Awareness servers provide information about a person to help observers determine whether a person is available for contact. A trade -off exists in these systems: more sources of information, and higher fidelity in those sources, can improve peoples decisions, but each increase in information reduces privacy. In this thesis, we look at whether the type of relationship between the observer and the person being observed can be used to manage this trade-off. We conducted a survey that asked people what amount of information from different sources that they would disclose to seven different relationship types. We found that in more than half of the cases, people would give different amounts of information to different relationships. We then constructed a prototype system and conducted a Wizard of Oz experiment where we took the system into the real world and observed individuals using it. Our results suggest that awareness servers can be improved by allowing finer-grained control than what is currently available.

Faculty of Criminology, Justice and Policy Studies

Awareness servers provide information about a person to help observers determine whether a person is available for contact. A trade -off exists in these systems: more sources of information, and higher fidelity in those sources, can improve peoples decisions, but each increase in information reduces privacy. In this thesis, we look at whether the type of relationship between the observer and the person being observed can be used to manage this trade-off. We conducted a survey that asked people what amount of information from different sources that they would disclose to seven different relationship types. We found that in more than half of the cases, people would give different amounts of information to different relationships. We then constructed a prototype system and conducted a Wizard of Oz experiment where we took the system into the real world and observed individuals using it. Our results suggest that awareness servers can be improved by allowing finer-grained control than what is currently available.

Abstract Instant Messenger has become one of the most popular software among juvenile and almost can not be parted from their lives. This research would like to probe deeper into the significance of Messenger in those minority families which are marginalized by the whole society. Therefore, this research takes the minority juvenile, being less social welfare distributed, as the subject, through fundamental interviews of cases, to have an understanding of these juvenile¡¦s using Messenger and Messenger¡¦s significance in their daily lives. This research presents in two ways: one is through story narration providing ample information and clues to achieve an overall understanding; second is to analyze. Aiming at the purpose, divided into the form of relation-establishing and the motive and mechanism of interrelation to analyze the phenomenon of using Messenger. The research finds that these juvenile mostly come from a minority family, such as grand parenting. They lack parental care, get lower grades and cannot get identified by the teachers. As a result, they are depressed in real life. In addition, these juvenile use Messenger in different and distinctive ways from others. Which include : a good means of ¡§calling together¡¨ ¡V to call friends and fellows into group fight; a stealthy way of running away from home ¡V to use Messenger for preparation of running away from home; ¡§group¡¨ ¡V to communicate in an utmost speed; ¡§E generation affaire d¡¦amour¡¨ ¡V Messenger becomes a tool for developing affaire d¡¦amour; a secret means of interconnection; pressure releasing ¡V to release pressure from life through chatting with friends in Messenger; to generate self-identification through using Messenger. For these frustrated juvenile who come from minority families and can not get satisfaction from school and society, Messenger is a bigger inducement. Therefore, the society, their parents and teachers should pay more concern and care to these minority group of juvenile.

Instant messaging (IM) has been a platform of spreading malware for hackers due to its popularity and immediacy. To evade anti-virus detection, hacker might send malicious URL message, instead of malicious binary file. A malicious URL is a link pointing to a malware file or a phishing site, and it may then propagate through the victim's contact list. Moreover, hacker sometimes might use social engineering tricks making malicious URLs hard to be identified. The previous solutions are improper to detect IM malicious URL in real-time. Therefore, we propose a novel approach for detecting IM malicious URL in a timely manner based on the anomalies of URL messages and sender's behavior. Malicious behaviors are profiled as a set of behavior patterns and a scoring model is developed to evaluate the significance of each anomaly. To speed up the detection, the malicious behavior patterns can identify known malicious URLs efficiently, while the scoring model is used to detect unknown malicious URLs. Our experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves low false positive rate and low false negative rate.

Reproduction de : Thèse doctorat : Lettres modernes : Lyon 2 : 2007. / Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. Bibliogr. Index.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 64-66).

<p>This thesis explored how hearing and deaf users are brought together into one communication space where interaction between them is a semi-synchronous form of message exchange. The focus of this thesis was the means by which message delivery between two e</p>

Instant messaging dialogue is used for communication by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, but has received relatively little attention in computational linguistics. We describe methods aimed at providing a shallow interpretation of messages sent via instant messaging. This is done by assigning labels known as dialogue acts to utterances within messages. Since messages may contain more than one utterance, we explore automatic message segmentation using combinations of parse trees and various statistical models to achieve high accuracy for both classification and segmentation tasks. Finally, we gauge the immediate usefulness of dialogue acts in conversation management by presenting a dialogue simulation program that uses dialogue acts to predict utterances during a conversation. The predictions are evaluated via qualitative means where we obtain very encouraging results.

Thesis (M.A.)--Liberty University, 2007. / Access restricted for one year per author's request.