Title: Context-aware privacy and security agents for distance education

Authors: George Yee, Larry Korba, Nigel H. Lin, Timothy K. Shih

Addresses: National Research Council Canada, Institute for Information Technology, 1200 Montreal Road, Building M-50, Ottawa, ON K1A 0R6, Canada. ' National Research Council Canada, Institute for Information Technology, 1200 Montreal Road, Building M-50, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0R6 Canada. ' Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Tamkang University, Tamsui, Taipei Hsien, Taiwan 251, ROC. ' Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Tamkang University, Tamsui, Taipei Hsien, Taiwan 251, ROC

Abstract: Although distance education applications have been widely deployed, not many of them provide privacy and security for their users. Most of them only provide access control by requesting a user id and password. In a recent paper for AINA (Lin et al., 2004), we conveyed the importance of privacy and security for distance education and showed how they can be provided. In this paper, we present an extension of that work for the use of context-aware agents that can provide privacy and security for distance education applications in an intelligent manner based on the user|s interaction context. Our agents are based on an agent framework adapted from IEEE P1484.1/D9: the Learning Technology Systems Architecture (LTSA) (IEEE, 2004).

Keywords: agents; distance education; e-learning; privacy protection; security; online learning; access control; learning technology; agent-based systems; multi-agent systems; distance learning; authentication; copyright protection; exam protection.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPCN.2005.009427

International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, 2005 Vol.3 No.5/6, pp.395 - 404

Published online: 31 Mar 2006 *

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