Reclaim Our Big Data

To Care or Not To Care?

OUR EVENT WILL BE HAPPENING, DESPITE THE TUBE STRIKE! SEE YOU THERE.

The London Overground is working (and buses). Nearest Overground is Shoreditch High St station (5 min walk).

LIVE WEBCAST FROM 7PM BST: http://www.cybersalon.org/bigdata

GET YOUR EVENT TICKETS HERE (http://cybersalonbigdata.eventbrite.co.uk/): £8 /£5 (students)

(University of Middlesex and Westminster students free)

Big Data emerged from scientific projects that needed to host a rather large amount of data. The Hadron Collider, large astronomy or geology projects routinely handle terabytes or even petabytes of data without breaking a sweat. However, recently Big Data, made famous by Google's Flu Trends, has spread like a dangerous Ebola virus beyond basic science and is poking its omnipresent analytical big eye into everyone’s online life.

Our 'found data'- such as medical and commuter data- is turning ad agency Mad Men into Math Men. The glamour of Big Data is becoming very tempting for governments who are increasingly building up their technological armoury to handle giant sets of data like those used in online surveillance.

With increased knowledge and ability to suck out the Big Data from us all, who is to win and who is to lose in the new cyber-battleground? Where are we on statistical knowledge of the pitfalls of Big Data as the threat of The End of Causation is looming on the horizon?

With Big Data, as with any other data technologies, the power will be on the side that gathers the data, not the side that provides it.

At Cybersalon our four experts will examine the new risks of the Big Data phenomenon, the impact on our daily lives, as well as look at the opportunities for new tools as we get a better handle on this potentially exciting new industry.

In order to solve medical or mega-city living challenges, we will all should be benefit from Big Data. But considering this will be a commercial process, how can we make sure the data we produce, we own and benefit from the upside as a collective as well as an individual.

Speakers

Kenneth Cukier - The Algorithm Will Get You

Kenneth Cukier (http://www.economist.com/mediadirectory/kenneth-cukier) is the Data Editor for The Economist, following a decade at the paper covering business and technology, and as a foreign correspondent (most recently in Japan from 2007-12). Previously he was the technology editor of the Wall Street Journal Asia in Hong Kong and worked at the International Herald Tribune in Paris. From 2002-2004 he was a research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He is the co- author of "Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Work, Live and Think" (2013).

He looks at Big Data as it raises a host of worries for which society is unprepared. What does it mean if big data denies us a bank loan or considers us unfit for a surgical operation, but we can’t learn the explicit reasons because the variables that went in were so myriad and complex? How do you regulate an algorithm? How do you regulate an algorithm that only a tiny handful of people on the planet understand?

Smári McCarthy- Privacy, Security and Mailpile

Smári (http://smarimccarthy.is/) is the director of the International Modern Media Institute (https://immi.is/), a skilled programmer and a prominent member of the Icelandic Pirate Party. He is also a sought after speaker who travels to far away lands, teaching journalists and activists how to communicate securely on-line. He has developed Mailpile (https://www.mailpile.is/)- an encrypted web mail client.

Alan Patrick -The Myth of Anonymisation

Alan Patrick (http://www.broadstuff.com/archives/2807-Open-Data,-Hedge-Funds-and-%20value-leakage.html) co founded Broadsight after a career both consulting to, and working at, senior level for leading global multimedia companies such as the BBC, British Telecom (OpenWorld and Ignite), AOL Time Warner, ntl and UPC. He was Managing Director and COO at Jacobs Rimell, who specialise in multi-media OSS systems. He also held positions as VP Corporate Development for Globix Corporation in New York, Head of Internet Business Development at British Telecom, and consulted widely on multimedia to a number of major TV and cable companies in his consulting career at McKinsey and PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Big Data is not about big data, which we have always had, but about cheap storage and computational power. Big Data is really Big Computation and Storage. What is possible now that was not possible before Big Data? Current use of Open Data and Big Computing to drive products for commercial purposes, utilising triangulation of Open Data and other freely available data leads to risk of de-anonymisation, which were not so apparent in the small data period. Can privacy be “baked-in” as in Jeff Jonas project at IBM – creating a system (G2) that has privacy "baked in" such that it's not possible to remove it later? Other proposals include Cynthia Dwork's differential privacy, which requires you to set the number of queries you will make of a database and burn it once those are finished.'

Daniel A. Smith- Supporting Modern Data Needs, The INDX Personal Data Store

Daniel (https://danielsmith.eu) is a Research Fellow with the SOCIAM Project at the University of Southampton. Daniel holds a PhD and a Master of Engineering in Computer Science from the University of Southampton, where he researched large scale exploration of heterogeneous data. He works on INDX, an open-source personal data store designed for long-term secure personal data storage and sharing. Daniel's research interests include personal data, open/government data, the semantic web, decentralised architectures, social machines, information security, and privacy, and has over 60 peer-reviewed works in conferences, workshops, and journals.

Some of his writing is here:

http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/363496/1/w15socm14-vankleek.pdf

http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/362097/1/chi2014-padd-wip-final_submitted_to_sheridan.pdf

Chair: Wendy Grossman (http://www.pelicancrossing.net)- technology journalist and writer and winner of the 2013 Enigma Award.