Michael Hitchens

• Professor (Associate) at Macquarie University

Macquarie University, in 2012, introduced two undergraduate coursework programs in the area of video games. These programs are a joint initiative of the Departments of Computing and Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies. The programs represent an innovative approach to curriculum structure in this area, combining technical, design and re...

Achieving secure cybersecurity systems requires a dual focus on technological aspects and human factors, both of which raise questions around ethical decision-making. While the objective is to ensure the comprehensive security of cybersecurity solutions, overlooking the ethical implications of decisions can lead to unexpected as well as unethical o...

With the improvement of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, services, and applications, there is a proliferation of access to smart devices in everyday life. However, granting access and controlling access rights for each resource is challenging in highly dynamic and large-scale IoT deployments. In particular, multiple access information may nee...

Purpose Cybersecurity vulnerabilities are often due to human users acting according to their own ethical priorities. With the goal of providing tailored training to cybersecurity professionals, the authors conducted a study to uncover profiles of human factors that influence which ethical principles are valued highest following exposure to ethical...

The use of parametric insurance is promising as its payouts can be directly tied to hazard indicators and thus provide a fast-tracked claim-to-payout process, which improves liquidity in times of disaster. In parametric insurance, policies are determined by a loss threshold (modelled or sustained) or physical hazard severity (e.g., rainfall or wind...

The Internet of Things (IoT) are becoming a prevalent part of our society offering operational flexibility and convenience. However, insecure provisioning makes the IoT devices susceptible to various cyberattacks. For instance, mal-provisioned devices may leak sensitive information allowing the attackers to eavesdrop or disrupt communication infras...

In recent years, the need for seamless connectivity has increased across various network platforms like IoT, with demands coming from industries, homes, mobile, transportation and office networks. The 5th generation (5G) network is being deployed to meet such demand for high-speed seamless network device connections. 5G is a high-speed network tech...

There has been considerable advancement in the use of blockchain for trust management in large-scale dynamic systems. In such systems, blockchain is mainly used to store the trust score or trust-related information of interactions among the various entities. However, present trust management architectures using blockchain lack verifiable interactio...

Serious moral games offer a tool for moral development that can help players translate ‘head knowledge’ of ethical principles into habits of everyday practice. In this paper, we present the design process behind one such game: Prescott & Krueger, a serious game for training information technology students in cybersecurity ethics. Our design draws o...

This paper will introduce the Exploitation Ecosystem (ExEc) model, which is based upon the foundational work of Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2006), Crane (2013), and Barrientos et al. (2013). The ExEc model organises and synthesizes research in slavery, exploitation, and precarious work into a more focused structure that can be applied to understa...

Future communication networks such as 5G are expected to support end-to-end delivery of services for several vertical markets with diverging requirements. Network slicing is a key construct that is used to provide end to end logical virtual networks running on a common virtualised infrastructure, which are mutually isolated. Having different networ...

Allocation of resources and their control over multiple organisations is challenging. This is especially true for a large-scale and dynamic system like the Internet of Things (IoT). One of the core issues in such a system is the provision of secure access control. In particular, transfer of access rights from one entity to another in a secure, flex...

There has been tremendous interest in the development of formal trust models and metrics through the use of analytics (e.g., Belief Theory and Bayesian models), logics (e.g., Epistemic and Subjective Logic) and other mathematical models. The choice of trust metric will depend on context, circumstance and user requirements and there is no single bes...

There has been tremendous interest in the development of formal trust models and metrics through the use of analytics (e.g., Belief Theory and Bayesian models), logics (e.g., Epistemic and Subjective Logic) and other mathematical models. The choice of trust metric will depend on context, circumstance and user requirements and there is no single bes...

Recent advances in wireless technologies have led to an increased deployment of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for a plethora of diverse surveillance applications such as health, military, and environmental. However, sensor nodes in WSNs usually suffer from short device lifetime due to severe energy constraints and therefore, cannot guarantee to m...

Research in cognitive science is rapidly increasing our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that give rise to our sense of being a unified conscious self and that allow us to interact in purposeful ways with the external environment. Laboratory research has shown that experimental manipulations involving computer-based tasks can alter aspects...

There has been a tremendous growth in the number of smart devices and their applications (e.g., smart sensors, wearable devices, smart phones, smart cars, etc.) in use in our everyday lives. This is accompanied by a new form of interconnection between the physical and digital worlds, commonly known as the Internet of Things (IoT). This is a paradig...

Node scheduling provides an effective way to prolong the network lifetime of Internet of Things (IoT) networks comprising of energy-constrained sensor nodes. Barrier scheduling is a special type of node scheduling scheme that targets IoT-based surveillance applications. An efficient barrier scheduling scheme must address the key Quality of Service...

Future communication networks such as 5G are expected to support end-to-end delivery of services for several vertical markets with diverging requirements. Network slicing is a key construct that is used to provide end to end logical virtual networks running on a common virtualised infrastructure, which are mutually isolated. Having different networ...

Our discussion overviews eSports’ connection to labour, work and the digital economy in an effort to situate and make contextual comment on those issues, finding that there is a particular concern in regard to the economic exploitation of fan-based digital labour, and specifically in relation to digital labour and streaming platforms. Our concern e...

There has been a tremendous growth in the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) in recent years. One important application area for the IoT is in the area of assistive technologies. Assistive technology can improve the functional capabilities of persons with disabilities by, for example, improved mobility and accessibility. IoT technologies, by virtu...

With the advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) in recent years, there is a tremendous potential to use online services than ever before. The use of the IoT brings numerous opportunities for both service providers and end users, however, it faces critical questions of security and privacy. Towards this, access control is one of the significant sec...

Research in cognitive science is rapidly increasing our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that give rise to our sense of being a unified conscious self, and that allow us to interact in purposeful ways with the external environment. Laboratory research has shown that experimental manipulations involving computer based tasks can alter aspect...

With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, devices are becoming more ubiquitous and openly accessible to the users. Commonly, IoT devices are constrained in nature (e.g. in memory, computational and battery capacity) and supposed to perform in constrained environment (e.g. restricted communication bandwidth). In these constraine...

The Internet of Things (IoT) presents new opportunities and challenges due to its scale and dynamic nature. One significant challenge for the IoT is the need for security, in particular access control solutions, that are designed to meet the characteristics of these systems. Delegation of rights, from one entity to another, is a crucial component o...

It is important that Software Engineering and Information Technology students learn techniques to conceive solutions that are centered on the users. Users are often from many different cultures; hence an awareness of cultural differences is an important concept for students to grasp. Particularly when class sizes are large, access to users that wou...

The Internet of Things (IoT), smart sensors and mobile wearable devices are helping to provide healthcare systems that are more ubiquitous, smarter, faster and easily accessible to users. However, security is a significant concern for the IoT, with access control being one of the major issues. With the growing size and presence of these systems an...

Persona, an archetypical user, has been widely used in the IT industry and has been studied by numerous researchers in academia, with the benefits flowing back to industry in the form of trained graduates and better tools. User Centered Design methodology places the end users at the center of design of an application. In this paper, we present a me...

Sensor networks are increasingly being used in the development and application of military surveillance systems. Small size battery-powered sensor devices are deployed in unattended and hostile environments, such as battlefields to detect any physical intrusion. Energy efficiency, coverage, and connectivity are the three major quality-of-service re...

As networks expand in size and complexity, they pose greater administrative and management challenges. Software Defined Networks (SDN) offer a promising approach to meeting some of these challenges. In this paper, we propose a policy driven security architecture for securing end to end services across multiple SDN domains. We develop a language bas...

Cybersecurity is a growing concern for organisations. Decision-making concerning responses to threats will involve making choices from a number of possible options. The choice made will often depend on the values held by the organisation and/or the individual/s making the decisions. To address the issue of how to capture ethical dilemmas and the va...

With the dramatic increase in social networking and online activities, security and privacy issues have become highly significant. At its base social networking relies on the ability of users to place information in a website and share that information with other users. In this paper we have investigated different types of metadata that are commonl...

As networks expand in size and complexity, they pose greater administrative and management challenges. Software Defined Networks (SDN) offer a promising approach to meeting some of these challenges. In this paper, we propose a policy driven security architecture for securing end to end services across multiple SDN domains. We develop a language bas...

There has been tremendous growth in the application of the Internet of Things (IoT) in our daily lives. Yet with this growth has come numerous security concerns and privacy challenges for both the users and the systems. Smart devices have many uses in a healthcare system, e.g. collecting and reporting patient data and controlling the administration...

This paper examines in-real-life (irl) sport and eSports in an attempt to clarify the definition of eSport. The notion of physicality and embodiment are central to the need for clarity in understanding of what eSports are and whether they are sport or some other activity. By examining existing definitions of eSport and irlSport we can identify the...

Multi-player online esports games are designed for extended durations of play, requiring substantial experience to master. Furthermore, esports game revenues are increasingly driven by in-game purchases. For esports companies, the trends in players leaving their games therefore not only provide information about potential problems in the user exper...

Purpose The research described here presents an approach to gamification for the classroom. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether students would perceive the gamification activities in a positive light. Previous research has contended that students need a positive mental attitude for effective learning. The core question was to examine...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is facilitating the development of novel and cost-effective applications that promise to deliver efficient and improved medical facilities to patients and health organisations. This includes the use of smart 'things' as medical sensors attached to patients to deliver real-time data. However, the security of patient data...

In this paper, we propose an access control architecture for IoT systems by developing a hybrid model with attributes, capabilities and role-based access control. We apply attributes for role-membership assignment and in permission evaluation, Membership of roles grants capabilities which are used to access specific services provided by things. Thi...

Persona, an archetypical user, is increasingly becoming a popular tool for Software Engineers to design and communicate with stakeholders. A persona is a representative of a class of end users of a product or service. However, the majority of personas presented in the literature do not take into consideration that the personality of users affects t...

Destiny is, to date, the most expensive digital game ever released with a total operating budget of over half a billion US dollars. It stands as one of the main examples of AAA titles, the term used for the largest and most heavily marketed game productions in the games industry. Destiny is a blend of a shooter game and massively multi-player onlin...

Software Defined Network(SDN) is a promising technological advancement in the networking world. It is still evolving and security is a major concern for SDN. In this paper we proposed policy based security architecture for securing the SDN domains. Our architecture enables the administrator to enforce different types of policies such as based on th...

Digital provenance, as an important type of cloud data, has aroused increasing attention on improving system performance. Currently, provenance have been employed to provide hints on access control and estimate data quality. However, provenance itself might also be sensitive information. Therefore, provenance might be encrypted to store on cloud. I...

In bio-security emergencies, such as an outbreak of an exotic animal disease, it is essential that the organizations involved in combating this outbreak collaborate effectively and efficiently. To achieve such a collaboration potentially confidential infrastructure and resources need to be shared amongst members of the participating organizations....

With the varied use of games, the need to measure player's involvement has become prominent. Several studies aimed to quantify users' involvement. However, none of these studies presented a robust framework to measure the player's involvement in games nor considered player types as a factor. In this paper, a framework to quantify automatically the...

Cloud systems provide significant benefits by allowing users to store massive amount of data on demand in a cost-effective manner. Role-based access control (RBAC) is a well-known access control model which can be used to protect the security of cloud data storage. Although cryptographic RBAC schemes have been developed recently to secure data outs...

As part of a larger project to develop a Mobile Based Information System (MBIS) to enhance livelihood activities of Sri Lankan farmers, we investigated how farmers access agricultural knowledge and apply the knowledge to do their tasks. As farmers found it difficult to access and find the required information among published knowledge currently ava...

The security of modern computer systems heavily depends on security tools, especially on antivirus software solutions. In the anti-malware research community, development of techniques for evading detection by antivirus software is an active research area. This has led to malware that can bypass or subvert antivirus software. The common strategies...

Due to the enormous growth in the amount of digital information that needs to be stored, outsourcing data to third-party storage service providers, such as cloud, have attracted much attention in recent times. This has raised significant security issues such as how to control access to outsourced data stored on third-party sites. There have been ma...

Although much has been written on peer review, most models fall short of a complete and practical guide for implementation. I begin by discussing some earlier proposals for implementation and highlighting how they fall short. I then suggest some goals and guiding principles for any successful model, such as the need for reflection, communication an...

In recent times, there has been an increasing development of storing data securely in the cloud. The Role-based access control (RBAC) model, a widely used access control model, can provide a flexible way for data owners to manage and share their data in the cloud environment. To enforce the access control policies in the cloud, several cryptographi...

Cloud data storage has provided significant benefits by allowing users to store massive amount of data on demand in a cost-effective manner. To protect the privacy of data stored in the cloud, cryptographic role-based access control (RBAC) schemes have been developed to ensure that the data can only be accessed by those who are allowed by access po...

With the rapid developments occurring in cloud computing and services, there has been a growing trend to use the cloud for large-scale data storage. This has raised the important security issue of how to control and prevent unauthorized access to data stored in the cloud. One well known access control model is the role-based access control (RBAC),...

It is well known that the development of a Shared Mental Model (SMM) leads to better teamwork performance. Communication of shared knowledge is considered a crucial factor in successful teamwork. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of applying a proposed Human-Agent Teamwork Communication Model, namely HAT-CoM, on the development of SMM between h...

World of Warcraft (WoW) represents a melting pot of popular culture myths, taking inspiration from a huge number of existing works and incorporating them together into its own vast lore. Amongst the many influences it draws upon are the works of H. P. Lovecraft, an influential horror writer. Lovecraft's writing encapsulated a particular pessimistic...

The first-person shooter (FPS), with its subjective view point and relentless action, gives its players an intense, often violent, virtual experience. There has been considerable debate about the effects of this mediated experience. Of particular concern is whether these games stage a propaganda campaign for the interests of governments and the mil...

Inherent in all forms of interactive storytelling is the problem of reconciling freedom of the user with requirements for pre-authored plot. In non-digital Role-Playing Games (RPGs), Game Masters (GMs) constantly encounter and solve this problem, facilitating collaborative, interactive storytelling in real-time. In this study, the various theories...

Time is a key concept in the design, playing and study of games and can be viewed from multiple perspectives, e.g. the player and the game world. Here a comprehensive, iteratively developed model of game time, based on empirical games research as well as recent theory, is presented. The model is tested in practice and its applicability across table...

There has been a recent trend in storing data in cloud due to the increasing amount of users' data and associated benefits such as on-demand access and scalability. Role-based access control (RBAC) provides a flexible way for data owners to manage and share their data in cloud. To enforce the access control policies in the cloud, cryptographic RBAC...

So far, the main focus of AI research around RTS games has been towards creating autonomous, virtual opponents to compete against human beings or other autonomous players. At the same time, popular commercial titles are increasing their emphasis on micro-management; neglecting development towards further autonomy. This paper proposes a simple react...

The player character is an important feature of many games, where it is through the character that the player interacts with game world. There has been considerable interest in the relationship between the player and the player character. Much of this work has examined the identification of players with their characters, generally taking either a t...

This paper is concerned with answering the following question: "Is Vladimir Propp's Model (31 Functions and 8 Broad Character Types) a valid model with which to analyse games from a variety of gaming genres?" More specifically what genres of games can be analysed by this model and in what terms? Can the model only be used to analyse the story arcs...

There has been an increasing trend towards outsourcing data to the cloud to cope with the massive increase in the amount of data. Hence trusted enforcement of access control policies on outsourced data in the cloud has become a significant issue. In this paper we address trusted administration and enforcement of role-based access control policies o...

The player character is an important feature of many games, where it is through the character that the player interacts with game world. There has been considerable interest in the relationship between the player and the player character. Much of this work has examined the identification of players with their characters, generally taking either a t...

There has been a recent trend in storing data in the cloud because of the significant benefits, such as on demand resources and low maintenance costs. However due to the distributed nature of the cloud, access control mechanisms need to be employed to protected the privacy of data stored in cloud. Role-based access control (RBAC) provides a flexibl...

In recent times, there has been increasing interest in storing data securely in the cloud environment. To provide owners of data stored in the cloud with flexible control over access to their data by other users, we propose a role-based encryption (RBE) scheme for secure cloud storage. Our scheme allows the owner of data to store it in an encrypted...

In this paper, we investigate the authorisation service provided by Microsoft® .NET MyServices [1]. We propose modifications and extensions to extensible Markup Language (XML) [2] based data structures' schemas to support a range of commonly used access policies in commercial systems. We have developed the modified access evaluation algorithms that...

Binary attestation in trusted computing platforms provide the ability to reason about the state of a system using hash measurements. Property based attestation on the other hand enables more meaningful attestation by abstracting low level binary values to high level security properties or functions of systems. In this paper, we try to understand th...

The First Person Shooter (FPS) is a popular game form, with examples appearing on many different platforms. Gameplay in the FPS is focused through the avatar, all the player's interaction with the world is mediated by the avatar. While there has been extensive study of the FPS genre, this has tended to focus on particular games, or at best a limite...

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are adaptive and self-organizing, and as a consequence, securing such networks is non-trivial. Most security schemes suggested for MANETs tend to build upon some fundamental assumptions regarding the trustworthiness of the participating hosts and the underlying networking system. If MANET is to achieve the same level...

Property based attestation is an extension of the proposed trusted computing attestation mechanism where binary measurements are abstracted to meaningful platform properties. In this paper, we propose ALOPA - Authorization Logic for Property Attestation, a logic based language for the specification and evaluation of authorization policies using pro...

Game time is a core feature of game design and study, and forms part of the gaming experience on a variety of levels. It can be viewed from multiple perspectives, for example, the time of the playing of the game or the flow of time in a game world. In this article, a comprehensive game time model based on empirical research as well as recent theory...

Trusted computing attestation mechanism relies on hash measurements to realize remote party attestation in distributed systems. Property based attestation enables more meaningful attestation by abstracting low level binary values to high level security properties or functions of systems. The contribution of this paper is two fold. In the first part...

Inherent in all forms of interactive storytelling is the problem of reconciling freedom of the user with requirements for pre-authored plot. In non-digital Role- Playing Games (RPGs), Game Masters (GMs) constantly encounter and solve this problem, facilitating collaborative, interactive storytelling in real-time. In this study, the various theories...

The role of story and narrative within games has been debated at length. By taking the approach that narrative can be understood with games, but only by incorporating the dynamics of game play and by accepting that existing models of narrative must be modified, this paper examines the place of narrative within role-playing games. Narrative can be d...