See programme details and how to sign up here.

As pervasive systems increasingly permeate everyday life, designing to aid data legibility, literacy, explainability and flexible decision-making is key. The widening gap between everyday users understanding of and the impermeability of black algorithmic boxes increasingly challenges current systems to ensure secure and private use for individuals, communities and publics. This symposium aims to tackle, debate and explore questions around the nature and implications of ethical, social and political perspectives for designing technologies. The topic of this symposium will explore issues of Trust, Identity, Privacy and Security (TIPS) in Technology from different contexts through design perspectives. Showcasing how researchers, designers and developers are tackling the increasingly big issues programmers and systems developers may face and how we design fair, ethical, unbiased, empowering systems at the outset of a new technological project.

This 2-day symposium on the 10th & 11th December in Edinburgh provides an exciting opportunity for PhD and early career researchers to connect with other TIPS researchers from across the country. Poster presentation and demo sessions will allow researchers to increase exposure to their research, while interactive workshops with leaders from diverse backgrounds will offer opportunities to learn about existing and novel tools and methods to support the design and development of future systems. 

Talks and workshops will include:

• Privacy and designing for automated decisions
• Identity management for distributed services
• Voice controlled trust and security in the Internet of Things
• Social values in computing and ‘intelligence’ of AI
• Bias in system development and pervasive algorithms

See programme details and how to sign up here.

Automated decisions are part of many services we use everyday, but how they work is rarely explained or understood. This matters because automated decisions have an impact at scale. For example, automated decisions within social media may only show people news from one side of a political argument. An automated system calculating insurance premiums could determine a less affluent area is high risk, increasing costs for people in that area. Decisions made by automated systems should be transparent, explainable and accountable. Technology studio IF, collaborated with researchers from London School of Economics to develop prototypes that show how to apply academic research to the way services are designed.

‘Talking Donkey’ – a neologism the critic Bruce Sterling uses to refer to voice user interfaces we use to operate Internet of Things devices in our homes. These ‘information appliances’ are the starting points for many of our interactions with so-called ‘smart’ devices. While they may appear physically indistinguishable from their ‘dumb’ counterparts, beneath the skin they collect and act on data to power and utilise AI systems; and through their interactions with each other have secretive social lives. The novelty of turning on the lights by interacting with a Talking Donkey may disguises the burden that this new brand of ‘smartness’ places on intuitive notions of trust and consent. Hence there is a need to refresh the patterns of intuition we employ, new conceptual frames to make sense of the ecosystems are devices are part of, not to mention not new ways of designing voice user interfaces. Building from more traditional interaction theory, this speculative and design fiction workshop will give participants the opportunity to probe possible Internet of Things ‘constellations’; explore the mechanisms that define our relationships with these devices; put their trust in a real-life simulated Talking Donkey; and develop insights about interface design for the Internet of Things.

Decentralised or ’self-sovereign’ identity management has recently emerged as a potential blockchain use-case, in particular to grant individuals greater control over their personal data, and support verification of identity and certification. In this design-led workshop, we aim to unpack the core premises of blockchain-based identity management applications, and create space for participants to consider the implications of these systems in a range of domains. The workshop will be based around a co-operative game, where participants will play as either individuals or organisations acquiring, managing and verifying ‘pizza-making’ skills to each other, through a combination of blockchain-based artefacts and a distributed ledger.

An Alien Intelligence has been discovered. As it happens, it is an Artificial form of Alien Intelligence emerged as a colony of spawn-like creatures. It is commonly accepted that entities exhibiting Artificial Intelligent (AI) characteristics can be described as intelligent agents, that is systems that perceive and act in some environment. However, being an Alien form of AI, the exact criterion for intelligence is difficult to establish and the environment of origin unknown. Our goal is to explore and specify this very criterion of intelligence and, from that, explore the potential attitudes and behaviour of Alien AI in a range of environments. This workshop is part of the Values in Computing (ViC) research programme and will be facilitated by Marie & Steve from Team ViC. ViC receives support from the EPRSC.

This session will use the the UnBias Fairness Toolkit to explore issues of fairness in pervasive environments, where explicit permission for data capture might not always be possible. The toolkit promotes awareness of algorithms, trust, bias and fairness and aims to stimulate a public civic dialogue about their role in our society. In particular, on how algorithms shape online experiences, influencing our everyday lives, and to reflect on how we want our future internet to be fair and free for all. The tools not only encourage critical thinking, but civic thinking – supporting a more collective approach to imagining the future as a contrast to the individual atomising effect that such technologies often cause. The toolkit has been developed by Giles Lane, with illustrations by Alice Angus and Exercises devised by Alex Murdoch; alongside contributions from the UnBias team members and the input of young people and stakeholders. unbias.wp.horizon.ac.uk/fairness-toolkit

The ParkLife project is a city-University collaborative initiative looking at new ways to use data and digital technologies to understand how parks are used and valued and to engage park users in shaping the future of parks. Currently the project is exploring potential uses of motion sensors, audio capture devices, mobile device tracking, and social media scraping to understand how people are using parks. There are many complex issues around these activities; two of the key issues are ensuring informed consent / participation of users and engaging users in the process.

In this workshop we will present different scenarios and monitoring options, and through a creative process, we invite you to help us design an interactive and ethical approach to collecting data about how parks are used, ensuring informed consent, and engaging park users while providing a service or offer that is valuable to them. Outcomes of the workshop will inform the project and will also feed into a larger piece of work being led by the University of Edinburgh IoT Research and Innovation Service and its associated IoT Ethics Committee.

See programme details and how to sign up here.