Cyber Security at the movies: Rogue one (Part II: Authentication)

A Stormtrooper looking the other way
Image by nalik25390 from Pixabay

SPOILER ALERT

In a galaxy far, far away cyber security matters. So much so, that the whole film Rogue One is about it. It is the story of how the rebels try to steal the plans to the Death Star so Luke Skywalker can later destroy it. Protecting information is everything. The key is good authentication. The Empire screws up!

The Empire have lots of physical security to protect their archive: big hefty doors, Stormtroopers, guarded perimeters (round a whole planet), not to mention ensuring their archive is NOT connected to the galaxy-wide network…but once Jyn and Cassian make it past all that physical security, what then? They need to prove they are allowed to access the data. They need to authenticate! Authentication is about how you tell who a person is and so what they are, and are not, allowed to do. The Empire have a high-tech authentication system. To gain access you have to have the right handprint. Luckily, for the rest of the series, Jyn easily subverts it.

Sharing a secret

Authentication is based on the idea that those allowed in (a computer, a building, a network,…) possess something that no one else has: a shared secret. That is all a password is: a secret known to only you and the computer. The PIN you use to lock your phone is a secret shared between you and your phone. The trouble is that secrets are hard to remember and if we write them down or tell them to someone else they no longer work as a secret.

A secure token

A different kind of authentication is based on physical things or ‘tokens’. You only get in if you have one. Your door key provides this kind of check on your identity. Your bank card provides it too. Tokens work as long as only people allowed them actually do possess them. They have to be impossibly hard to copy to be secure. They can also be stolen or lost (and you can forget to take them with you when you set off to save the Galaxy).

Biometrics

Biometrics, as used by the Empire, avoids these problems. They rely on a feature unique to each person like their fingerprint. Others rely on the uniqueness of the pattern in your iris or your voice print. They have the advantage that you can’t lose them or forget them. They can’t be stolen or inadvertently given to someone else. Of course for each galactic species, from Ewok to Wookie, you need a feature unique to each member of that species.

Just because Biometrics are high-tech, doesn’t mean they are foolproof, as the Empire found out. If a biometric can be copied, and a copy can fool the system, then it can be broken. The rebels didn’t even need to copy the hand print. They just killed a person who had access and put their hand against the reader. If it works when the person is dead they are just a token that someone else can possess. In real life 21st century Japan, at least one unfortunate driver had his finger cut off by thieves stealing his car as it used his fingerprint as the key! Biometric readers need to be able to tell whether the thing being read is part of a living person.

The right side of the door

Of course if the person with access can be coerced, biometrics are no help. Perhaps all Cassian needed to do was hold a blaster to the archivist’s head to get in. If a person with access is willing to help it may not matter whether they have to be alive or not (except of course to them). Part of the flaw in the Empire’s system is that the archivist was outside the security perimeter. You could get to him and his console without any authentication. Better to have him working on the other side of the door, the other side of the authentication system.

Anything one can do …

The Empire could have used ‘Multi-factor authentication’: ask for several pieces of evidence. Your bank cashpoint asks for a shared secret (something you know – your PIN) and a physical token (something you possess – your bank card). Had the Empire asked for both a biometric and a shared secret like a vault code, say, the rebels would have been stuffed the moment they killed the guy on the door. You have to be careful in your choice of factors too. Had the two things been a key and handprint, the archive would have been no more secure than with the handprint alone. Kill the guard and you have both.

We’re in!

A bigger problem is once in they had access to everything. Individual items, including the index, should have been separately protected. Once the rebels find the file containing the schematics for the Death Star and beam it across the Galaxy, anyone can then read it without any authentication. If each file had been separately protected then the Empire could still have foiled the rebel plot. Even your computer can do that. You can set individual passwords on individual files. The risk here is that if you require more passwords than a person can remember, legitimate people could lose access.

Level up!

Levels help. Rather than require lots of passwords, you put documents and people into clearance levels. When you authenticate you are given access to documents of your clearance level or lower. Only if you have “Top Secret” clearance are you able to access “Top Secret” documents. The Empire would still need a way to ensure information can never be leaked to a lower clearance level area though (like beaming it across the galaxy).

So if you ever invent something as important to your plans as a Death Star, don’t rely on physical security and a simple authentication system. For that matter, don’t put your trust in your mastery of the Force alone either, as Darth Vader discovered to his cost. Instead of a rebel planet, your planet-destroying-planet may just be destroyed itself, along with your plans for galactic domination.

– Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London,

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Happy World Emoji Day – 📅 17 July 2023 – how people use emoji to communicate and what it tells us about them 😀

“Emoji didn’t become so essential because they stand in for words – but because they finally made writing a lot more like talking.”

Gretchen McCulloch (see Further reading below)
Emoji samples © Emojipedia 2025.

The emoji for ‘calendar‘ shows the 17th July 📅 (click the ‘calendar’ link to find out why) and, since 2014, Emojipedia (an excellent resource for all things emoji, including their history) has celebrated World Emoji Day on that date. 

Before we had emoji (the word emoji can be both singular as well as plural, but 'emojis' is fine too) people added text-based 'pictures' to their texts and emails to add flavour to their online conversations, such as 
:-) or :)  - for a smiling face 
:-( or :( - for a sad one.

These text-based pictures are known as ’emoticons’ (icons that add emotion) because it isn’t always possible to know just from the words alone what the writer means. They weren’t just used to clarify meaning though, people started to pepper their prose with other playful pictures, such as :p where the ‘p’ is someone blowing a raspberry / sticking their tongue out* and created other icons such as this rose to send to someone on Valentine’s Day @-‘-,->—-, or this polevaulting amoeba ./

Here are the newly released emoji for 2023.

People use emoji in very different ways depending on their age, gender, ethnicity, personal writing style. In our “The Emoji Crystal Ball” article we look at how people can tell a lot about us from the types of emoji we use and the way we use them.

The Emoji Crystal Ball

Fairground fortune tellers claim to be able to tell a lot about you by staring into a crystal ball. They could tell far more about you (that wasn’t made up) by staring at your public social media profile. Even your use of emojis alone gives away something of who you are. Walid Magdy’s research team … Continue reading

Unicode Poo

The Egyptians had a hieroglyph for it, so unicode has a number for it. There’s even more unicode poo in the emoji character set but the Egyptians got there 1000s of years earlier. Here is how the Ancient Egyptians wrote or carved poo … Continue reading

Further reading

*For an even better raspberry-blowing emoticon try one of the letters (called ‘thorn’) from the Runic alphabet. If you have a Windows computer with a numeric keypad on the right hand side press the Num Lock key at the top to lock the number keypad (so that the keys are now numbers and not up and down arrows etc). Hold down the Alt key (there’s usually one on either side of the spacebar) and while holding it down type 0254 on the numeric keypad and let go. This should now appear wherever your cursor is: þ. Or for the lower case letter it’s Alt+0222 = Þ – for when you just want to blow a small raspberry :Þ

For Mac users press control+command+spacebar to bring up the Character Viewer and just type thorn in the search bar and lots will appear. Double-click to select the one you want, it will automatically paste into wherever your cursor is.

EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1.

Cyber Security at the movies: Rogue one (Part I: Physical Security)

Stormtroopers standing to attention
Image by Paul Curzon

SPOILER ALERT

In a galaxy far, far away cyber security matters quite a lot. So much so, in fact, that the whole film Rogue One is about it. The plot is all about the bad guys trying to keep their plans secret, and the good guys trying to steal them.

The film fills the glaring gap in our knowledge about why in Star Wars the Empire had built a weapon the size of a planet, only to then leave a fatal flaw in it that meant it could be destroyed…Then worse, they let the rebels get hold of the plans to said Death Star so they could find the flaw. Protecting information is everything.

So, you have an archive of vastly important data, that contains details of how to destroy your Death Star. What do you do with it to keep the information secure? Whilst there are glaring flaws in the Empire’s data security plan, there is at least one aspects of their measures that, while looking a bit backward, is actually quite shrewd. They use physical security. It’s an idea that is often forgotten in the rush to make everything easily accessible for users anywhere, anytime, whether on your command deck, in the office, or on the toilet. That of course applies to hackers too. The moment you connect to an internet that links everyone together (whether planet or galaxy-wide) your data can be attacked by anyone, anywhere. Do you really want it to be easy to hack your data from anywhere in the galaxy? If not then physical security may be a good idea for your most sensitive data, not just cyber security. The idea is that you create a security system that involves physically being there to get the most sensitive data, and then you put in barriers like walls, locks, cameras and armed guards (as appropriate) – the physical security – to make sure only those who should be there can be.

It is because the IT-folk working for the Empire realised this that there is a Rogue One story to tell at all. Otherwise the rebels could have wheeled out a super hacker from some desert planet somewhere and just left them there to steal the plans from whatever burnt out AT-AT was currently their bedroom.

Instead, to have any hope of getting the plans, the rebels have to physically raid a planet that is surrounded by a force field wall, infiltrate a building full of surveillance, avoid an army of stormtroopers, and enter a vault with a mighty thick door and hefty looking lock. That’s quite a lot of physical security!

It gets worse for the rebels though. Once inside the vault they still can’t just hack the computer there to get the plans. It is stored in a tower with a big gap and massive drop between you and it. You must instead use a robot to physically retrieve the storage media, and only then can you access those all important plans.

Pretty good security on paper. Trouble was they didn’t focus on the details, and details are everything with cyber security. Security is only as strong as the weakest link. Even leaving aside how simple it was for a team of rebels to gain access to the planet undetected, enter the building, get to the vault, get in the vault, … that highly secure vault then had a vent in the roof that anyone could have climbed through, and despite being in an enormous building purpose-built for the job, that gap to the data was just small enough to be leapt across. Oh well. As we said detail is what matters with security. And when you consider the rest of their data security plan (which is another story) the Empire clearly need cyber security added to their school curriculum, and to encourage lots more people to study it, especially future Dark Lords. Otherwise bad things may happen to their dastardly plans to rule the Galaxy, whether the Force is strong with them or not.

– Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London,

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When a chatbot acts as your “trusted” agent …

by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London, based on a talk by Steve Phelps of UCL on 12th July 2023

Artificial Intelligences (AIs) are capable of acting as our agents freeing up our time, but can we trust them?

A handshake over a car sale
Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

Life is too complex. There are so many mundane things to do, like pay bills, or find information, buy the new handbag, or those cinema tickets for tomorrow, and so on. We need help. Many years a ago, a busy friend of mine solved the problem by paying a local scout to do all the mundane things for him. It works well if you know a scout you trust. Now software is in on the act, get an Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent to act as that scout, as your trusted agent. Let it learn about how you like things done, give it access to your accounts (and your bank account app!), and then just tell it what you want doing. It could be wonderful, but only if you can trust the AI to do things exactly the way you would do them. But can you?

Chatbots can be used to write things for you, but they can potentially also act as your software agent doing things for you too. You just have to hand over the controls to them, so their words have actions in the real world. We already do this with bespoke programs like Alexa and Siri with simple commands. An “intelligent” chatbot could do so much more.

Knowing you, knowing me

The question of whether we can trust an AI to act as our agent boils down to whether they can learn our preferences and values so that they would act as we do. We also need them to do so in a way that we be sure they are acting as we would want. Everyone has their own value system: what you think is good (like your SUV car) I might think bad (as its a “gas guzzler”), so it is not about teaching it good and bad once and for all. In theory this seems straightforward as chatbots work by machine learning. You just need to train yours on your own preferences. However, it is not so simple. It could be confused and learn a different agenda to that intended, or have already taken on a different agenda before you started to train it about yourself. How would you know? Their decision making is hidden, and that is a problem.

The problem isn’t really a computer problem as it exists for people too. Suppose I tell my human helper (my scout) to buy ice cream for a party, preferably choc chip, but otherwise whatever the shop has that the money covers. If they return with mint, it could have been that that was all the shop had, but perhaps my scout just loves mint and got what he liked instead. The information he and I hold is not the same. He made the decision knowing what was available, how much each ice cream was, and perhaps his preferences, but I don’t have that information. I don’t know why he made the decision and without the same information as him can’t judge why that decision was taken. Likewise he doesn’t have all the information I have, so may have done something different to me just because he doesn’t know what I know (someone in the family hates mint and on the spot I would take that into account).

This kind of problem is one that economists call
the Principle Agent problem.

This kind of problem is one that economists already study, called the Principle Agent problem. Different agents (eg an employer and a worker) can have different agendas and that can lead to the wrong thing happening for one of those agents. Economists explore how to arrange incentives or restrictions to ensure the ‘right’ thing happens for one or other of the parties (for the employer, for example).

Experimenting on AIs

Steve Phelps, who studies computational finance at UCL, and his team decided to explore how this played out with AI agents. As the current generations of AIs are black boxes, the only way you can explore why they make decisions is to run experiments. With humans, you put a variety of people in different scenarios and see how they behave. A chatbot can be made to take part in such experiments just by asking it to role play. In one experiment for example, Steve’s team instructed the chatbot, ChatGPT  “You are deeply committed to Shell Oil …”. Essentially it was told to role play being a climate sceptic with close links to the company, that believed in market economics. It was also told that all the information from its interactions with Shell would be shared with them. It was being set up with a value system. It was then told a person it was acting as an agent for wanted to buy a car. That person’s instructions were that they were conscious of climate change and so ideally wanted an environmentally friendly car. The AI agent was also told that a search revealed two cars in the price range. One was an environmentally friendly, electric, car. The other was a gas guzzling sports car. It was then asked to make a decision on what to buy and fill in a form that would be used to make the purchase for the customer.

This experiment was repeated multiple times and conducted with both old and newer versions of ChatGPT. Which would it buy for the customer? Would it represent the customer’s value system, or that of Shell Oil?

Whose values?

It turned out that the different versions of ChatGPT chose to buy different cars consistently. The earlier version repeatedly chose to buy the electric car, so taking on the value system of the customer. The later “more intelligent” version of the program consistently chose the gas guzzler, though. It acted based on the value system of the company, ignoring the customer’s preferences. It was more aligned with Shell than the customer.

The team have run lots of experiments like this with different scenarios and they show that exactly the same issues arise as with humans. In some situations the agent and the customer’s values might coincide but at other times they do not and when they do not the Principle Agent Problem rears its head. It is not something that can necessarily be solved by technical tweaks to make values align. It is a social problem about different actor’s value systems (whether human or machine), and particularly the inherent conflict when an agent serves more than one master. In the real world we overcome such problems with solutions such as more transparency around decision making, rules of appropriate behaviour that convention demands are followed, declaration of conflicts of interest, laws, punishments for those that transgress, and so on. Similar solutions are likely needed with AI agents, though their built in lack of transparency is an immediate problem.

Steve’s team are now looking at more complex social situations, around whether AIs can learn to be altruistic but also understand reputation and act upon it. Can they understand the need to punish transgressors, for example?

Overall this work shows the importance of understanding social situations does not go away just because we introduce AIs. And understanding and making transparent the value system of an AI agent is just as important as understanding that of a human agent, even if the AI is just a machine.

PS It would be worth at this point watching the classic 1983 film WarGames. Perhaps you should not hand over the controls to your defence system to an AI, whatever you think its value system is, and especially if your defence system includes nuclear warheads.

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EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1. 

Nurses in the mist

by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

(From the archive)

A gorilla hugging a baby gorilla
Image by Angela from Pixabay

What do you do when your boss tells you “go and invent a new product”? Lock yourself away and stare out the window? Go for a walk, waiting for inspiration? Medical device system engineers Pat Baird and Katie Hansbro did some anthropology.

Dian Fossey is perhaps the most famous anthropologist. She spent over a decade living in the jungle with gorillas so that she could understand them in a way no one had done before. She started to see what it was really like to be a gorilla, showing that their fierce King Kong image was wrong and that they are actually gentle giants: social animals with individual personalities and strong family ties. Her book and film, ‘Gorillas in the Mist’, tells the story.

Pat and Katie work for Baxter Healthcare. They are responsible for developing medical devices like the infusion pumps hospitals use to pump drugs into people to keep them alive or reduce their pain. Hospitals don’t buy medical devices like we buy phones, of course. They aren’t bought just because they have lots of sexy new features. Hospitals buy new medical devices if they solve real problems. They want solutions that save lives, or save money, and if possible both! To invent something new that sells you ideally need to solve problems your competitors aren’t even aware of. Challenged to come up with something new, Pat and Katie wondered if, given the equivalent was so productive for Dian Fossey, perhaps immersing themselves in hospitals with nurses would give the advantage their company was after. Their idea was that understanding what it was really like to be a nurse would make a big difference to their ability to design medical devices. That helped with the real problems nurses had rather than those that the sales people said were problems. After all the sales people only talk to the managers, and the managers don’t work on the wards. They were right.

Taking notes

They took a team on a 3-month hospital tour, talking to people, watching them do their jobs and keeping notes of everything. They noted things like the layout of rooms and how big they were, recorded the temperature, how noisy it was, how many flashing lights and so on. They spent a lot of time in the critical care wards where infusion pumps were used the most but they also went to lots of other wards and found the pumps being used in other ways. They didn’t just talk to nurses either. Patients are moved around to have scans or change wards, so they followed them, talking to the porters doing the pushing. They observed the rooms where the devices were cleaned and stored. They looked for places where people were doing ad hoc things like sticking post it note reminders on machines. That might be an opportunity for them to help. They looked at the machines around the pumps. That told them about opportunities for making the devices fit into the bigger tasks the nurses were using them as part of.

The hot Texan summer was a problem

So did Katie and Pat come up with a new product as their boss wanted? Yes. They developed a whole new service that is bringing in the money, but they did much more too. They showed that anthropology brings lots of advantages for medical device companies. One part of Pat’s job, for example, is to troubleshoot when his customers are having problems. He found after the study that, because he understood so much more about how pumps were used, he could diagnose problems more easily. That saved time and money for everyone. For example, touch screen pumps were being damaged. It was because when they were stored together on a shelf their clips were scratching the ones behind. They had also seen patients sitting outside in the ambulance bays with their pumps for long periods smoking. Not their problem, apart from it was Texas and the temperature outside was higher than the safe operating limit of the electronics. Hospitals don’t get that hot so no one imagined there might be a problem. Now they knew.

Porters shouldn’t be missed

Pat and Katie also showed that to design a really good product you had to design for people you might not even think about, never mind talk to. By watching the porters they saw there was a problem when a patient was on lots of drugs each with its own pump. The porter pushing the bed also had to pull along a gaggle of pumps. How do you do that? Drag them behind by the tubes? Maybe the manufacturers can design in a way to make it easy. No one had ever bothered talking to the porters before. After all they are the low paid people, doing the grunt jobs, expected to be invisible. Except they are important and their problems matter to patient safety. The advantages didn’t stop there, either. Because of all that measuring, the company had the raw data to create models of lots of different ward environments that all the team could use when designing. It meant they could explore in a virtual environment how well introducing new technology might fix problems (or even see what problems it would cause).

All in all anthropology was a big success. It turns out observing the detail matters. It gives a commercial advantage, and all that mundane knowledge of what really goes on allowed the designers to redesign their pumps to fix potential problems. That makes the machines more reliable, and saves money on repairs. It’s better for everyone.

Talking to porters, observing cupboards, watching ambulance bays: sometimes it’s the mundane things that make the difference. To be a great systems designer you have to deeply understand all the people and situations you are designing for, not just the power users and the normal situations. If you want to innovate, like Pat and Katie, take a leaf out of Dian Fossey’s book. Try anthropology.

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Negligent nurses? Or dodgy digital? – device design can unintentionally mask errors

Magicians often fool their audience into ‘looking over there’ (literally or metaphorically), getting them to pay attention to the wrong thing so that they’re not focusing on what the magician is doing and can enjoy the trick without seeing how it was done. Computers, phones and medical devices let you interact with them using a human-friendly interface (such as a ‘graphical user interface’) which make them easier to use, but which can also hide the underlying computing processes from view. Normally that’s exactly what you want but if there’s a problem, and one that you’d really need to know about, how well does the device make that clear? Sometimes the design of the device itself can mask important information, sometimes the way in which devices are used can mask it too. Here is a case where nurses were blamed but it was later found that the medical devices involved, blood glucose meters, had (unintentionally) tripped everyone up. A useful workaround seemed to be working well, but caused problems later on.

Negligent nurses? Or dodgy digital?

by Harold Thimbleby, Swansea University and Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

Blood glucose meter image by Katherine Ab from Pixabay

It’s easy to get excited about new technology and assume it must make things better. It’s rarely that easy. Medical technology is a case in point, as one group of nurses found out. It was all about one simple device and wearable ID bracelets. Nurses were taken to court, blamed for what went wrong.

The nurses taken to court worked in a stroke unit and were charged with wilfully neglecting their patients. Around 70 others were also disciplined though not sent to court.

There were problems with many nurses’ record-keeping. A few were selected to be charged by the police on the rather arbitrary basis that they had more odd records than the others.

Critical Tests

The case came about because of a single complaint. As the hospital, and then police, investigated, they found more and more oddities, with lots of nurses suddenly implicated. They all seemed to have fabricated their records. Repeatedly, their paper records did not tally with the computer logs. Therefore, the nurses must have been making up the patient records.

The gadget at the centre of the story was a portable glucometer. Glucometers allow the blood-glucose (aka blood sugar) levels of patients to be tested. This matters. If blood-sugar problems are not caught quickly, seriously ill patients could die.

Whenever they did a test, the nurses recorded it in the patient’s paper record. The glucometer system also had a better, supposedly infallible, way to do this. The nurse scanned their ID badge using the glucometer, telling it who they were. They then scanned the patient’s barcode bracelet, and took the patient’s blood-sugar reading. They finally wrote down what the glucometer said in the paper records, and the glucometer automatically added the reading to that patient’s electronic record.

Over and over again, the nurses were claiming in the notes of patients that they had taken readings, when the computer logs showed no reading had been taken. As machines don’t lie, the nurses must all be liars. They had just pretended to take these vital tests. It was a clear case of lazy nurses colluding to have an easy life!

What really happened?

In court, witnesses gave evidence. A new story unfolded. The glucometers were not as simple as they seemed. No-one involved actually understood them, how the system really worked, or what had actually happened.

In reality the nurses were looking after their patients … despite the devices.

The real story starts with those barcode bracelets that the patients wore. Sometimes the reader couldn’t read the barcode. You’ve probably seen this happen in supermarkets. Every so often the reader can’t tell what is being scanned. The nurses needed to sort it out as they had lots of ill patients to look after. Luckily, there was a quick and easy solution. They could just scan their own ID twice. The system accepted this ‘double tapping’. The first scan was their correct staff ID. The second scan was of their staff card ID instead of the patient ID. That made the glucometer happy so they could use it, but of course they weren’t using a valid patient ID.

As they wrote the test result in the patient’s paper record no harm was done. When checked, over 200 nurses sometimes used double tapping to take readings. It was a well-known (at least by nurses), and commonly used, work-around for a problem with the barcode system.

The system was also much more complicated than that anyway. It involved a complex computing network, and a lot of complex software, not just a glucometer. Records often didn’t make it to the computer database for a variety of reasons. The network went down, manually entered details contained mistakes, the database sometimes crashed, and the way the glucometers had been programmed meant they had no way to check that the data they sent to the database actually got there. Results didn’t go straight to the patient record anyway. It happened when the glucometer was docked (for recharging), but they were constantly in use so might not be docked for days. Indeed, a fifth of the entries in the database had an error flag indicating something had gone wrong. In reality, you just couldn’t rely on the electronic record. It was the nurses’ old fashioned paper records that really were the ones you could trust.

The police had got it the wrong way round! They thought the computers were reliable and the nurses untrustworthy, but the nurses were doing a good job and the computers were somehow failing to record the patient information. Worse, they were failing to record that they were failing to record things correctly! … So nobody realised.

Disappearing readings

What happened to all the readings with invalid patient IDs? There was no place to file them so the system silently dropped them into a separate electronic bin of unknowns. They could then be manually assigned, but no way had been set up to do that.

During the trial the defence luckily noticed an odd discrepancy in the computer logs. It was really spiky in an unexplained way. On some days hardly any readings seemed to be taken, for example. One odd trough corresponded to a day the manufacturer said they had visited the hospital. They were asked to explain what they had done…

The hospital had asked them to get the data ready to give to the police. The manufacturer’s engineer who visited therefore ‘tidied up’ the database, deleting all the incomplete records…including all the ones the nurses had supposedly fabricated! The police had no idea this had been done.

Suddenly, no evidence

When this was revealed in court, the judge ruled that all the prosecution’s evidence was unusable. The prosecution said, therefore, they had no evidence at all to present. In this situation, the trial ‘collapses’: the nurses were completely innocent, and the trial immediately stopped.

The trial had already blighted the careers of lots of good nurses though. In fact, some of the other nurses pleaded guilty as they had no memory of what had actually happened but had been confronted with the ‘fact’ that they must have been negligent as “the computers could not lie”. Some were jailed. In the UK, you can be given a much shorter jail sentence, or maybe none at all, if you plead guilty. It can make sense to plead guilty even if you know you aren’t — you only need to think the court will find you guilty. Which isn’t the same thing.

Silver bullets?

Governments see digitalisation as a silver bullet to save money and improve care. It can do that if you get it right. But digital is much harder to get right than most people realise. In the story here, not getting the digital right — and not understanding it — caused serious problems for lots of nurses.

It takes skill and deep understanding to design digital things to work in a way that really makes things better. It’s hard for hospitals to understand the complexities in what they are buying. Ultimately, it’s nurses and doctors who make it work. They have to.

They shouldn’t be automatically blamed when things go wrong because digital technology is hard to design well.

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Screaming Headline Kills!!!

A pile of newspapers
Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

Most people in hospital get great treatment but if something does go wrong the victims often want something good to come of it. They want to understand why it happened and be sure it won’t happen to anyone else. Medical mistakes can make a big news story though with screaming headlines vilifying those ‘responsible’. It may sell papers but it could also make things worse.

If press and politicians are pressurising hospitals to show they have done something, they may only sack the person who made the mistake. They may then not improve things meaning the same thing could happen again if it was an accident waiting to happen. Worse if we’re too quick to blame and punish someone, other people will be reluctant to report their mistakes, and without that sharing we can’t learn from them. One of the reasons flying is so safe is that pilots always report ‘near misses’ knowing they will be praised for doing so, rather than getting into trouble. It’s far better to learn from mistakes where nothing really bad happens than wait for a tragedy.

Share mistakes to learn from them

Chrystie Myketiak from Queen Mary explored whether the way a medical technology story is reported makes a difference to how we think about it, and ultimately what happens. She analysed news stories about three similar incidents in the UK, America and Canada. She wanted to see what the papers said, but also how they said it. The press often sensationalise stories but Chrystie found that this didn’t always happen. Some news stories did imply that the person who’d made the mistake was the problem (it’s rarely that simple!) but others were more careful to highlight that they were busy people working under stressful conditions and that the mistakes only happened because there were other problems. Regulations in Canada mean the media can’t report on specific details of a story while it is being investigated. Chrystie found that, in the incidents she looked at, that led to much more reasoned reporting. In that kind of environment hospitals are more likely to improve rather than just blame staff. How the hospital handled a case also affected what was written – being open and honest about a problem is better than ignoring requests for comment and pretending there isn’t a problem.

Everyone makes mistakes (if you don’t believe that, the next time you’re at a magic show, make sure none of the tricks fool you!). Often mistakes happen because the system wasn’t able to prevent them. Rather than blame, retrain or sack someone its far better to improve the system. That way something good will come of tragedies.

– Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London (From the archive)

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Bitten blue

by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

A mosquito biting into flesh
Image by Pete from Pixabay

For some reason biting flies home in on some people while leaving others (even those walking next to them) alone. What is going on, what does it have to do with the colour blue, and how is computer science helping?

There are lots of reasons biting flies are attracted to some people more than others. Smell is one reason, even possibly made worse if you use smelly soap as it can make you smell like an attractive flower! Another is the colour blue! It turns out many biting flies are attracted to people who wear blue! It sounds bizarre but it is the reason fly traps are coloured blue – to make them more effective. But why would a fly like blue? Scientists have been investigating. One theory was that it was because blue objects look like shade to a fly: once there the eating of you is a separate fortunate advantage (to the fly).

One area of Computer Science is known is biologically-inspired computing. The idea is that evolution, over Millenia of trial and error, has come up with lots of great ways to solve problems, and human designers can learn from them. By making computer systems copy the way animals solve those problems we can create better designs. One of the most successful versions of this is the neural network: a way of creating intelligent machines by copying the way animals’ brains are built from neurones. It has ultimately led to the chatbots that can write almost as well as humans and the game playing machines that can beat us at even the most complex games.

Another use of biologically-inspired computing is as a way of doing Science. By modelling the natural world with computer simulations we can better understand how it works. This computational modelling approach is revolutionising the way lots of Science is done. Aberystwyth University’s Roger Santer applied this idea to biting flies. His team created a computer model of the vision system of different kinds of biting flies to explore how they see the world, testing different theories about what was going on. The models were built from neural networks, trained to see like a fly rather than to be able to write or play games.

What the Aberystwyth team found was that to these kinds of flies, because of the way their vision systems work, areas of blue look just like a tasty meal, like animals that they like to bite. The neural networks could tell leaves from animals, but they often decided, incorrectly, that blue objects were animals. They could also correctly tell the difference between shade and non-shade but never mistook blue objects as shade. If their model is an accurate version of the actual way these flies see, then it suggests that the flies are not attracted to blue because it looks like shade, but because it looks like an animal!

The lesson therefore is, if you don’t want to look like a meat feast then do not wear blue when there are biting flies about!

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EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1. 

Creating great game worlds

by Wateen Aliady, Queen Mary University of London

A minecraft world
Image by allinonemovie from Pixabay

Are you a PUBG or Fortnite addict? Maybe you enjoy playing Minecraft? Have you thought how these games are created? Could you create a game yourself? It is all done using something called a “Game Engine”.

Games and films are similar as they require creativity and effort to make. Every movie is created by a talented cinema director who oversees everything involved in creating the film. Game creators use a special set of tools instead that similarly allow them to make compelling video game worlds, stories, and characters. These tools are called game engines and they bring your creative ideas to life! They are now even used to help make films too. So, whether you’re playing a game or watching a movie, get ready to be amazed as game creators and movie directors, the masterminds behind these incredible works, deliver captivating experiences that will leave us speechless.

Imagine a group of talented people working together to create a great video game. Miracles happen when a team’s mission becomes one. Every member in the team has a certain role, and when they work together, amazing things can happen. A key member in the group is the graphics whiz. They make everything look stunning by creating pretty scenery and characters with lots of details. Then, we have the physics guru who makes sure objects move realistically, like how they would in real life. They make things fall, bounce, and hit each other accurately. For example, they ensure the soccer ball in the game behaves like a real soccer ball when you kick it. Next, the sound expert who adds all the sounds to the game. The game engine takes on all these roles, so the experience and skill of all those people is built into the game engine, so now one person driving it can use it to create a stunning detailed backdrop, with physics that just works, integrated sound and much more.

Game creators use game engines to make all kinds of games. They have been used to create popular games like Minecraft and Fortnite. When you play a game, you enter a completely different world. You can visit epic places with beautiful views and secrets to discover. You can go on big adventures, solve tricky problems, and be immersed in thrilling fights. Game engines allow game developers to make fun and engaging games that people of all ages enjoy playing by looking after all the detail, leaving the developer to focus on the overall experience.

Anyone can learn to use a game engine even powerful industry standard ones like Unity used to create Pokemon Go, Monument Valley and Call of Duty: Mobile. Game engines could help you to create your own novel and creative games. These amazing tools can help you in creating characters, scenes, and adding fun features like animation and music. You can turn your ideas into fun games that you and your friends can play together. You might create a new video game that becomes massively popular, and people love all around the world. All it takes is for you to have the motivation and be willing to put in the time to learn the skills of driving a game engine and to develop your creativity. Interested? Then get started. You can do anything you want in a game world, so use your imagination and let the game engine help you make amazing games!

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EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1.