Comparing Successful DLT Consortia: A Lifecycle Perspective

In 2021, enterprise distributed ledger technology has evolved beyond the proof-of-concept stage. It is now providing business value to large consortia in several successful and well documented case studies. Nevertheless, other consortia and initiatives are stuck in early stages of consortium formation or conceptualization. They stand to benefit from lessons learned by successful consortia, but an in-depth comparison has not yet been conducted. Thus, this study performs the first methodological comparison of large DLT consortia that have launched a product. Based on the temporal evolution of these consortia, a lifecycle with 4 stages and 12 sub-phases is developed to provide further guidance for early-stage consortia. The results show how 9 pioneer consortia have successfully integrated novel DLT into existing processes, but also point out challenges faced on the way

Situation Awareness for Recommender Systems

One major shortcoming of traditional recommender systems is their inability to adjust to users' short-term preferences resulting from varying situation-specific factors. To address this, we propose the notion of situation-aware recommender systems, which are supposed to autonomously determine the users' current situation based on a multitude of contextual side information and generate truly personalized recommendations. In particular, we develop a situation awareness model for recommender systems, include it in a situation-aware recommendation process, and derive generic design steps for the design of situation-aware recommender systems. The feasibility of these concepts is demonstrated by directly employing them for the development and implementation of a music recommender system for everyday situations. Moreover, their meaningfulness is shown by means of an empirical user study. The outcomes of the evaluation indicate a significant increase in user satisfaction compared to traditional (i.e. non-situation-aware) recommendations

A Security Information and Event Management Pattern

In order to achieve a high level of cyber security awareness most mid to large sized companies use Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) embedded into a Security Operations Center. These systems enable the centralized collection and analysis of security relevant information generated by a variety of different systems, to detect advanced threats and to improve reaction time in case of an incident. In this paper, we derive a generic SIEM pattern by analyzing already existing tools on the market, among additional information. Thereby, we adhere to a bottom-up process for pattern identification and authoring. This article can serve as a foundation to understand SIEM in general and support developers of existing or new SIEM systems to increase reusability by defining and identifying general software modules inherent in SIEM

TRIVIA: visualizing reputation profiles to detect malicious sellers in electronic marketplaces

Reputation systems are an essential part of electronic marketplaces that provide a valuable method to identify honest sellers and punish malicious actors. Due to the continuous improvement of the computation models applied, advanced reputation systems have become non-transparent and incomprehensible to the end-user. As a consequence, users become skeptical and lose their trust toward the reputation system. In this work, we are taking a step to increase the transparency of reputation systems by means of providing interactive visual representations of seller reputation profiles. We thereto propose TRIVIA - a visual analytics tool to evaluate seller reputation. Besides enhancing transparency, our results show that through incorporating the visual-cognitive capabilities of a human analyst and the computing power of a machine in TRIVIA, malicious sellers can be reliably identified. In this way we provide a new perspective on how the problem of robustness could be addressed

A serious game-based peer-instruction digital forensics workshop

Increasing threats in the area of information security raise the necessity for companies to be prepared for a digital forensic investigation. However, even the best investments in technology and infrastructure will fail if employees are not adequately trained. In this paper we propose a workshop concept combining the peer instruction method and elements from the field of serious games. The goal of the combined methods is to enable the participants to investigate a use case in an interactive and playful way. Our concept guides the participants step by step into an increasingly independent way of performing a digital forensic investigation