Andrew Patrick

I gave a keynote talk this week at the ISSNet workshop on “Ecological validity in studies of security and human behaviour” Here is the Abstract…

It is becoming increasingly clear that studies of the effectiveness of information security solutions must take into account the human factor — the behaviour of the users of the systems. Conducting research on human behaviour is hard, however, and it is often difficult to witness authentic behaviour in a laboratory environment. Ecological validity refers to the extent to which the results of a test or experiment can be applied to the real-life of the people being studied. Using a series of case studies from research on security-related behaviours, Dr. Patrick will lead a discussion about the nature of validity in research, the issues surrounding ecological validity, and research techniques that can be used to increase the validity of security studies.

And here are the slides with notes PDF (5.7 MB).

I recently attended the Security & Human Behaviour Workshop in Boston. I made a brief presentation about usability and biometrics. Other presentations are about human decision making, trust, security interfaces, terror, crowd behaviour, etc. This was a great workshop that brought together some really interesting people.

Some blogs covering the conference are available:

Bruce Schneier
Ross Anderson
Adam Shostack

And audio recordings are also being provided by Matt Blaze. Audio of my presentation can be heard at the beginning of Session 3 (mp3).

One of the benefits of changing jobs and offices is digging through old files and messages. I still have warm memories of the work with did with CBC in the early 90’s creating the first on-line radio programs. This article describes some of that history, although there never was a thesis, just a research project.

CBC.ca – 10th Anniversary

Williamson told the group about an Ottawa scientist named Andrew Patrick, who was writing a thesis about audio on the internet. Patrick, who worked for the Communications Research Council, was a CBC listener and fan. He approached CBC about putting some CBC Radio programming online. It seemed like a natural pairing.