Marcie's stuff

Greetings to you, and thanks for dropping by Marcia Gibson's home page!

About me

Me in my graduation outfitI am a PhD student at the University of Bedfordshire in the UK. My research focuses on designing and evaluating an accessible, usable and secure authentication system. The principal aim is to enhance the prospect of digital inclusion for members of society who find using established techniques difficult due to economic, physical or cognitive impairments. I am currently experimenting with the use of music as a possible solution to some of the challenges these people face.

I'm also a student member of the British Computer Society and an advocate of the Race Online 2012 initiative (you can also check out my pledge page to learn more).

Areas of interest

Usable security, authentication, HCI, learning and memory, accessibility, Internet and e-society

Contact

marcia DOT gibson AT beds DOT ac DOT uk

Peer reviewed publications (as of, June 2010)

Marcia Gibson, Marc Conrad, Carsten Maple (2010) 'Infinite Alphabet Passwords: A Unified Model for a Class of Authentication Systems', (Poster and paper). Procs. International Conference on Security and Cryptography SECRYPT 2010 (26-28 July, Athens, Greece). (To appear)

Marcia Gibson, Marc Conrad, Carsten Maple, Karen Renaud, (2010) 'Accessible and Secure? Design Constraints on Image and Sound Based Passwords', Procs. International Conference on Information Society i-Society 2010. (June 28-30 2010, London, UK) (preprint)

Marcia Gibson, Karen Renaud, Marc Conrad, Carsten Maple, (2009) 'Musipass: Authenticating me softly with "my" song', Procs. 16th New Security Paradigms Workshop NSPW09 (8-11 Sept 2009 in Oxford, UK), pp. 85-100, ACM, New York, USA. 978-1-60558-845-2. (link)

Marc Conrad, Tim French, Marcia Gibson, (2006) 'A Pragmatic and Musically Pleasing Production System for Sonic Events', Procs. 10th IEEE International Conference on Information Visualisation IV06 (5-7 July 2006 in London, UK), pp. 630-635, IEEE Publications 0-7695-2602-0. (preprint).

Other presented work

Poster: 'Musipass authenticating me softly with "my" song', Presented at SICSA Socio Technical Systems Meeting (Sociotechnical issues in Security), 20th April 2010, Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, UK ( view)

Seminar talk: 'Infinite Alphabet Authentication Systems', Presented to Software engineering and Technology interest group, University of Glasgow, UK, 29th Oct 2007 (slides)

Education

  • 2002-2005, BSc (Hons), Computer Science, Class: 1 (Final year project: Comparing the Usability and Security of Interfaces for Image-based Passwords)
  • 2006-2007, MRes (Master of Research): "Infinite Alphabet Passwords: The way forward for user authentication?", supervisor: Dr. Marc Conrad
  • 2008-2011, PhD: "Opening the web for all: Designing authentication for accessibility", supervisors: Dr. Marc Conrad, Prof. Carsten Maple and Dr. Tim French

Other certificates

  • Nov 2007: Ethical Hacking and Countermeasures (CEHv5)

Demonstrating and lecturing

Demonstrating (2005-2009):
Introduction to Object Oriented programming, Systems Architecture, Concepts of AI, Secure data communications, Distributed software technologies, Internet programming, Personal professional and academic development, Database development, Creating and Communicating solutions, Operating Systems.

Lecturing (2007-2009):
Multimedia, Project management, Internet programming, Multimedia applications

Technologies and skills

  • Wide experience: (X)HTML, XML, CSS, Fireworks, Flash, Actionscript 2.0, Actionscript 3.0, PHP, MySQL, WCAG
  • Languages I used to be very good at, but that I haven't used for ages: Javascript, C#, Java
  • Limited experience: C++, Prolog, XML-RPC, CORBA, Java RMI, Visual Basic, Oracle

Work examples:

  • This website!
  • Mar 2009: STARS, www.starsprocess.ac.uk Online tool to enable HE students to articulate skills
  • May 2008: University of Bedfordshire, www.beds.ac.uk Accessibility audit and usability testing
  • Feb 2008: Jarrette the Jewellers, www.jarrette.co.uk e-commerce web site

Hobbies and pastimes

Creating and using made up words, purposeful malaproprisms and mispronunciations for descriptive or comic effect, growing vegetables and gardening in general, quirky films - for example, Me and you and everyone we know, Wristcutters: A love story and Eagle Vs. Shark, my doglets (small dogs), making my house look pretty, reading SF, visiting places of natural beauty, computer games (mainly girly ones with themes such as, tactical warfare with imaginary creatures/tactical warfare with seedlings/magic/extreme cuteness/puzzling/zombies/zombies and plants and sometimes, eggs, chickens and time travel)

Other stuff I like

Ph.D Blues Turing apology Brass eye Box diving cat Ninja cat! Very eccentric and strange rock band Cool beatboxers