My main research interest is in Data Privacy - primarily from a consumer
perspective.
As the Infographic to the right shows, there is no universal - one size
fits all - view of privacy shared by all users.
I believe that online privacy is a pragmatic tradeoff between perceptions
of utility, risk and cost. Users are preapred to trade an acceptable amount
of risk in return for utility gained. So rather than adopting a traditional
minimal-disclosure approach, how can we enable the user to make informed, balanced
choices. I am interested in real and practical techniques the user to manage
their privacy risk - rather than a traditional hiding or anonymisation
approach. I'm currently looking at how users can actively detect, understand
and adapt their privacy utility-risk-cost balance as they interact with
systems. While it may seem like the commerical big guys hold all the cards,
the good news for the user is there are plenty of free, large-scale, online laboratories
where we can test ideas - online search and recommender systems.
This is a relatively new research area - investigating methods for privacy
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My main research interest is in Data Privacy - primarily from a consumer
perspective.
As the Infographic to the right shows, there is no universal - one size
fits all - view of privacy shared by all users.
I believe that online privacy is a pragmatic tradeoff between
perceptions of utility, risk and cost. Users are preapred to trade an
acceptable amount of risk in return for utility gained. So rather than
adopting a traditional minimal-disclosure approach, how can we enable the
user to make informed, balanced choices. I am interested in real and
practical techniques the user to manage their privacy risk - rather than a
traditional hiding or anonymisation approach. I'm currently looking at how
users can actively detect, understand and adapt their privacy
utility-risk-cost balance as they interact with systems. While it may seem
like the commerical big guys hold all the cards, the good news for the user
is there are plenty of free, large-scale, online laboratories where
we can test ideas - online search and recommender systems.
This is a relatively new research area - investigating methods for privacy
as a (user) service. We merge techniques from Data Mining, Machine
Learning, together with mathematical frameworks for privacy such as
Bayesian, Information Theoretic and Differential Privacy Models to give the
user more control of their privacy.
Applied Data Privacy is also a practical research topic for my work at
IBM. Complex and increasingly connected systems only increase the challenges
for data publishers. It's clear there is a need for new thinking and
technologies. I co-authored a high-level article a while back in the IBM
Journal of Research and Development called Privacy protection in open
information management platforms starting to think about some of the
challenges. It's something I'd like to explore further.
Infographic source:
www.thedrum.com.
Computer Science
I work at IBM Research's Dublin Laboratory where I lead research teams
applying semantics for large-scale cataloguing, processing and integration
of semi-structured data.
Team research interests span data management for semi-structured data,
parallel methods for data intensive processing, Semantic Web, Linked Data,
reasoning with Web data, flexible data integration methods, stream
processing, peer-to-peer and other distributed systems.
Our use cases are mostly drawn from urban systems and more recently from
person-centric care (Social care and Healthcare in particular). The team
has won second prize at the Semantic Web Challenge in 2012 and third prize
in 2013 for this work.
It's probably easiest to explain if you check out some of our projects on
the IBM Research site:
A big part of my IBM Research job team is participation in EU Research programs.
We have proposals underway in H2020 FET, ICT and Societal Challenge tracks.
We are partners in two FP7 projects at the moment:
I suggest installing the Mozilla add-on LightBeam and using it
to explore third party web tracking. It’s not something you want to keep
running constantly as it does sometimes slow down the browser for sites
with many third party cookies. But as a simple intereactive tool to inform
yourself it is an excellent start.
Me & My Shadow (myshadow.org) is an interesting list of
user privacy tools. A lot of design has gone into the site to make it
attractive and simple to navigate.
While you are on Me and My Shadow
you should check out Trackography.
It’s a great way to understand all that third party tracking that goes on.
Just follow the instructions. Again hats off to the team working on this as
they have clearly invested a lot of work in making a really usable and
interesting tool.