HotSoft

This week Marty Kauhanen successfully defended his MCS (Master of Computer Science) thesis: congratulations, Marty! He has been working at Microsoft in Redmond since July of 2008. Marty’s thesis is entitled “Examining Support Of Narrative Scripting For Serious Games”, and the abstract is as follows:

In this thesis, we explore the support required to build interactive narratives for serious games. Serious games typically are built to support learning, training or persuasion and have different requirements than other types of games, including shorter durations of game-play and much smaller development budgets. In addition, there is a need to support non-programmers in scripting serious games. We believe authoring tools can provide this support.

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Daniel LeBlanc’s MA thesis was accepted today: congratulations Dan! He begins his PhD work immediately, continuing to work on usable security.

Dan’s thesis was entitled “Can Preselection Gaze Distribution Statistics Predict Graphical Passwords?”, and the abstract is as follows:

Graphical passwords are a new method of authentication of much interest to researchers due to the potential for better usability and security. This thesis first introduces past research on usability and security issues relating to graphical passwords. The thesis then presents a study to investigate a possible weakness in a particular approach to click-based graphical passwords, whether eye gaze information may assist attackers in guessing passwords.

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Sonia Chiasson successfully defended her PhD thesis on Wednesday
December 17th: congratulations Sonia! She will be staying at Carleton
University for a little while longer, beginning a post-doctoral
fellowship on January 1st, 2009.

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Welcome to the new blog and home page of the Carleton University HotSoft Research Group! Our research is on software as interactive media, and in particular on aspects of computer security, games, and software development. Our pages used to be part of the HotLab site, and we have moved them here to make it easier to try experimental ideas without disturbing our colleagues.