Footstep: An Approach to Track Web Usage in Real Time

Compreender o comportamento do usuário é primordial para o sucesso de um website. As abordagens existentes que exploram análise do comportamento dos usuários utilizam os logs de servidor. Esses logs possuem detalhes sobre o que cada usuário acessou, como, por exemplo, uma loja online. Embora os logs sejam úteis ao fornecer uma boa percepção a respeito do comportamento dos usuários, eles não fornecem informações detalhadas sobre as ações realizadas pelos mesmos nas páginas acessadas. A fim de atacar este problema, este trabalho propõe o Footstep, um sistema completo que fornece coleta, processamento e análise dos eventos disparados pelos usuários, no nível dos elementos das páginas. Footstep fornece rastreamento dos usuários à medida em que navegam pelas páginas, coletando informações sobre a estrutura DOM dos elementos associados a cada evento. Footstep fornece também um modelo de dados baseado em grafos que facilita a extração de informação útil dos eventos coletados. Finalmente, uma ferramenta analítica é fornecida para visualizar as informações a respeito das interações sobre as páginas e elementos, como audiência, fluxos de navegação e taxas de conversão das páginas e elementos

Surveilling Queerness and Queering Surveillance: The Techno-Social Making of Queer Identity in the US and Canada, 1939-Present.

This dissertation positions itself at the intersection of two disparate areas of study: Queer theory and surveillance studies. It aims to tease out the ways that technologies of surveillance and Queer lifeways evolved alongside one another, and how the acts of watching and being watched sculpted the range of ontological possibilities that Queerness has, both historically and currently, indicated. As a text, the dissertation itself is divided into three main articles, each exploring a different facet of the mutually constitutive relationship between Queerness and surveillance. This dissertation begins with a broad historical examination of the ways that surveillance—in the forms of various technologies of apprehension, delineation, and abjection—encircled a set of labile and nascent notions of sexual identity. Additionally, I argue that surveillance and sexuality converge most productively (and disastrously) at moments of great historical transformation and geopolitical upheaval: the Second World War, the Cold War, and its proxies. Next, I investigate the ways in which residual institutionalization—represented by the liminal space of national borders and boundaries—operates on sexual and gender identity vis-à-vis the deployment of surveillant technologies that aim to transform sex and gender into objects of scientific measurement and scrutiny. Here, the border becomes a space of gendered performance wherein one’s perceived gender identity is compelled to align with documentary and “scientific” evidence. The implications of the systematic, technological probing of sex and gender at the border span far beyond the border itself. Indeed, as Toby Beauchamp (2018) has shown, gender identity and gender performance exist under a moving mesh of surveillance that is continuous with questions of national security and geopolitics. Additionally, I demonstrate how the surveillant dynamics in place at the border can be leveraged in protest of the cis/hetero/homonormative standards they enforce. Finally, I explore the effects of deinstitutionalized, corporate surveillance on the ontological status of Queerness as a radical injunction against the status quo. Taking Eve Sedgwick’s notion of the Queer as that which exists “in the open mesh of possibility, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, and resonances” (Sedgwick 1993: 8), I show how highly granular data extraction and analysis techniques foreclose upon a definition of the Queer that locates itself in the negative—in relation to what it is not or what it is in excess of—rendering the Queer unable to survive the transformation into capital implicit within a surveillant regime aimed at producing novel revenue streams. Taken together, these articles demonstrate how Queerness, by way of its articulation with various surveillant technologies, shares valences with broad, geopolitical and biopolitical phenomena, including national security, biosecurity, warfare, and statecraft. It also demonstrates the ways in which sex, sexuality, and gender have remained a focal point for the global operation of power, elaborating on Sedgwick’s (2008) assertation that any sufficiently advanced society must have a theory of homosexuality. This dissertation makes clear the ways that the surveillance of sex, sexuality, and gender has intensified, far beyond the scope of Foucault’s analysis, through the rapid periods of technologies and social transformation brought on by the Second World War, the Cold War, and the so-called Internet Revolution. At these points of transformation and cultural upheaval, I trace the ways that surveillance and sexuality have both evolved through time as a consistent dyad (although sharing valences with many other forces). Both sexuality and surveillance exert a force on one another, each necessitating and initiating the shape one another can take

How Municipal and Regional Police Align Their Practices with Canadian Security Intelligence Agencies: A Study in Nodal Governance

This thesis explores the inter-agency cooperation between municipal and regional police agencies and security intelligence agencies, as it seeks to answer the overarching research question: How have municipal and regional police agencies in Ontario aligned their practices with security intelligence agencies in Canada? The goal is to explore and lend insight into how municipal and regional police agencies cooperate with security intelligence agencies, such as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to address national security concerns. This thesis uses the concept of nodal governance (Shearing & Wood, 2003) to discuss any partnership or cooperation, as well as David Garland’s (1996) concept of ‘responsibilization’ from the nodal governance and related governmentality literatures (Lippert & Stenson, 2010). Some investigative alignment will be discerned using publicly available documents. The findings will also analyze the general nature of relations, any inter-agency misalignment and conflict, the alignment of training techniques, the alignment of mentalities, and the use of central intelligence hubs and/or communication formats (Ericson & Haggerty, 1997).Keywords: national security, intelligence-led policing, inter-agency cooperation, information-sharing, interoperability, and collaboratio

A Human-Centred Approach to National Identity Management Systems

This thesis explores the concept of a human-centred Identity Management System (IDMS), and how it can be implemented by organisations. The review of the literature on previous approaches to identity (i.e. privacy, trust, and usability) reveals that claims of IDMS being ‘human-centred’ are rhetorical; in reality, organisations’ administrative convenience is prioritised over the needs of individuals who are treated as purely functional components within the IDMS ecosystem. The research conducted to build a human-centred identity concept involved three separate studies, each approaching the question of identity from a different perspective. Study 1, the system study, focused on the design of IDMS and its impact on individuals’ everyday lives. A total of 14 different past and present N-IDMS implementations were analysed using thematic coding. The result of the study was the development of a framework that expressed a system in terms of a set of structural and metrical design properties, and how these can shape the individuals’ lived experience of identity. Study 2, the individual study, explored individuals’ perceptions and initial acceptance of N-IDMS. Grounded Theory analysis was applied to the data from 15 focus group discussions (groups consisted of 3 participants who were all either of British, Indian, or Bruneian nationality). The study revealed that individuals’ decision to accept an IDMS are influenced by their situation perception, system judgment, and concerns. These findings were further refined through the use of a survey study. The individual study also explored the impacts of National Culture on individuals’ perception of an IDMS. Finally, the third study took an organisation-centric approach, through the analysis of documentation and interviews on the current N-IDMS implementations in 3 different countries (UK, Brunei, and India). Exploring identity as a strategic resource, the study developed a set of organisational requirements around the identity creation and identity application processes, which have an influence the design of the IDMS. The main contribution of this thesis is the development of a unified framework that provides a complete narrative of the identity situation, from planning and design to individual perceptions, as well as the impacts on the lived experience. The findings of this research have been validated through the use of expert evaluations, which have found the framework to be complete and useful for both practitioners and researchers

Cosmic cowboys, armadillos and outlaws: the cultural politics of Texan identity in the 1970s

textThis dissertation investigates the figure of “the Texan” during the 1970s across local, regional, and national contexts to unpack how the “national” discourse of Texanness by turns furthered and foreclosed visions of a more inclusive American polity in the late twentieth century. The project began in oral history work surrounding the cultural politics of Austin’s progressive country music scene in the decade, but quickly expanded to encompass the larger transformations roiling the state and the nation in the 1970s. As civil rights and feminist movements redefined hegemonic notions of the representative Texan, icons of Anglo-Texan masculinity—the cowboy, the oilman, the wheeler-dealer—came in for a dizzying round of celebration and critique, satire and ritual performance. Such Seventies performances of “the Texan” as took place in Austin’s “cosmic cowboy” subculture provided an imaginative space to refigure Anglo-Texan identity in ways that responded to and internalized the decade’s identity politics. From the death of Lyndon Johnson to Willie Nelson’s picnics, from the United Farm Workers’ marches on Austin to the spectacle of Texas Chic on the streets of New York City, Texas mattered in these years not simply as a place, but as a repository of longstanding American myths and symbols at a historical moment in which that mythology was being deeply contested. This dissertation maps the messy ground of the 1970s in Texas along several paths. It begins some years prior with the Centennial Exposition of 1936 and the regionalism of J. Frank Dobie, Walter Prescott Webb, and Roy Bedichek before proceeding to the challenges to their vision of “the Texan” on the part of the African American civil rights, Chicano, and women’s movements. The dissertation’s central chapters then address the melding of countercultural forms and the state’s traditional Anglo-Texan iconography and music in spaces like Austin’s Armadillo World Headquarters. Popular music, art, film, journalism, and literature evoke this attempted revisioning of Anglo-Texan masculinity in dialogue with the decade’s identity politics.American Studie

Affective Computing for Emotion Detection using Vision and Wearable Sensors

The research explores the opportunities, challenges, limitations, and presents advancements in computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions (Picard, 1997). The field is referred to as Affective Computing (AC) and is expected to play a major role in the engineering and development of computationally and cognitively intelligent systems, processors and applications in the future. Today the field of AC is bolstered by the emergence of multiple sources of affective data and is fuelled on by developments under various Internet of Things (IoTs) projects and the fusion potential of multiple sensory affective data streams. The core focus of this thesis involves investigation into whether the sensitivity and specificity (predictive performance) of AC, based on the fusion of multi-sensor data streams, is fit for purpose? Can such AC powered technologies and techniques truly deliver increasingly accurate emotion predictions of subjects in the real world? The thesis begins by presenting a number of research justifications and AC research questions that are used to formulate the original thesis hypothesis and thesis objectives. As part of the research conducted, a detailed state of the art investigations explored many aspects of AC from both a scientific and technological perspective. The complexity of AC as a multi-sensor, multi-modality, data fusion problem unfolded during the state of the art research and this ultimately led to novel thinking and origination in the form of the creation of an AC conceptualised architecture that will act as a practical and theoretical foundation for the engineering of future AC platforms and solutions. The AC conceptual architecture developed as a result of this research, was applied to the engineering of a series of software artifacts that were combined to create a prototypical AC multi-sensor platform known as the Emotion Fusion Server (EFS) to be used in the thesis hypothesis AC experimentation phases of the research. The thesis research used the EFS platform to conduct a detailed series of AC experiments to investigate if the fusion of multiple sensory sources of affective data from sensory devices can significantly increase the accuracy of emotion prediction by computationally intelligent means. The research involved conducting numerous controlled experiments along with the statistical analysis of the performance of sensors for the purposes of AC, the findings of which serve to assess the feasibility of AC in various domains and points to future directions for the AC field. The AC experiments data investigations conducted in relation to the thesis hypothesis used applied statistical methods and techniques, and the results, analytics and evaluations are presented throughout the two thesis research volumes. The thesis concludes by providing a detailed set of formal findings, conclusions and decisions in relation to the overarching research hypothesis on the sensitivity and specificity of the fusion of vision and wearables sensor modalities and offers foresights and guidance into the many problems, challenges and projections for the AC field into the future

Defining Federal Crimes – Chapters 2-4

These are three chapters from a forthcoming Federal Criminal Law casebook that will focus on institutional interactions – between Congress and the courts; the courts and prosecutors, and among elements within the federal enforcement bureaucracy. Chapter 2 focuses on criminal jurisdiction under the Commerce Clause. Chapter 3 generally considers how separation of powers issues play out in the interpretation of federal criminal statutes. Chapter 4 explores mail and wire fraud