Human-Data Interaction

HDI Research Assistant job

webmaster@hdiresearch.org (Richard Mortier) — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Dear all,

To help manage our new EPSRC NetworkPlus on Human-Data Interaction (official announcement to come soon), Matthew Chalmers (PI) is hiring a Research Assistant in Glasgow to help managing the network over the next 3 years, please see the advertt and details:

https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BKO803/research-assistant-associate/

Research Assistant/Associate University of Glasgow - College of Science & Engineering Closes: 16th July 2018

Job Purpose: You will contribute to a project the Human Data Interaction EPSRC NetworkPlus (HDI), working with Prof. Matthew Chalmers and his co-investigators. The job requires expert knowledge in running interdisciplinary projects, most obviously those centred on data-centred systems. Just as the network will span public, private and third sectors, we welcome applications from any of these sectors. The successful candidate will be expected to help the investigators manage and direct the network, and the portfolio of ~45 subprojects that the network will fund. He/she will also assist the investigators in the formulation and submission of research publications and research proposals.

New paper: Human-Data Interaction

webmaster@hdiresearch.org (Richard Mortier) — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

HDI becomes encyclopaedic!

We have been working together for a while to put together a new publication that catches all aspects of the HDI based on our discussions up until now, this paper has now been published in the Encyclopedia of Human Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed. We hope you enjoy reading it and would love to hear back your thouhgts about it!

Richard Mortier, Hamed Haddadi, Tristan Henderson, Derek McAuley, Jon Crowcroft, Andy Crabtree, “Human-Data Interaction”, Encyclopedia of Human Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed, October 2016. (paper)

HDI as part of EPSRC TIPS call for proposals

webmaster@hdiresearch.org (Richard Mortier) — Tue, 25 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

EPSRC Digital Economy call for proposals

The recent EPSRC Trust, Identity, Privacy and Security in the Digital Economy call focuses on elements of HDI as part of the Systems and their Ecosystems research theme.

See the call at the EPSRC website. Closing date: 13 October 2015 at 16:00

Databox appearing at the Decennial

webmaster@hdiresearch.org (Richard Mortier) — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Short paper accepted to AARHUS’15!

Things are picking up – our short paper submission Personal Data: Thinking Inside the Box concerning the Databox, based on our arXiv paper. This puts forward some of our ideas and plans around the Databox, as well as some of the challenges we see in building and successfully deploying it.

The full abstract is:

We are in a ‘personal data gold rush’ driven by the dominance of advertising as the primary revenue source for most online companies. These companies accumulate extensive personal data about individuals with minimal consideration of 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 technical alternatives to current practice, to enable individuals to participate in the processes of collection, management and consumption of personal data, thereby returning means of control to them. In this paper we discuss the Databox, a personal networked device (and associated services) that collates and mediates access to personal data, allowing us to recover control of our online lives. Our hope is that the Databox is a first step towards re-balancing power between us who are the data subjects, and the corporations that collect, hold and use our data.

Really hoping I’ll be able to make it to Aarhus to see the presentation¹ and take part in the discussion – the accepted papers mean it looks like it’ll be an exciting event!

Unfortunately Aarhus collides precisely with SIGCOMM’15 :( ↩

Lessons from the Past for the Future

webmaster@hdiresearch.org (Richard Mortier) — Fri, 29 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Full paper accepted to ECSCW’15!

I’m very pleased to announce that we have had a full paper, Human Data Interaction: Historical Lessons from Social Studies and CSCW accepted to the European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW) 2015! A collaboration with Dr Andy Crabtree, it examines particularly the role of interaction in HDI and explores how past technical approaches, such as Dataware, to the challenges posed by HDI haven’t fully considered the inherently social nature of data.

The full abstract is as follows:

Human Data Interaction (HDI) is an emerging field of research that seeks to support end-users in the day-to-day management of their personal digital data. This is a programmatic paper that seeks to elaborate foundational challenges that face HDI from an interactional perspective. It is rooted in and reflects foundational lessons from social studies of science that have had a formative impact on CSCW, and core challenges involved in supporting interaction/collaboration from within the field of CSCW itself. These are drawn upon to elaborate the inherently social and relational character of data and the challenges this poses for the ongoing development of HDI, particularly with respect to the ‘articulation’ of personal data. Our aim in doing this is not to present solutions to the challenges of HDI but to articulate core problems that confront this fledgling field as it moves from nascent concept to find a place in the interactional milieu of everyday life and particular research challenges that accompany it.

and we conclude:

This paper set out to understand how interaction is configured within the field of Human Data Interaction, taking the Dataware infrastructure as an exemplar, and how this ‘fits’ with existing social viewpoints on personal data interaction. Seen from a social perspective, data interaction appears to be as much about human relationships as it is about data itself. Data, as Star makes visible, is always embedded in human relationships, and efforts to create infrastructure turn upon stabilising those relationships through appropriate methods of communication and coordination. CSCW orients us to key issues involved in creating such methods, particularly the need to devise mechanisms of interaction that articulate a) the field of work and flow of information between parties, and b) the arrangements of collaboration that make the flow possible. Historical insights drawn from social studies of science and CSCW have allowed us to identify a range of problems that affect HDI and a number of distinct thematic challenges they occasion. The broad challenge now is to address these problems and themes and shape the articulation of HDI around the accountable social nature of personal data interaction in order to drive a real and significant step-change in everyday life.

DARPA and CRASSH

webmaster@hdiresearch.org (Richard Mortier) — Fri, 22 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A Recent Call, and a Recent Seminar

As evidence of growing international interest in Human-Data Interaction, it was pleasing to see DARPA pick up on Human-Data Interaction in their recent Brandeis BAA (now closed) – even to the extent of explicitly referring to this website! With a reasonable size pot of money put on the table ($60M), here’s hoping some really interesting and high-impact work gets funded.

I was also happy to give a seminar recently to CRASSH, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. A good turnout (about 35 people), a really interesting mix (from linguists to medics to economists to computer scientists, and they were only the ones who were admitting it!), and a fascinating discussion. Plenty to think about afterwards about power relationships, the social nature of data, and some practical areas where we might start some implementation work. Slides I used are available here.

Thinking inside the (Data)box

webmaster@hdiresearch.org (Richard Mortier) — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

HDI and Personal Data Managemet

We have crystallised the HDI manifesto into a concrete system that takes a user-centric approach to handling personal data, described in our preprint paper “Personal Data: Thinking Inside the Box” that is now available online.

The Databox paper was covered in the media by:

MIT Tech Review in “How a box could solve the personal data conundrum”
The Guardian in “Fightback against Internet giants’ stranglehold on personal data starts here”

As always, we’d welcome any feedback on any of these publications!

A Working Paper

webmaster@hdiresearch.org (Richard Mortier) — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

After a Long Hiatus…

We haven’t been completely idle in the preceding 10 months, honest! Specifically, we’ve been attempting to set out in a bit more detail the HDI concept and ideas discussed in the shorter previous papers at DE’14 and our CUCL Tech Report. We’ve now done so, and a copy of this extended paper is online in SSRN.

We’d welcome any feedback!

Human-Centered Big Data

webmaster@hdiresearch.org (Richard Mortier) — Sat, 14 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Call for Participation

Workshop on Human-Centered Big Data Research April 1–3 2014 North Carolina State University, Raleigh NC

Does the size of data change the way we think about data? Are the tools we provide people to understand Big Data empowering, sufficient, or even limiting their abilities? While there is much active research in the technical aspects of Big Data, there is very little research that examines the impact of Big Data on people.

The Laboratory for Analytic Sciences is hosting a workshop to discuss the future of Big Data from the human perspective. The purpose of this workshop is to gather experts in multi-disciplinary fields to discuss a potential framework that could be used for human-centered Big Data research. This includes Big Data topics such as:

Data creation and consumption
Disruptive technology and effects on society
Human factors/Cognitive engineering
Human-computer interaction
Information systems and management
Information overload
Interactive analytic systems
Mental models and cognitive frameworks
Sensemaking and analysis processes
Storytelling using data
User interfaces for Big Data

Participation in this workshop is by invitation. Researchers interested in participation may submit a 2-4 page position paper related to the topics of interest. Accepted submissions will receive a travel and lodging stipend for the author and a co-author to attend the workshop. Authors will be asked to present their position paper and participate in one of several breakout sessions.

Deadlines:

Abstracts (2-4 pages): February 14 2014
Notification of Acceptance: February 28 2014
Author Confirmation: March 14 2014
Workshop: April 1-3 2014

Questions and abstracts may be submitted to LASoutreach@ncsu.edu.

Events & Opportunities

webmaster@hdiresearch.org (Richard Mortier) — Thu, 12 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Making A Start

webmaster@hdiresearch.org (Richard Mortier) — Fri, 29 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The first HDI workshop

The first Human-Data Interaction workshop (HDI 2013) was held at the Open Data Institute, London, UK on the 2nd October 2013, supported by EPSRC IT as a Utility Network+ and Horizon Digital Economy Research. Attended by around 40 participants drawn from academia and industry in the UK, Europe and the USA, following introductions and position statements, the workshop focused in on HDI with two break-out sessions and group presentations on the challenges and opportunities posed by research into personal data, and approaches to solve these challenges. Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt also delivered a talk on the importance of open-data to the success of research into human-data interaction and user engagement. Finally, the workshop concluded with a lively discussion about the need for HDI as a topic and whether we need yet another acronym and sub-discipline in computer science.

In the end the consensus seemed to be that the framing of the topic as a dialogue between humans and data was useful: it helps to emphasise the relevance of the topic to those in less technical domains, and thus the need for an inter-disciplinary dialogue around these matters. A joint report on the workshop is planned, which will present and establish the key outcomes and elements of this events and new research interest group. Watch the site for updates!

Following the workshop, as well as (obviously!) setting up this website, we’ve also setup a mailing list to help disseminate relevant information. Please do join if you’d like to be informed of future events and get involved in research and networking discussions.

Presenting HDI

webmaster@hdiresearch.org (Richard Mortier) — Mon, 11 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

First public outing for HDI garners a best paper award!

Having serialised our thoughts into the Tech Report, we thought it would be a good idea to give them a public airing so to speak. So we did, submitting an extended abstract to the Digital Economy All-hands meeting 2013. Now in it’s fourth year, this is the annual meeting of the RCUK Digital Economy Programme, and a good chance to meet up with like-minded folk.

We were accepted for presentation with some pretty favourable reviews and so, last Monday (November 4th) we were the first research presentation up at this year's meeting in Salford. As the first research presentation following several keynote presentations, the audience were still warming up but we still had some good questions and subsequent discussions over drinks at the very fine technical demonstrator session (disclaimer: I organised it :)

On the Tuesday evening I was even more pleased to discover that we'd been awarded one of the best paper awards (the others were the best student paper, “Designing e-Voting for Participation: methodology” and one other best paper, “CURIOS: Connecting Community Heritage through Linked Data”.

As the presenter, I (of course) claimed the prize associated with the award: a shiny new Nexus 7 mini-tablet -- very nice! First impressions after being an iPad user for a few months is that it's a useful form factor, Android has improved significantly since the (rather old) version on my Samsung Galaxy SII phone, and I probably prefer it to iOS even though I've not yet upgraded to iOS7. (Read that as you will :)

Setting an Agenda

webmaster@hdiresearch.org (Richard Mortier) — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome!

We’re a group of independent researchers who came together because of a shared interest in Human-Data Interaction or HDI. Stemming from a discussion between Richard Mortier and Hamed Haddadi, the essence of HDI is to empower users to understand and control the increasingly pervasive collection and analysis of data about and by them. We believe this is an exciting and highly relevant research agenda – we look forward to having you join us as it develops! We’re in the process of setting up a mailing list, and other related resources – please get in touch if you’d like to be notified when these are ready.