Robert Gordon University’s Institute for Innovation, Design and Sustainability Research (IDEAS) will host the latest in a series of digital technology seminars on Friday 2 March at the School of Computing, St Andrew Street, Aberdeen.

During the guest lecture, aimed at IT professionals and security specialists, Dr Karen Renaud, Senior Lecturer in Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, will explore the real effects of password policies on IT systems in large organisations.

Users are often considered the weakest link in a company’s security chain because of poor password protection behaviour. As the need for increased IT security grows, there is now an emphasis on enhanced password management in both private and public sector organisations.

Dr Renaud explains:

“We currently have a good idea of the extent to which poor password management impacts on an individual user’s personal security – people have fallen victim to online credit card fraud and phishing scams. However, there is currently a lack of research in to what the impact of this kind of behaviour by employees has on larger organisations. Nor do we know how to best intervene as to improve general security as a whole.

“Current wisdom mandates the use of certain policies to curb insecure behaviours but it is clear this approach has limited effectiveness.”

During the seminar, Dr Renaud will explore usable security methods via a simulation engine which models an organisation with employee agents using a number of systems over an extended period. The simulation is tailorable, allowing tweaking of particular system-wide settings in order to implement policy regulations so as to determine their potential impact on the overall security of the business.

Dr Renaud’s seminar will take place in Room C48, School of Computing, St Andrew Street at 2.15pm on Friday 2 March. Entry is free and open to the public.  More information is available at www.rgu.ac.uk/events.

SICSA is highlighting the range of Computing programmes and graduate skills on offer at Scottish Universities at the first SICSA Education Showcase in Spring 2012.  This innovative, employer facing event will be held from 17.00-19.00 on 25th April 2012 at the Wolfson Medical School Building, University of Glasgow.

Despite the global recession, demand for highly skilled Computing practitioners remains buoyant and is likely to grow further as economies recover. Scotland's Universities are extremely well placed to meet this demand, offering internationally leading undergraduate and postgraduate education across the range of Computing.  This event will bring together all 14 SICSA Universities, providing them with an opportunity to showcase their programmes and graduate skills to UK business.

Aim and Scope of Symposium

• Next Generation e-Health Infrastructures, especially around Cloud Computing, which are scaleable, robust and secure.
• Patient Centric Approaches.
• Security Infrastrutures for Health Care, and cross-domain information sharing.
• Assisted Living Infrastructures and their links to formal health care.
• Integration of Primary and Secondary Health Care with Assisted Living.
• Sensor infrastructures, patient identification, and assisted living.
• Creation of collaborative infrastructures and knowledge exchange.

The programme for the workshop was richly varied and consisted of eight 20 minute technical presentations, three 10 minute tool presentations and four posters.  One of the presentations, by Derek Gatherer from the University of Glasgow, gave account of joint work with Vashti Galpin, from the University of Edinburgh, considering dynamic models of Rosen’s M,R System which had been asserted to be incomputable.  This work arose from a collaboration started as a result of the First SICSA Workshop on Biological Networks: Theory and Applications in October 2010.  Other presentations in the morning ranged from gene networks in the virus MRSA, through host-pathogen interaction networks to investigation of neural avalanches in neural networks.  The talks in the afternoon included work from the University of Abertay Dundee, applying techniques from computer games to the visualisation of biological networks.  Such visualisations provide a valuable form of communication between experimental biologists and computational modellers.

The invited speaker at the workshop was Professor Vito Latora, who had been a SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellow earlier in the year.  This offered a welcome opportunity for those who missed Professor Latora’s lectures over the summer another chance to hear about some of his work.  His talk, Complex Networks in Biology, briefly outlined several areas where his work on complex networks has had biological applications, but the majority of the talk focussed on applications related to the brain.  Professor Latora explained how, building on previous work by others showing that cortical networks exhibit small world characteristics, he and co-authors defined a measure of efficiency which could be considered both locally and globally within networks, and showed that cortical networks exhibited both forms of efficiency.  At a different level of abstraction, Professor Latora and his colleagues have also worked on a comparison of the brain connectivity found in healthy and epileptic patients.  This comparison highlighted a marked contrast between the structures found in the two groups of patients.  In a final application, to high resolution EEG images of brain activities while subjects carried out a physical task, Professor Latora and his collaborators demonstrated the need to establish dynamic characterisations of graphs, taking into consideration temporal aspects as well as static connectivity, clustering etc.

Professor Calder, currently Professor of Computing Science and Dean of Research at the University of Glasgow’s College of Science and Engineering, has been appointed following an open competition.