Case Study of a Complex Informing System: Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JIFX)

The Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JIFX) event, organized by the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), is conducted 3-4 times a year at various locations. The four day event can be characterized as an informing system specifically designed to facilitate structured and unstructured communications between a variety of parties—e.g., software developers, inventors, military and civilian users of various technologies, academics, and agencies responsible for identifying and procuring technology solutions—that frequently are constrained in their informing activities in more restrictive venues. Over the course of the event, participants may observe technology demonstrations, obtain feedback from potential users, acquire new ideas about their technologies might be employed and, perhaps most significantly, engage in ad hoc collaborations with other participants. The present paper describes an exploratory case research study that was conducted over a one year period and involved both direct observation of the event and follow-up interviews with 49 past participants in the event. The goal of the research was to assess the nature of participant-impact resulting from attending JIFX and to consider the consistency of the findings with the predictions of various theoretical frameworks used in informing science. The results suggest that participants perceived that the event provided significant value from three principal sources: discovery, interaction with potential clients (users) of the technologies involved, and networking with other participants. These findings were largely consistent with what could be expected from informing under conditions of high complexity; because value generally derives from combinations of attributes rather than from the sum of individual attributes, we would expect that overall value from informing activities will be perceived even though estimates of the incremental value of that informing cannot be made.

Case Study of a Complex Informing System: Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JIFX)

The Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JIFX) event, organized by the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), is conducted 3-4 times a year at various locations. The four day event can be characterized as an informing system specifically designed to facilitate structured and unstructured communications between a variety of parties—e.g., software developers, inventors, military and civilian users of various technologies, academics, and agencies responsible for identifying and procuring technology solutions—that frequently are constrained in their informing activities in more restrictive venues. Over the course of the event, participants may observe technology demonstrations, obtain feedback from potential users, acquire new ideas about their technologies might be employed and, perhaps most significantly, engage in ad hoc collaborations with other participants. The present paper describes an exploratory case research study that was conducted over a one year period and involved both direct observation of the event and follow-up interviews with 49 past participants in the event. The goal of the research was to assess the nature of participant-impact resulting from attending JIFX, and considering the consistency of the findings with the predictions of various theoretical frameworks used in informing science. The results suggest that participants perceived that the event provided significant value from three principal sources: discovery, interaction with potential clients (users) of the technologies involved, and networking with other participants. These findings were largely consistent with what could be expected from informing under conditions of high complexity: because value generally derives from combinations of attributes rather than from the sum of individual attributes, we would expect that overall value from informing activities will be perceived even though estimates of the incremental value of that informing cannot be made. A revised version of this paper was published in the journal Informing Science: the International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline, Volume 18, 2015

A Context-Aware Model of Trust for Facilitating Secure Ad Hoc Collaborations

Ad hoc collaborations often necessitate impromptu sharing of sensitive information or resources between member organizations. Each member of resulting collaboration needs to carefully assess and tradeoff the requirements of protecting its own sensitive information against the requirements of sharing some or all of them. The challenge is that no policies have been previously arrived at for such secure sharing (since the collaboration has been formed in an ad hoc manner). Thus, it needs to be done based on an evaluation of the trustworthiness of the recipient of the information or resources. In this chapter, the authors discuss some previously proposed trust models to determine if they can be effectively used to compute trustworthiness for such sharing purposes in ad hoc collaborations. Unfortunately, none of these models appear to be completely satisfactory. Almost all of them fail to satisfy one or more of the following requirements: (i) well defined techniques and procedures to evaluate and/or measure trust relationships, (ii) techniques to compare and compose trust values which are needed in the formation of collaborations, and (iii) techniques to evaluate trust in the face of incomplete information. This prompts the authors to propose a new vector (we use the term “vector” loosely; vector in this work means a tuple) model of trust that is suitable for reasoning about the trustworthiness of systems built from the integration of multiple subsystems, such as ad hoc collaborations. They identify three parameters on which trust depends and formulate how to evaluate trust relationships. The trust relationship between a truster and a trustee is associated with a context and depends on the experience, knowledge, and recommendation that the truster has with respect to the trustee in the given context. The authors show how their model can measure trust in a given context. Sometimes enough information is not available about a given context to calculate the trust value. Towards this end the authors show how the relationships between different contexts can be captured using a context graph. Formalizing the relationships between contexts allows us to extrapolate values from related contexts to approximate a trust value of an entity even when all the information needed to calculate the trust value is not available. Finally, the authors develop formalisms to compare two trust relationships and to compose two or more of the same – features that are invaluable in ad hoc collaborations.

Trust Management and Context-Driven Access Control

The increasing diffusion of wireless portable devices and the emergence of mobile ad hoc networks promote anytime and anywhere opportunistic resource sharing. However, the fear of exposure to risky interactions is currently limiting the widespread uptake of ad hoc collaborations. This chapter introduces the challenge of identifying and validating novel security models/systems for securing ad hoc collaborations, by taking into account the high unpredictability, heterogeneity, and dynamicity of envisioned wireless environments. We claim that the concept of trust management should become a primary engineering design principle, to associate with the subsequent trust refinement into effective authorization policies, thus calling for original and innovative access control models. The chapter overviews the state-of-theart solutions for trust management and access control in wireless environments by pointing out both the need for their tight integration and the related emerging design guidelines, that is, exploitation of context awareness and adoption of semantic technologies.