HotSoft

IEEE’s Privacy, Security, Trust conference (PST) was held here in Ottawa this year. The talks were an interesting mix ranging from very technical to public policy topics, including a keynote by Ann Cavoukian, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario. Dan, Alain, and Robert presented a paper on using eye-gaze as a tool to predict likely click-based graphical password click-points. Sonia taught a half-day tutorial introducing usable security and how to run usability evaluations.

SOUPS and USER were hosted at Microsoft in Redmond, WA this week. It’s always nice to see everyone again and meet new people working in usable security. Listening to the SOUPS talks showed that the community of people engaged in trying to balance or increase both usability and security is growing every year. Our workshop went well, we were lucky to have a wide range of talks and great experts for the panel.  Alain presented a poster about our recent CHI paper, and Sonia presented one about our MVP framework for running authentication studies. Some of the non-academic highlights were the fake lawn on the Microsoft campus and the boat cruise around Seattle.

The NSERC Internetworked Systems Security Network (ISSNet) annual workshop was held in Ottawa last week. Several members of our lab presented posters at the opening reception and poster session. Robert introduced theme 3 (human-oriented security), and talked about our lab’s research. Max, Alain and Elizabeth gave short talks about ongoing research. The workshop was a great opportunity to hear about research and network with other ISSNet researchers and students.

Last week several members of our lab were in Atlanta for CHI 2010.  It was a great conference as usual, with nearly 2400 attendees, lots of fun demos, and interesting talks.  Elizabeth earned 3rd place in the undergraduate Student Research Competition. Alain’s talk and poster presentations went very well too.

Several members of the lab attended ACM’s CCS 2009 conference on November 10-12 in Chicago. We presented our paper on multiple password interference on Wednesday afternoon.   We were happy to see that despite being the last talk of the day, many people stayed behind to chat and ask  further questions.  CCS is regarded as one of the main computer security conferences, with a focus mostly on the technical aspects of security. However,  there seems to be a gradual recognition that human factors are also an important component of security. This year’s keynote by Dorothy Denning was on usable authentication, and Jeff Yan held a tutorial introducing usable security methodologies, both were well attended.

Oopsla 2009 and WikiSym 2009 were held in Orlando this year, and not just Orlando but Disney World: a strange island of space and time right down to the Mickey Mouse shaped swimming pool. I find Oopsla itself hard to keep up with: too many interesting workshops, panels, technical talks; and with WikiSym too I was overwhelmed and didn’t see as much as I would have liked. Moreover, this marked the year that Oopsla was more formally distinguished from Onward 2009, the conference on the new and the strange in software, so they are full sibling conferences. For me the highlights were the Onward “Plateau” workshop on the HCI of programming languages, the Onward talk by Jenny Quillien, Pam Rostal, Dave West on Christopher Alexander’s work, and the WikiSym closing keynote by Brion Vibber of the Wikimedia Foundation. I also had a great time at my tutorial on human aspects of software development practice based on our hacked version of the board game Monopoly. New year Oopsla and Onward are both under the new “Splash” umbrella at Reno, and WikiSym is co-located with WikiMania in Gdansk. Robert Biddle

Oh Agile: so ever-changing. In Chicago this year, huge attendance and huge industry involvement in this bad year for conferences. More diverse than ever, UX, Kanban, Real Options, a real bazaar of ideas for the new in making software happen. Buzzy yet familiar. New faces and old friends. The UX stream organized by Angela Martin and Lane Halley was really mainstream this year, and the closing keynote by Jared Spool still took focus on the Agile-UX potential. Angela and I also presented two papers based on her thesis work about the customer role in XP, and I presented tutorials on Activity Theory and on the role of culture in software development practices. Busy busy! Next year at Opryland. Robert Biddle

The Immersive Worlds conference was this week, held at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. This conference is largely sponsored by Silicon Knights. Many game-industry topics were tackled throughout. Geoffrey Rockwell’s debate-style keynote explored the purpose, role, and value of “serious games”. The “Making Good Ideas Work” panel emphasised building bridges between the games industry, academia, and the government to enable bright game developers to find employment or entrepreneurial success in Canada. The three tracks offered insightful presentations on game-related issues in areas such as education, intellectual property, marketing, new interaction media, social impact, and more. Several members of Carleton’s Hyperlab and HotSoft lab gave presentations: Jessica Aldred, Pippin Barr, Claire Dormann, Alain Forget, Brain Greenspan, Rilla Khaled, Natalie King, Jennifer Whitson.

MIT6 (Media in Transition) was in Boston for the last few days, and we did a road trip: Rilla Khaled, Pippin Barr, Natalie King, Jennifer Whitson, Chris Eaket, Brian Greenspan, and Robert Biddle. Although at MIT, this is a humanities conference, with a focus on new kinds of literature and new kinds of literacy. Our group of HotSoft and Hyperlab people had a number of talks, on topics ranging from journalism to hyperfiction. The conference had many parallel streams, and it was always difficult to choose what to attend: on the whole I think  was particularly impressed by the talks that exposed vibrant ecosystems of new media. For example, there is more going on at Youtube that I realized. We left at mid-day on Sunday to drive back to Ottawa, and so missed Thomas Pettitt, from the University of Southern Denmark, summarize the conference and reference both Natalie’s  paper on Patchwork Girl, and also our new StoryTrek system.

Ben Sawyer invited us to present a poster at the Serious Games Summit, part of the Game Developers Conference, held in San Francisco this year. The presentations and attendees were an eclectic mix of busniess executives, academics, game developers, and enthusiasts. I recommend anyone looking to land a job, strike a deal, or simply network in the games industry to attend the GDC. Plus, you’ll get to enjoy some awesome keynotes. This year, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata gave his insights on Mr. Miyamoto & Nintendo game development, and Hideo Kojima described how turning impossible problems into opportunities gave birth to the Metal Gear & Metal Gear Solid series.