KirCCS Researchers win Best Paper Award at HICSS 2021 Conference

Professor Shujun Li and former Computing Research Associate Dr Tasmina Islam, both from the School of Computing and the Kent Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Cyber Security (KirCCS), have won a Best Paper Award at HICSS 2021 (54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences), for their joint work with five other researchers from the University College London (UCL), TRL Ltd and the University of Surrey.

As part of this award-winning work titled "Privacy in Transport? Exploring Perceptions of Location Privacy Through User Segmentation" (open access), Professor Li and his co-authors conducted the first representative survey on internet privacy concerns, cyber and physical risk taking, privacy victimisation, usage of location sharing apps and transport choices, with 466 UK participants. They found that the differences in risk perception and behaviours varied greatly between clusters of participants, suggesting that future transport systems, apps and websites that rely on location data need a more personalised approach to information provision surrounding location sharing. They posited that failing to recognise these differences could lead to reduced data sharing, riskier sharing behaviour or even total avoidance of new forms of technology in transport.

The research paper was part of the recently completed EPSRC-funded research project ACCEPT (Addressing Cybersecurity and Cybercrime via a co-Evolutionary aPproach to reducing human-relaTed risks), led by Professor Shujun Li. The project involved a group of researchers from five academic disciplines (Computer Science, Crime Science, Business, Engineering, Behavioural Science) and seven research organisations including six universities (University of Kent, University of Surrey, UCL, University of Warwick, University of Exeter, University of Birmingham) and TRL Ltd.

Professor Li said: "We are very pleased to have received this Best Paper Award for what we believe is a significant piece of research showing how important it is to consider personalised approaches to address privacy issues, in the context of geo-location sharing and other similar applications. The work will allow geo-location related services to consider how to serve their customers better by personalising their services based on each user's specific characteristics."

HICSS is considered a major top-tier conference in Information Systems, and it covers interdisciplinary topics in cyber security, privacy, and digital forensics. It was ranked as an A or A+ conference according to some conference rankings systems such as CORE 2018, GII-GRIN-SCIE (GGS), LiveSHINE and Qualis 2016. It is also ranked a Top 100 conference for all topics in computer science according to Microsoft Academic.

The full article is available to read here:
https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/71270/0523.pdf