Christopher Laing

Managing the transition into higher education An on-line Spiral Induction Programme

In helping students manage the transition into higher education, there must be (i) an understanding of the needs and expectations of the students, and (ii) a process that inducts the students into the needs and expectations of higher education. This premise underpins the on-line Spiral Induction Programme (onSIP) developed at Southampton Institute. onSIP consists of various on-line activities designed to help students take responsibility for their own learning; feedback from these activities enables both staff and students to identify if and what additional support is required. The intention was to provide a real-time analysis and indication of those students who may be ‘at risk’, allowing for the appropriate targeting of timely support. Initial results indicate a positive reaction by the students to onSIP. In addition, the predictive feedback from onSIP demonstrates a good correlation with the end-of-year outcomes for a cohort of technology students at Southampton Institute.

Composition of mismatched web services in distributed service oriented design activities

The composition of heterogeneous web services is a key aspect of usability and applicability of web services in different application domains such as business applications, healthcare, and e-government. Current research has developed different techniques to achieve effective composition of web services. Unfortunately, they fail to ensure a perfect match in the composition of web services. This paper investigates the composition of web services and how to effectively employ web services in the design activities. Objectives of this work are twofold. Firstly, to proposes a new technique that assists users to resolve a mismatch in the composition of web services. Secondly, to implement, validate, and evaluate the proposed technique within the context of design activities thus establishing a workbench called Service Oriented Design Activities (SODA). SODA provides a web-based design infrastructure that allows loosely coupled design teams to collaborate on different services, and to enable them to resolve any mismatch between heterogeneous design services. Other anticipated advantages include interoperability of design services, improving designer capabilities, and the reduction of product development time.

An ontological engineering approach for automating inspection and quarantine at airports

Customs and quarantine departments are applying information systems to automate their inspection processes and improve their inspection efficiency and accuracy. The product codes from the Harmonized System (HS codes) are the essential elements of the systems integration, automation and intelligence. The identified HS codes are well-accepted and precise product references used by customs authorities, to match applicable policies to the products being inspected and taxed. Domain ontology for importing and exporting industry can be used to acquire HS codes for given products, and is a prerequisite for an integrated and intelligent automated inspection system. The authors have proposed and implemented an importing and exporting domain ontology. The ontology is composed of an integrated and comprehensive knowledge base derived from static dictionaries and the HS specification, and dynamic processing data. Based on this ontology, a reasoning engine is developed to generate HS codes intelligently for the given product names. Information systems can use the engine to get HS codes for submitted products and find applicable policies automatically. The ontology and the engine have been implemented in a Java-based platform and published as a HS Web service. In this paper, knowledge structure, reasoning mechanism and implementation details for the domain ontology and reasoning engine are presented. A test bed in the application environment has been conducted and experimental results have been obtained. The ontology and the service have the potential to be widely used by authorities and international traders of importing and exporting industry around the world.

Sonification of a network's self-organized criticality for real-time situational awareness

Abstract Communication networks involve the transmission and reception of large volumes of data. Research indicates that network traffic volumes will continue to increase. These traffic volumes will be unprecedented and the behaviour of global information infrastructures when dealing with these data volumes is unknown. It has been shown that complex systems (including computer networks) exhibit self-organized criticality under certain conditions. Given the possibility in such systems of a sudden and spontaneous system reset the development of techniques to inform system administrators of this behaviour could be beneficial. This article focuses on the combination of two dissimilar research concepts, namely sonification (a form of auditory display) and self-organized criticality (SOC). A system is described that sonifies in real time an information infrastructure’s self-organized criticality to alert the network administrators of both normal and abnormal network traffic and operation. It is shown how the system makes changes in a system’s SOC readily perceptible. Implications for how such a system may support real-time situational awareness and post hoc incident analysis are discussed.

Sonification Aesthetics and Listening for Network Situational Awareness

This paper looks at the problem of using sonification to enable network administrators to maintaining situational awareness about their network environment. Network environments generate a lot of data and the need for continuous monitoring means that sonification systems must be designed in such a way as to maximise acceptance while minimising annoyance and listener fatigue. It will be argued that solutions based on the concept of the soundscape offer an ecological advantage over other sonification designs.

A Case Based Reasoning Framework for Improving the Trustworthiness of Digital Forensic Investigations

A novel concept for improving the trustworthiness of results obtained from digital investigations is presented. Case Based Reasoning Forensic Auditor (CBR-FA) is a method by which results from previous digital forensic examinations are stored and reused to audit current digital forensic investigations. CBR-FA provides a method for evaluating digital forensic investigations in order to provide a practitioner with a level of reassurance that evidence that is relevant to their case has not been missed. The structure of CBR-FA is discussed as are the methodologies it incorporates as part of its auditing functionality.

Securing Critical Infrastructures and Critical Control Systems: Approaches for Threat Protection

The increased use of technology is necessary in order for industrial control systems to maintain and monitor industrial, infrastructural, or environmental processes. The need to secure and identify threats to the system is equally critical. Securing Critical Infrastructures and Critical Control Systems: Approaches for Threat Protection provides a full and detailed understanding of the vulnerabilities and security threats that exist within an industrial control system. This collection of research defines and analyzes the technical, procedural, and managerial responses to securing these systems.

SODA: service oriented design activities

This work presents a new approach towards design activities that require collaborative work among diverse design disciplines and autonomous organisations each providing specialised services. This approach is called SODA (Service Oriented Design Activities), which provides a Web-based design infrastructure that allows loosely coupled design teams to collaborate on different services. SODA is based on the paradigm of service-oriented computing of Web services and semantic Web. It provides interoperability among distributed design services and also represents their knowledge in order to aid the understanding of data and functions of design services. Validation of SODA is performed through the development of a prototype tool and its application to a real life case study of ship design. Advantages of SODA include interoperability and knowledge sharing of design services and the consequentially improvement of designer capabilities, reduction of product development time, and achievement of higher-level product quality.

Context informed intelligent information infrastructures for better situational awareness

In this multi-disciplinary project, we intend to explore the advantages of an information fusion system in which the infrastructure finds new ways to reflect upon its own state and new ways to express this state that provides a good fit to human communication and cognition processes. This interplay should then generate a better and more responsive humancomputer symbiosis. The outcomes of this project will help to develop context and content aware networks that are better able to extract meaning and understanding from network data and behaviour.

Inspection-oriented coding service based on machine learning and semantics mining

HS codes have been adopted by the majority of countries as being the basis for import and export inspection and the generation of trade statistics. Customs authorities and international traders need a HS code query tool to make their processing efficient and automatic. Since HS codes are identified at 5–7 levels of classification, then any intelligent coding service will need to combine a knowledge database, with the techniques of data mining, machine learning and semantics reasoning. In this paper, the authors propose a comprehensive solution for such a coding service. The architecture, related techniques, technical solution and implementation considerations for the proposed system have been provided. Several of the proposed functions and implementation techniques have been developed and deployed by the Shanghai International Airport Entry-Exit Inspection and Quarantine Bureau. The coding service has been published as a Web service, and has the potential to be widely used by authorities and international traders around the world. The proposed system may also be appropriate for other applications that relate to code or classification processes, such as RFID-based or product ontology based applications.