The Bipartite Influence of Information Overload on User Resistance to Knowledge Management Systems

This research centers on the relationship between information overload as an aspect of information quality on the one side, and, on the other side, user resistance to knowledge management systems as an aspect of an individual’s decision process. While discussing this relationship theoretically we propose a bipartite influence of information overload as on the one hand it fosters acceptance of these system, but on the other hand also causes user resistance. By analyzing information overload in pre- and post-implementation phases of knowledge management systems we argue that information overload has an ambivalent causal effect as it can act both positively and negatively in relation to the point of time overload occurs or is expected. Therefore, based on existing literature we propose a research model and illustrate the relationships through results of a case study

Developing Accessible Services:Understanding Current Knowledge and Areas for Future Support

When creating digital artefacts, it is important to ensure that the product being made is accessible to as much of the population as is possible. Many guidelines and supporting tools exist to assist reaching this goal. However, little is known about developers’ understanding of accessible practice and the methods that are used to implement this.We present findings from an accessibility design workshop that was carried out with a mixture of 197 developers and digital technology students. We discuss perceptions of accessibility, techniques that are used when designing accessible products, and what areas of accessibility development participants believed were important. We show that there are gaps in the knowledge needed to develop accessible products despite the effort to promote accessible design. Our participants are themselves aware of where these gaps are and have suggested a number of areas where tools, techniques and guidance would improve their practice

UMA INVESTIGAÇÃO DAS PRÁTICAS INTERDISCIPLINARES NA EDUCAÇÃO A DISTÂNCIA

Este artigo apresenta um mapeamento sistemático da literatura que investiga o estado da arte das práticas interdisciplinares (PI) na educação a distância em instituições de ensino superior. Foram selecionados 279 artigos no período de 2010 a 2018. O objetivo foi compreender como as práticas interdisciplinares estão sendo aplicadas, de que forma estão sendo avaliadas, e amparadas por quais ferramentas na educação a distância. A partir dos 279 artigos selecionados, a análise dos trabalhos compreendeu 3 passos que resultaram respectivamente 62, 11 e 8 artigos que foram utilizados efetivamente, pois atenderam aos critérios de inclusão e exclusão. Observou-se que diversas PI estão sendo utilizadas com ênfase na aprendizagem baseada em problemas – PBL ou pautadas em estudo de casos mediados por meio de diversas tecnologias de informação e comunicação. Além disso, identificou-se que essas práticas são disponibilizadas em plataformas de aprendizagem eletrônica e ancoradas em interfaces ativas e colaborativas

Risk assessment of email accounts: Difference between perception and reality

The use of Internet is associated with a growing number of security threats. This thesis analyzes how users perceive the security of their email account based on the email account provider. With our study, we aim to contribute to the information security systems literature in three ways: First, by taking a more complete view on security online, and reviewing the concept of usable security, usability, human-computer interaction, trust and user perception. Second, by performing an analysis of providers of online services specifically emails. Third, by applying a renowned risk analysis method called Information Security Risk Analysis Method (ISRAM) for risk assessment. The ISRAM analysis revealed that Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo email accounts have a medium risk level, while the reality analysis demonstrated no clearly more secure account provider with only low level risk counts

Desenvolvimento de uma interface gráfica de site de e-commerce para um negócio digital através da metodologia Kansei

PCC (graduação) — Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Centro de Comunicação e Expressão. Design.A interface de um site de e-commerce é um fator crucial para construir uma relação entre vendedores e consumidores. Além de ser uma plataforma de venda, a interface também é um canal de comunicação e seus aspectos gráficos devem refletir a identidade e as estratégias do negócio digital que ela representa. Em vista disso, o presente trabalho tem como objetivo desenvolver uma interface de site de e-commerce no ramo de produtos promocionais customizáveis. A caracterização geral da pesquisa é de natureza aplicada, de tipo exploratória com abordagem mista, qualitativa e quantitativa. O projeto foi conduzido através da metodologia kansei, que se divide em quatro etapas: síntese do espécime (etapa 1); estruturação da checklist kansei (etapa 2); conceituação kansei e requisitos (etapa 3) e prototipagem e validação (etapa 4). Primeiramente, foi avaliado o contexto do projeto e o levantamento de trabalhos predecessores, realizados para a empresa Smerch.lab. Baseado nisso, criou-se um formulário que foi aplicado remotamente com voluntários para avaliar exemplares de interfaces gráficas diferentes com base em palavras-chaves da identidade da marca do site. Os valores médios das respostas foram cruzados com os valores de atributos dos elementos presentes em cada exemplar, gerando índices de correlação entre conceitos subjetivos avaliados por usuários comuns e dados objetivos mensuráveis. Os resultados obtidos na pesquisa mostram índices de correlação satisfatórios entre os conceitos da marca e os elementos projetáveis de uma interface, proporcionando diretrizes e requisitos para o desenvolvimento do protótipo final da interface gráfica que representa os conceitos da marca do negócio digital.The interface of an e-commerce website is an important factor for building a relationship between sellers and customers. Besides being a sales platform, the interface is also a communication channel, and its graphic features have to reflect the identity and the strategies of the digital business it represents. Considering that, this work aims to develop the interface of an e-commerce website in the field of customizable promotional products. This study was done as an applied and exploratory research, with a qualitative and quantitative mixed approach. The project was conducted through the kansei methodology, which is divided in four stages: Synthesizing Specimen (Stage 1); Establishment of Checklist (Stage 2); Determination of Kansei Concept and Requirement (Stage 3) and Prototyping/Testing (Stage 4). Firstly, the project context and previous works done for the Smerch.lab company were analysed. Based on that, an application form was created and applied remotely with volunteers, in order to evaluate graphic interface samples based on key-words related to the website’s brand identity. The values measured by the answers were cross-referenced with the values of the element’s traits present in each sample, creating correlation indexes between the subjective concepts rated by regular users and the measurable and objective data. The results obtained in the research showed satisfying correlation indexes between the brand concepts and the design elements of an interface, providing guidelines and requirements for the development of the final graphic interface prototype that represents the brand concepts of the digital business

A Systematic Analysis of Accessibility Education Within Computing Disciplines

Accessible technologies improve the usability for all users, including 1 billion people in the world who have a disability. Although there is a demand for accessible technologies, there is currently no requirement for universities to integrate this content within the computing curriculum. A systematic comparison of teaching efficacy is important to effectively prepare future computing professionals with the skills to create accessible technologies. This dissertation contains a mixed-methods cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of undergraduate Software Engineering and Information Technology students’ learning of accessibility. Four teaching conditions were assessed at Rochester Institute of Technology: content lectures, projects, exposure to stakeholders with a disability, and collaboration with a team member who had a disability. Evidence of student learning was obtained through questionnaires, project reports, and interview data. Student learning was quantified by a knowledge of programming techniques, awareness of accessible technologies, and attitudes towards individuals with a disability. The cross-sectional analysis spanned three years (spring 2016-2019), fourteen courses, and seven distinct professors. We found that students in all conditions gained an increased knowledge of implementation methods. Students who were exposed to a stakeholder with a disability obtained significantly higher scores in their prosocial sympathetic attitudes, awareness of accessible technologies, and knowledge of programming techniques following the course. Students in the other conditions obtained significant changes in only a subset of these measures. While students in all conditions obtained significantly higher knowledge scores in the short term, only students who had a project or a team member with a disability sustained significantly higher knowledge scores two years after exposure. In interviews, senior-level students revealed that there were multiple factors outside the classroom that dissuaded them from furthering their learning of accessibility. Students mentioned a lack of person-centered topics in major software development processes (e.g., agile, waterfall) and workplace tasks. Without direct reinforcement, students focused on functional software requirements and expressed that accessibility would only be necessary in select front-end development career paths or domains. While current work in computer accessibility education evaluates learning during, or immediately following, one course, this dissertation provides a systematic comparison of student learning throughout multiple courses and instructors. The findings within this dissertation may be used to inform future curriculum plans and educational initiatives

Enhancing trustability in MMOGs environments

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs; e.g., World of Warcraft), virtual worlds (VW; e.g., Second Life), social networks (e.g., Facebook) strongly demand for more autonomic, security, and trust mechanisms in a way similar to humans do in the real life world. As known, this is a difficult matter because trusting in humans and organizations depends on the perception and experience of each individual, which is difficult to quantify or measure. In fact, these societal environments lack trust mechanisms similar to those involved in humans-to-human interactions. Besides, interactions mediated by compute devices are constantly evolving, requiring trust mechanisms that keep the pace with the developments and assess risk situations. In VW/MMOGs, it is widely recognized that users develop trust relationships from their in-world interactions with others. However, these trust relationships end up not being represented in the data structures (or databases) of such virtual worlds, though they sometimes appear associated to reputation and recommendation systems. In addition, as far as we know, the user is not provided with a personal trust tool to sustain his/her decision making while he/she interacts with other users in the virtual or game world. In order to solve this problem, as well as those mentioned above, we propose herein a formal representation of these personal trust relationships, which are based on avataravatar interactions. The leading idea is to provide each avatar-impersonated player with a personal trust tool that follows a distributed trust model, i.e., the trust data is distributed over the societal network of a given VW/MMOG. Representing, manipulating, and inferring trust from the user/player point of view certainly is a grand challenge. When someone meets an unknown individual, the question is “Can I trust him/her or not?”. It is clear that this requires the user to have access to a representation of trust about others, but, unless we are using an open source VW/MMOG, it is difficult —not to say unfeasible— to get access to such data. Even, in an open source system, a number of users may refuse to pass information about its friends, acquaintances, or others. Putting together its own data and gathered data obtained from others, the avatar-impersonated player should be able to come across a trust result about its current trustee. For the trust assessment method used in this thesis, we use subjective logic operators and graph search algorithms to undertake such trust inference about the trustee. The proposed trust inference system has been validated using a number of OpenSimulator (opensimulator.org) scenarios, which showed an accuracy increase in evaluating trustability of avatars. Summing up, our proposal aims thus to introduce a trust theory for virtual worlds, its trust assessment metrics (e.g., subjective logic) and trust discovery methods (e.g., graph search methods), on an individual basis, rather than based on usual centralized reputation systems. In particular, and unlike other trust discovery methods, our methods run at interactive rates.MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games, como por exemplo, World of Warcraft), mundos virtuais (VW, como por exemplo, o Second Life) e redes sociais (como por exemplo, Facebook) necessitam de mecanismos de confiança mais autónomos, capazes de assegurar a segurança e a confiança de uma forma semelhante à que os seres humanos utilizam na vida real. Como se sabe, esta não é uma questão fácil. Porque confiar em seres humanos e ou organizações depende da percepção e da experiência de cada indivíduo, o que é difícil de quantificar ou medir à partida. Na verdade, esses ambientes sociais carecem dos mecanismos de confiança presentes em interacções humanas presenciais. Além disso, as interacções mediadas por dispositivos computacionais estão em constante evolução, necessitando de mecanismos de confiança adequados ao ritmo da evolução para avaliar situações de risco. Em VW/MMOGs, é amplamente reconhecido que os utilizadores desenvolvem relações de confiança a partir das suas interacções no mundo com outros. No entanto, essas relações de confiança acabam por não ser representadas nas estruturas de dados (ou bases de dados) do VW/MMOG específico, embora às vezes apareçam associados à reputação e a sistemas de reputação. Além disso, tanto quanto sabemos, ao utilizador não lhe é facultado nenhum mecanismo que suporte uma ferramenta de confiança individual para sustentar o seu processo de tomada de decisão, enquanto ele interage com outros utilizadores no mundo virtual ou jogo. A fim de resolver este problema, bem como os mencionados acima, propomos nesta tese uma representação formal para essas relações de confiança pessoal, baseada em interacções avatar-avatar. A ideia principal é fornecer a cada jogador representado por um avatar uma ferramenta de confiança pessoal que segue um modelo de confiança distribuída, ou seja, os dados de confiança são distribuídos através da rede social de um determinado VW/MMOG. Representar, manipular e inferir a confiança do ponto de utilizador/jogador, é certamente um grande desafio. Quando alguém encontra um indivíduo desconhecido, a pergunta é “Posso confiar ou não nele?”. É claro que isto requer que o utilizador tenha acesso a uma representação de confiança sobre os outros, mas, a menos que possamos usar uma plataforma VW/MMOG de código aberto, é difícil — para não dizer impossível — obter acesso aos dados gerados pelos utilizadores. Mesmo em sistemas de código aberto, um número de utilizadores pode recusar partilhar informações sobre seus amigos, conhecidos, ou sobre outros. Ao juntar seus próprios dados com os dados obtidos de outros, o utilizador/jogador representado por um avatar deve ser capaz de produzir uma avaliação de confiança sobre o utilizador/jogador com o qual se encontra a interagir. Relativamente ao método de avaliação de confiança empregue nesta tese, utilizamos lógica subjectiva para a representação da confiança, e também operadores lógicos da lógica subjectiva juntamente com algoritmos de procura em grafos para empreender o processo de inferência da confiança relativamente a outro utilizador. O sistema de inferência de confiança proposto foi validado através de um número de cenários Open-Simulator (opensimulator.org), que mostrou um aumento na precisão na avaliação da confiança de avatares. Resumindo, a nossa proposta visa, assim, introduzir uma teoria de confiança para mundos virtuais, conjuntamente com métricas de avaliação de confiança (por exemplo, a lógica subjectiva) e em métodos de procura de caminhos de confiança (com por exemplo, através de métodos de pesquisa em grafos), partindo de uma base individual, em vez de se basear em sistemas habituais de reputação centralizados. Em particular, e ao contrário de outros métodos de determinação do grau de confiança, os nossos métodos são executados em tempo real

Taking Trust Seriously in Privacy Law

Trust is beautiful. The willingness to accept vulnerability to the actions of others is the essential ingredient for friendship, commerce, transportation, and virtually every other activity that involves other people. It allows us to build things, and it allows us to grow. Trust is everywhere, but particularly at the core of the information relationships that have come to characterize our modern, digital lives. Relationships between people and their ISPs, social networks, and hired professionals are typically understood in terms of privacy. But the way we have talked about privacy has a pessimism problem – privacy is conceptualized in negative terms, which leads us to mistakenly look for “creepy” new practices, focus excessively on harms from invasions of privacy, and place too much weight on the ability of individuals to opt out of harmful or offensive data practices. But there is another way to think about privacy and shape our laws. Instead of trying to protect us against bad things, privacy rules can also be used to create good things, like trust. In this paper, we argue that privacy can and should be thought of as enabling trust in our essential information relationships. This vision of privacy creates value for all parties to an information transaction and enables the kind of sustainable information relationships on which our digital economy must depend. Drawing by analogy on the law of fiduciary duties, we argue that privacy laws and practices centered on trust would enrich our understanding of the existing privacy principles of confidentiality, transparency, and data protection. Re-considering these principles in terms of trust would move them from procedural means of compliance for data extraction towards substantive principles to build trusted, sustainable information relationships. Thinking about privacy in terms of trust also reveals a principle that we argue should become a new bedrock tenet of privacy law: the Loyalty that data holders must give to data subjects. Rejuvenating privacy law by getting past Privacy Pessimism is essential if we are to build the kind of digital society that is sustainable and ultimately beneficial to all – users, governments, and companies. There is a better way forward for privacy. Trust us