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Thoughts on regulatory and ethical issues relating to the use of technology in education and research
One promising application of Machine Learning in education is marking support. Colleagues in Jisc’s National Centre for AI have identified several products that implement a similar process, where a program “watches” a human marking assessments, learns in real time, and suggests how the quality and consistency of marking can be maintained or even improved. This […]
The recent increased awareness of federated social networks has produced some discussion about their status under new “platform regulation” laws, such as the UK Online Safety Bill. Most of this has focussed on whether federated instances might be covered by legislation and, if so, what their operators’ responsibilities are. But this post uses them as […]
European Data Protection Regulators have been expressing their concerns for nearly twenty years about public records of domain name ownership (commonly referred to as WHOIS data). A recent case (C37-20) on public records of company ownership (required under money-laundering legislation) suggests that the European Court of Justice would have similar doubts. But its comments on […]
Discussions of student wellbeing tend to focus on providing individual support for those who are struggling to cope. That’s great, but likely to demand a lot of skilled staff time. A few years ago Bangor University investigated whether the university might be contributing to stress through excessive or spiky workloads. Addressing causes of stress would, […]
I’ve read two documents this week – one academic paper and one guide from the Information Commissioner – pointing out that just because someone chooses to participate in an activity doesn’t mean that Consent is the appropriate legal basis for processing their personal data. There might be several reasons for that… First, if the nature […]
One of the major causes of disruption on the Internet is Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Unlike “hacking”, these don’t require there to be any security weakness in the target system: they simply aim to overload it with more traffic than it (or its network connection) can handle. Often such attacks are launched from […]
The Proposal for a Regulation on Cybersecurity Requirements, recently published by the European Commission, significantly raises the profile of software vulnerabilities and processes for dealing with them after a product is delivered. The Regulation on Digital Resilience in the Financial Sector (DORA), proposed in 2020 and likely to become law shortly, does require organisations to […]
The latest draft part of the ICOs guidance on data protection technologies covers Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). This is a useful return to a topic covered in a very early factsheet, informed both by technical developments and a better understanding of how technologies can (and cannot) contribute to data protection. Perhaps the most important message […]
Display Names are often how we are represented online. Michael might choose to appear as “MusicFan”, “Mikey”, “Florence” or “Andrew”. Does that establish a good tone for discussion? Or does it risk misleading readers, perhaps making them act on the basis of a mistaken identity? Platforms that use display names can and, I think, should […]
Sophos have recently released a tool that uses Machine Learning to propose simple rules that can be used to identify malware. The output from YaraML has many potential uses, but here I’m considering it as an example of how automation might help end devices identify hostile files in storage (a use-case described by Sophos) and […]