Personal Data: Thinking Inside the Box

We are in a ‘personal data gold rush’ driven by advertising being the primary revenue source for most online companies. These companies accumulate extensive personal data about individuals with minimal concern for us, the subjects of this process. This can cause many harms: privacy infringement, personal and professional embarrassment, restricted access to labour markets, restricted access to highest value pricing, and many others. There is a critical need to provide technologies that enable alternative practices, so that individuals can par- ticipate in the collection, management and consumption of their personal data. In this paper we discuss the Databox, a personal networked device (and associated services) that col- lates and mediates access to personal data, allowing us to re- cover control of our online lives. We hope the Databox is a first step to re-balancing power between us, the data subjects, and the corporations that collect and use our data.Work supported in part by the EU FP7UCN project, grant agreement no 611001

Personal Data: Thinking Inside the Box

We are in a ‘personal data gold rush’ driven by advertising being the primary revenue source for most online companies. These companies accumulate extensive personal data about individuals with minimal concern for us, the subjects of this process. This can cause many harms: privacy infringement, personal and professional embarrassment, restricted access to labour markets, restricted access to highest value pricing, and many others. There is a critical need to provide technologies that enable alternative practices, so that individuals can par- ticipate in the collection, management and consumption of their personal data. In this paper we discuss the Databox, a personal networked device (and associated services) that col- lates and mediates access to personal data, allowing us to re- cover control of our online lives. We hope the Databox is a first step to re-balancing power between us, the data subjects, and the corporations that collect and use our data.

Retrofitting parallelism onto OCaml.

OCaml is an industrial-strength, multi-paradigm programming language, widely used in industry and academia. OCaml is also one of the few modern managed system programming languages to lack support for shared memory parallel programming. This paper describes the design, a full-fledged implementation and evaluation of a mostly-concurrent garbage collector (GC) for the multicore extension of the OCaml programming language. Given that we propose to add parallelism to a widely used programming language with millions of lines of existing code, we face the challenge of maintaining backwards compatibility--not just in terms of the language features but also the performance of single-threaded code running with the new GC. To this end, the paper presents a series of novel techniques and demonstrates that the new GC strikes a balance between performance and feature backwards compatibility for sequential programs and scales admirably on modern multicore processors

Decentralised Edge-Computing and IoT through Distributed Trust

The emerging Internet of Things needs edge-computing - this is an established fact. In turn, edge computing needs infrastructure decentralisation. What is not necessarily established yet is that infrastructure decentralisation needs a distributed model of Internet governance and decentralised trust schemes. We discuss the features of a decentralised IoT and edge-computing ecosystem and list the components that need to be designed, as well the challenges that need to be addressed