Designing for engagement : building IT systems

Context The School of Information Technology at QUT has recently undertaken a major restructuring of their Bachelor of Information Technology (BIT) course. Some of the aims of this restructuring include a reduction in first year attrition and to provide an attractive degree course that meets both student and industry expectations. Emphasis has been placed on the first semester in the context of retaining students by introducing a set of four units that complement one another and provide introductory material on technology, programming and related skills, and generic skills that will aid the students throughout their undergraduate course and in their careers. This discussion relates to one of these four fist semester units, namely Building IT Systems. The aim of this unit is to create small Information Technology (IT) systems that use programming or scripting, databases as either standalone applications or web applications. In the prior history of teaching introductory computer programming at QUT, programming has been taught as a stand alone subject and integration of computer applications with other systems such as databases and networks was not undertaken until students had been given a thorough grounding in those topics as well. Feedback has indicated that students do not believe that working with a database requires programming skills. In fact, the teaching of the building blocks of computer applications have been compartmentalized and taught in isolation from each other. The teaching of introductory computer programming has been an industry requirement of IT degree courses as many jobs require at least some knowledge of the topic. Yet, computer programming is not a skill that all students have equal capabilities of learning (Bruce et al., 2004) and this is clearly shown by the volume of publications dedicated to this topic in the literature over a broad period of time (Eckerdal & Berglund, 2005; Mayer, 1981; Winslow, 1996). The teaching of this introductory material has been done pretty much the same way over the past thirty years. During this period of time that introductory computer programming courses have been taught at QUT, a number of different programming languages and programming paradigms have been used and different approaches to teaching and learning have been attempted in an effort to find the golden thread that would allow students to learn this complex topic. Unfortunately, computer programming is not a skill that can be learnt in one semester. Some basics can be learnt but it can take many years to master (Norvig, 2001). Faculty data typically has shown a bimodal distribution of results for students undertaking introductory programming courses with a high proportion of students receiving a high mark and a high proportion of students receiving a low or failing mark. This indicates that there are students who understand and excel with the introductory material while there is another group who struggle to understand the concepts and practices required to be able to translate a specification or problem statement into a computer program that achieves what is being requested. The consequence of a large group of students failing the introductory programming course has been a high level of attrition amongst first year students. This attrition level does not provide good continuity in student numbers in later years of the degree program and the current approach is not seen as sustainable

Analysing e-mail text authorship for forensic purposes

E-mail has become the most popular Internet application and with its rise in use has come an inevitable increase in the use of e-mail for criminal purposes. It is possible for an e-mail message to be sent anonymously or through spoofed servers. Computer forensics analysts need a tool that can be used to identify the author of such e-mail messages. This thesis describes the development of such a tool using techniques from the fields of stylometry and machine learning. An author's style can be reduced to a pattern by making measurements of various stylometric features from the text. E-mail messages also contain macro-structural features that can be measured. These features together can be used with the Support Vector Machine learning algorithm to classify or attribute authorship of e-mail messages to an author providing a suitable sample of messages is available for comparison. In an investigation, the set of authors may need to be reduced from an initial large list of possible suspects. This research has trialled authorship characterisation based on sociolinguistic cohorts, such as gender and language background, as a technique for profiling the anonymous message so that the suspect list can be reduced

Identifying the authors of suspect email

In this paper, we present the results of an investigation into identifying the authorship of email messages by analysis of the contents and style of the email messages themselves. A set of stylistics features applicable to text in general and an extended set of email-specific structural features were identified. A Support Vector Machine learning method was used to discriminate between the authorship classes. Through a series of baseline experiments on non-email data, it was found that approximately 20 email messages with approximately 100 words in each message should be sufficient to discriminate authorship in most cases. These results were confirmed with a corpus of email data and performance was further enhanced when a set of email-specific features were added. This outcome has important implications in the management of such problems as email abuse, anonymous email messages and computer forensics

Retention and degradation of organics in Rundle waste shale/retort water mixtures

Batch, column and field lysimeter studies have been conducted to evaluate the concept of codisposal of retort water with Rundle (Queensland, Australia) waste shales. The batch studies indicated that degradation of a significant proportion of the total organic load occurs if the mixture is seeded with soil or compost. These results are compared with those from laboratory column studies and from the field lysimeter at the Rundle site. G.c.-m.s. analysis of some of the eluants indicated that significant degradation of the base-neutral fraction occurs even if no soil seed is added, and that degradation of this fraction was higher under anaerobic conditions

Roni Horn : Things which Happen Again

Fuchs describes Horn's installations referring to the clarity and singularity of her work which, unlike minimalist art, does not stress formal continuity through subtle variations on one concept. In interview with Kersting, Horn discusses her pairing of identical site-dependent objects with architecturally coherent spaces

Multi-Topic E-mail Authorship Attribution Forensics

In this paper we describe an investigation of forensic authorship identification or categorisation undertaken on multitopic e-mail documents. We use an extended set of e-mail\ud document features such as structural characteristics and linguistic patterns together with a Support Vector Machine learning algorithm. Experiments on a number of e-mail documents\ud generated by different authors on a set of topics gave promising results for both inter- and intra-topic author categorisation

Detecting anomalous user activity

Systems, methods and articles for determining anomalous user activity are disclosed. Data representing a transaction activity corresponding to a plurality of user transactions can be received and user transactions can be grouped according to types of user transactions. The transaction activity can be determined to be anomalous in relation to the grouped user transactions based on a predetermined parameter