James Walkerdine

Supporting Law Enforcement in Digital Communities through Natural Language Analysis

Recent years have seen an explosion in the number and scale of digital communities (e.g. peer-to-peer file sharing systems, chat applications and social networking sites). Unfortunately, digital communities are host to significant criminal activity including copyright infringement, identity theft and child sexual abuse. Combating this growing level of crime is problematic due to the ever increasing scale of todays digital communities. This paper presents an approach to provide automated support for the detection of child sexual abuse related activities in digital communities. Specifically, we analyze the characteristics of child sexual abuse media distribution in P2P file sharing networks and carry out an exploratory study to show that corpus-based natural language analysis may be used to automate the detection of this activity. We then give an overview of how this approach can be extended to police chat and social networking communities.

Dependability properties of P2P architectures

This paper aims to identify the main dependability properties (and related properties) that can play a part within P2P systems. This, in turn, can be used to help inform the creation of more dependable systems. Given the influence the choice of architecture can have, this paper first provides an overview of the main P2P architectures, before going on to identifying the different properties. Future work will provide a detailed analysis of the effect the architectures can have on these properties.

Who Am I? Analyzing Digital Personas in Cybercrime Investigations

The Isis toolkit offers the sophisticated capabilities required to analyze digital personas and provide investigators with clues to the identity of the individual or group hiding behind one or more personas.

A Faceted Approach to Service Specification

Service-centric computing is developing and maturing rapidly as a paradigm for developing distributed systems. In recent years there has been a rapid growth in the number and types of processes being proposed to support aspects of SOC. Many of these processes require that services be modelled in a particular way and this puts great pressure on traditional notions of service specification, questioning the very nature of how services should be described for potential consumers. We present a technique for addressing this theoretical and practical bottleneck: faceted service specification. This allows different specifications to exist side-by-side if they are needed, yet places little obligation on the service provider to support specifications that are judged to be of little or no value. We show how faceted service specification is being used in the SeCSE project to support advanced service-centric system development activities.

A framework for P2P application development

Although Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing has become increasingly popular over recent years, there still exist only a very small number of application domains that have exploited it on a large scale. This can be attributed to a number of reasons including the rapid evolution of P2P technologies, coupled with their often-complex nature. This paper describes an implemented abstraction framework that seeks to aid developers in building P2P applications. A selection of example P2P applications that have been developed using this framework are also presented.

Monitoring Challenges and Approaches for P2P File-Sharing Systems

Since the release of Napster in 1999, P2P file-sharing has enjoyed a dramatic rise in popularity. A 2000 study by Plonka on the University of Wisconsin campus network found that file-sharing accounted for a comparable volume of traffic to HTTP, while a 2002 study by Saroiu et al. on the University of Washington campus network found that file-sharing accounted for more than treble the volume of Web traffic observed, thus affirming the significance of P2P in the context of Internet traffic. Empirical studies of P2P traffic are essential for supporting the design of next-generation P2P systems, informing the provisioning of network infrastructure and underpinning the policing of P2P systems. The latter is of particular significance as P2P file-sharing systems have been implicated in supporting criminal behaviour including copyright infringement and the distribution of illegal pornography

UDesignIt: towards social media for community-driven design

Online social networks are now common place in day-to-day lives. They are also increasingly used to drive social action initiatives, either led by government or communities themselves (e.g., SeeClickFix, LoveLewisham.org, mumsnet). However, such initiatives are mainly used for crowd sourcing community views or coordinating activities. With the changing global economic and political landscape, there is an ever pressing need to engage citizens on a large-scale, not only in consultations about systems that affect them, but also involve them directly in the design of these very systems. In this paper we present the UDesignIt platform that combines social media technologies with software engineering concepts to empower communities to discuss and extract high-level design features. It combines natural language processing, feature modelling and visual overlays in the form of “image clouds” to enable communities and software engineers alike to unlock the knowledge contained in the unstructured and unfiltered content of social media where people discuss social problems and their solutions. By automatically extracting key themes and presenting them in a structured and organised manner in near real-time, the approach drives a shift towards large-scale engagement of community stakeholders for system design.

P2P-4-DL: digital library over peer-to-peer

The P2P-4-DL project aims to investigate and build a DL system that would operate over a P2P structure. Rather than storing digital objects centrally they remain the responsibility of the individual peers that provide them. This allows the system to utilise network resources more efficiently as well as providing users with a greater sense of control over the digital objects they share. Our prototype also draws upon natural language processing (NLP) techniques in an attempt to increase the usability of the system. Other related work within this area includes EDUTELLA, a RDF based P2P infrastructure that can support the development of DLs.

Annotated web as corpus

This paper presents a proposal to facilitate the use of the annotated web as corpus by alleviating the annotation bottleneck for corpus data drawn from the web. We describe a framework for large-scale distributed corpus annotation using peer-to-peer (P2P) technology to meet this need. We also propose to annotate a large reference corpus in order to evaluate this framework. This will allow us to investigate the affordances offered by distributed techniques to ensure replicability of linguistic research based on web-derived corpora.

The conductor interaction method

Computers have increasingly become part of our everyday lives, with many activities either involving their direct use or being supported by one. This has prompted research into developing methods and mechanisms to assist humans in interacting with computers (human-computer interaction, or HCI). A number of HCI techniques have been developed over the years, some of which are quite old but continue to be used, and some more recent and still evolving. Many of these interaction techniques, however, are not natural in their use and typically require the user to learn a new means of interaction. Inconsistencies within these techniques and the restrictions they impose on user creativity can also make such interaction techniques difficult to use, especially for novice users. This article proposes an alternative interaction method, the conductor interaction method (CIM), which aims to provide a more natural and easier-to-learn interaction technique. This novel interaction method extends existing HCI methods by drawing upon techniques found in human-human interaction. It is argued that the use of a two-phased multimodal interaction mechanism, using gaze for selection and gesture for manipulation, incorporated within a metaphor-based environment, can provide a viable alternative for interacting with a computer (especially for novice users). Both the model and an implementation of the CIM within a system are presented in this article. This system formed the basis of a number of user studies that have been performed to assess the effectiveness of the CIM, the findings of which are discussed in this work.