CENS Technical Seminar Series

Privacy and Participation in Urban Sensing

Invited Speaker: Jeff Burke and Katie Shilton, UCLA
Date: January 11, 2008
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Venue: 4760 Boleter Hall, UCLA

Abstract

Building sensing systems to interact with people’s lives requires consideration of participation and privacy. Both are processes that encompass a spectrum of behaviors. Privacy is a process of selective control over access to the self or information about the self. It acquires explicit – and variable – meaning in specific circumstances and settings. Privacy processes include negotiating boundaries, identity, and time. Participation is a process of engagement in an activity, such as research or system design. Engagement can range from passive to fully self-mobilized based on the roles and activities in which a participant is involved.

We will use this seminar to ask difficult (and unanswered) questions about participation and privacy in urban sensing. How do we build privacy-sensitive and participation-enabling systems? Should participatory processes and privacy decision-making slow the design process? And what are the consequences of failure of participation and privacy mechanisms in human-embedded sensing systems?

Biography

Jeff Burke is Executive Director of the UCLA Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance, a joint program of the School of Theater, Film and Television and Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. REMAP’s core projects investigate the interrelationships among community, culture and technology and how embedded and mobile computing can support community development and cultural expression. He is also urban sensing area lead at the NSF Center for Embedded Networked Sensing.

Katie Shilton is a graduate student in Information Studies at UCLA's Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. Her research interests include exploring motivations for remembering and documentation contrasted against respect for privacy and forgetting. She is a graduate student researcher for the urban sensing project of the NSF Center for Embedded Networked Sensing.