Identification and Validation of Social Media Socio-Technical Information Security Factors with Respect to Usable-Security Principles

The goal of this manuscript is to present a research finding, based on a study conducted to identify, examine, and validate Social Media (SM) socio-technical information security factors, in line with usable-security principles. The study followed literature search techniques, as well as theoretical and empirical methods of factor validation. The strategy used in literature search includes Boolean keywords search, and citation guides, using mainly web of science databases. As guided by study objectives, 9 SM socio-technical factors were identified, verified and validated. Both theoretical and empirical validation processes were followed. Thus, a theoretical validity test was conducted on 45 Likert scale items, involving 10 subject experts. From the score ratings of the experts, Content Validity Index (CVI) was calculated to determine the degree to which the identified factors exhibit appropriate items for the construct being measured, and 7 factors attained an adequate level of validity index. However, for reliability test, 32 respondents and 45 Likert scale items were used. Whereby, Cronbach’s alpha coefficient (α-values) were generated using SPSS. Subsequently, 8 factors attained an adequate level of reliability. Overall, the validated factors include;1) usability—visibility, learnability, and satisfaction;2) education and training—help and documentation;3) SM technology development—error handling, and revocability;4) information security —security, privacy, and expressiveness. In this case, the confirmed factors would add knowledge by providing a theoretical basis for rationalizing information security requirements on SM usage.

A Socio-Technical Approach to Cyber Risk Management and Impact Assessment

Technology is increasingly being used by organisations to mediate social/business relationships and social/business transactions. While traditional models of impact assessment have focused on the loss of confidentiality, integrity and availability, we propose a new model based upon socio-technical systems thinking that places the people and the technology within an organisation’s business/functional context. Thus in performing risk management in a cyber security and safety context, a detailed picture of the impact that a security/safety incident can have on an organisation is developed. This in turn stimulates a more holistic view of the effectiveness, and appropriateness, of a counter measure.

Complex adaptive system theory,agent-based modeling,and simulation in dominant technology formation

Dominant technology formation is the key for the hightech industry to“cross the chasm”and gain an established foothold in the market(and hence disrupt the regime).Therefore,a stimulus-response model is proposed to investigate the dominant technology by exploring its formation process and mechanism.Specifically,based on complex adaptive system theory and the basic stimulus-response model,we use a combination of agent-based modeling and system dynamics modeling to capture the interactions between dominant technology and the socio-technical landscape.The results indicate the following:(i)The dynamic interaction is“stimulus-reaction-selection”,which promotes the dominant technology’s formation.(ii)The dominant technology’s formation can be described as a dynamic process in which the adaptation intensity of technology standards increases continuously until it becomes the leading technology under the dual action of internal and external mechanisms.(iii)The dominant technology’s formation in the high-tech industry is influenced by learning ability,the number of adopting users and adaptability.Therein,a“critical scale”of learning ability exists to promote the formation of leading technology:a large number of adopting users can promote the dominant technology’s formation by influencing the adaptive response of technology standards to the socio-technical landscape and the choice of technology standards by the socio-technical landscape.There is a minimum threshold and a maximum threshold for the role of adaptability in the dominant technology’s formation.(iv)The socio-technical landscape can promote the leading technology’s shaping in the high-tech industry,and different elements have different effects.This study promotes research on the formation mechanism of dominant technology in the high-tech industry,presents new perspectives and methods for researchers,and provides essential enlightenment for managers to formulate technology strategies.

UnIC: Towards Unmanned Intelligent Cluster and Its Integration into Society

Collaborative unmanned systems have emerged to meet our society’s wide-ranging grand challenges,with their advantages including high performance,efficiency,flexibility,and inherent resilience.Increasing levels of group/team autonomy have also been achieved due to the embodiment of artificial intelligence(AI).However,the current networked unmanned systems are primarily designed for and applicable to a narrow range of domain-specific missions,and do not have sufficient human-level intel-ligence and human needs fulfillment for the challenging missions in our lives.We propose in this paper a vision of human-centric networked unmanned systems:Unmanned Intelligent Cluster(UnIC).Within this vision,distributed unmanned systems and humans are connected via knowledge sharing and social awareness to achieve collaborative cognition.This paper details UnIC’s concept,sources of intelligence,and layered architecture,and reviews enabling technologies for achieving this vision.In addition to the technological aspects,the social acceptance issues are highlighted.

Social Energy:Mining Energy From the Society

The inherent nature of energy,i.e.,physicality,sociality and informatization,implies the inevitable and intensive interaction between energy systems and social systems.From this perspective,we define "social energy" as a complex sociotechnical system of energy systems,social systems and the derived artificial virtual systems which characterize the intense intersystem and intra-system interactions.The recent advancement in intelligent technology,including artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies,sensing and communication in Internet of Things technologies,and massive high performance computing and extreme-scale data analytics technologies,enables the possibility of substantial advancement in socio-technical system optimization,scheduling,control and management.In this paper,we provide a discussion on the nature of energy,and then propose the concept and intention of social energy systems for electrical power.A general methodology of establishing and investigating social energy is proposed,which is based on the ACP approach,i.e., "artificial systems"(A), "computational experiments"(C) and "parallel execution"(P),and parallel system methodology.A case study on the University of Denver(DU) campus grid is provided and studied to demonstrate the social energy concept.In the concluding remarks,we discuss the technical pathway,in both social and nature sciences,to social energy,and our vision on its future.

Activity theory for understanding and managing system innovations

This study aims to show how activity theory in the socio-technical systems paradigm can assist in understanding and managing system innovation.We conceptualize sociotechnical systems to address societal needs as activity systems and system innovations as transformations of such systems.Transformations result from resolving contradictions that develop due to technical and social change within and between the activities carried out by various agencies to fulfll societal needs.Along this line,the explanation of system innovations focuses on identifying emerging contradictions,resolution initiatives,and their outcomes,whereas the governance of system innovations can be carried out by interactively developing policies through successive interventions to resolve contradictions.We demonstrate the employment of activity theory to understand the transformation of the recorded music socio-technical system towards streaming,as well as to facilitate the management of the transition of the olive oil-producing sector at the regional level towards a circular economy through the adoption of innovative waste-processing technology.

Community Smell Occurrence Prediction on Multi-Granularity by Developer-Oriented Features and Process Metrics

Community smells are sub-optimal developer community structures that hinder productivity.Prior studies performed smell prediction and provided refactoring guidelines from a top-down aspect to help community shepherds.Simultaneously,refactoring smells also requires bottom-up effort from every developer.However,supportive measures and guidelines for them are not available at a fine-grained level.Since recent work revealed developers'personalities and working states could influence community smells'emergence and variation,we build prediction models with experience,sentiment,and development process features of developers considering three smells including Organizational Silo,Lone Wolf,and Bottleneck,as well as two related classes including smelly developer and smelly quitter.We predict the five classes in the individual granularity,and we also generate forecasts for the number of smelly developers in the community granularity.The proposed models achieve F-measures ranging from 0.73 to 0.92 in individual-wide within-project,time-wise,and cross-project prediction,and mean R2 performance of 0.68 in community-wide Smelly Developer prediction.We also exploit SHAP(SHapley Additive exPlanations)to assess feature importance to explain our predictors.In conclusion,we suggest developers with heavy workload should foster more frequent communication in a straightforward and polite way to build healthier communities,and we recommend community shepherds to use the forecasting model for refactoring planning.