The First Privacy and Trust Workshop in Trondheim

What can our facial images reveal about us? This was one of the interesting examples presented by the keynote speaker at TPSIE, Eirik Gulbrandsen, a senior engineer at The Norwegian Data Protection Authority (Datatilsynet). TPSIE, the 1st Workshop on Trust and Privacy Aspects of Smart Information Environments, was organized by SINTEF in collaboration with NTNU and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. This workshop was held in conjunction with the 18th IFIP Conference on e-Business, e-Services and e-Society I3E 2019, on the 18-20 September 2019 in Trondheim.

Privacy and GDPR as a human rights related issue

This workshop was kicked off with a keynote speech given by Eirik Gulbrandsen, who presented privacy and GDPR as a human rights related issue and highlighted new challenges that Machine Learning and AI applications may bring. His presentation had inspirations from Yuval Noah Harari’s books and presented some thought-provoking quotes from Harari. He also presented examples from real life that highlighted the relevance of being aware of protecting our privacy to avoid potential undesirable consequences.

The workshop drew a small, but a very engaged audience from Greece, Germany, Spain and Norway. The five presentations included in the workshop spanned different aspects of privacy related research, ranging from softer aspects to more technical and design related issues. Differential Privacy was presented by a German researcher as one of the methods for sharing data while withholding some information. Interestingly, there was less focus on the concept of trust in the presentations.

Contributions to the EU project HUMAN

SINTEF and the new spinoff, KIT-AR, presented their contributions to the EU project HUMAN (Human Manufacturing). One of SINTEF’s main contributions to the HUMAN project and the research in Privacy is the HUMAN Trust and Privacy Framework and input to designing privacy dashboards. In fact, the TPSIE workshop was inspired by privacy related research conducted by SINTEF in the HUMAN project.

• Read more about the HUMAN project

The final part of the TPSIE workshop was a discussion among the participants with the aim to pursue the common interests and to explore ideas for a research article and future collaborations. The best papers in the workshop will be invited to a special version of Enterprise Modelling and Information Systems Architectures (EMISAJ) – International Journal of Conceptual Modelling. The energy and momentum in the TPSIE workshop were inspiring and very encouraging. The organisers (Felix Mannhardt and Sobah Abbas Petersen, from SINTEF) foresee a growing interest in this research area and look forward to organising TPSIE workshops in the future.