The School of Computing
Student Research Conference - Report
Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:22:00 BST
The student research conference on March 16th was very well attended, with a large number of external visitors. The presentations on technical subjects were thoroughly prepared by the students and well received by the audience. The posters, which covered a range of subjects from Google's ethics to assistive technologies lead to a lot of discussion with the audience. Finally, we had about 20 students from all years demonstrating a range of software from state of the art mobile and social networking apps to a prototype case tool for teaching python.
Prize Winners:
Best presentation: Ahmad Ahmad (MSc Information Systems) Implementation of usable security
This project involved the design and development of a human computer interface to provide a log-on module for the Kuwait armed forces tactical intranet. The development focused on relieving the user from the cognitive load of creating, remembering and maintaining their passwords for the login process, and the consequent use of paper reminders. The use of pictures or graphical images for authentication or access control is a practice that is gaining popularity in establishing system security nowadays. Authentication relies on the user logging in to the system after identifying five pictures they have uploaded earlier from among a grid of twenty pictures. Using these pictures greatly reduced the cognitive load on a user who was required to remember strong passwords that ended up being compromised
Best poster: Peter Riley (BSc Computing and Society) Music to the people?
A investigation into the impact of Social Media and the changing relationships between bands and fans within the music industry
Best software demonstration: Vahid Panjganj (BSc Business Information Systems) e-mail archiving for web-based project management
The project creates a web-based E-mail archiving system for a company client, to manage communication which usually involves requests from company to customers in order to provide more information about a part, or to report a problem during manufacturing. Presently anyone in the company can request data from a customer when a job stops for technical reasons. This process makes for difficult tracking of open queries and tracing closed ones. The present process results in costly, time consuming and occasionally embarrassing situations where customer information is requested from many employees. E-mail archiving software systematically records and saves copies of e-mail correspondence for record keeping and documentation purposes. This system is being used by the client.