Biblio

Conversational agents (CAs), often referred to as chatbots, are being widely deployed within existing commercial frameworks and online service websites. As society moves further into incorporating data rich systems, like the internet of things (IoT), into daily life, it is expected that conversational agents will take on an increasingly important role to help users manage these complex systems. In this, the concept of personality is becoming increasingly important, as we seek for more human-friendly ways to interact with these CAs. In this work a conceptual framework is proposed that considers how existing standard psychological and persona models could be mapped to different kinds of CA functionality outside of strictly dialogue. As CAs become more diverse in their abilities, and more integrated with different kinds of systems, it is important to consider how function can be impacted by the design of agent personality, whether intentionally designed or not. Based on this framework, derived archetype classes of CAs are presented as starting points that can hopefully aid designers, developers, and the curious, into thinking about how to work toward better CA personality development.

Increase in usage of electronic communication tools (email, IM, Skype, etc.) in enterprise environments has created new attack vectors for social engineers. Billions of people are now using electronic equipment in their everyday workflow which means billions of potential victims of Social Engineering (SE) attacks. Human is considered the weakest link in cybersecurity chain and breaking this defense is nowadays the most accessible route for malicious internal and external users. While several methods of protection have already been proposed and applied, none of these focuses on chat-based SE attacks while at the same time automation in the field is still missing. Social engineering is a complex phenomenon that requires interdisciplinary research combining technology, psychology, and linguistics. Attackers treat human personality traits as vulnerabilities and use the language as their weapon to deceive, persuade and finally manipulate the victims as they wish. Hence, a holistic approach is required to build a reliable SE attack recognition system. In this paper we present the current state-of-the-art on SE attack recognition systems, we dissect a SE attack to recognize the different stages, forms, and attributes and isolate the critical enablers that can influence a SE attack to work. Finally, we present our approach for an automated recognition system for chat-based SE attacks that is based on Personality Recognition, Influence Recognition, Deception Recognition, Speech Act and Chat History.

Research into the darker traits of human nature is growing in interest especially in the context of increased social media usage. This allows users to express themselves to a wider online audience. We study the extent to which the standard model of dark personality – the dark triad – consisting of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism, is related to observable Twitter behavior such as platform usage, posted text and profile image choice. Our results show that we can map various behaviors to psychological theory and study new aspects related to social media usage. Finally, we build a machine learning algorithm that predicts the dark triad of personality in out-of-sample users with reliable accuracy.

Embodied conversational agents are changing the way humans interact with technology. In order to develop humanlike ECAs they need to be able to perform natural gestures that are used in day-to-day conversation. Gestures can give insight into an ECAs personality trait of extraversion, but what factors into it is still being explored. Our study focuses on two aspects of gesture: amplitude and frequency. Our goal is to find out whether agents should use specific gestures more frequently than others depending on the personality type they have been designed with. We also look to quantify gesture amplitude and compare it to a previous study on the perception of an agent's naturalness of its gestures. Our results showed some indication that introverts and extraverts judge the agent's naturalness similarly. The larger the amplitude our agent used, the more natural its gestures were perceived. The frequency of gestures between extraverts and introverts seem to contain hardly any difference, even in terms of types of gesture used.

Insider threats remain a significant problem within organizations, especially as industries that rely on technology continue to grow. Traditionally, research has been focused on the malicious insider; someone that intentionally seeks to perform a malicious act against the organization that trusts him or her. While this research is important, more commonly organizations are the victims of non-malicious insiders. These are trusted employees that are not seeking to cause harm to their employer; rather, they misuse systems-either intentional or unintentionally-that results in some harm to the organization. In this paper, we look at both by developing and validating instruments to measure the behavior and circumstances of a malicious insider versus a non-malicious insider. We found that in many respects their psychological profiles are very similar. The results are also consistent with other research on the malicious insider from a personality standpoint. We expand this and also find that trait negative affect, both its higher order dimension and the lower order dimensions, are highly correlated with insider threat behavior and circumstances. This paper makes four significant contributions: 1) Development and validation of survey instruments designed to measure the insider threat; 2) Comparison of the malicious insider with the non-malicious insider; 3) Inclusion of trait affect as part of the psychological profile of an insider; 4) Inclusion of a measure for financial well-being, and 5) The successful use of survey research to examine the insider threat problem.

There are many techniques to improve software quality. One is using automatic static analysis tools. We have observed, however, that despite the low-cost help they offer, these tools are underused and often discourage beginners. There is evidence that personality traits influence the perceived usability of a software. Thus, to support beginners better, we need to understand how the workflow of people with different prevalent personality traits using these tools varies. For this purpose, we observed users' solution strategies and correlated them with their prevalent personality traits in an exploratory study with student participants within a controlled experiment. We gathered data by screen capturing and chat protocols as well as a Big Five personality traits test. We found strong correlations between particular personality traits and different strategies of removing the findings of static code analysis as well as between personality and tool utilization. Based on that, we offer take-away improvement suggestions. Our results imply that developers should be aware of these solution strategies and use this information to build tools that are more appealing to people with different prevalent personality traits.