Masashi Crete-Nishihata

Reconstructing the Past: Personal Memory Technologies Are Not Just Personal and Not Just for Memory

Research has shown that personal memory technologies are a promising way to address the needs of older adults with memory impairments. In this article, we review three recently completed studies that evaluated technologies for personal memories intended for persons with Alzheimers disease (AD) or mild cognitive impairment (MCI). In the first study, we worked with 12 participants with AD or MCI and their families to construct DVD-based Multimedia Biographies that depicted prominent events, people, and places from the participants past. We then evaluated over a period of 6 months psychosocial effects that viewing the biographies had on the participants and their family members. These effects included stimulating reminiscence of past events, triggering predominantly positive emotions of happiness and occasional moments of sadness, and engaging conversations with family members. In our second study, we designed a home-based ambient display that allowed a man with AD to similarly review his past life, in combination with recent photos automatically captured by a lifelogging device called SenseCam. Psychometric tests and semistructured interviews revealed how the intervention appeared to improve the participants sense of self and lower apathy. In our final study of 5 cognitively impaired participants we compared representations of recent experiences captured with SenseCam in 3 ways: with the raw image stream, with a slide show consisting of a selected number of SenseCam images narrated by a family member, and with a control reviewing no images. Results included evidence that reviewing SenseCam images improved episodic recall for personal events depicted in the images for 4 of the 5 participants. Based on lessons learned from this research, we suggest that personal memory technologies should not just be framed as systems for augmenting an individual users capacity for accurate recall of personal events, but instead should support groups of people such as members of a family in telling their life stories. This conception yields benefits beyond the support of memory, such as fostering a sense of self and strengthening interpersonal relationships with family members. We conclude the article by presenting design considerations to help guide and inform the development and evaluation of future “personal memory” technologies.

Multimedia Biographies: A Reminiscence and Social Stimulus Tool for Persons with Cognitive Impairment

The multimedia biography tells the story of the life of an elderly person with a cognitive impairment in motion picture format. The multimedia biography combines family photographs, film clips, audio narration, and music. It is intended to be screened on an ongoing basis to provide spaces for reminiscence and communication between cognitively impaired persons and their families. Using a production process in which we collaborated with family caregivers, we created 12 multimedia biographies for persons having Alzheimers disease or mild cognitive impairment. This article describes our production and screening processes. We also share lessons learned from the multimedia biography research to assist practitioners, families, or researchers who wish to use similar technologies and processes for eliciting and sharing life stories.

Cyclones in cyberspace: Information shaping and denial in the 2008 Russia–Georgia war

While the rhetoric of cyber war is often exaggerated, there have been recent cases of international conflict in which cyberspace has played a prominent role. In this article, we analyze the impact of cyberspace in the conflict between Russia and Georgia over the disputed territory of South Ossetia in August 2008. We examine the role of strategic communications, information operations, operations in and through cyberspace, and conventional combat to account for the political and military outcomes of the conflict. The August 2008 conflict reveals some emergent issues in cyber warfare that can be generalized for further comparative research: the importance of control over the physical infrastructure of cyberspace, the strategic and tactical importance of information denial, the emergence of cyber-privateering, the unavoidable internationalization of cyber conflicts, and the tendency towards magnifying unanticipated outcomes in cyber conflicts – a phenomenon we call ‘cyclones in cyberspace’.

Characterizing Web Censorship Worldwide: Another Look at the OpenNet Initiative Data

In this study, we take another look at 5 years of web censorship data gathered by the OpenNet Initiative in 77 countries using user-based testing with locally relevant content. Prior to our work, this data had been analyzed with little automation, focusing on what content had been blocked, rather than how blocking was carried out. In this study, we use more rigorous automation to obtain a longitudinal, global view of the technical means used for web censorship. We also identify blocking that had been missed in prior analyses. Our results point to considerable variability in the technologies used for web censorship, across countries, time, and types of content, and even across ISPs in the same country. In addition to characterizing web censorship in countries that, thus far, have eluded technical analysis, we also discuss the implications of our observations on the design of future network measurement platforms and circumvention technologies.

A method for identifying and confirming the use of URL filtering products for censorship

Products used for managing network traffic and restricting access to Web content represent a dual-use technology. While they were designed to improve performance and protect users from inappropriate content, these products are also used to censor the Web by authoritarian regimes around the globe. This dual use has not gone unnoticed, with Western governments placing restrictions on their export. Our contribution is to present methods for identifying installations of URL filtering products and confirming their use for censorship. We first present a methodology for identifying externally visible installations of URL filtering products in ISPs around the globe. Further, we leverage the fact that many of these products accept user-submitted sites for blocking to confirm that a specific URL filtering product is being used for censorship. Using this method, we are able to confirm the use of McAfee SmartFilter in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Netsweeper in Qatar, the UAE, and Yemen. Our results show that these products are being used to block a range of content, including oppositional political speech, religious discussion and gay and lesbian material, speech generally protected by international human rights norms.