I'm Chief Regulatory Advisor at Jisc, responsible for keeping an eye out for places where our ideas, services and products might raise regulatory issues. My aim is to fix either the product or service, or the regulation, before there's a painful bump!
An interesting virtual water-cooler discussion with colleagues who are exploring the potential of AI as a Service. They tested a selection of easily available cloud face-processing systems on a recording of one of our internal Zoom meetings, and were startled by the results. Face identification wasn’t a surprise: everyone who has changed the background on […]
In the week that would have been their annual conference, EEMA have been hosting a series of fascinating online discussions among experts in the identity world. Today’s featured Steve Purser, Dave Birch and Kim Cameron in a deep discussion about whether we might have been looking at the wrong kind of “identity” all along… The […]
This morning’s Westminster e-Forum event on regulating Online Harms contained a particularly rich discussion of both the challenges and opportunities of using regulation to reduce the amount of harmful content we see on the Internet. The Government published a white paper in April 2019 and an initial response to comments in February 2020. A full […]
I was delighted to be invited to contribute an article to IDPro’s Body of Knowledge for professionals working in the field of digital identity. Mine is (of course) on how the GDPR applies to identity management. But as well as standards and regulation the collection is steadily expanding to cover things like privacy for consumers, […]
WONKHE has published my article on the need to be careful in introducing, and withdrawing, with any post-virus data processing (the absolute sub-head isn’t mine!) Maintaining trust in university data handling
As data protection regulators keep reminding us, the research and data protection communities mean different things when they talk about “consent”. A couple of recent conversations have made me wonder whether that terminology clash may have another effect: are those putting research into practice missing out on existing guidance that could help with that transition? […]
Tony Sheehan, of Gartner, observed in this morning’s EUNIS 2020 keynote that Higher Education has changed more in the past three months than in the whole of his previous career. Universities have delivered an “extraordinary achievement” in delivering learning continuity through various intensities of COVID-19 lockdown. Now we’re approaching a recovery stage when we can […]
A pair of interesting sessions at today’s EUNIS conference looked at how universities responded to the impact of COVID-19 lockdown on end of year assessment. An audience survey indicated that 60% have changed the form of their assessment, 15% cancelled exams, and 15% adopted some kind of remote proctoring system to allow for traditional-format exams […]
Alberto Cairo, Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the School of Communication of the University of Miami, gave a wonderful EUNIS 2020 keynote on Making Good Visualisation Decisions. His argument – Visualisation is like writing: there are basic (grammatical) rules, but also choices, and those should be reasoned. Bad decisions can cause real-world harm. Just […]
There seems to be a widespread perception that “AI is creepy”. But at the same time as reacting strongly against an app that would check social media posts for signs that we were struggling to cope, we don’t think twice about the grammar checker that continually reads everything we type. I wondered why and if […]