Exploring the Impact of Security Policy on Compliance

Extant studies on compliance with security policies have largely ignored the impact of monitoring, security operations, and roles and responsibilities on employees' compliance. This chapter proposes a theoretical model that integrates security policy, monitoring, security operations, and security roles to examine employees' security compliance. Data were collected from 233 IT security and management professionals. Using partial least square structural equation modelling and testing hypotheses, the study finds that information security policy has significant indirect influence on information security compliance. The effect of security policy is fully mediated by security roles, operations security activities, and security monitoring activities. Security policy strongly influences operations security activities and has the greatest effect on security roles and responsibilities. Among the three mediating variables, monitoring has the most significant influence on security compliance. Conversely, the direct impact of security policy on compliance is not significant.

Scaffolding the OEEU's Data-Driven Ecosystem to Analyze the Employability of Spanish Graduates

This chapter outlines the technological evolution experimented by the Observatory for University Employability and Employment's information system to become a data-driven technological ecosystem. This observatory collects data from more than 50 Spanish universities and their graduate students (bachelor's degree, master's degree) with the goal of measuring the factors that lead to students' employability and employment. The goals pursued by the observatory need a strong technological support to gather, process, and disseminate the related data. The system that supports these tasks has evolved from a standard (traditional) information system to a data-driven ecosystem, which provides remarkable benefits covering the observatory's requirements. The benefits, the foundations, and the way the data-driven ecosystem is built will be described throughout the chapter, as well as how the information obtained is exploited in order to provide insights about the employment and employability variables.

Information Attacks and Defenses on the Social Web

Social web sites are used daily by many millions of users. They have attracted users with very weak interest in technology, including absolute neophytes of computers in general. Common users of social web sites often have a carefree attitude in sharing information. Moreover, some system operators offer sub-par security measures, which are not adequate for the high value of the published information. For all these reasons, online social networks suffer more and more attacks by sophisticated crackers and scammers. To make things worse, the information gathered from social web sites can trigger attacks to even more sensible targets. This work reviews some typical social attacks that are conducted on social networking systems, describing real-world examples of such violations and analyzing in particular the weakness of password mechanisms. It then presents some solutions that could improve the overall security of the systems.

Enhanced Bio-Inspired Algorithms for Detecting and Filtering Spam

The internet era promotes electronic commerce and facilitates access to many services. In today's digital society, the explosion in communication has revolutionized the field of electronic communication. Unfortunately, this technology has become incontestably the original source of malicious activities, especially the plague called undesirables email (SPAM) that has grown tremendously in the last few years. This chapter unveils fresh bio-inspired techniques (artificial social cockroaches [ASC], artificial haemostasis system [AHS], and artificial heart lungs system [AHLS]) and their application for SPAM detection. For the experimentation, the authors used the benchmark SMS Spam corpus V.0.1 and the validation measures (recall, precision, f-measure, entropy, accuracy, and error). They optimize the sensitive parameters of each algorithm (text representation technique, distance measure, weightings, and threshold). The results are positive compared to the result of artificial social bees and machine-learning algorithms (decision tree C4.5 and K-means).

Clinical Decision Support Systems Question and Answering

A question answering system to help clinical practitioners in a cardiovascular healthcare environment to interface clinical decision support systems can be built by using an extended discourse representation structure, CIDERS, and an ontology framework, Ontology for General Clinical Practice. CIDERS is an extension of the well-known DRT (discourse representation theory) structures, intending to go beyond single text representation to embrace the general clinical history of a given patient represented in an ontology. The Ontology for General Clinical Practice improves the currently available state-of-the-art ontologies for medical science and for the cardiovascular specialty. The chapter shows the scientific and philosophical reasons of its present dual structure with a deeply expressive (SHOIN) terminological base (TBox) and a highly computable (EL++) assertions knowledge base (ABox). To be able to use the current reasoning techniques and methodologies, the authors made a thorough inventory of biomedical ontologies currently available in OWL2 format.

Addressing Knowledge Management and Virtual Learning Communities in MOOC Using Open Resources and Gamification

The confluence of thousands of students in a MOOC is an opportunity to manage all the knowledge generated through the creation of open educational resources (OER), especially when a connectivist approach is applied and the MOOC makes use of virtual learning communities. The challenge is transferring the flow of knowledge, activity, and interactions of the course to the community and making that transference sustainable and ongoing over time. For this purpose, the use of elements of gamification to train and retain the knowledge creators of the community along with the use of social networking platforms is proposed. This chapter analyses several editions of a MOOC and the opportunity offered by the use of different types of learning (formal, non-formal, and informal) that occur in them, thus characterizing patterns to train the open content and knowledge generation through gamification. From the results, indicators for managing successful and sustainable knowledge communities are proposed along with indicators for persistence and interaction between participants.

Developing a Research Method to Analyze Visual Literacy Based on Cross-Cultural Characteristics

This chapter presents a new approach of a quantitative analysis used to research the understanding of visual literacy issues. The objective of the research is to find common patterns, opinions, and behaviors between different people regarding the use of visual communication and people's state of visual literacy, while also considering the possible cultural differences related. To explain visual literacy and its implications, the theoretical background about the visual literacy research field is presented first. Then, also within the section on background, the chapter presents the main concepts related to culture, and how it and visual literacy can be analyzed together to enable cross-cultural analysis. To conduct these cross-cultural analyses, this chapter proposes a new kind of quantitative questionnaire-based instrument that includes a section to measure the cultural characteristics of the individual and their level of literacy. This instrument proposal is the main result, since the research field of visual literacy lacks this kind of quantitative approach.

Towards an Intelligent System for the Territorial Planning

This chapter concerns the conceptualization of an intelligent system for the territorial planning, taking as an example the agriculture case as a tool in decision making. It is started by giving a comparison between the geographical information system (GIS) and the intelligent system (IS), demonstrating the limits of the GIS and the appeal to the artificial intelligence. Also, the chapter gives an overview of the application of decision support systems (DSSs), modeling and simulation applied in forest management, agriculture, ecology, and environment. Finally, the chapter proposes the methodology and the intelligent system proposed, setting up some indicators which help to aid decision making.

Current Situation and Appraisal Tendencies of M-Learning

Mobile devices and apps are placed in a prominent position in the daily routine of all people. The fast evolution of these devices and their main advantages have caused a real impact in the society. Currently, they are essential tools to be totally connected anywhere and to consult and access information of any field. The use of these devices has been increasing since the last decade. The emergence of new and sophisticated devices and new services has contributed to this sparkling uptrend. One of the fields that society is using these mobile technologies is in learning. The aim of this chapter is to describe the current situation of these technologies and to make an approach of the future tendencies of these tools. To achieve this goal, it was necessary to conduct a survey and involve different undergraduate students of the university and different professionals. Results reveal that students are using more and more apps and mobile devices but there is an important gap between students and professionals so it is still necessary to boost their relevance to improve their potential use.

Assessment of Information Literacy and Its Relationship With Learning Outcomes

The global integration of competence-based education and training systems and the search for a generalized common framework for the incorporation of key competences in the curriculums of national education systems have generated a growing need for information literacy as a way of advancing to the awaited knowledge society. Large-scale assessments of student performance present criterion variables such as language, mathematics, or science, but it is noticeable how these assessments leave aside contents from other key competences such as information literacy. This chapter shows a theoretical approach to the subject and an example of an empirical study that aims to shed some light to the topic of information literacy by analysing the relationship between the level of information literacy shown by a student and their academic performance in subjects such as language and mathematics. The results suggest that it is possible to develop an instrument for the assessment of the complex information literacy competence, and which is also easy to administer in the classroom.