Skip to main content

Events & Opportunities

12 December 2013

Events, Past & Future; and a Funding Call

A few announcements to the list in the last week or so that I thought it would be useful to publicise more widely.

The past event, attended by Hamed, took place in on 21st November. Run jointly by ICT KTN and Cambridge Wireless User Experience SIG and hosted by Microsoft Research, it was titled “No Free Lunch: The Consumer as Product in a Data-Driven Economy”, it included contributions from small start-ups, big corporations, lawyers, and academics focusing on use of personal data in different contexts. Debates centred around individuals’ ability to evaluate their personal information, and the privacy and ethics involved in data collection by third parties. The event ended with an intense panel discussion of “oldies and techies” versus 5 young “ordinary” (define as you wish!) individuals selected from the Cambridge public. The panel members had views about privacy across the range of spectrum, from “don’t-care” and “free-for-all-data”, to complete desire to remain anonymous. Debate ended with agreement on need to increase public-engagement efforts in order to educate individuals about the risks and opportunities with use of their data.

The future event is a workshop being advertised for CHI 2014, “Beyond Quantified Self: Data for Wellbeing”. The submission deadline for position papers is January 17th, 2014 with notification about three weeks later. For more details, check their website at http://BeyondQS.offis.de/.

The just-announced funding call is for a total of £4.5M, initially £2M from TSB to be supplemented by additional funding from EPSRC Digital Economy Theme, ESRC, BBSRC, AHRC and DSTL. The call is titled “Data Exploration”, and it opens on January 6th, 2014 with a briefing day on January 7th in London. Proposals must be collaborative and business-led and include at least one small or medium-sized enterprise (SME). For more details visit the competition site or download the competition briefing document.

Fork me on GitHub