<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.

Magister Scientiae - MSc / A semi-synchronous environment consists of a combination of synchronous and asynchronous transport media used to transport messages from source to destination. This thesis explores an empirical solution for guaranteeing the delivery of messages in a multimodal semi-synchronous environment for a Deaf Telephony application. SoftBridge for Instant Messaging Bridging Application (SIMBA), is a communication platform that make use of a semi-synchronous framework to allow a hearing and Deaf person to communicate inside a single uniform space. SIMBA was modified to provide reliability for both synchronous and asynchronous transport media. In the process of modification, SIMBA was renamed to NaradaBrokering integrated in SIMBA (NIMBA). Within the literature various systems are analyzed and successes and failures are distilled to help formulate a good solution for the thesis question. To guarantee asynchronous messages sent, the Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) paradigm was used with Forward Error Correction (FEC) used to guarantee the delivery of synchronous messages sent. The work forms part of a social study conducted at the Deaf Community of Cape Town (DCCT) community centre. Ethnography was used to identify the requirements for a Deaf Telephony application. Thus, this thesis is based on a socio- technical environment where the system is developed in a laboratory and tested in an actual community. Results show that these solutions are cceptable for a semi-synchronous communication environment. However, interviews conducted with a select group of Deaf participants showed that cell phones are currently too popular to be replaced by NIMBA as a primary communication device and service. This is due to the immense popularity of Short Message Service (SMS) among the Deaf and cell phone devices mobile capabilities. The overall goal of the thesis is to guarantee delivery for a semisynchronous environment with broader implications of showing how multimodal semi-synchronous services like Deaf Telephony can be made attractive to service providers concerned with reliability in the new Internet Protocol (IP) world of telecommunications. / South Africa

Instant Messaging (IM) has grown tremendously over the last few years. Even though IM was originally developed as a social chat system, it has found a place in many companies, where it is being used as an essential business tool. However, many businesses rely on free IM and have not implemented a secure corporate IM solution. Most free IM clients were never intended for use in the workplace and, therefore, lack strong security features and administrative control. Consequently, free IM clients can provide attackers with an entry point for malicious code in an organization’s network that can ultimately lead to a company’s information assets being compromised. Therefore, even though free IM allows for better collaboration in the workplace, it comes at a cost, as the title of this dissertation suggests. This dissertation sets out to answer the question of how free IM can facilitate an attack on a company’s information assets. To answer the research question, the dissertation defines an IM attack model that models the ways in which an information system can be attacked when free IM is used within an organization. The IM attack model was created by categorising IM threats using the STRIDE threat classification scheme. The attacks that realize the categorised threats were then modelled using attack trees as the chosen attack modelling tool. Attack trees were chosen because of their ability to model the sequence of attacker actions during an attack. The author defined an enhanced graphical notation that was adopted for the attack trees used to create the IM attack model. The enhanced attack tree notation extends traditional attack trees to allow nodes in the trees to be of different classes and, therefore, allows attack trees to convey more information. During the process of defining the IM attack model, a number of experiments were conducted where IM vulnerabilities were exploited. Thereafter, a case study was constructed to document a simulated attack on an information system that involves the exploitation of IM vulnerabilities. The case study demonstrates how an attacker’s attack path relates to the IM attack model in a practical scenario. The IM attack model provides insight into how IM can facilitate an attack on a company’s information assets. The creation of the attack model for free IM lead to several realizations. The IM attack model revealed that even though the use of free IM clients may seem harmless, such IM clients can facilitate an attack on a company’s information assets. Furthermore, certain IM vulnerabilities may not pose a great risk by themselves, but when combined with the exploitation of other vulnerabilities, a much greater threat can be realized. These realizations hold true to what French playwright Jean Anouilh once said: “What you get free costs too much”.

Instant messaging applications noted significant grow especially in the last decade. In fact, the Internet communication is cheap and convenient way how to communicate with distant people. However, this grow of user communication and data exchange through the online world impacts user security and privacy, as it was also shown recently by WhatsApp privacy issues. Firstly this article evaluates security and privacy issues of current mobile messaging applications. Secondly, we design our basic open source solution with the focus on security, privacy, and user centric features. Furthermore, we provide proof-of-concept implementation of our system

Group chat facilitates remote collaboration and idea exchanges. With the widespread use of group chat for productive information exchanges, it becomes dicult for members of groups to keep up and stay grounded during the long stream of conversation that is generated. I conducted a need-finding study where I simulated group chat conversations in the context of collaboration to learn about issues and behaviors in a group chat when the size of the group chat is 5 or 10. The study participants also filled out a survey post the group chat, describing their challenges and issues with the group chat. A grounded theory approach analyses of the data collected, and the chat conversation gave us several themes. Our results show that participants generally felt that there were too many messages. A majority of the participants found it was hard to keep track of what was happening. Information overload is a significant challenge that creates several other challenges for the participants, such as missed messages, redundant messages, wasted e↵orts, and diculty in gathering consensus. I observed some behaviors such as broken utterances and other strategies employed by participants when overwhelmed with the high activity. I use this knowledge to motivate recommendations and suggestions for future redesigns and development of this indispensable tool of the workforce / Master of Science / Group chat facilitates remote collaboration, idea exchanges. It becomes dicult for members of groups to keep up and remain on the same page during long conversations. I conducted experiments where I simulated collaborative group chat conversations to learn about issues and behaviors in a group chat with 5 or 10 members. The experiment participants also filled out a survey after the group chat, describing their challenges and issues with the group chat. Qualitative analyses of the survey data, and the chat conversation gave us several insights. Our results show that participants generally felt that there were too many messages. A ma- jority of the participants found it was hard to keep track of what was happening. Information overload is a significant challenge that creates several other problems for the participants, such as missed messages, repeated messages, wasted e↵orts, and diculty in obtaining agree- ment. I observed some behaviors and strategies used by the participants when overwhelmed with too many messages. I use this knowledge to motivate recommendations and suggestions for future redesigns and development of this indispensable tool of the workforce.

Text communication is often perceived as lacking some components of communication that are essential in sustaining interaction or conversation. This interaction incoherency tends to make text communication plastic. It is traditionally devoid of intonation, pitch, gesture, facial expression and visual or auditory cues. Nevertheless, Instant Messaging (IM), a form of text communication is on the upward uptake both on PCs and on mobile handhelds. There is a need to rubberise this plastic text messaging to improve co-presence for text communications thereby improving synchronous textual discussion, especially on handheld devices. <br /> <br /> One element of interaction is gesture, seen as a natural way of conversing. Attaining some level of interaction naturalism requires improving synchronous communication spontaneity, partly achieved by enhancing input mechanisms. To enhance input mechanisms for interactive text-based chat on mobile devices, there is a need to facilitate gesture input. Enhancement is achievable in a number of ways, such as input mechanism redesigning and input offering adaptation. This thesis explores affective gesture mode on interface redesign as an input offering adaptation. This is done without a major physical reconstruction of handheld devices.<br /> <br /> This thesis presents a text only IM system built on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE). It was developed with a novel user-defined hotkey implemented as a one-click context menu to &ldquo / fast-track&rdquo / text-gestures and emoticons.<br /> <br /> A hybrid quantitative and qualitative approach was taken to enable data triangulation. Results from experimental trials show that an Affective Gesture (AG) approach improved IM chat spontaneity/response. Feedback from the user trials affirms that AG hotkey improves chat responsiveness, thus enhancing chat spontaneity.

En años recientes, el uso de tabletas y teléfonos o dispositivos inteligentes ha incrementado continuamente gracias a la facilidad y disponibilidad de acceso a la información, entretenimiento y comunicación que ofrecen con su creciente variedad de aplicativos y especialmente su acceso a internet. A diferencia de computadoras o notebooks, estos dispositivos tienen tecnologías para mejorar la usabilidad para personas con dificultades visuales que también pueden ser utilizadas para crear nuevos aplicativos de asistencia sin la necesidad de aparatos externos. Esto genera oportunidades para un desarrollo inclusivo que mantiene la misma portabilidad. Sin embargo, estos dispositivos principalmente usan una pantalla táctil y aún entre sus tecnologías incorporadas, no tienen medios para ingresar datos que sean permitan que personas con ceguera ingresen información por otros medios que no sean su voz o un complejo teclado QWERTY. En este artículo, proponemos el uso de una solución adaptativa que permite al usuario usar la misma pantalla táctil como una alternativa para ingresar datos al simular un teclado Braille y demostramos su uso, además de tecnologías de lector de texto, con una aplicación que permite que una persona ciega chatee mediante mensajes instantáneos.

<p>Opera är främst en webbläsare, men innehåller även klienter för bl.a. mail och chat. Innan den här rapporten skrevs saknades dock en klient för instant messaging-protokollet Jabber. Denna rapport beskriver arbetsgången och resultatet av utvecklandet av en Jabberklient till Opera.</p><p>Eftersom det inte fanns nog med tid att utveckla en fullfjädrad Jabberklient beslutades det att målet skulle vara ett s.k. ”proof of concept”. Kraven sattes till grundläggande instant messagingfunktionalitet, som närvarostatushantering och möjlighet att skicka och ta emot meddelanden.</p><p>Målet uppfylldes och resultatet blev en Jabberklient med grundläggande funktionalitet. I enlighet med direktiven lades relativt lite fokus på gränssnittet. Klienten har kända brister och användarvänligheten går att öka.</p><p>Resultatet skulle kunna utgöra grunden för en komplett Jabberklient. Kvar att göra är att förbättra gränssnittet för att matcha resten av Opera i användbarhet. Alla krav i Jabberspecifikationen bör också uppfyllas, speciellt eftersom företaget är stolt över att Opera följer standarder väl1. För att inte vara sämre rustad än andra Jabberklienter bör även extra funktionalitet läggas till, såsom samtalshistorik, filöverföring och möjligheten att använda andra instant messaging-protokoll via Jabberkontot.</p> / <p>Opera is first and foremost a web browser, but it also has e-mail and chat clients. Before this thesis was written however, it did not have a client for the instant messaging protocol Jabber. This thesis describes the workflow and the results of the development of a Jabber client for Opera.</p><p>Since there wasn’t enough time to develop a full-featured Jabber client, it was decided that the goal would be a proof of concept. The requirements were basic instant messaging functionality, which means the proper handling of presence information and the ability to send and receive instant messages.</p><p>The goal was achieved and the result was a Jabber client with basic functionality. In accordance with the directives, the user interface was not a primary focus. The client has known flaws and the usability is not as good as it could be.</p><p>The result could be used as the foundation of a releasable Jabber client. One of the things left to do is to improve the user interface so it matches the usability of the rest of Opera. All the requirements of the Jabber specification should also be fulfilled, especially since the company takes pride in the standards compliance of Opera2. In order to match the features of other Jabber clients, extra functionality should be added as well. Some examples would be message history, file transfer and the ability to use other instant messaging protocols through the Jabber account.</p>