A Virtual Conversational Agent for Teens with Autism: Experimental Results and Design Lessons

We present the design of an online social skills development interface for teenagers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The interface is intended to enable private conversation practice anywhere, anytime using a web-browser. Users converse informally with a virtual agent, receiving feedback on nonverbal cues in real-time, and summary feedback. The prototype was developed in consultation with an expert UX designer, two psychologists, and a pediatrician. Using the data from 47 individuals, feedback and dialogue generation were automated using a hidden Markov model and a schema-driven dialogue manager capable of handling multi-topic conversations. We conducted a study with nine high-functioning ASD teenagers. Through a thematic analysis of post-experiment interviews, identified several key design considerations, notably: 1) Users should be fully briefed at the outset about the purpose and limitations of the system, to avoid unrealistic expectations. 2) An interface should incorporate positive acknowledgment of behavior change. 3) Realistic appearance of a virtual agent and responsiveness are important in engaging users. 4) Conversation personalization, for instance in prompting laconic users for more input and reciprocal questions, would help the teenagers engage for longer terms and increase the system's utility

Emerging Phishing Trends and Effectiveness of the Anti-Phishing Landing Page

Each month, more attacks are launched with the aim of making web users believe that they are communicating with a trusted entity which compels them to share their personal, financial information. Phishing costs Internet users billions of dollars every year. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) created an anti-phishing landing page supported by Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) with the aim to train users on how to prevent themselves from phishing attacks. It is used by financial institutions, phish site take down vendors, government organizations, and online merchants. When a potential victim clicks on a phishing link that has been taken down, he / she is redirected to the landing page. In this paper, we present the comparative analysis on two datasets that we obtained from APWG's landing page log files; one, from September 7, 2008 - November 11, 2009, and other from January 1, 2014 - April 30, 2014. We found that the landing page has been successful in training users against phishing. Forty six percent users clicked lesser number of phishing URLs from January 2014 to April 2014 which shows that training from the landing page helped users not to fall for phishing attacks. Our analysis shows that phishers have started to modify their techniques by creating more legitimate looking URLs and buying large number of domains to increase their activity. We observed that phishers are exploiting ICANN accredited registrars to launch their attacks even after strict surveillance. We saw that phishers are trying to exploit free subdomain registration services to carry out attacks. In this paper, we also compared the phishing e-mails used by phishers to lure victims in 2008 and 2014. We found that the phishing e-mails have changed considerably over time. Phishers have adopted new techniques like sending promotional e-mails and emotionally targeting users in clicking phishing URLs

Goal-based structuring in a recommender systems

Recommender systems help people to find information that is interesting to them. However, current recommendation techniques only address the user's short-term and long-term interests, not their immediate interests. This paper describes a method to structure information (with or without using recommendations) taking into account the users' immediate interests: a goal-based structuring method. Goal-based structuring is based on the fact that people experience certain gratifications from using information, which should match with their goals. An experiment using an electronic TV guide shows that structuring information using a goal-based structure makes it easier for users to find interesting information, especially if the goals are used explicitly; this is independent of whether recommendations are used or not. It also shows that goal-based structuring has more influence on how easy it is for users to find interesting information than recommendations

Bridging the Innovation Divide: An Agenda for Disseminating Technology Innovations within the Nonprofit Sector

Examines technology practices -- such as neighborhood information systems, electronic advocacy, Internet-based micro enterprise support, and digital inclusion initiatives -- that strengthen the capacity of nonprofits and community organizations

Invisible Market: Energy and Agricultural Technologies for Women's Economic Advancement

This research explores what it takes for technology initiatives, specifically in the energy and agricultural sectors, to reach and economically benefit women in developing countries through market-based strategies that have the potential for achieving scale and financial sustainability. It builds on ICRW's landmark paper, Bridging the Gender Divide: How Technology Can Advance Women Economically, which made the case for how technologies can create pathways for strengthening women's economic opportunities. Through a field-level investigation and interviews with experts, the authors examine how women's use of technology and their involvement in the development and distribution of a technology can not only advance women economically, but also can benefit enterprise-based technology initiatives by expanding their markets and helping them generate greater financial returns

An agent system to support student teams working online

Online learning is now a reality, with distributed learning and blended learning becoming more widely used in Higher Education. Novel ways in which undergraduate and postgraduate learning material can be presented are being developed, and methods for helping students to learn online are needed, especially if we require them to collaborate with each other on learning activities. Agents to provide a supporting role for students have evolved from Artificial Intelligence research, and their strength lies in their ease of operation over networks as well as their ability to act in response to stimuli. In this paper an application of a software agent is described, aimed at supporting students working on team projects in the online learning environment. Online teamwork is problematical for a number of reasons, such as getting acquainted with team members, finding out about other team members’ abilities, agreeing who should do which tasks, communications between team members and keeping up to date with progress that has been made on the project. Software agents have the ability to monitor progress and to offer advice by operating in the background, acting autonomously when the need arises. An agent prototype has been developed in Prolog to perform a limited set of functions to support students. Team projects have a planning, doing and completing stage, all of which require them to have some sort of agent support. This agent at present supports part of the planning stage, by prompting the students to input their likes, dislikes and abilities for a selection of task areas defined for the project. The agent then allocates the various tasks to the students according to predetermined rules. The results of a trial carried out using teams working on projects, on campus, indicate that students like the idea of using this agent to help with allocating tasks. They also agreed that agent support of this type would probably be helpful to both students working on team projects with face to face contact, as well as for teams working solely online. Work is ongoing to add more functionality to the agent and to evaluate the agent more widely