Participatory Security: Self-protecting Communities On the fly

Topic Description

 People’s increasing connectivity -through social media- paves the way for empowering citizens who now engage in neighbourhood-scale human collaborations, possibly supported by the city government as participatory budgeting campaigns illustrate.

Participatory security aims to develop an approach and semi-automated tools to enable communities to self-protect on the fly. On the fly means: live and on the move, within the relevant spatial context, and in unexpected/unplanned situations

A key novelty of the approach is that it exploits the structure of the communities, the capabilities of the devices, the topology of the environment together with the collective intelligence of the community. This approach ultimately aims to enable the automated and adaptive composition of communities’ capabilities to protect the relevant assets from harm.

In this context, the levels of dynamism required to address the security problem spans from the changing functional needs of the citizens, of the changing threats to their assets, and the changing relationships between them. Hence, collaboration between citizens is no longer some centralised service but is distributed, opportunistic, and can take place also at the edge.

In addition, participatory security aims to deliver adaptive software capabilities for supporting citizens in managing their privacy requirements, and adaptive software capabilities to deliver secure socio-technical environments that underpin those requirements. At the core of this approach will be the development of representations of security and privacy problem structures that capture citizens requirements, the context in which those requirements arise, and the adaptive software that aims to meet those requirements.

Several scenarios can be envisioned to develop this research, from identifying malicious agents during demonstrations, while preserving privacy and anonymity, to online engagement with live protests, to human agents assisting in neighbourhood watch.

Skills Required:

• Background in software development
• Background in distributed system
• An interest in the human aspects of computing and automation
• A drive to develop technology mediated social impact

Background Reading:

S. Dustdar, O. Scekic. On Managing the Social Components in a Smart City. Vision Track. ICDCS’2018.

C. Parra, C. Rohaut, M. Maeckelbergh, V. Issarny, J. Holston. Expanding the Design Space of ICT for Participatory Budgeting. International Conference on Communities and Technologies 2017, June 2017.

Bennaceur, A., & Issarny, V. (2015). Automated synthesis of mediators to support component interoperability. Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, 41(3), 221-240.

A. Bennaceur, T. Tun, A. Bandara, Y. Yu, and B. Nuseibeh, Feature-driven Mediator Synthesis: Supporting Collaborative Security in the Internet of Things. ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, 2017.

A. Bennaceur, C. McCormick, J. García-Galán, C. Perera, A. Smith, A. Zisman, and B. Nuseibeh: Feed me, feed me: an exemplar for engineering adaptive software. In Proc. of the 11th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems, SEAMS: 89-95, 2016

Schuler, D., De Liddo, A., Smith, J. et al. 2018. Collective intelligence for the common good: cultivating the seeds for an intentional collaborative enterprise. AI & Soc Journal, Springer (2018) 33: 1. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-017-0776-6

De Liddo, A., 2017. Making Decision in Open Communities: Collective Actions in the Public Realm. Group Decision and Negotiation Journal, Springer, 26(5), pp.847-856.

De Liddo, A., Sándor, Á. and Shum, S.B., 2012. Contested collective intelligence: Rationale, technologies, and a human-machine annotation study. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) Journal, 21(4-5), pp.417-448.