Posts

Showing posts from May, 2012

Understanding adaptive user interfaces

Image
Modern enterprises are heavily dependent on computer systems that often have quite complex user interfaces.  Indeed studies on the effectiveness of enterprise software systems, such as customer relationship management or supply chain management systems, frequently find that usability is one of the main issues.  One of my PhD students, Pierre Akiki is investigating ways of improving this situation be devising a model-driven software framework that will enable adaptive user interfaces for enterprise applications, based on a combination of contextual parameters and user preferences (e.g., depending on the expertise level of the user).  As part of this work, he is conducting a survey of individuals' user interface preferences when undertaking a variety of common tasks. You can find out more about his work on his webpage on  Engineering Adaptive User Interfaces for Enterprise Applications .  You can help with the research by taking the survey linked above!

Teaching Network Security at a distance

Image
I have been going to InfoSec Europe for the past couple of years (although missed it in 2012) where there was always a fair amount of interest from individuals who wanted to learn network security, part time and at a distance. This stimulated a discussion with colleagues to expand our post graduate offering in this area, and with the help of Andrew Smith ( @teraknor ) and Blaine Price , we were able to put together a 30 credit module that combined the CCNA Security and CISSP curricula - it's called Network Security (T828) . The graphic above shows how the module combines material covering different areas to provide coverage of a number of different commercial certifications whilst also being part of a post-graduate degree programme. It is taken from a presentation Andrew and I gave at the Virus Bulletin seminar, which was held at the OU in April. We are just coming to the end of the first presentation and apart from some minor issues things have gone pretty smoothly.  On

Cargo-bot - game to teach programming

Image
A friend just posted a link to an iPad game called Cargo-bot , which requires players to program robots with the right sequence of instructions to manipulate stacks of cargo crates.  It's free and looks like a great way to introduce basic programming and algorithms. The app has been built using Codea and looks pretty slick.  Definitely worth a look if you have an iPad. Thanks to Nat Pryce for sharing the original link