate the resources and the members themselves. In this method the reputation of the single member grows or decreases according to its activity in the community and the evaluations received from the other members over a certain period of time. All members opinions/votes are themselves weighted accordingly to the single member reputation. This approach makes possible to put in place new kinds of business models, which aim to use users reputations as a digital currency inside Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 communities

Computer Aided Verification

This open access two-volume set LNCS 13371 and 13372 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 34rd International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, CAV 2022, which was held in Haifa, Israel, in August 2022. The 40 full papers presented together with 9 tool papers and 2 case studies were carefully reviewed and selected from 209 submissions. The papers were organized in the following topical sections: Part I: Invited papers; formal methods for probabilistic programs; formal methods for neural networks; software Verification and model checking; hyperproperties and security; formal methods for hardware, cyber-physical, and hybrid systems. Part II: Probabilistic techniques; automata and logic; deductive verification and decision procedures; machine learning; synthesis and concurrency. This is an open access book

Conceptualising sustainable future landscapes : a case study with communities of the oil and gas exploration region Nigeria

PhD ThesisThe Federal government of Nigeria has undertaken social intervention programmes in the oil and gas exploration Region since 1960 producing an average of one programme each decade to address the underdevelopment of the Region. This underdevelopment appears to be as a result of the devastating effects of the oil spills and gas flaring in the Region. This has affected community wellbeing and connection with the landscape as over 94% are small communities in rural landscapes. The result is loss of livelihood, social disintegration and disruption of economic activities locally and nationally. The most recent government intervention programme is the Niger Delta Regional Development Master Plan (NDRDMP) of 2006 with the goal of sustainable development of the Region. This thesis therefore aligns with the argument that spatial planning is the critical sector to examine, as the problem of the Niger Delta Region is presently predominantly that of landscape degradation. Landscape planning is essential in planning for sustainability; to improve the quality of the environment at the community level it aspires for quality environments. But what vision should guide landscape planning and the future landscape change of the Region? A review of the relevant literature indicates that emerging theories view the landscape as a holistic representation of the interaction between human and natural processes and a need for transdisciplinary planning. The thesis supports this view and argues for creating a future landscape vision with the communities who live and work the landscape of the Region. Hence an empirical study of types of communities that define the Region was conducted. Using an interpretivist theoretical perspective and guided by questions posed by the Carl Steinitz Framework Model of 1990 (revised 1995; 2012) a case study approach and a variety of data collection tools appropriate to demographic groupings were employed. The findings provided insights from an analysis of the narratives of different demographic groups on the community landscape representations. Four landscape types were identified as well as various political and economic impacts on the landscape. Oil and gas exploration activities were seen not always to be the direct driver of the cultural landscape changes. The thesis demonstrated that engaging the community can help to identify the different drivers of landscape change relating to each landscape type examined. It also outlined possible change drivers for future landscapes. An implication for landscape planning is the importance in considering how future landscapes can be effectively conceptualised in a situation where the community landscapes are predominantly small and in rural settings.Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) Nigeri

Reflections on European Values:Honouring Loek Halman's contribution to the European Values Study

This book on Reflections on European Values is a Liber Amicorum honouring Loek Halman’s contribution to the European Values Study. For years, he has been a key figure in this longitudinal and cross-national research project on moral, social, and political values, dedicating his academic life to advancing the understanding of values in Europe. This Liber Amicorum is published at the occasion of Loek’s retirement after a long career at the Department of Sociology at Tilburg University. It brings together essays on the study of European values, written by his academic friends. The 32 chapters in this volume are structured in five themes that reflect Loek’s scholarly interest. A first group of contributions presents theoretical and methodological reflections on the European Values Study. Second, essays on the sociology of religion reflect Loek’s interest in this topic. Third, comparative studies using the European Values Study are presented. The fourth part focuses on a case most well-known : the Netherlands. The fifth and final section further deepens the understanding of values in several specific countries in Europe. Upon his retirement, this book will serve as an inspiration for scholars who want to walk in Loek Halman's footsteps in continuing research on values in Europe

User Experience Design for Cybersecurity & Privacy: addressing user misperceptions of system security and privacy

The increasing magnitude and sophistication of malicious cyber activities by various threat actors poses major risks to our increasingly digitized and inter-connected societies. However, threats can also come from non-malicious users who are being assigned too complex security or privacy-related tasks, who are not motivated to comply with security policies, or who lack the capability to make good security decisions. This thesis posits that UX design methods and practices are necessary to complement security and privacy engineering practices in order to (1) identify and address user misperceptions of system security and privacy; and (2) inform the design of secure systems that are useful and appealing from end-users’ perspective. The first research objective in this thesis is to provide new empirical accounts of UX aspects in three distinct contexts that encompass security and privacy considerations, namely: cyber threat intelligence, secure and private communication, and digital health technology. The second objective is to empirically contribute to the growing research domain of mental models in security and privacy by investigating user perceptions and misperceptions in the afore-mentioned contexts. Our third objective is to explore and propose methodological approaches to incorporating users’ perceptions and misperceptions in the socio-technical security analyses of systems. Qualitative and quantitative user research methods with experts as well as end users of the applications and systems under investigation were used to achieve the first two objectives. To achieve the third objective, we also employed simulation and computational methods. Cyber Threat Intelligence: CTI sharing platforms Reporting on a number of user studies conducted over a period of two years, this thesis offers a unique contribution towards understanding the constraining and enabling factors of security information sharing within one of the leading CTI sharing platforms, called MISP. Further, we propose a conceptual workflow and toolchain that would seek to detect user (mis)perceptions of key tasks in the context of CTI sharing, such as verifying whether users have an accurate comprehension of how far information travels when shared in a CTI sharing platform, and discuss the benefits of our socio-technical approach as a potential security analysis tool, simulation tool, or educational / training support tool. Secure & Private Communication: Secure Email We propose and describe multi-layered user journeys, a conceptual framework that serves to capture the interaction of a user with a system as she performs certain goals along with the associated user beliefs and perceptions about specific security or privacy-related aspects of that system. We instantiate the framework within a use case, a recently introduced secure email system called p≡p, and demonstrate how the approach can be used to detect misperceptions of security and privacy by comparing user opinions and behavior against system values and objective technical guarantees offered by the system. We further present two sets of user studies focusing on the usability and effectiveness of p≡p’s security and privacy indicators and their traffic-light inspired metaphor to represent different privacy states and guarantees. Digital Health Technology: Contact Tracing Apps Considering human factors when exploring the adoption as well as the security and privacy aspects of COVID-19 contact tracing apps is a timely societal challenge as the effectiveness and utility of these apps highly depend on their widespread adoption by the general population. We present the findings of eight focus groups on the factors that impact people’s decisions to adopt, or not to adopt, a contact tracing app, conducted with participants living in France and Germany. We report how our participants perceived the benefits, drawbacks, and threat model of the contact tracing apps in their respective countries, and discuss the similarities and differences between and within the study groups. Finally, we consolidate the findings from these studies and discuss future challenges and directions for UX design methods and practices in cybersecurity and digital privacy