Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Analysis, modelling and simulation of social media

The School of Sciences, UCLan Cyprus cordially invites you to a seminar titled:

Analysis, modelling and simulation of social media”

with a guest talk from Associate Professor Panayiotis Zaphiris of the Cyprus University of Technology.

In this talk, Associate Professor Zaphiris will cover the results of a series of projects focusing on analysing, modelling and simulating on-line user behaviour. Studies to be presented will focus on describing and analysing social support in on-line communities for older people; studying cultural differences in on-line communities and analysing, modelling and simulating social networks around computer games. The presentation will highlight the importance of these findings to Human Computer Interaction and Inclusive Design research and propose a research agenda for the future.



Panayiotis Zaphiris is Dean of School of Fine and Applied Arts of the Cyprus University of Technology. Panayiotis has a PhD (April 2002) in Human Computer Interaction from Wayne State University, USA. He also has an MSc (May 1998) in Systems Engineering and a BSc (May 1995) in Electrical Engineering both from University of Maryland, College Park, USA. He has worked for a number of years at the Centre for HCI Design of City University London where he reached the rank of Reader in HCI.

His research interests are in the area of Human Computer Interaction, Social Computing and Inclusive Design with an emphasis on the design of interactive systems for people with disabilities. More info from his homepage and from his research lab Cyprus Interaction Lab.






When: Wednesday, December 18th, 2013 at 14:00-15:00
Where: Room CY007 (Ground floor), UCLan Cyprus, Pyla CY-7080

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Towards the Personalization of CAPTCHA Mechanisms based on Individual Differences in Cognitive Processing

The School of Sciences, UCLan Cyprus cordially invites you to a seminar titled:

Towards the Personalization of CAPTCHA Mechanisms based on Individual Differences in Cognitive Processing”

with a talk from Professor George Samaras of the University of Cyprus.


One of the most important security concerns on the World Wide Web today is to protect Web-based systems and services against automated software agents whose purpose is to degrade the quality of a provided service. Examples include among others the automated creation of fake email accounts that are used later on for spam, generation of massive scale advertising, manipulation of online voting systems, access of private information, generation of hyperlinks in forums to improve their Web-sites’ search engine ranking, dictionary attacks of passwords, etc.

A “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” (CAPTCHA) is a widely used security mechanism to protect Web applications, interfaces, and services from such malicious software by verifying that the entity interacting with a system is actually a human being, and not a machine. A typical example of a CAPTCHA mechanism requires from a legitimate user to type letters or digits based on a distorted image that appears on the screen. Such a challenge is based on the assumption that a distorted text-based image can be easily recognized by the human brain but present significant difficulty for an optical character or image recognition system.

CAPTCHA challenges over the World Wide Web are performed primarily with the use of text-recognition CAPTCHA. The reCAPTCHA project, which is currently the most popular and widely used CAPTCHA online, estimates that over 200 million reCAPTCHAs are completed daily, and it takes an average of 10 seconds to complete one. In addition, major Web service providers such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and many others utilize text-recognition CAPTCHA to protect their premises against automated attacks.

Current text-based CAPTCHA implementations suffer from an important drawback; making the characters of the CAPTCHA hard to be recognized by computer systems, also increases the difficulty for humans, and thus decreases usability of interaction. The problem is further exacerbated by the improvement of current character recognition systems that are more capable of breaking CAPTCHA mechanisms, and as a consequence, the characters’ distortion and complexity is increased making it even more difficult to be recognized by humans.
Within this realm, given that individuals share different characteristics, needs and preferences, supporting usability of CAPTCHA systems via adaptation and personalization technologies may improve the system’s usability and user experience by providing users with adaptive and personalized CAPTCHA challenges according to their unique characteristics. Given that current text-based CAPTCHA implementations require from individuals to recognize specific characters among irrelevant, noisy information, and process this information on a cognitive level, we suggest that individual differences in cognitive processing should be taken into consideration in the design of current text-recognition CAPTCHA mechanisms.

To this end, the purpose of our research is to investigate the effect of specific individual characteristics of users, targeting cognitive processes (i.e., speed of processing, controlled attention and working memory capacity), toward efficiency and effectiveness of different variations of text-recognition CAPTCHA challenges in terms of complexity (i.e., low, medium and high level of complexity illustrating respectively, 5, 7 or 9 characters with increased character distortion and noise). We will report our results of a three-month user study that investigates the effect of individuals’ different cognitive processing abilities, targeting on speed of processing, controlled attention and working memory capacity toward efficiency and effectiveness with regard to different levels of complexity in text-recognition CAPTCHA tasks. A total of 107 users interacted with CAPTCHA challenges for a two month period indicating that the usability of CAPTCHA mechanisms may be supported by personalization techniques based on individual differences in cognitive processing.





Dr. Samaras is a Professor at the University of Cyprus at the Computer Science department. He received a PhD in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA, in 1989. He was previously at IBM Research Triangle Park, USA and taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (adjunct Assistant Professor, 1990-93). He served as the lead architect of IBM's distributed commit architecture (1990-94) and co-authored the final publication of the architecture (IBM Book, SC31-8134-00, September 1994). He also served on IBM's internal international standards committees for issues related to distributed transaction processing (OSI/TP, XOPEN, OMG). His research interest includes personalization and location-based management, collaborative infrastructures, mobile and pervasive computing, sensor networks, mobile and wireless models and interfaces, context based services, personalization for the wireless environment, transaction processing, commit protocols and resource recovery, Web computing and information retrieval.  He has been involved or is currently participating, as coordinator or partner, in more than 35 national and international (IST) funded projects. related to eLearning, eHealth, Ambient Assisted Living, mobile, pervasive and wireless computing. 

He has published more than 220 articles in conferences and journals and co-authored two books and a number of book chapters. His work on utilizing mobile agents for Web database access has received the best paper award of the 1999 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE99), the work on personalizing eLearning utilizing cognitive characteristics received the best student paper award at of the 5th International Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-based Systems (AH 2008) and recently the work on the usability of CAPTCHA mechanisms by personalization techniques on individual differences in cognitive processing received the best paper award of the 2013 SouthCHI International Conference on Human Factors in Computing & Informatics. He also has a number of patents relating to transaction processing technology. Dr. Samaras is on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Internet Technology and Secured Transactions and has served as guest editor for a number of journals and on program committees of most top conferences and workshops on Database and Mobile Computing. In 2005, he was the General Chair of the International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM). In 2007 he co-chaired the technical program of the ACM Workshop on Data Engineering for Mobile and Wireless Access (MobiDE) and in 2010 he was the General Chair of the 9th Hellenic Data Management Symposium (HDMS 2010). He is regularly (since December 1998) invited by the European Commission to serve as an external project evaluator and auditor for the ESPRIT and IST Program (FP5, FP6 and FP7) in areas related to internet, RFID and sensor networks, mobile and wireless computing, Grid computing and Internet of Things. At the European level he has reviewed and audited more than 120 multimillion-EURO proposals and projects.




When: Wednesday, December 11th, 2013 at 14:00-15:00
Where: Room CY108 (First floor), UCLan Cyprus, Pyla CY-7080

Friday, September 27, 2013

Mathematical Puzzles and Games - How to make mathematics attractive

The School of Sciences, UCLan Cyprus cordially invites you to a seminar titled:
Mathematical Puzzles and Games - How to make mathematics attractive
featuring a talk from a distinguished guest, Professor Mihalis Lambrou of the University of Crete.

In this talk, Professor Lambrou will refer to the need of enriching mathematics in school with interesting mathematical puzzles. He will also cover a few things from the history of recreational mathematics and deal with some interesting mathematical games.



Mihalis Lambrou is Professor of Analysis in the Department of Mathematics of the University of Crete. He studied mathematics at Imperial College, London obtained a B.Sc. with first class honours and an M.Sc. with distinction. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1977 from King’s College, London under the supervision of J. A. Erdos. His research interests are in the areas of functional analysis and the history of Greek mathematics. 

Professor Lambrou has also spent considerable time in popularizing mathematics and has been involved with the secondary education. This includes the writing, translation and editing of several books, the training of secondary school teachers, the involvement with mathematical Olympiads and the teaching of gifted young students, as well as the delivery of public lectures and the writing of popularised articles.




When: Wednesday, October 9th, 2013 at 9:00-10:00
Where: Room CY006 (Ground floor), UCLan Cyprus, Pyla CY-7080

Thursday, February 21, 2013

What makes your phone smart? Opportunities as seen by Cyprus-based start-ups

The School of Sciences, UCLan Cyprus and the Centre for Entrepreneurial Development and Research (CEDAR) invite you to a seminar titled:
“What makes your phone smart? Opportunities as seen by Cyprus-based start-ups”.
Did you know that shipments of smartphones have already surpassed those of desktop computers? Or that mobile Internet use is projected to overtake desktop Internet use as early as in 2014?


If you have ever wished you knew more about the technology that makes your phone smart, then join us for this seminar. It will showcase the experiences of three Cyprus-based - but internationally-focused - start-ups that build and market mobile applications and games:
The presentations will cover topics such as:
  • How small start-ups develop, launch and market mobile apps?
  • What are the opportunities and challenges in starting a high-tech business in Cyprus that focuses on smartphone app development?
When: Thursday, February 21st, 2013 at 15:00-16:30
Where: Room CY007 (Ground floor), UCLan Cyprus, Pyla CY-7080