IADIS-INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON COMPUTER SCIENCE AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS

11

Authors: Maja Kocoń

This paper describes the synthesis of virtual human head movements while waiting for a response in human-machine interaction systems. The described approach uses a three-dimensional human head model and kinematic chain of rigid elements. We proposed a method to perform a motion sequence of a virtual head in the idle mode. This mode is a state when a virtual person or robot performs subtle movements during the waiting phases between different interaction intervals. This form of action removes the problem of character freeze in motion and has a higher degree of user acceptance. This research covers issues related to creating trajectories of motion to rotate the head model's rigid objects. The proposed method has been used to trajectory generation for loop animation and executes smooth movements in the idle mode. Since the used algorithm has low computational requirements and introduces low interaction delays, we can use it in real-time operation in the HMI framework.

14

Authors: Hilde G. Corneliussen and Gilda Seddighi

Although digitalization across sectors drives an increasing demand for IT specialists, women still make up a small part of computing communities, IT education and work – in the US and across Europe. Our project aims to build knowledge about how this situation can be improved in the context of Nordic gender equality regimes. The "gender equality paradox" is a label for women's underrepresentation in STEM disciplines, particularly in IT, that seems to be more extreme in highly gender egalitarian cultures. It has been suggested that the paradox is a result of women's choices in wealthy countries with a high degree of individual freedom. Our project highlights another side to this paradox, as we explore attitudes towards women's underrepresentation among IT employers and organizations. The analysis reveals mixed signals from the organizations: while they recognize the low proportion of women in IT, they simultaneously negotiate the meaning of women's underrepresentation in IT in ways that do not make gender equality in IT a goal, thus it leaves little space for gender equality actions. While this can have major consequences for women's careers in computing and IT work, it also illustrates a central mechanism of the "gender equality paradox" characterized by a widely accepted norm of gender equality existing alongside employers' skepticism to the goal of gender balance in computing. Here we analyze the organizations' approaches towards gender equality ideals through the notion of "discursive resources", which points to how individuals translate these ideals in light of their own organizational context. Furthermore, this highlights the importance of taking the organizations' "discursive resources" into account when suggesting solutions to increased awareness of and engagement for gender equality in the IT sector.

14

Authors: Imen Ben Mansour, Ines Alaya and Moncef Tagina

Parallelism arises as an attractive option when solving Multi-Objective optimization problems (MOPs). Moreover, it seems interesting when metaheuristics demand an intensive use of CPU or memory. In this paper, we propose a parallel implementation of a hybrid ant colony optimization metaheuristic for the multiobjective knapsack problem using the OpenMP framework called MHAC_OMP. The proposed approach combined a MultiObjective Ant Colony Optimization (MOACO) algorithm with Tchebycheff based Local Search (TLS) procedure. The idea behind MHAC_OMP is to evolve several independent MOACO in parallel. Each MOACO hold a local archive to maintain diversity. The parallelization is defined as assuming a shared-memory based on threads in which the initialization phase begins with a single thread called the master thread and executed sequentially. Afterward, a parallel region is defined where many threads are created, each one of them executing its own copy of the proposed ant colony algorithm independently. Experimental results show a significant efficiency of the solutions returned over the sequential implementation.

15

Authors: Hirofumi Nagano, Taku Shimosawa, Atsushi Shimamura and Norihisa Komoda

Currently most of the workflows in enterprise business processes are implemented and managed as information system. However, workflows between organizations are still processed manually based on paper document because it is difficult for the organizations to trust the process and the result of workflow in the system which is provided by one of the organizations or a third-party organization. In this paper, a system architecture for cross organizational workflow management utilizing blockchain technology is proposed. It eliminates every Single Point of Trust (SPoT) which causes falsification risk of the process and data. Our proposed system architecture is considered to connect with internal workflow management system and accommodates two types of smart contracts for interorganizational workflow definition and interorganizational workflow processing, which validates related data in every transaction. By this architecture, each organization can be aware of the data falsification when the data on one of the organization nodes is falsified by a malicious workflow administrator or a system administrator. Through the implementation of the proposed system and evaluation of the falsification risks based on the attack scenarios along workflow life cycle, it is confirmed that all the risks are avoided by the proposed system architecture.

16

Authors: Mathew Nicho

The objective of this paper is to present a serious games model that assist organizations to substantially enhance computer user’s cyber security awareness. Extensive research into academic literature revealed that a comprehensive model for designing serious games for training users to reduce user vulnerabilities in lacking. This paper thus focusses on strategically deploying serious games to educate, train and aware organizational users to detect, prevent, eliminate/mitigate and report instances of social engineering threats deployed by advanced persistent threat (APT) vectors, that predominantly target organisational user vulnerabilities. Training computer users on APT threat vectors which deploys simple social engineering yet complex technical methods to exploit internetworked computer user and subsequent vulnerabilities is a challenging task faced by organizations worldwide as is evident from publicly reported attacks. Serious games find immense applications in the domain of education, information systems and information security due to convenience of time, instant feedback, attractiveness and the ease of simulating novel and multiple attack scenarios. While serious games and models have been proposed by researchers in cyber security domain, attributes for building a serious gaming model for APT is wanting in both academic and practitioner domains. In this respect, we propose a serious game model GAM-APT by integrating the serious gaming model components namely the ‘player’, ‘game’ and ‘knowledge’ dimensions with Gagne’s nine events.

18

Authors: Anne Falkenberg and Benjamin Buchwitz

The large number of available prices gave rise to price comparison sites that yet lack recommendation services to support their customers in scheduling buying decisions. Using a large data set with 1.46 million daily minimum price observations for four product categories of electronic consumer goods, we outline reasons for the slow adoption of recommendation services, evaluate 6.56 billion price forecasts and show that forecasted product prices can be used to build recommendation services to advise customers on their purchase time decision. We compare 16 different methods that can act as the core of price prediction services and give detailed insights on performance as well as advice on model selection for short-, medium and long-term forecasting horizons, outline differences by category and advocate the transition towards prescriptive price analytics services.