Kristiina Karvonen

The beauty of simplicity

In this paper we show how discussion about design quality or even usability is often discussion about aesthetics. First, we introduce some definitions of beauty in aesthetics. Then, we introduce how the beauty of the Web design affects the feeling of online trust, and bring forth observations about this design quality as an aesthetic notion. As a result, we present how simplicity and beauty affect the users experience and interpretation of the design, and contemplate on how this perception may vary according to cultural background, age, and the amount of user experience. We will also envision some future trends for the aesthetics of user interfaces.

Users and Trust in Cyberspace

I did my PhD in decentralised authorisation, but I guess now I’m jumping right through the rat hole of this conference by speaking about trust. I’m trying to look at trust from a psychological point of view, not so much from the technical point of view, and trying to point out some of the observations that have been made about how users perceive trust in cyberspace. I am presenting work that I am doing with one of my PhD students, Kristiina Karvonen. She is doing research on what trust is from the user’s point of view in the Web, but I am more interested in how we could generalise these issues to uses of computer communications other than the Web, and how we could possibly make computers understand trust in some limited sense. First I am going to speak a little bit about our motivations, then try and define what wemean with the word trust (and I hope it is an acceptable definition even though it’s a limited one), and then I’m going to tread on thin ice and try to contemplate whether we could make computers understand trust in this limited sense. It seems to be a fact that the Web is getting everywhere and, at least in Finland, everybody these days has to have a cellular telephone. Teenagers are the most active cell phone user group in Finland, sending short messages to each other all the time, and some schools have banned cell phones altogether. Even primary school kids have cell phones, and this has a number of privacy concerns that make me think really hard. How could I change the world so that when my daughter comes to the age that she wants to have a cell phone that the operator doesn’t get all the information about her habits and friendships and so on? And in the more distant future it seems to be that these kind of devices will get integrated into our clothing and jewellery and maybe some people will turn into cyborgs! Now when we are starting to look at security concepts from that point of view, instead of an organisational point of view, so we are speaking about protecting the personal data and privacy in this kind of connected world, then we get quite a different view to what is trust, and whom should we trust, and whom have we to trust. That’s what we are trying to address. From this point of view it seems that when we are speaking about trust, it’s first that trust implies lack of knowledge; so trust is a special kind of belief meaning that when we make a trust decision, when we decide to believe, it has quite a heavy emotional load from the psychological point of view. We make a commitment in trusting and we make ourselves more vulnerable when we decide to trust something or somebody. So we made ourselves dependent and when we are speaking about computers it seems that trust implies that we made a decision that our attitudes or perception towards the computer system is that we decide

Usable Access Control inside Home Networks

WLAN link layer security has been well studied but very little work exists in the area of intuitive access control inside home networks. In this paper we propose an approach that allows fine-grained access control without overburdening users with difficult questions or complicated configuration tasks. The proposed concept originated from a user needs study and user trials, and it builds on the existing WiFi Protected Setup standard.

Safeguarding Against Sybil Attacks via Social Networks and Multipath Routing

Peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks are currently being used to build large scale distributed systems running various decentralized applications like distributed storage, content distribution, collaborative scheduling, and leader election. Although we have protocols like Byzantine agreement, voting schemes etc. for building resilient distributed applications; we have very few solutions available for safeguarding these distributed protocols from Sybil attacks. In a Sybil attack, an adversary could forge multiple identities and create multiple, distinct nodes in the system hence overthrowing any upper bound on number of malicious nodes in these protocols. In this paper, we present a multipath routing protocol using graph theoretic approach to group the Sybil nodes first and then to poll them using host identity protocol (HIP) to decide upon whether they really belong to a Sybil group. HIP clearly separates participating users from overlay nodes. It overcomes P2P network challenges like stability over time and identity differentiation. We also use a social network where the attack edges are minimum. An attack edge between a malicious user and an honest user indicates that the malicious user is able to establish a trust relationship with the honest user by some means. We perform simulations to show the feasibility of our distributed protocol.

Users and trust: the new threats, the new possibilities

In this paper, we describe the current threats and possibilities in the online environment from a users perspective on basis of literary analysis and a set of user studies concentrating on online trust formation and expression. The work includes a review on the current level of understanding about online trust, what kind of research has been done and what the basic ingredients of trust might be in the future. By comparing the new results with results gained in 1999, we can see how the situation has been changing. The analysis is based on research conducted on trust between 1999 and 2007, utilising user studies, ethnography, cultural studies, aesthetics, and basic usability engineering as methods. We also include some discussion on the appropriateness of various methods available for studying online trust, and propose directions for new trust research as a field inside human-computer interaction.

Creating home network access for the elderly

Wireless broadband networks for home environment present us with many challenges unfamiliar in more public settings. At home, we encounter the end-users with little ICT experience. Probably among the most challenging members of the home network are the elderly, who may have demanding needs for ensuring accessibility. Either living in a joined community as in a home for the elderly or at home on their own, the possibility to have a remote connection to the homes of their extended family may become important by e.g. decreasing mobility. Interconnectivity between various heterogeneous networks across multiple homes means for example situations where the family shares a photo album or web server with various pieces located at different homes. In this paper, we identify usability challenges presented by internetworking multiple homes, with a special focus on universal accessibility.