The multifaceted and ever-changing directions of information security - Australia get ready!

In recent years, we have witnessed many information security developmental trends. As a consequence, the dimensions of information security - once single disciplinary area - have become multifaceted and convoluted. This paper aims to (1) recapitulate these key developments: (2) argue that the emergence of many complex information security dimensions are the result of 'constant change agents' (CCAs); (3) discuss the implications on Australia's society, i. e. government, companies and individuals; and (4) propose key consideration areas and possible solutions thereof. We hope that the discussion presented here will position Australia to make better aligned information security and strategic plans, such as choosing appropriate investments and adopting effective solutions to strengthen and secure Australia's national information security posture.

Doctoral research and scholarly communication : candidates, supervisors and information literacy

This study investigates information literacy and scholarly communication within the processes of doctoral research and supervision at a distance. Both doctoral candidates and supervisors acknowledge information literacy deficiencies and it is suggested that disintermediation and the proliferation of information may contribute to those deficiencies. Further to this, the influence of pedagogic continuity—particularly in relation to the information seeking behaviour of candidates—is investigated, as is the concomitant aspect of how doctoral researchers practise scholarly communication. The well-documented and enduring problem for candidates of isolation from the research cultures of their universities is also scrutinised. The contentious issue of more formally involving librarians in the doctoral process is also considered, from the perspective of candidates and supervisors. Superimposed upon these topical and timely issues is the theoretical framework of adult learning theory, in particular the tenets of andragogy. The pedagogical-andragogical orientation of candidates and supervisors is established, demonstrating both the differences and similarities between candidates and supervisors, as are a number of independent variables, including a comparison of on-campus and off-campus candidates. Other independent variables include age, gender, DETYA (Department of Education, Training & Youth Affairs) category, enrolment type, stage of candidature, employment and status, type of doctorate, and English/non-English speaking background. The research methodology uses qualitative and quantitative techniques encompassing both data and methodological triangulation. The study uses two sets of questionnaires and a series of in-depth interviews with a sample of on-campus and off-campus doctoral candidates and supervisors from four Australian universities. Major findings include NESB candidates being more pedagogical than their ESB counterparts, and candidates and supervisors from the Sciences are more pedagogical than those from Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, or Education. Candidates make a transition from a more dependent and pedagogically oriented approach to learning towards more of an independent and andragogical orientation over the duration of their candidature. However, over tune both on-campus and off-campus candidates become more isolated from the research cultures of their universities, and less happy with support received from their supervisors in relation to their literature reviews. Ill The study found large discrepancies in perception between the support supervisors believed they gave to candidates in relation to the literature review, and the support candidates believed they received. Information seeking becomes easier over time, but candidates face a dilemma with the proliferation of information, suggesting that disintermediation has exacerbated the challenges of evaluation and organisation of information. The concept of pedagogic continuity was recognised by supervisors and especially candidates, both negative and positive influences. The findings are critically analysed and synthesised using the metaphor of a scholarly 'Club' of which obtaining a doctorate is a rite of passage. Recommendations are made for changes in professional practice, and topics that may warrant further research are suggested.

Algorithms and applications of preference based ranking for information retrieval

In this thesis, the author designed three sets of preference based ranking algorithms for information retrieval and provided the corresponsive applications for the algorithms. The main goal is to retrieve recommended, high similar and valuable ranking results to users.

An parallel information retrieval method for e-commerce

An online transaction always retrieves a large amount of information before making decisions. Currently, the parallel methods for retrieving such information can only provide a similar performance to serial methods. In this paper we first perform an analysis to determine the factors that affect the performance of exiting methods, i.e., HQR and EHQR, and show that the several of these factors are not considered by these methods. Motivated by this, we propose a new dispatch scheme called AEHQR, which takes into account the features of parallel dispatching. In addition, we provide cost models that determine the optimal performance achievable by any parallel dispatching method. Using experimental comparison, we illustrate that the AEHQR is significantly outperforms the HQR and EHQR under all conditions.

Information retrieval in documents using semantic criteria

The central problem of automatic retrieval from unformatted text is that computational devices are not adequately trained to look for associated information. However for complete understanding and information retrieval, a complete artificial intelligence would have to be built. This paper describes a method for achieving significant information retrieval by using a semantic search engine. The underlying semantic information is stored in a network of clarified words, linked by logical connections. We employ simple scoring techniques on collections of paths in this network to establish a degree of relevance between a document and a clarified search criterion. This technique has been applied with success to test examples and can be easily scaled up to search large documents.

Detection of setting and subject information in documentary video

Interpretation of video information is a difficult task for computer vision and machine intelligence. In this paper we examine the utility of a non-image based source of information about video contents, namely the shot list, and study its use in aiding image interpretation. We show how the shot list may be analysed to produce a simple summary of the 'who and where' of a documentary or interview video. In order to detect the subject of a video we use the notion of a 'shot syntax' of a particular genre to isolate actual interview sections.

Exploiting side information in locality preserving projection

Even if the class label information is unknown, side information represents some equivalence constraints between pairs of patterns, indicating whether pairs originate from the same class. Exploiting side information, we develop algorithms to preserve both the intra-class and inter-class local structures. This new type of locality preserving projection (LPP), called LPP with side information (LPPSI), preserves the data's local structure in the sense that the close, similar training patterns will be kept close, whilst the close but dissimilar ones are separated. Our algorithms balance these conflicting requirements, and we further improve this technique using kernel methods. Experiments conducted on popular face databases demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms LPP. Further, we show that the performance of our algorithm with partial side information (that is, using only small amount of pair-wise similarity/dissimilarity information during training) is comparable with that when using full side information. We conclude that exploiting side information by preserving both similar and dissimilar local structures of the data significantly improves performance.

Media-independent information representation and retrieval

In this paper we propose a media-independent knowledge indexing and retrieval system as a basis for an information retrieval system. The representation allows for sharing of low level information bearing objects and at the same time allows for maintaining of user-dependent views. The tools for maintenance and manipulation of concepts focus on the user and user's intentions. The aim of the system is to provide a set of flexible tools and let the user structure the knowledge in his or her own way, instead of attempting to build an all-encompassing common sense, or general knowledge representation.

Accessing database information using mobile agents

Many real-world applications on the Internet require accessing database information and typical technology employed is client/server plus Web (C/S + Web). Although past few years saw many success applications by using this technique, there are still some drawbacks that need to be overcome. One of the drawbacks is that the transaction often fails if the network connection is unstable. Another disadvantage is high bandwidth requirement and latency. This paper argues that mobile agent technology provide an easy way to overcome the shortcomings in CIS + Web in database access on the Internet. A success case study using mobile agents to admit new students to China's institutions is then presented. The mobile agent was created by using IBM's Aglets Software Development Kit (SDK). Based on the experimental results, it is evident that mobile agent technology is well suited for such applications.

Effectively finding relevant web pages from linkage information

This paper presents two hyperlink analysis-based algorithms to find relevant pages for a given Web page (URL). The first algorithm comes from the extended cocitation analysis of the Web pages. It is intuitive and easy to implement. The second one takes advantage of linear algebra theories to reveal deeper relationships among the Web pages and to identify relevant pages more precisely and effectively. The experimental results show the feasibility and effectiveness of the algorithms. These algorithms could be used for various Web applications, such as enhancing Web search. The ideas and techniques in this work would be helpful to other Web-related researches.

Reasoning with multimedia information using symbolic projection

In many multimedia application systems, it is not the final goal to retrieve the relevant multimedia information from different multimedia information sources. Rather, post-processing of the retrieved multimedia information is needed. For example, the retrieved information is used as “known facts”. The systems will do some reasoning to obtain further conclusions based on these multimedia form “known facts”. We call this reasoning with multimedia information. Most current research work in multimedia information processing is focused on multimedia information retrieval, but post-processing the retrieved information is more or less ignored. This paper explores the way to tackle this problem by using symbolic projection. A case study of reasoning with still image information is presented. Some extensions to symbolic projection- introducing auxiliary pictorial objects in symbolic pictures that need to be processed-are discussed. We expect this paper will stimulate further research on this important but ignored topic.

The portal as information broker

The term information broker is widely used in the area of library and information science to describe a middle agent who deals in information as a commodity, enabling customers to gain more efficient access to quality data. The role of this middle agent is described as “information retrieval and information organisation” (Rugge & Glossbrenner, 1995). The role of the broker is to bring additional organisation to the market by lowering search costs (Palmer & Lindemann, 2003).

Teaching future Australian information systems professionals

Teaching Information Systems (IS) to Australian tertiary students has come increasing problematic with many of them relying on a face level approach to study. This will surely affect their understanding of IS material and in turn affect their effectiveness in the workplace. This paper examines the issues behind this trend and considers Problem Based Learning (PBL) as an aid to counteract it.

An agent-based intelligent system for information gathering from world wide web environment

To use the vast amount of information efficiently and effectively from Web sites is very important for making informed decisions. There are, however, still many problems that need to be overcome in the information gathering research arena to enable the delivery of relevant information required by users. In this paper, an information gathering system is develop by means of multiple agents to solve those problems. We employed some ideas of Gaia's methodology and an open agent architecture to analyze and design the system. The system consists of a query preprocessing agent, information retrieval agent, information filtering agent, and information management agent. The filtering agent is trained with categorized documents and can provide users with the necessary information. The experimental results show that all agents in the system can work cooperatively to retrieve relevant information from the World Wide Web environment.