Categories
Articles

Adaptability, Openness and Curiosity

If Education 4.0 is about preparing students for the workplace of the future, that’s going to be a dynamically changing workplace. Even in my working life I’ve gone from VT100s to laptops and video-conferences. The mobile phone in my pocket is much more powerful than the first university mainframe I encountered. To send a single […]

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Articles

Student-led smart cities

A fascinating Digifest talk by Westminster City Council suggested that students may have a key role in ensuring that smart city and intelligent campus projects deliver real benefits. Westminster have a partnership with two of their local universities – KCL and UCL – that gives Masters students access to the council’s extensive datasets about use […]

Categories
Presentations

Thinking about data?

The question mark in the title of my Digifest talk is the key point, because I wonder whether data is the wrong place to start. In our current digital landscape, we’re all too used to hearing ourselves described as “silkworms”, donating “new oil” to “surveillance capitalists”; even the term “data subject” has a dehumanising feel. […]

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Closed Consultations

Consultation: Assessing the impact of (re-)using campus data

Our university and college buildings already contain a surprising number of sensors that could collect information about those who occupy them. At a recent event I spotted at least half a dozen different systems in a normal lecture room, including motion detectors, swipe card readers, wireless access points, the camera and microphone being used to […]

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Articles

ePrivacy Regulation: more support for information sharing

The latest text in the long-running saga of the draft ePrivacy Regulation contains further reassuring indicators for incident response teams that want to share data to help others. Article 6(1)(b) allows network providers to process electronic communications data (a term that includes both metadata and content) where this is necessary “necessary to maintain or restore […]

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Publications

Digital Threats: Research and Practice

Having acted as programme chair for the FIRST Security and Incident response conference last year, I also got to co-edit the special conference issue of the ACM journal Digital Threats: Research and Practice (DTRAP). FIRST sponsored the journal, so our issue is open access, available for anyone to read. Topics covered: Using power consumption to […]