The Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2019 (HICSS) took place form January 8-11, 2019 in Grand Wailea on the island of Maui. HICSS is a multidisciplinary conference that covers a wide array of topics including software engineering, social media, IT in healthcare, electrical energy systems, and more. This year was the 52nd proceedings of HICSS and featured keynote speakers Dr. Todd Coleman from UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and Dr. Ramesh Gopinath Vice President of IBM Blockchain Solutions.

Jacob Abbott, one of IU’s Center on Security & Privacy in Informatics, Computing, and Engineering (SPICE) PhD students, attended HICSS for the first time this presented research from a global interdisciplinary pilot on phishing,  with L. Jean Camp, Marthie Grobler, Julian Jang-Jaccard, Christian Probst, Karen Renaud, and Paul Watters. Slides are available.

I was honored to be asked by Dr. Camp to present the paper at HICSS. Their paper discussed the need for an international collaboration in cyber security and presented a model for research that was created by authors from the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom that worked together collaboratively from a number of different institutions.

Researchers from Indiana University in the United States, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia, Massey University in New Zealand, Abertay University in the United Kingdom, and La Trobe University in Australia collaborated on the paper “Conceptualizing Human Resilience in the Face of the Global Epidemiology of Cyber Attacks.” The research looked at taking a health model approach to investigating risks and building a consistent model for other researchers to utilize in regards identifying risks and ways of mitigating cyber attacks as cybersecurity tends to be a global issue, so looking at just a single area may not give a holistic picture of the entire environment.

HICSS is four days filled with talks, discussions, keynotes, symposiums, workshops, and tutorials pertaining to Security, IT in Healthcare, and Sustainability covering a wide array of topics from multiple angles. As Jacob explained,

I attended one of the sessions and in the three presentations there were authors from physics, computer science, and social sciences all in one session. HICSS has had the widest array of presenter backgrounds that I have seen from conferences I’ve attended. It was great to hear from so many people about their work and interests during the breaks and bounce ideas off one another from discussions.