Month: March 2018

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Towards Moral-IT and Legal-IT by Design

We are pleased to begin the ‘Privacy, Law and Ethics’ cross-cutting project as part of the Horizon services campaign. We will be adopting a ‘responsible research & innovation’ led approach to surfacing ethical and legal issues within each of the respective service campaign projects. The goal is to reflect on impacts for wider human values and embed safeguards into the technologies from the beginning, for both research and deployment.

We will be doing this by running a series of workshops with the research teams and partners using our newly developed Moral-IT and Legal-IT cards.

The Moral-IT cards have a broad scope, drawing on a principles and concepts from ethics, privacy, security and law more widely. Their process for use is a more user-friendly impact assessment to foreground risks, likelihood of occurrence, safeguards, and strategies for implementation. We observed a wide range of frameworks from STS, HCI, computer ethics and law to distil our process. These include:

Value sensitive design (Friedman et al 2008),

Reflective design (Sengers et al 2005), a variety of impact assessments including Ethical (SATORI, 2016)/social (Edwards, Diver and McAuley 2016)/surveillance) /privacy (Wright and De Hert, 2012)/ RFID (Spiekermann, 2011) / data protection (ICO, 2014),

Responsible research and innovation (Stahl, Eden and Jirotka, 2013),

Human data interaction (Mortier and Crabtree, 2015),

Real time technology assessment (Guston and Sarewitz, 2002);

Anticipatory governance (Barben et al, 2008)

These new cards and process been developed as part of the project ‘About Algorithms and Beyond’ between project lead Lachlan Urquhart and Peter Craigon.  Peter will continue to work with Lachlan in this new project.

The Legal-IT cards focus on five regulatory frameworks relevant to IT, namely the General Data Protection Regulation 2016; Network and Information Security Directive 2016; Cybercrime Convention 2001; Attacks Against Information Systems Directive 2013, and proposed e-Privacy Regulation 2017.

This approach builds on Lachlan’s previous experience using ‘privacy by design’ cards as a tool to supporting reflection and action by IT designers on data protection compliance issues. Through the combination of both decks in exercises and games within the workshops, we will develop understanding of how a variety of issues are being negotiated within different sectors. Given the breadth of the Services campaign, this will include health & wellbeing (ALFE, Memory Machine); transportation (In My Seat); fast moving consumer goods (Hybrid Gifting) & cultural heritage (Panopticon).

For more information please contact: Dr Lachlan Urquhart, Research Fellow, Horizon Digital Economy Research

 

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‘Catch and Connect’ on Nottingham Buses

It’s Monday morning and I’ve just caught the 8.52am bus into the city, which I do every day for work. I show my travel card to the usual driver who nods, we don’t speak and I make my way to my usual seat, third row back, facing forward, on the left. I acknowledge one or two of the many faces I see every day, but we don’t speak. Familiar strangers. I get my phone out, put my earphones in, put my playlist on, put my head down and start to disappear into my social media, my emails, my photos, my bubble. I’m immersed, but become aware that the bus has stopped and people are starting to look up and around, no-body seems to know what is happening, but nobody speaks. I notice several people on CityCycles go past, something I’d quite like to try if I knew where or how to hire them. Finally the bus continues and people return silently to their phones. Despite rarely looking up, after making this journey twice a day for 3 years I instinctively know my stop is next, outside the Concert Hall. I often wonder what shows they have on and still keep meaning to find out, but never seem to find the time. I leave the bus, stopping to buy a coffee in the usual place, before walking the last 10 minutes along my usual route down the high street.

Unfortunately, not only can such everyday journeys on public transport take a notable proportion of our day, they can often be monotonous, isolating and largely unfulfilling experiences. What if we could address this situation by offering (bus) passengers ‘dynamic’ and additionally more enjoyable, engaging and relevant digital content, both enriching potential connections within the passenger ‘community’ on-board and also enabling connections to be made with the external environment, en route.  The ‘In my Seat’ projects aims to do this by offering pertinent, personalised passenger-driven content, both stakeholder delivered and user-generated, which can be accessed via a mobile app, linked directly to individual sensors in a passenger’s seat / vehicle.

For the passenger, such rich and context specific content may include a ‘today’s fun fact’ or joke left by a previous passenger, or an on-going, on-board bus game. More practically it may offer real-time notifications of potential delays, information on complimentary, sustainable transport e.g. city bike hire, or alternatively upcoming shows at a local theatre, or lunch time deals at cafes along the route. For the public transport operators and city councils, being able to identify when, where and how many people are using particular public transport modes e.g. buses, is invaluable in being able to ‘evidence’ need and demand and thereby align services and supporting infrastructure effectively.

With this in mind, the project will shortly run a series of stakeholder engagement and also user (passenger) design workshops to frame and (co-)design our initial concept(s) / mobile app. Outputs from these workshops will be subsequently posted on the ‘In my Seat’ blog.

Nancy Hughes, Research Fellow, Human Factors Research Group, Faculty of Engineering, University of Nottingham

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How do people think about data?

When people interact with an online service, they form theories about how it is working. As part of the services campaign in Horizon, we are investigating the ways in which people commonly understand the use of personal data in products and services that are mediated by algorithms. We are doing this by examining the mental models people form about how different types of data are used within systems.

Mental models are a form of reasoning where people create internal representations of reality. They help us to interact with systems and understand how they function. Mental models represent a bridging point between our lived experience and the service as part of a wider system (consider the relationship between how warm you are at home, the physical form of a central heating system, and your interaction with a thermostat). This is useful for our study because the concepts of algorithmically-mediated services and algorithmically-generated content are highly complex and we tend to rely on metaphors to talk about what is happening. A further challenge in this area is that people are not necessarily used to articulating in detail how they think these things work and thus simply asking people directly is likely to result in a lot of shrugging and sighing! One technique that we will use instead then is to ask people to engage in a series of simple compare and contrast exercises. This process anchors what is for some a highly abstract topic and helps people identify the sorts of categorisations, concepts and understandings that they have been using if only implicitly and to generate words that can describe them. This is based on similar techniques originally adopted in psychological therapies (especially Person Construct Theory), to tease out people’s perceptions of things in their lives that they might not previously have spent much time consciously considering, but that have big effect upon decisions they make, and their feelings towards certain people and activities.

Our first study will involve ‘odd-one-out’ style sorting tasks using different types of personal data and services. First participants will individually develop a set of constructs, or keywords, to describe different types of data. Then they will work in groups to create hypothetical services based on groups of data types. In this task they will be given four data types written on cards. They will ‘throw one away’ and then suggest a data-driven service they could create using the other three cards. For example, being presented with Age, Employer, Browser History and Location, could lead to them throwing away Employer and creating a service that suggests new hobbies and days out in your local area.

We will run this workshop at least twice to gain a wide range of responses from different groups of people. Another type of workshop will be run with the groups running the other Services Campaign projects, using the data collected in the first workshop. This is in the planning stages, as is an online study asking people to rate different types of data based on the constructs from the first part of the workshops. Watch this space!

Liz Dowthwaite, Research Assistant, Horizon Digital Economy Research

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Chronicling the Lives of Objects

An image of the first page of the Peterborough Chronicle

A chronicle (Latin: chronica, from Greek χρονικά, from χρόνος, chronos, “time”) is a historical account of facts and events ranged in chronological order, as in a time line (Wikipedia). Chronicle is also the name of the platform being developed by Horizon to support its Services Campaign projects. These projects are categorised by the necessity of keeping an electronic record of facts and events relating to a thing. Take for example the Memory Machine project, the thing in this instance is the physical artefact (the Memory Machine), and the electronic record is the content being added to it. So far so boring, the platform could be little more than a database.

Where the Chronicle platform gets interesting however, is as a tool to support the concepts of ownership, sharing, and gifting. Take again the example of the Memory Machine; the physical artefact itself is owned by an individual. It’s intended use though is for third parties to have the capability to share content that that party has some ownership of. The physical heirloom may also (ideally) gain an heirloom status in which it is gifted and regifted. These actions begin to create new layers of complexities that mean our simple database begins to look a lot more complicated.

The Chronicle platform is being designed and built to support these interactions but also to ask its own questions such as:

  • What does it mean to delete something from the record? should it even be possible or should a record remain indelible?
  • If a record is indelible, what are the implications for privacy and ownership rights?
  • How are changes of ownership handled?

You can follow the progress of the development of Chronicle at https://chronicle.horizon.ac.uk/ and on Bitbucket at https://bitbucket.org/account/user/horizon-dev/projects/CHRON.

Featured image by Peterborough.Chronicle.firstpage.jpg: en:User:Geogrederivative work: Hchc2009 (Peterborough.Chronicle.firstpage.jpg) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Dominic Price, Research Fellow, Horizon Digital Economy Research