Vigilantes - could they be the future of security in Australia?

Provides an overview of current research by the author and related Australian scholars on the problem of vigilantism as a question of media representation, as opposed to a substantive crime prevention trend. Implications of this research discussed for a professional security audience.

Energy-efficient management of data center resources for cloud computing : a vision, architectural elements, and open challenges

Cloud computing is offering utility-oriented IT services to users worldwide. Based on a pay-as-you-go model, it enables hosting of pervasive applications from consumer, scientific, and business domains. However, data centers hosting Cloud applications consume huge amounts of energy, contributing to high operational costs and carbon footprints to the environment. Therefore, we need Green Cloud computing solutions that can not only save energy for the environment but also reduce operational costs. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements for energy-efficient management of Cloud computing environments. We focus on the development of dynamic resource provisioning and allocation algorithms that consider the synergy between various data center infrastructures (i.e., the hardware, power units, cooling and software), and holistically work to boost data center energy efficiency and performance. In particular, this paper proposes (a) architectural principles for energy-efficient management of Clouds; (b) energy-efficient resource allocation policies and scheduling algorithms considering quality-of-service expectations, and devices power usage characteristics; and (c) a novel software technology for energy-efficient management of Clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that Cloud computing model has immense potential as it offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost saving under dynamic workload scenarios.

Lesson study - how it could work for you

There is growing worldwide interest in Japanese Lesson Study as a form of professional development, with adaptations of Lesson Study taking place in hundreds of schools clusters in USA, large-scale adoption in the UK, and smaller scale implementation in Australia, and many other countries, including Chile, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. This presentation will use classroom video to illustrate the typical Japanese structured-problem-solving research lessons that form the basis for Lesson Study, and discuss how they are planned, the role of the teacher, and the use of Lesson Study as a means of professional
development.

Above the trust and security in cloud computing : a notion towards innovation

While the nascent Cloud Computing paradigm supported by virtualization has the upward new notion of edges, it lacks proper security and trust mechanisms. Edges are like on demand scalability and infinite resource provisioning as per the `pay-as-you-go' manner in favour of a single information owner (abbreviated as INO from now onwards) to multiple corporate INOs. While outsourcing information to a cloud storage controlled by a cloud service provider (abbreviated as CSP from now onwards) relives an information owner of tackling instantaneous oversight and management needs, a significant issue of retaining the control of that information to the information owner still needs to be solved. This paper perspicaciously delves into the facts of the Cloud Computing security issues and aims to explore and establish a secure channel for the INO to communicate with the CSP while maintaining trust and confidentiality. The objective of the paper is served by analyzing different protocols and proposing the one in commensurate with the requirement of the security property like information or data confidentiality along the line of security in Cloud Computing Environment (CCE). To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to derive a secure protocol by successively eliminating the dangling pitfalls that remain dormant and thereby hamper confidentiality and integrity of information that is worth exchanging between the INO and the CSP. Besides, conceptually, our derived protocol is compared with the SSL from the perspectives of work flow related activities along the line of secure trusted path for information confidentiality.

Text document clustering with metric learning

One reason for semi-supervised clustering fail to deliver satisfactory performance in document clustering is that the transformed optimization problem could have many candidate solutions, but existing methods provide no mechanism to select a suitable one from all those candidates. This paper alleviates this problem by posing the same task as a soft-constrained optimization problem, and introduces the salient degree measure as an information guide to control the searching of an optimal solution. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in the improvement of the performance, especially when the amount of priori domain knowledge is limited.

Women in ICT : guidelines for evaluating intervention programmes

Many intervention programmes to increase the number of women in theInformation and Communications Technology (ICT) profession have been implemented over the last twenty years. Detailed evaluations help us to determine the effectiveness of these programmes yet few comprehensive evaluations appear in the literature.The research reported here describes an investigation of the evaluation of the intervention programmes focusing on increasing the enrolment and retention of females in ICT in Australia. This paper describes an empirical study which explores how evaluation has been and might be conducted and concludes with guidelines for evaluation for those developing programmes for increasing the participation of women in ICT.The guidelines encourage evaluation to be considered early, highlight the importance of establishing objective outcomes and promote the publication of results to build knowledge for those planning programmes in the future. Further, the developed guidelines could adapted and used with other ICT intervention programs.

Conceptualizing social influence in the ubiquitous computing era : technology adoption and use in multiple use contexts

Ubiquitous and mobile computing has increased the level of social connectedness. In an era where technology has permeated into spaces of work, play and socializing, social influence has become an important consideration. The operationalization of the social influence construct in the technology adoption and use literature often assumes singular technology use contexts and purposes. We question whether social influence, as operationalized in IS, is reflective of the utilitarian, hedonic and social environment that many individuals operate in. We propose a framework to consider social influence more inclusively, drawing on differences in referent power and levels of expertise. We outline our research approach within the demographic segment of young working professionals. Research in this area is necessary to improve theoretical explanations of adoptive behavior of these technologies. We hope to contribute by suggesting a richer, more encompassing operationalization of the social influence construct for future IS research.

Conceptualizing user satisfaction in the ubiquitous computing era

In this research-in-progress paper we argue that technology in the ubiquitous computing era offers experiences to users that extend well beyond the functional, practical applications offered in the world of work. In this era a realm of engagement is opening up to the individual that transcends the utilitarian, to encompass hedonic and social existence. Our central argument, therefore, is that user satisfaction is a notion which must extend to encompass rich, holistic human experience involving complex and fleeting interactions, driven by highly personal circumstances. We argue that the expectations, requirements and value perceptions of individuals in this dynamic context may only be anticipated and understood if situational factors (such as location, time, context, history-of-use) and quality of life factors (such as life stage, mobility, health, income, background, education) are taken into account. We identify the fundamental differences in key characteristics of user satisfaction between the traditional and ubiquitous computing environments and provide details about our own research approach, in which we are exploring ubiquitous content provision from the perspective of content providers.

Contextual influences on user satisfaction with mobile computing : findings from two healthcare organizations

Mobile information technologies (IT) are transforming individual work practices and organizations. These devices are extending not only the boundaries of the ‘office’ in space and time, but also the social context within which use occurs. In this paper, we investigate how extra-organizational influences can impact user satisfaction with mobile systems. The findings from our longitudinal study highlight the interrelatedness of different use contexts and their importance in perceptions of user satisfaction. The data indicate that varying social contexts of individual use (individual as employee, as professional, as private user, and as member of society) result in different social influences that affect the individual’s perceptions of user satisfaction with the mobile technology. While existing theories explain user satisfaction with IT within the organizational context, our findings suggest that future studies of mobile IT in organizations should accommodate such extra-organizational contextual influences.

Toward higher level abstractions for cloud computing

The general idea of cloud computing is offering computational resources as scalable, on demand services accessible over the internet. However, this new realisation of on demand computing is hindered by the amount of user involvement. Currently, high level abstractions in cloud computing only exist in the form of services. In particular, there is no effective means to publish, discover and finally use required services in clouds. In response, we propose a user level abstraction on top of already available cloud abstraction layers, present its concept using the resources via web services (RVWS) framework and demonstrate its feasibility by simplifying the exposure and use of clusters, a commonly used resource in cloud computing.

Special section : trusted computing

Security and privacy have been the major concern when people build computer networks and systems. Any computer network or system must be trustworthy to avoid the risk of losing control and retain confidence that it will not fail [1] Jun Ho Huh, John Lyle, Cornelius Namiluko and Andrew Martin, Managing application whitelists in trusted distributed systems. Future Generation Computer Systems,  27 2 (2011), pp. 211–226. [1]. Trust is the key factor to enable dynamic interaction and cooperation of various users, systems and services [2]. Trusted Computing aims at making computer networks, systems, and services available, predictable, traceable, controllable, assessable, sustainable, dependable, and security/privacy protectable. This special section focuses on the issues related to trusted computing, such as trusted computing models and specifications, trusted reliable and dependable systems, trustworthy services and applications, and trust standards and protocols.

Trevor Gale raises equity fears as Bradley recommendations could concentrate disadvantage

Disadvantaged students could be further concentrated in younger and regional universities if Bradley review recommendations on entitlements are implemented without stringent controls, derailing a major objective of the review, according to National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education director Trevor Gale.