Cyber Security Body of Knowledge and Curricula Development

The cyber world is an ever-changing world and cyber security is most important and touches the lives of everyone on the cyber world including researchers, students, businesses, academia, and novice user. The chapter suggests a body of knowledge that incorporates the view of academia as well as practitioners. This research attempts to put basic step and a framework for cyber security body of knowledge and to allow practitioners and academicians to face the problem of lack of standardization. Furthermore, the chapter attempts to bridge the gap between the different audiences. The gap is so broad that the term of cyber security is not agreed upon even in spelling. The suggested body of knowledge may not be perfect, yet it is a step forward

Understanding Engineers' Drivers and Impediments for Ethical System Development: The Case of Privacy and Security Engineering

Machine ethics is a key challenge in times when digital systems play an increasing role in people's life. At the core of machine ethics is the handling of personal data and the security of machine operations. Yet, privacy and security engineering are a challenge in today's business world where personal data markets, corporate deadlines and a lag of perfectionism frame the context in which engineers need to work. Besides these organizational and market challenges, each engineer has his or her specific view on the importance of these values that can foster or inhibit taking them into consideration. We present the results of an empirical study of 124 engineers based on the Theory of Planned Behavior and Jonas' Principle of Responsibility to understand the drivers and impediments of ethical system development as far as privacy and security engineering are concerned. We find that many engineers find the two values important, but do not enjoy working on them. We also find that many struggle with the organizational environment. They face a lack of time and autonomy that is necessary for building ethical systems, even at this basic level. Organizations' privacy and security norms are often too weak or even oppose value-based design, putting engineers in conflict with their organizations. Our data indicate that it is largely engineers' individually perceived responsibility as well as a few character traits that make a positive difference

Information Outlook, May 2004

Volume 8, Issue 5https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2004/1004/thumbnail.jp

Report of the 2014 NSF Cybersecurity Summit for Large Facilities and Cyberinfrastructure

This event was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number 1234408. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed at the event or in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation

Adaptive notifications to support knowledge sharing in virtual communities

Social web-groups where people with common interests and goals communicate, share resources, and construct knowledge, are becoming a major part of today’s organisational practice. Research has shown that appropriate support for effective knowledge sharing tailored to the needs of the community is paramount. This brings a new challenge to user modelling and adaptation, which requires new techniques for gaining sufficient understanding of a virtual community (VC) and identifying areas where the community may need support. The research presented here addresses this challenge presenting a novel computational approach for community-tailored support underpinned by organisational psychology and aimed at facilitating the functioning of the community as a whole (i.e. as an entity). A framework describing how key community processes—transactive memory (TM), shared mental models (SMMs), and cognitive centrality (CCen)—can be utilised to derive knowledge sharing patterns from community log data is described. The framework includes two parts: (i) extraction of a community model that represents the community based on the key processes identified and (ii) identification of knowledge sharing behaviour patterns that are used to generate adaptive notifications. Although the notifications target individual members, they aim to influence individuals’ behaviour in a way that can benefit the functioning of the community as a whole. A validation study has been performed to examine the effect of community-adapted notifications on individual members and on the community as a whole using a close-knit community of researchers sharing references. The study shows that notification messages can improve members’ awareness and perception of how they relate to other members in the community. Interesting observations have been made about the linking between the physical and the VC, and how this may influence members’ awareness and knowledge sharing behaviour. Broader implications for using log data to derive community models based on key community processes and generating community-adapted notifications are discussed

Information Outlook, May 2007

Volume 11, Issue 5https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2007/1004/thumbnail.jp

Information Outlook, April 2007

Volume 11, Issue 4https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2007/1003/thumbnail.jp

Evaluation of Information Systems Curriculum in Portugal and Russia: IPB and KubSAU

The importance of Information Technology (IT) and Information Systems (IS) to organizations and the need for skilled professionals in the field is one of the most important challenges to universities. With the technological and organizational changes, IS education has been under continued adaptation, and higher education institutions have several difficulties in keeping the bachelor degrees curriculum updated. Several international organizations (ACM, AIS, BCS, IFIP, etc.) proposed for the last 40 years several curriculum guidelines, which are important to redesign the curriculum for survival in the current economic environment. The main purpose of this work is to compare Portuguese and Russian bachelor degrees with several standard curriculum on Information Systems proposed by recognized international organizations. The results obtained show the differences that exist between international curriculum guidelines and the bachelor degrees, and give us a perspective of the adequacy of the Portuguese and Russian curricula to the current requirements

Defining the Competencies, Programming Languages, and Assessments for an Introductory Computer Science Course

The purpose of this study was to define the competencies, programming languages, and assessments for an introductory computer science course at a small private liberal arts university. Three research questions were addressed that involved identifying the competencies, programming languages, and assessments that academic and industry experts in California’s Central Valley felt most important and appropriate for an introduction to computer science course. The Delphi methodology was used to collect data from the two groups of experts with various backgrounds related to computing. The goal was to find consensus among the individual groups to best define aspects that would best comprise an introductory CS0 course for majors and non-majors. The output would be valuable information to be considered by curriculum designers who are developing a new program in software engineering at the institution. The process outlined would also be useful to curriculum designers in other fields and geographic regions who attempt to address their local education needs. Four rounds of surveys were conducted. The groups of experts were combined in the first round to rate the items in the straw models determined from the literature and add additional components when necessary. The academic and industry groupings were separated for the remainder of the study so that a curriculum designer could determine not only the items deemed most important, but also their relative importance among the two distinct groups. The experts selected items in each of the three categories in the second round to reduce the possibilities for subsequent rounds. The groups were then asked to rank the items in each of the three categories for the third round. A fourth round was held as consensus was not reached by either of the groups for any of the categories as determined by Kendall’s W. The academic experts reached consensus on a list of ranked competencies in the final round and showed a high degree of agreement on lists of ranked programming languages and assessments. Kendall’s W, values, however, were just short of the required 0.7 threshold for consensus on these final two items. The industry experts did not reach consensus and showed low agreement on their recommendations for competencies, programming languages, and assessments

The role of HCI in the construction of disability

As a discipline concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use, and with the study of major phenomena surrounding them, human computer interaction (HCI) is involved in the phenomenon of disability. For an interaction between humans and computers to take place, there should be an interface mediating between both parties. The design of such an interface may inadvertently impose access barriers to some people. HCI literature addresses the relationship between the theory and practice of HCI and disability from different angles, some of which are diametrically opposed. This thesis explores three modern conceptions, or models, of disability — the individualistic medical, the biopsychosocial and the social models —, investigates which model predominates in the HCI literature, and analyzes why choosing a particular model may determine and constrain the classes of problems that can be identified during a solution discovery process. Departing from HCI’s traditional discourse, which interprets the phenomenon of disability as a problem in the human body, the author, leading a team of engineers and psychologists, carried out a project in a school for children with cerebral palsy. The project was aimed to improve different areas of child development, using non conventional user interfaces — i.e. user interfaces that use other input/output devices than the keyboard, mouse or screen. After two years working directly within the field of operations”, the author had the opportunity to contrast the theory underpinning HCI’s methods with real practice and to expand his understandings about the relationships between HCI and disability. The research process involved an action research approach, which allowed the author and the team of experimenters to formulate new hypotheses as they learned more about the context, to review the process and, ultimately and most importantly,to readapt their actions to better serve the end beneficiaries. The experiences and learnings gathered throughout the process have been included in this thesis as a case study, for the purpose of helping HCI researchers embarking on projects relatable to the one described. Finally, the author urges the HCI community to update its discourse and to connect it with the vast literature related to modern conceptions of the phenomenon of disability