Doha, January 06 (QNA) - Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) has been awarded a major research grant from Facebook for a new collaborative study examining digital privacy concerns in 21 Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries.

QCRI secured one of only five awards for their project titled "Privacy Personas in the MENA Region: A Large-Scale Analysis of 21 Countries" under Facebooks Peoples Expectations and Experiences with Digital Privacy research call. The project outcome will be data-driven online personas of user segments based on social media privacy concerns and attitudes.

The QCRI team responsible for developing the data-driven persona system and methodology known as Automatic Personal Generation (APG) will lead the collaborative research project.

Developed through extensive research over the past four years, APG is a robust tool for turning online data into personas. It currently pulls data from several online analytics platforms and tools (e.g., YouTube Analytics, Google Analytics, and Facebook Insights) to automatically generate user personas representing the most engaged user segments. The use of personas is well established in human-computer interaction (HCI) as a method for understanding user segments.

With APG, the QCRI team has demonstrated that the data from these online analytics platforms can be used to generate personas in real-time providing insights for decision-makers. Since the data provided by the platforms is at an aggregated group level, only non-personally identifiable information is used, protecting the privacy of individual users.

On this occasion, the principal scientist Dr. Jim Jansen said that they found, through APG, that the best use of personas in online analytics is combining numbers and human attributes to create dynamic, accurate, and constantly updated data-driven persona profiles. " when making and using user personas for security, it is best to ensure you are highly specific to different populations concerns. Therefore, we look forward to advancing this work and updating the persona creation concept through this cross-disciplinary collaborative effort with our esteemed research partners," he added.(QNA)