KMi Seminars
Information and communication in Context
This event took place on Thursday 08 December 2005 at 11:00

 
Dr. Anne Adams University College London Interaction Centre

This presentation reviews both security and information resource studies that highlight the important theme of social and organisational context.

The first half of this talk reviews security in context. Studies are presented that highlight how context can change users perceptions of authentication and privacy. Physical location can change perceptions as can awareness and perceived control of virtual context. A model is presented which details how users' apparent cavalier attitude towards privacy can change when they realise that their contextual assumptions are inaccurate.

The second half of this talk reviews digital resources in context from digital libraries to the web. Findings are presented that detail how the web can be both perceived as an empowering tool and a threat to social structures. When the latter is the case this can result in computers locked behind doors to protect social order. Issues of information quality, awareness and accessibility are also reviewed.

Dr. Anne Adams is a Research Fellow at UCL Interaction Centre and a visiting Senior Lecturer at the Middlesex University 'Interaction Design Centre'. Her research reviews the social and organisational aspects of information and communication resources. Her research domains have ranged from academia to the health domain. Findings were not only published but also fed back to the information providers and designers in the development of their systems.

Dr Adams research into usability and security (i.e. authentication, privacy and trust) has concentrated on CSCW and multimedia communications. Recent publications and a Book chapter relate to these issues in both the academic and health domain.

She is a member of the ACM and has been on the committee for the British HCI group and has organised the Healthcare Digital Library workshop (at the European Conference for Digital libraries) for the past three years. She has presented at and chaired sessions at international conferences and been both an invited and keynote speaker for academic, industrial and health organisations across the world. This year she was an invited speaker at the 'Royal Society of Medicine', 'GOOGLE' in Palo Alto & 'Microsoft' whilst also winning the 'best international paper' at the IEEE ACM joint conference of digital libraries.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Future Internet is...


Future Internet
With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

  • Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

  • Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection

  • Interoperability of semantic data and metadata, and of services which will be dynamically orchestrated

  • Pervasive usability for users of mobile devices, different languages, cultures and physical abilities

  • Mobility for users who expect a seamless experience across spaces, devices, and velocities