The Precautionary Principle as a Framework for a Sustainable Information Society

The precautionary principle (PP) aims to anticipate and minimize potentially serious or irreversible risks under conditions of scientific uncertainty. Thus it preserves the potential for future developments. It has been incorporated into many international treaties and pieces of national legislation for environmental protection and sustainable development. In this article, we outline an interpretation of the PP as a framework of orientation for a sustainable information society. Since the risks induced by future information and communication technologies (ICT) are social risks for the most part, we propose to extend the PP from mainly environmental to social subjects of protection. From an ethical point of view, the PP and sustainability share the principle of intergenerational justice, which can be used as an argument to preserve free space for the decisions of future generations. Applied to technical innovation and to ICT issues in particular, the extended PP can serve as a framework of orientation to avoid socio-economically irreversible developments. We conclude that the PP is a useful approach for: (i) policy makers to reconcile information society and sustainability policies and (ii) ICT companies to formulate sustainability strategie

Regulatory Model for AAL

Proceedings of: 6th International Conference on Soft Computing Models in Industrial and Environmental Applications (SOCO 2011). Salamanca, April 6-8, 2011Abstract: In this work, authors define a set of principles that should be contained in context-aware applications (including biometric sensors) to accomplish the legal aspect in Europe and USA. Paper presents the necessity to consider legal aspect, related with pri-vacy or human rights, into the development of the incipient context based services. Clearly, context based services and Ambient Intelligence (and the most promising work area in Europe that is Ambient Assisted Living, ALL) needs a great effort in research new identification procedures.Publicad

European Values for Ethics in Digital Technology

Digital Ethics deals with the impact of digital Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on our societies and the environment at large. It covers a wide spectrum of societal and ethical impacts including issues such as data governance, privacy and personal data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), algorithmic decision-making and pervasive technologies. Importantly, it is not only about hardware and software, but it also concerns systems, how people and organizations and society and technology interact. In addition, with Digital Ethics comes the added variable of assessing the ethical implications of artefacts which may not yet exist, or artefacts which may have impacts we cannot predict. The Ethics4EU Project is an Erasmus+ transnational project that explores issues around teaching Digital Ethics in Computer Science. This research report on European Values for Ethics in Technology is the first Intellectual Output of the Ethics4EU project and it is presented in two parts: Part 1 used a semi-systematic literature review methodology to discuss and present the origins of Digital Ethics, recent views from EU working groups on Digital Ethics, geographical perceptions of Digital Ethics and a summary overview of pertinent Digital Ethics topics and challenges for an increasingly interconnected ICT world. These topics include data ethics, including data management and practices, AI Ethics including ethical concerns when building AI systems, automated decision making and AI policy, ethics for pervasive computing including topics such as surveillance, privacy and smart technologies, social media ethics including topics such as balancing free speech and access to accurate information and the relationship between Digital Ethics, digital regulations and digital governance with a specific focus on the GDPR legislation. Part 2 presents the results of focus groups conducted with three key groups of stakeholders – academics, industry specialists and citizens. The analysis captures their insights with regard to ethical concerns they have about new technologies, the skills or training future computer professionals should have to protect themselves in the online world and who should be responsible for teaching Digital Ethics. We analyse the similarities between the topics uncovered in the literature review and those highlighted by the focus group participants

Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions

The green potential of RFID projects: A case-based analysis

Findings from 13 case studies on RFID's use in green projects reveal its potential not only to enhance environmental sustainability but also to reduce costs and generate revenue by creating new commercial opportunities. © 2006 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Shaping sustainable harvest boundaries for marine populations despite estimation bias

Biased estimates of population status are a pervasive conservation problem. This problem has plagued assessments of commercial exploitation of marine species and can threaten the sustainability of both populations and fisheries. We develop a computer-intensive approach to minimize adverse effects of persistent estimation bias in assessments by optimizing operational harvest measures (harvest control rules) with closed-loop simulation of resource–management feedback systems: management strategy evaluation. Using saithe (Pollachius virens), a bottom-water, apex predator in the North Sea, as a real-world case study, we illustrate the approach by first diagnosing robustness of the existing harvest control rule and then optimizing it through propagation of biases (overestimated stock abundance and underestimated fishing pressure) along with select process and observation uncertainties. Analyses showed that severe biases lead to overly optimistic catch limits and then progressively magnify the amplitude of catch fluctuation, thereby posing unacceptably high overharvest risks. Consistent performance of management strategies to conserve the resource can be achieved by developing more robust control rules. These rules explicitly account for estimation bias through a computational grid search for a set of control parameters (threshold abundance that triggers management action, Btrigger, and target exploitation rate, Ftarget) that maximize yield while keeping stock abundance above a precautionary level. When the biases become too severe, optimized control parameters– for saithe, raising Btrigger and lowering Ftarget–would safeguard against overharvest risk (<3.5% probability of stock depletion) and provide short-term stability in catch limit (<20% year-to-year variation), thereby minimizing disruption to fishing communities. The precautionary approach to fine-tuning adaptive risk management through management strategy evaluation offers a powerful tool to better shape sustainable harvest boundaries for exploited resource populations when estimation bias persists. By explicitly accounting for emergent sources of uncertainty our proposed approach ensures effective conservation and sustainable exploitation of living marine resources even under profound uncertainty.submittedVersio

Big Data and the Reform of the European Data Protection Framework: : An Overview of Potential Concerns Associated with Proposals for Risk Management-based Approaches to the Concept of Personal Data.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Information & Communications Technology Law on September 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600834.2017.1375237. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 2 March 2019.This article considers the emergence of big data and how it poses considerable difficulties for the European Data Protection framework’s key enabling concept: the notion of personal data. The article starts by outlining the fact that there is an emerging body of opinion which suggests some of these problems might best be addressed by adopting a risk management-based model of personal data. This, it is argued, is suggestive of the emergence of a possible fusion between the disciplines of data protection law and risk management. The article contends, however, that there are several complications associated with the adoption of risk management-based regulatory strategies which have to date not been meaningfully explored in the legal and regulatory literature pertaining to data protection. Consequently, these are issues in need of address. Whilst not intending to counsel against the adoption of risk management-based regulatory strategies the aim of this article is to begin bridging the metaphorical “gap” between legal, regulatory, and risk research and management discourses, to stoke much-needed debate in this topical area. To this end, the article highlights several areas which are in need of further consideration, and where there will likely be possibilities for future inter-disciplinary research.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio