Averting Robot Eyes

Home robots will cause privacy harms. At the same time, they can provide beneficial services—as long as consumers trust them. This Essay evaluates potential technological solutions that could help home robots keep their promises, avert their eyes, and otherwise mitigate privacy harms. Our goals are to inform regulators of robot-related privacy harms and the available technological tools for mitigating them, and to spur technologists to employ existing tools and develop new ones by articulating principles for avoiding privacy harms. We posit that home robots will raise privacy problems of three basic types: (1) data privacy problems; (2) boundary management problems; and (3) social/relational problems. Technological design can ward off, if not fully prevent, a number of these harms. We propose five principles for home robots and privacy design: data minimization, purpose specifications, use limitations, honest anthropomorphism, and dynamic feedback and participation. We review current research into privacy-sensitive robotics, evaluating what technological solutions are feasible and where the harder problems lie. We close by contemplating legal frameworks that might encourage the implementation of such design, while also recognizing the potential costs of regulation at these early stages of the technology

Visual Privacy Protection Methods: A Survey

Recent advances in computer vision technologies have made possible the development of intelligent monitoring systems for video surveillance and ambient-assisted living. By using this technology, these systems are able to automatically interpret visual data from the environment and perform tasks that would have been unthinkable years ago. These achievements represent a radical improvement but they also suppose a new threat to individual’s privacy. The new capabilities of such systems give them the ability to collect and index a huge amount of private information about each individual. Next-generation systems have to solve this issue in order to obtain the users’ acceptance. Therefore, there is a need for mechanisms or tools to protect and preserve people’s privacy. This paper seeks to clarify how privacy can be protected in imagery data, so as a main contribution a comprehensive classification of the protection methods for visual privacy as well as an up-to-date review of them are provided. A survey of the existing privacy-aware intelligent monitoring systems and a valuable discussion of important aspects of visual privacy are also provided.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under project “Sistema de visión para la monitorización de la actividad de la vida diaria en el hogar” (TIN2010-20510-C04-02) and by the European Commission under project “caring4U - A study on people activity in private spaces: towards a multisensor network that meets privacy requirements” (PIEF-GA-2010-274649). José Ramón Padilla López and Alexandros Andre Chaaraoui acknowledge financial support by the Conselleria d'Educació, Formació i Ocupació of the Generalitat Valenciana (fellowship ACIF/2012/064 and ACIF/2011/160 respectively)

Journal of Internet Services and Applications manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Middleware for Social Computing: A

Abstract Social computing broadly refers to supporting social behaviours using computational systems. In the last decade, the advent of Web 2.0 and its social networking services, wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking has revolutionised social computing, creating new online contexts within which people interact socially (social networking). With the pervasiveness of mobile devices and embedded sensors, we stand at the brink of another major revolution, where the boundary between online and offline social behaviours blurs, providing opportunities for (re)defining social conventions and contexts once again. But opportunities come with challenges: can middleware foster the engineering of social software? We identify three societal grand challenges that are likely to drive future research in social computing and elaborate on how the middleware community can help address them

The Internet of Things Will Thrive by 2025

This report is the latest research report in a sustained effort throughout 2014 by the Pew Research Center Internet Project to mark the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-LeeThis current report is an analysis of opinions about the likely expansion of the Internet of Things (sometimes called the Cloud of Things), a catchall phrase for the array of devices, appliances, vehicles, wearable material, and sensor-laden parts of the environment that connect to each other and feed data back and forth. It covers the over 1,600 responses that were offered specifically about our question about where the Internet of Things would stand by the year 2025. The report is the next in a series of eight Pew Research and Elon University analyses to be issued this year in which experts will share their expectations about the future of such things as privacy, cybersecurity, and net neutrality. It includes some of the best and most provocative of the predictions survey respondents made when specifically asked to share their views about the evolution of embedded and wearable computing and the Internet of Things

“I Don’t Want to Become a Number’’: Examining Different Stakeholder Perspectives on a Video-Based Monitoring System for Senior Care with Inherent Privacy Protection (by Design)

Active and Assisted Living (AAL) technologies aim to enhance the quality of life of older adults and promote successful aging. While video-based AAL solutions offer rich capabilities for better healthcare management in older age, they pose significant privacy risks. To mitigate the risks, we developed a video-based monitoring system that incorporates different privacy-preserving filters. We deployed the system in one assistive technology center and conducted a qualitative study with older adults and other stakeholders involved in care provision. Our study demonstrates diverse users’ perceptions and experiences with video-monitoring technology and offers valuable insights for the system’s further development. The findings unpack the privacy-versus-safety trade-off inherent in video-based technologies and discuss how the privacy-preserving mechanisms within the system mitigate privacy-related concerns. The study also identifies varying stakeholder perspectives towards the system in general and highlights potential avenues for developing video-based monitoring technologies in the AAL context.This work was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 861091 for the visuAAL project. This publication is based upon work from COST Action GoodBrother—Network on Privacy-Aware Audio- and Video-Based Applications for Active and Assisted Living (CA19121), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology)

Editing Team: Markus Fiedler

and contributions of the FIA community on the important research topics that should be addressed for the Framework Programme 8 research programmes broadly grouped around three main concerns; economic and business interests; societal interests and challenges; technical disruptions and capabilities. The contents of this roadmap originate with the community of researchers working on all aspects of the Future Internet and meet to share and discuss ideas through the Future Internet Assembly through an open consultation of research projects who participate in FIA. This roadmap is primarily concerned with identifying research that can be carried out in the second half of this decade and which will have an impact in 2020 and beyond. By ‘impact ’ we mean will result in products, services, systems, capabilities, that come to market and are available and deployed in that timeframe The approach adopted in this report is to integrate contributions across the entire space of future Internet research with the aim of bringing out the vision for how and where the Internet will make a significant difference in the future and identifying the broad challenges and gaps, and identifying the solutions and research needs in the future. In this report we have summarised and grouped ideas with the aim of identifying the strong themes and consistent challenges that emerge looking acros

Urban hydroinformatics: past, present and future

This is the author accepted manuscriptHydroinformatics, as an interdisciplinary domain that blurs boundaries between water science, data science and computer science, is constantly evolving and reinventing itself. At the heart of this evolution, lies a continuous process of critical (self) appraisal of the discipline’s past, present and potential for further evolution, that creates a positive feedback loop between legacy, reality and aspirations. The power of this process is attested by the successful story of hydroinformatics thus far, which has arguably been able to mobilize wide ranging research and development and get the water sector more in tune with the digital revolution of the past 30 years. In this context, this paper attempts to trace the evolution of the discipline, from its computational hydraulics origins to its present focus on the complete socio-technical system, by providing at the same time, a functional framework to improve the understanding and highlight the links between different strands of the state-of-art hydroinformatic research and innovation. Building on this state-of-art landscape, the paper then attempts to provide an overview of key developments that are coming up, on the discipline’s horizon, focusing on developments relevant to urban water management, while at the same time, highlighting important legal, ethical and technical challenges that need to be addressed to ensure that the brightest aspects of this potential future are realized. Despite obvious limitations imposed by a single paper’s ability to report on such a diverse and dynamic field, it is hoped that this work contributes to a better understanding of both the current state of hydroinformatics and to a shared vision on the most exciting prospects for the future evolution of the discipline and the water sector it serves

Supporting Diabetes Self-Management with Ubiquitous Computing Technologies: A User-Centered Inquiry

Ubiquitous computing technologies offer opportunities to improve treatments for chronic health conditions. Type 1 diabetes is a compelling use-case for such approaches, given its severity, and need for individuals to make frequent care decisions, informed by complex data. However, current apps, typically based on effortful reflection on collected data, generally show poor adoption, lack vital cognitive and emotional support, and are poorly tailored to users’ actual diabetes decision making processes. This thesis investigates how diabetes apps can be improved from a user-centered perspective. An initial questionnaire-based study investigated how well existing diabetes apps meet user needs. Perceived benefits, limitations, and reasons for low adoption rates were identified. A talk-aloud study of detailed user interactions with diabetes logging apps was conducted to characterize the benefits and limitations of diverse UI elements for T1 diabetes management, and to more precisely identify wider problems with current interaction designs. This led to positing a refined version of Mamykina et al.’s model for diabetes self-management, to account for observed practices, whereby the previously accepted habitual and sensemaking cognitive states are augmented by a posited ‘fluid contextual reasoning’ (FCR) mode, which allows multiple contextual factors to be balanced for dynamic course correction when navigating complex situations, using previously learned knowledge. To investigate user perceptions of the levels and kinds of monitoring anticipated in next generation diabetes decision support systems, a 4-week technology probe, in which participants used multiple networked devices and external data aggregation, was used to frame requirements for user-centered development of such future systems. Integrating all of the above work, an iterative design process was undertaken to create DUETS, a card-based system to facilitate reflection by designers, users, and other stakeholders on diabetes support management systems. The resulting tool and method were then implemented and evaluated through structured sessions with stakeholder focus groups