On 8th June members of the Digital Police Officer (DPO) team made a trip to London to present a poster at Privacy and Trust in the Era of Big Data Analytics, an event organised by the Web Science Institute celebrating their first birthday. The event was hosted on the ninth floor of the Digital Catapult Centre, which provided stunning views of the skyline of the city of London. Despite the amazing views next to our poster (which you can view on our DPO Resources page), we still got lots of interest in our ongoing research. With interdisciplinary topics such as privacy, trust and security on the Web being the main focus of the day, DPO’s interdisciplinary focus also drew a lot of attention from visitors. We talked to people from academia, law enforcement and industry.
The event opened with a lively poster session in which we held our first wave of conversations. After that the afternoon’s panel sessions started with a fascinating discussion on digital privacy and security between Sir David Omand and Mr Philip Sheldrake, chaired by Dame Wendy Hall. As former head of GCHQ, Omand’s views clashed with technologist Sheldrake. Nonetheless, both Omand and Sheldrake presented compelling arguments for and against encryption. This was followed by equally lively panels on Private and Personal Data in the Age of the Web of Data (chaired by Sir Nigel Shadbolt with Gavin Starks, Liz Brandt and John Taysom as speakers), and Algorithms and Accountability (chaired by Professor Susan Halford with Dr Dan McQuillan, Dr Caroline Wilson and Dr Alison Powell as speakers). The final panel, chaired by Professor Les Carr, had three students from the University of Southampton Web Science Centre for Doctoral Training as speakers and focused on their current research on personal data.
Our conversations with interested people about DPO continued during the breaks in between and after the panel sessions. Overall, it was a very enjoyable day and moreover it very useful for the project as well. After the Second Southampton Cybercrime Symposium in March, this was the second event at which we presented a poster. Such events pose a useful avenue for us to show the impact of our research and to start discussions with external parties. We already look forward to the next such event, when we can present the progress we have already made since the 8th June!
