Semantic Technology: Good for Business, bad for Privacy?

Semantic Technology is a powerful tool to improve the understanding of data for businesses, but what does this mean for personal privacy? How much are we giving up? Have we given it away already?

We will address these and other questions as part of the IEEE (http://www.ieee.org/index.html) - ICSC (http://www.ieee-icsc.org/ICSC2011/) - ICSI (http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/) panel in Conjuction with the annual IEEE-ICSC Confernce on Semantic Computing (http://www.ieee-icsc.org/ICSC2011/) featuring:

Dr. Gerald Friedland (http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~fractor/homepage/About_Me.html) - a senior research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute, a lab affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, where he leads multimedia content analysis research, mostly focussing on acoustic techniques such as speaker diarization and acoustic event detection. He is currently PI on an IARPA-funded project on video concept detection, a PI on a DARPA project on multimodal grounded learning for robots, a PI on an NSF project on the human accuracy of location estimation, a co-PI in an NGA-funded project on Multimodal Location Detection, and co-PI on an NSF project on the privacy implications of global inference, and various industry projects including CISCO, and TASC.

Nicholas Weaver (http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/) - a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, specializing in network security and network measurement. Among other work he is one of the primary developers of the Netalyzr network measurement tool, and developed the concepts behind very fast (sub-15 minute) Internet worms. His web browser configuration speaks to his paranoia.

Anne Hunt - Principal (Engineering) at First Retail, defines and manages technical projects to support our clients as well as research efforts. Anne became interested in semantic technologies as an undergraduate, drawing connections among ideas in mathematics, logic, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. She pursued these interests to receive a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Virginia, and discovered that semantic technologies have real industrial applications.

Anne has helped leverage semantic technologies within new products and infrastructure at companies ranging from small start-ups (Cycorp, Ingenuity, and Primal) to multinational firms (Boeing and Microsoft). After spending a year building an engineering team in the snowy wilderness outside of Toronto, Ontario, Anne is happy to be back in the heart of the Silicon Valley.