A design theory for transparency of information privacy practices

The rising diffusion of information systems (IS) throughout society poses an increasingly serious threat to privacy as a social value. One approach to alleviating this threat is to establish transparency of i nformation privacy practices (TIPP) so that consumers can better understand how their information is processed. However, the design of transparency artifacts (eg, privacy notices) has clearly not followed this approach, given the ever-increasing volume of information processing. Hence, consumers face a situation where they cannot see the ‘forest for the trees’ when aiming to ascertain whether information processing meets their privacy expectations. A key problem is that overly comprehensive information presentation results in information overload and is thus counterproductive for establishing TIPP. We depart from the extant design logic of transparency artifacts and develop a theoretical foundation (TIPP theory) for transparency artifact designs useful for establishing TIPP from the perspective of privacy as a social value. We present TIPP theory in two parts to capture the sociotechnical interplay. The first part translates abstract knowledge on the IS artifact and privacy into a description of social subsystems of transparency artifacts, and the second part conveys prescriptive design knowledge in form of a corresponding IS design theory. TIPP theory establishes a bridge from the complexity of the privacy concept to a metadesign for transparency artifacts that is useful to establish TIPP in any IS. In essence, transparency artifacts must accomplish more than offering comprehensive information; they must also be adaptive to the current information needs of consumers

An Evaluation Framework for Reputation Management Systems

Reputation management (RM) is employed in distributed and peer-to-peer networks to help users compute a measure of trust in other users based on initial belief, observed behavior, and run-time feedback. These trust values influence how, or with whom, a user will interact. Existing literature on RM focuses primarily on algorithm development, not comparative analysis. To remedy this, we propose an evaluation framework based on the trace-simulator paradigm. Trace file generation emulates a variety of network configurations, and particular attention is given to modeling malicious user behavior. Simulation is trace-based and incremental trust calculation techniques are developed to allow experimentation with networks of substantial size. The described framework is available as open source so that researchers can evaluate the effectiveness of other reputation management techniques and/or extend functionality. This chapter reports on our framework’s design decisions. Our goal being to build a general-purpose simulator, we have the opportunity to characterize the breadth of existing RM systems. Further, we demonstrate our tool using two reputation algorithms (EigenTrust and a modified TNA-SL) under varied network conditions. Our analysis permits us to make claims about the algorithms’ comparative merits. We conclude that such systems, assuming their distribution is secure, are highly effective at managing trust, even against adversarial collectives

“People with Equal but Opposite Afflictions, Propping Each Other Up”: Sleep Solidarity and Fictions of Mass Sleeplessness

Fictions of mass sleeplessness form a microgenre that imagines wakefulness as an epidemic, and in so doing turns the solitary experience of insomnia into a collective catastrophe. The texts this essay considers—Charlie Huston’s Sleepless, Adrian Barnes’s Nod, Kenneth Calhoun’s Black Moon, and Karen Russell’s Sleep Donation—all depict an outbreak of fatal mass insomnia in North America and were published between 2010 and 2014. These narratives use the architecture of the zombie apocalypse (transmuted into an insomnia apocalypse) to represent scenarios of collective, public sleeplessness and, I argue, use the zombie genre’s imaginary of the crowd, pack, or horde to construct emergent forms of sleep solidarity beyond the solitude of insomnia. All four texts counterpoint the public space of the street, where collective insomnia is made manifest, with the private space of the bedroom. Understanding the bedroom as a primary site of social reproduction—because of its associations with the heteronormative family and the renewal of labor power—this essay identifies the relationships between the bedroom and the street, the private and the public, and the individual and the collective, as crucial dynamics in these four texts’ interest in mass insomnia. These fictions show moments of sleep solidarity ultimately emerging from apocalyptic scenarios of mass sleeplessness, and these texts break open the strictures of private sleeping to imagine alternative structures of mutual support among all those whose sleep is under threat

Nudging people's decisions using social informations as the default option

openThis research aims at understanding how a nudge intervention could have an influence on people decision making in pro environmental, pro social and donation behaviors. The designed intervention uses a social information as the default option between the options that the participant could choose from. This kind of information has been demonstrated to be useful to guide people's decisions. It will be also indagated how matching genders in the social information could influence the decision' maker.This research aims at understanding how a nudge intervention could have an influence on people decision making in pro environmental, pro social and donation behaviors. The designed intervention uses a social information as the default option between the options that the participant could choose from. This kind of information has been demonstrated to be useful to guide people's decisions. It will be also indagated how matching genders in the social information could influence the decision' maker

Youth and Digital Media: From Credibility to Information Quality

Building upon a process-and context-oriented information quality framework, this paper seeks to map and explore what we know about the ways in which young users of age 18 and under search for information online, how they evaluate information, and how their related practices of content creation, levels of new literacies, general digital media usage, and social patterns affect these activities. A review of selected literature at the intersection of digital media, youth, and information quality -- primarily works from library and information science, sociology, education, and selected ethnographic studies -- reveals patterns in youth's information-seeking behavior, but also highlights the importance of contextual and demographic factors both for search and evaluation. Looking at the phenomenon from an information-learning and educational perspective, the literature shows that youth develop competencies for personal goals that sometimes do not transfer to school, and are sometimes not appropriate for school. Thus far, educational initiatives to educate youth about search, evaluation, or creation have depended greatly on the local circumstances for their success or failure

Foundations of Human-Aware Planning -- A Tale of Three Models

abstract: A critical challenge in the design of AI systems that operate with humans in the loop is to be able to model the intentions and capabilities of the humans, as well as their beliefs and expectations of the AI system itself. This allows the AI system to be "human- aware" -- i.e. the human task model enables it to envisage desired roles of the human in joint action, while the human mental model allows it to anticipate how its own actions are perceived from the point of view of the human. In my research, I explore how these concepts of human-awareness manifest themselves in the scope of planning or sequential decision making with humans in the loop. To this end, I will show (1) how the AI agent can leverage the human task model to generate symbiotic behavior; and (2) how the introduction of the human mental model in the deliberative process of the AI agent allows it to generate explanations for a plan or resort to explicable plans when explanations are not desired. The latter is in addition to traditional notions of human-aware planning which typically use the human task model alone and thus enables a new suite of capabilities of a human-aware AI agent. Finally, I will explore how the AI agent can leverage emerging mixed-reality interfaces to realize effective channels of communication with the human in the loop.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

Towards an Effective Organization-Wide Bulk Email System

Bulk email is widely used in organizations to communicate messages to employees. It is an important tool in making employees aware of policies, events, leadership updates, etc. However, in large organizations, the problem of overwhelming communication is widespread. Ineffective organizational bulk emails waste employees' time and organizations' money, and cause a lack of awareness or compliance with organizations' missions and priorities. This thesis focuses on improving organizational bulk email systems by 1) conducting qualitative research to understand different stakeholders; 2) conducting field studies to evaluate personalization's effects on getting employees to read bulk messages; 3) designing tools to support communicators in evaluating bulk emails. We performed these studies at the University of Minnesota, interviewing 25 employees (both senders and recipients), and including 317 participants in total. We found that the university's current bulk email system is ineffective as only 22% of the information communicated was retained by employees. To encourage employees to read high-level information, we implemented a multi-stakeholder personalization framework that mixed important-to-organization messages with employee-preferred messages and improved the studied bulk email's recognition rate by 20%. On the sender side, we iteratively designed a prototype of a bulk email evaluation platform. In field evaluation, we found bulk emails' message-level performance helped communicators in designing bulk emails. We collected eye-tracking data and developed a neural network technique to estimate how much time each message is being read using recipients' interactions with browsers only, which improved the estimation accuracy to 73%. In summary, this work sheds light on how to design organizational bulk email systems that communicate effectively and respect different stakeholders' value.Comment: PhD Thesi

The Lived Experience of the First 300 Days as a City Manager

The purpose of this study was to understand the lived experience of newly appointed city managers through their first 300 days on the new job. Through Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), five male participants shared their experiences of joining a new city as a newly appointed city manager. Data was collected through one-on-one interviews which provided rich descriptions of the participant’s perceptions during their first 3oo days. Analysis of the interviews resulted in the development of three Super-Ordinate themes that are part of the experience of the city managers as they worked through their first 300 days. The first theme, Joining the Organization, identifies the transformation city managers experience from their decision to leave their old organization and breaking bonds to experiencing disorientation associated with the expectations, strangeness, and tests of their new job. The second theme, Transitioning to the New Normal, describes how the new managers establish trust, set the tone of their administration, and deal with doubts while letting go of their old job. The third theme, Experiencing Effectiveness, brings the experience to the point where the new managers have established their effectiveness through the acquisition of institutional knowledge, contributing to the organization culture, and building their relationship with the city council. Future research is suggested for both positivistic and interpretive studies