Nik Thompson

Government data does not mean data governance: Lessons learned from a public sector application audit

Public sector agencies routinely store large volumes of information about individuals in the community. The storage and analysis of this information benefits society, as it enables relevant agencies to make better informed decisions and to address the individuals needs more appropriately. Members of the public often assume that the authorities are well equipped to handle personal data; however, due to implementation errors and lack of data governance, this is not always the case. This paper reports on an audit conducted in Western Australia, focusing on findings in the Police Firearms Management System and the Department of Health Information System. In the case of the Police, the audit revealed numerous data protection issues leading the auditors to report that they had no confidence in the accuracy of information on the number of people licensed to possess firearms or the number of licensed firearms. Similarly alarming conclusions were drawn in the Department of Health as auditors found that they could not determine which medical staff member was responsible for clinical data entries made. The paper describes how these issues often do not arise from existing business rules or the technology itself, but a lack of sound data governance. Finally, a discussion section presents key data governance principles and best practices that may guide practitioners involved in data management. These cases highlight the very real data management concerns, and the associated recommendations provide the context to spark further interest in the applied aspects of data protection.

Multimedia and Cognition: Examining the Effect of Applying Cognitive Principles to the Design of Instructional Materials.

The human cognitive system possesses a finite processing capacity, which is split into channels for various modalities, and learning can be inhibited if any of the cognitive channels is overloaded. However, although the amount of e-learning materials is increasing steadily, the design of instructional material has been largely based on intuition rather than cognitive principles. This research investigated if it is possible to improve the effectiveness of an established e-learning system by the application of cognitive design principles. And if so, does the increased development time and resources yield a substantial effect on learning. Quantitative data collecting during the experiment supported the cognitive principles based design and demonstrated that significantly better quiz scores were obtained in transfer and retention tests when compared against a more traditional design. The results of the study also indicate that the cognitive principles based design was both practical and feasible to apply in terms of necessary resources.

Towards cultural translation of websites: a large-scale study of Australian, Chinese, and Saudi Arabian design preferences

ABSTRACT Since websites are developed and maintained by different cultures, web page design may be influenced by the originating culture. This study examines the usage of design attributes between Australian, Chinese, and Saudi Arabian cultures. This study used automated and manual techniques to investigate design attributes including layout, navigation, links, multimedia, visual representation, colour, and text. Significant differences were found in each of the listed design attributes, suggesting that different interfaces may be needed for successful communication with different cultural groups. The results of this study confirm and extend prior research and anthropological models. The contribution of this study is the scale (460 websites in total) and breadth (seven design attributes) of the research. It also provides revised insights into culture and website design and the concept of cultural translation of web content.

“Security begins at home”: Determinants of home computer and mobile device security behavior

Abstract Personal computing users are vulnerable to information security threats, as they must independently make decisions about how to protect themselves, often with little understanding of technology or its implications. However, personal computing users are under-represented in security research studies, especially for mobile device use. The study described in this paper addresses this research gap by evaluating data from 629 home computer and mobile device users to improve understanding of security behavior in both contexts. The research model extends protection motivation theory by including the roles of social influences and psychological ownership, and by including actual behavior. The model was separately tested with home computer users and mobile device users and data reveals that some of the determinants of security behavior differ between home computer and mobile device use. The results show that perceived vulnerability, self-efficacy, response cost, descriptive norm and psychological ownership all influenced personal computing security intentions and behavior for both home computer users and mobile device users. However, perceived severity was only found to play a role in mobile device security behavior and neither response efficacy nor subjective norm influenced security intentions for either type of user. These findings are discussed in terms of their practical and research implications as well as generating new research opportunities into personal computing security.

Old risks, new challenges: exploring differences in security between home computer and mobile device use

ABSTRACT Home users are particularly vulnerable to information security threats as they must make decisions about how to protect themselves, often with little knowledge of the technology. Furthermore, information for home users tends to focus on the traditional PC and may downplay threats faced on mobile devices, transforming well-known and old risks into new challenges for information security. To address the need for more behavioural information security research that focusses on mobile devices, this paper reports on the first large-scale study comparing security perceptions and behaviours on home computer and mobile devices. Data from 629 users revealed that in addition to differences in information security behaviour, the following security-related perceptions all differ significantly between home computer and mobile device use: perceived severity, security self-efficacy, response efficacy, response cost, descriptive norm, psychological ownership and intention to perform security behaviours. In each case, the direction of the difference was such that mobile devices were more likely to be at risk than a home computer. The practical implications of these differences are discussed.

Cross-Cultural web usability model

Research shows that different user interfaces are needed for successful communication with different cultural groups, yet studies on cross-cultural website usability are limited. This research works towards creating a culturally sensitive world wide web by addressing the gap with a novel cross-cultural website usability model. The authors’ prior work evaluated Australian, Chinese, and Saudi Arabian web pages and revealed significant differences in the use of web attributes including: layout, navigation, links, multimedia, visual representation, colour and text. This paper extends those findings by mapping the usage of web attributes with theories of culture to create website design guidelines and a usability measuring instrument. The development of this model includes: evaluation of element use, identification of prominent elements, organisation of cultural factors, organisation of HCI factors, development of design guidelines and development of the usability measuring instrument. This model simplifies the creation of cross-cultural websites, while enabling developers to evaluate page usability for different cultures.

Affective Stack - A Model for Affective Computing Application Development

Affective computing applications hold promise to revolutionize human-computer interaction by enabling more natural and intuitive interaction modalities. These may include the communication of vocal expressions, physiological signals or other non-verbal indicators of underlying affective state. Although the field has experienced substantial expansion in recent years, the tools and techniques utilized are not yet mature or well established. A notable issue is the one-off nature of currently implemented affective computing systems. There is as yet no notion of standardized program architecture and there is no straightforward way to extend the functionality of existing software to include affective components. This paper introduces a new model which describes the affective computing application in terms of a set of loosely coupled functional components. This model encourages a uniform and replicable approach to affective application development in which functional components can be improved independently and subsequently re-used. The model also incorporates existing third party software as a functional component highlighting the potential to build upon existing, well established, software packages. It is hoped that this model and discussion spurs further, focused development in this growing field.

An open affective platform

Affective computer interfaces improve human-computer interaction by enabling the communication of the users emotional state. To this end, subtle non-verbal methods of communication provide a rich source of information which may provide valuable affective context to the human-computer interaction. Of particular note are physiological indicators of affective state, as these are objective in nature and have been demonstrated to be successful in many studies. Physiological computing may be viewed as a data acquisition and signal processing task whereby the electrical impulses or biopotentials created by the body are captured, analyzed and recorded in a suitable format for later communication. Whilst there are a number of commercially available hardware platforms to support physiological data acquisition, these all possess limitations in a few distinct areas. Not least of these is the physical form factor. For such devices to be embedded and integrated into the next generation of computer interfaces, an open physiological platform is required. This will enable future development to build upon this foundation and concentrate on novel and unique form factors and implementation environments. This paper describes the development and implementation of an open affective platform. This hardware and software solution provides the necessary functionality to measure and describe the users underlying affective state in terms of its component dimensions. This data may then be communicated to other application software, or modules within a larger affective computing application.

Incremental submission of programming code using object-oriented classes

Given increasing adoption of agile software development methodologies it is essential that information technology students are exposed to them. This paper describes and evaluates an attempt to introduce agile programming into a core second year programming course. The initiative appeared to be associated with improvements in both drop out and pass rate, and student perceptions of the innovation were largely positive.