Academic Marginalia

"Unboxing responsible requirements engineering" In December 2023, I attended the ESEC/FSE conference in San Francisco, and in addition to hearing about lots of interesting work relating to human aspects of software engineering, and security, I also enjoyed listening to the keynote talks delivered at the event. I already shared some reflections on one of these keynotes in a previous blog post ( GenAI for Software Engineering ) and in this one I cover my notes on another keynote which was delivered by Professor Margaret Burnett, a University Distinguished Professor from Oregon State.  Her talk was titled " Getting outside the Bug Boxes " and highlighted the importance of distinguishing between the goals (or policies) of software engineering from the mechanisms (or tools and methods) used to engineer software. The central thesis was that, too often, software engineers constrain themselves inside a box that is based on the latter and therefore miss important aspects of ...

I recently had an opportunity to share my STEM Journey with students who attended the Stemettes Monster Confidence event at CDW in Peterborough.  The slides below are from my talk, which highlights how my interest in computing and electronics, and a sustained curiosity that has led me to a career in academia. My STEM Journey - Arosha K. Bandara   from  Arosha Bandara

I was invited to deliver a presentation to the Institute of Engineering & Technology's EC3 Group on "Dealing with the Internet of Insecure Things".  My talk provided an overview of the security challenges of the Internet of Things and argued that we should adopt human-centric engineering approaches to address these challenges. Abstract:  We are in an age of the ‘Internet of Everything’ where boundaries between citizens, governments, media, and societal organisations are becoming increasingly fuzzy as interconnected digital devices enable the collection and exchange of vast amounts of information across the globe. The availability of data gathered by these devices, coupled with advances in channels of digitally mediated communication, has created a host of new systems that are embedded into a range of human activities, including agriculture, energy, transportation, healthcare, policing, and education – creating the potential for a ‘smarter planet’. However, these cy...

FB Live Session on Applying for a PhD I often get contacted by potential PhD students who are interested in pursuing a research degree and I put some slides together as a resource to help answer some of the common questions.  I will be conducting a Facebook Live Session for the Sustainable Education Foundation on this topic on 18 June 2017.  Of course, there are many similar guides available on this topic and I am particularly grateful to Matt Might for his excellent " Illustrated guide to a PhD ", which I have borrowed from to prepare this information.   SEF - Applying for a PhD   from  Arosha Bandara

I was recently invited by Heimdal Security to take part in an expert roundup, with the theme of "Is Internet Security a Losing Battle?".   The main thrust of my answer was to question our use of analogies of conflict in the context of Internet Security or cyber security.  As I said in my response: "... in this context the metaphors of conflict, such as ‘war’ and ‘battle’ are unhelpful because they suggest that internet security is the responsibility of the technologists who act our defensive force against attackers.   Instead, as has been argued by technology activists like Cory Doctorow  and others we might have more success by thinking of cyber security using the analogy of public health and communicable diseases.   By using this analogy, we make cyber security issues more relevant to people and spur them to gain a better understanding that, like diseases, any of us can be afflicted by a cyber security attack.  We can also adopt an analogous ap...

Privacy Dynamics: Learning Privacy Norms for Social Software from Arosha Bandara The slides above are from a presentation of our work on learning privacy norms for social software at the Symposium on Engineering Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS) in Austin, Texas.  The paper describes an architecture for integrating privacy management capabilities into social applications that integrate sharing functionality using social media platforms like Facebook.  The following summary is extracted from the abstract of the paper that accompanies this presentation: Privacy Dynamics, is an adaptive architecture that learns privacy norms for different audience groups based on users’ sharing behaviours. Our architecture is underpinned by a formal model inspired by social identity theory, a social psychology framework for analysing group processes and intergroup relations. Our formal model comprises two main concepts, the group membership as a Social Identity (SI) map and...

Privacy Distilation for Mobile Applications from Arosha Bandara I had the opportunity to present our research on Privacy Distillation for Mobile Applications at the British Computer Society Requirements Engineering Specialist Group's Best of RESG Research 2014 event .  The slides above are based on those originally presented by Keerthi Thomas at ICSE 2014. Some interesting questions were discussed following my presentation, including: How does the distillation process cope with the overall mobile software eco-system? At the moment we have only considered the peer-to-peer information flows between the end users of the mobile application.  However, it should be possible to use the Privacy Facets Framework to consider the information, information flows and actors in the overall mobile software eco-system.  Of course some extensions will be required, for example to capture factors such the legal and regulatory aspects of privacy associated with the plac...

Code Club Assembly Presentation from akbandara As part of my work with STEMnet, I recently signed up as a CodeClub volunteer at St. Bernadette's Catholic Primary School in Milton Keynes.  Working with Kate Clarke, the ICT leader at the school, I am going to be leading an after-school club that will introduce kids in Year 5 and Year 6 to the exciting world of programming.  CodeClub is a nationwide, volunteer driven, grass-roots movement to get kids learning about the fun that can be had programming computers, rather than simply using them. In order to give the kids some idea about what they might be letting themselves in for, last week I delivered the short presentation (embedded above) at the school.  I started out by getting the kids to identify different computers, and think about what a computer really does, i.e. follows a set of instructions to complete a task.  We then played with a neat little iPad game called 'Kodable' which allows the player t...

I presented the above talk about research done as part of the PRiMMA project on studying privacy management for mobile applications at the Mobile East 2012 conference .  The following is the abstract of this talk: As a result of advances in ubiquitous computing areas, and the widespread use of related technology in various applications, it is now possible to capture an unprecedented amount of information about people’s daily lives and use this information in various ways. Proponents of these developments argue that they will allow computer technologies to inform, entertain and assist us in ways that are more comfortable, intuitive and unobtrusive. On the other hand, it is argued that such pervasive data gathering is likely to cause serious invasions of individual privacy, potentially culminating in harm to individuals and society at large.  This talk reports on research that has been investigating users' experience of managing their privacy when using mobile applicatio...