Circumvention of censorship of internet access and publication

Internet censorship of one form or another affects on the order of half of all internet users. Previous work has studied this censorship, and proposed techniques for circumventing it, ranging from making proxy servers available to censored users, to tunneling internet connections through services such as voice or video chat, to embedding censorship circumvention in cloud platforms' front-end servers or even in ISP's routers. This dissertation describes a set of techniques for circumventing internet censorship building on and surpassing prior efforts. As is always the case, there are tradeoffs to be made: some of this work emphasizes deployability, and some aims for unstoppable circumvention with the assumption of significant resources. However, the latter techniques are not merely academic thought experiments: this dissertation also describes the experience of successfully deploying such a technique, which served tens of thousands of users. While the solid majority of previous work, as well as much of the work presented here, is focused on governments blocking access to sites and services hosted outside of their country, the rise of social media has created a new form of internet censorship. A country may block a social media platform, but have its own domestic version, on which it tightly controls what can be said. This dissertation describes a system for enabling users of such a platform to monitor for post deletions, and distribute the contents to other users

Mediating disruption in human-computer interaction from implicit metrics of attention

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 143-150).Multitasking environments cause people to be interrupted constantly, often disrupting their ongoing activities and impeding reaching their goals. This thesis presents a disruption reducing approach designed to support the user's goals and optimize productivity that is based on a model of the user's receptivity to an interruption. The model uses knowledge of the interruption content, context and priority of the task(s) in progress, user actions and goal-related concepts to mediate interruptions. The disruption management model is distinct from previous work by the addition of implicit sensors that deduce the interruption content and user context to help determine when an interruption will disrupt an ongoing activity. Domain-independent implicit sensors include mouse and keyboard behaviors, and goal-related concepts extracted from the user documents. The model also identifies the contextual relationship between interruptions and user goals as an important factor in how interruptions are controlled. The degree to which interruptions are related to the user goal determines how those interruptions will be received. We tested and evolved the model in various cases and showed significant improvement in both productivity and satisfaction. A disruption manager application controls interruptions on common desktop computing activities, such as web browsing and instant messaging. The disruption manager demonstrates that mediating interruptions by supporting the user goals can improve performance and overall productivity. Our evaluation shows an improvement in success of over 25% across prioritization conditions for real life computing environments.(cont.) Goal priority and interruption relevance play an important role in the interruption decision process and several experiments these factors on people's reactions and availability to interruptions, and overall performance. These experiments demonstrate that people recognize the potential benefits of being interrupted and adjust their susceptibility to interruptions during highly prioritized tasks. The outcome of this research includes a usable model that can be extended to tasks as diverse as driving an automobile and performing computer tasks. This thesis supports mediating technologies that will recognize the value of communication and control interruptions so that people are able to maintain concentration amidst their increasingly busy lifestyles.by Ernesto Arroyo Acosta.Ph.D

Supporting user appropriation of public displays

Despite their prevalence, public engagement with pervasive public displays is typically very low. One method for increasing the relevance of displayed content (and therefore hopefully improving engagement) is to allow the viewer themselves to affect the content shown on displays they encounter – for example, personalising an existing news feed or invoking a specific application on a display of their choosing. We describe this process as viewer appropriation of public displays. This thesis aims to provide the foundations for appropriation support in future ‘open’ pervasive display networks. Our architecture combines three components: Yarely, a scheduler and media player; Tacita, a system for allowing users to make privacy-preserving appropriation requests, and Mercury, an application store for distributing content. Interface points between components support integration with thirdparty systems; a prime example is the provision of Content Descriptor Sets (CDSs) to describe the media items and constraints that determine what is played at each display. Our evaluation of the architecture is both quantitive and qualitative and includes a mixture of user studies, surveys, focus groups, performance measurements and reflections. Overall we show that it is feasible to construct a robust open pervasive display network that supports viewer appropriation. In particular, we show that Yarely’s thick-client approach enables the development of a signage system that provides continuous operation even in periods of network disconnection yet is able to respond to viewer appropriation requests. Furthermore, we show that CDSs can be used as an effective means of information exchange in an open architecture. Performance measures indicate that demanding personalisation scenarios can be satisfied, and our qualitative work indicates that both display owners and viewers are positive about the introduction of appropriation into future pervasive display systems

An Approach to Guide Users Towards Less Revealing Internet Browsers

When browsing the Internet, HTTP headers enable both clients and servers send extra data in their requests or responses such as the User-Agent string. This string contains information related to the sender’s device, browser, and operating system. Previous research has shown that there are numerous privacy and security risks result from exposing sensitive information in the User-Agent string. For example, it enables device and browser fingerprinting and user tracking and identification. Our large analysis of thousands of User-Agent strings shows that browsers differ tremendously in the amount of information they include in their User-Agent strings. As such, our work aims at guiding users towards using less exposing browsers. In doing so, we propose to assign an exposure score to browsers based on the information they expose and vulnerability records. Thus, our contribution in this work is as follows: first, provide a full implementation that is ready to be deployed and used by users. Second, conduct a user study to identify the effectiveness and limitations of our proposed approach. Our implementation is based on using more than 52 thousand unique browsers. Our performance and validation analysis show that our solution is accurate and efficient. The source code and data set are publicly available and the solution has been deployed

Automated analysis of free-text comments and dashboard representations in patient experience surveys: a multimethod co-design study

BACKGROUND: Patient experience surveys (PESs) often include informative free-text comments, but with no way of systematically, efficiently and usefully analysing and reporting these. The National Cancer Patient Experience Survey (CPES), used to model the approach reported here, generates > 70,000 free-text comments annually. MAIN AIM: To improve the use and usefulness of PES free-text comments in driving health service changes that improve the patient experience. SECONDARY AIMS: (1) To structure CPES free-text comments using rule-based information retrieval (IR) (‘text engineering’), drawing on health-care domain-specific gazetteers of terms, with in-built transferability to other surveys and conditions; (2) to display the results usefully for health-care professionals, in a digital toolkit dashboard display that drills down to the original free text; (3) to explore the usefulness of interdisciplinary mixed stakeholder co-design and consensus-forming approaches in technology development, ensuring that outputs have meaning for all; and (4) to explore the usefulness of Normalisation Process Theory (NPT) in structuring outputs for implementation and sustainability. DESIGN: A scoping review, rapid review and surveys with stakeholders in health care (patients, carers, health-care providers, commissioners, policy-makers and charities) explored clinical dashboard design/patient experience themes. The findings informed the rules for the draft rule-based IR [developed using half of the 2013 Wales CPES (WCPES) data set] and prototype toolkit dashboards summarising PES data. These were refined following mixed stakeholder, concept-mapping workshops and interviews, which were structured to enable consensus-forming ‘co-design’ work. IR validation used the second half of the WCPES, with comparison against its manual analysis; transferability was tested using further health-care data sets. A discrete choice experiment (DCE) explored which toolkit features were preferred by health-care professionals, with a simple cost–benefit analysis. Structured walk-throughs with NHS managers in Wessex, London and Leeds explored usability and general implementation into practice. KEY OUTCOMES: A taxonomy of ranked PES themes, a checklist of key features recommended for digital clinical toolkits, rule-based IR validation and transferability scores, usability, and goal-oriented, cost–benefit and marketability results. The secondary outputs were a survey, scoping and rapid review findings, and concordance and discordance between stakeholders and methods. RESULTS: (1) The surveys, rapid review and workshops showed that stakeholders differed in their understandings of the patient experience and priorities for change, but that they reached consensus on a shortlist of 19 themes; six were considered to be core; (2) the scoping review and one survey explored the clinical toolkit design, emphasising that such toolkits should be quick and easy to use, and embedded in workflows; the workshop discussions, the DCE and the walk-throughs confirmed this and foregrounded other features to form the toolkit design checklist; and (3) the rule-based IR, developed using noun and verb phrases and lookup gazetteers, was 86% accurate on the WCPES, but needs modification to improve this and to be accurate with other data sets. The DCE and the walk-through suggest that the toolkit would be well accepted, with a favourable cost–benefit ratio, if implemented into practice with appropriate infrastructure support. LIMITATIONS: Small participant numbers and sampling bias across component studies. The scoping review studies mostly used top-down approaches and focused on professional dashboards. The rapid review of themes had limited scope, with no second reviewer. The IR needs further refinement, especially for transferability. New governance restrictions further limit immediate use. CONCLUSIONS: Using a multidisciplinary, mixed stakeholder, use of co-design, proof of concept was shown for an automated display of patient experience free-text comments in a way that could drive health-care improvements in real time. The approach is easily modified for transferable application. FUTURE WORK: Further exploration is needed of implementation into practice, transferable uses and technology development co-design approaches. FUNDING: The National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research programme

4th International Symposium on Ambient Intelligence (ISAmI 2013)

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is a recent paradigm emerging from Artificial Intelligence (AI), where computers are used as proactive tools assisting people with their day-to-day activities, making everyone’s life more comfortable. Another main concern of AmI originates from the human computer interaction domain and focuses on offering ways to interact with systems in a more natural way by means user friendly interfaces. This field is evolving quickly as can be witnessed by the emerging natural language and gesture based types of interaction. The inclusion of computational power and communication technologies in everyday objects is growing and their embedding into our environments should be as invisible as possible. In order for AmI to be successful, human interaction with computing power and embedded systems in the surroundings should be smooth and happen without people actually noticing it. The only awareness people should have arises from AmI: more safety, comfort and wellbeing, emerging in a natural and inherent way. ISAmI is the International Symposium on Ambient Intelligence and aiming to bring together researchers from various disciplines that constitute the scientific field of Ambient Intelligence to present and discuss the latest results, new ideas, projects and lessons learned, namely in terms of software and applications, and aims to bring together researchers from various disciplines that are interested in all aspects of this area

Testing the speed and accuracy of navigating layouts of web page elements through the use of an eye tracking and speech recognition mechanism

The use of world wide web has increased rapidly over the past few years. In addition, websites covering many topics, are the first source of information. The content of these websites are designed in creative ways to help the web users navigate quickly and easily along with using the input mechanisms. New input mechanisms have been introduced to the field of computer interaction such as mouse, keyboard, touch pad, touch screen and touch pen. Since then computer users have been increasingly using these new techniques to communicate with computers. This tendency pushed computer engineers to come up with more intuitive ways to facilitate interaction mechanism. Moreover, there remains significant demand to meet the needs of physically challenged users in communicating with computers. Furthermore, the traditional methods of navigating websites lack the ability to sense our attention. Hence there must be new alternative input mechanisms to navigate web pages rather than using a mouse and keyboard (KB). Among these mechanisms are the ones that interact with our capabilities, such as voice, and our senses such as sight. This motivated us to think of alternative methods to navigate web pages other than using traditional methods. For this purpose, eight basic layouts of page elements were designed with seven tasks, and each task represented one of the these layouts. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) techniques and evaluation methods were followed to test the speed and accuracy of navigating the layouts through the use of eye tracking and speech recognition mechanisms.Master of Science (MSc) in Computational Scienc