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Location - The Cobham Lecture Theatre, Bournemouth University, Talbot Campus, Wallisdown Road, Poole
On memory, I've been looking into the increase in the use of technology to store records, photographs, videos, blogs, facebook, twitter etc etc etc. The result is in effect a huge outsourcing of memory, analogous to the changes in society and personal psychology that followed the coming of writing and the development of a literate society. I don't think we've really thought very deeply about the social changes that we might expect when we will be leaving these enormous and semi-permanent footprints behind us.
At Southampton University we are beginning some experiments with students developing devices for recording our daily lives, based on Microsoft's Sensecam, which I should be able to report on.
I blogged about this a while ago at http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConBlogEntry.1155, to give a sense of what we are saying.
Re privacy, I've been looking at various issues to do with the invasion of our privacy by technology, as recorded in such terms as the 'database state' or the 'surveillance society'. I wrote a book about this last year, and to get a flavour you can download a chapter from http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15683/. I tried to work out the balance between unwarranted storing and use of information, and the great value that can be achieved by collecting and analysing data, so that we don't throw the scientific baby out with the political bathwater. But there is no doubt our traditional notions of privacy are coming under great strain, and the battle is currently being lost.
Speaker Dr Kieron O'Hara
Kieron O'Hara is a senior research fellow in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and a research fellow of the Web Science Research Initiative, currently on the LiveMemories project. He is the author of nine books, including: 'Plato and the Internet' (2002); 'Trust: From Socrates to Spin' (2004); 'inequality.com: Power, Poverty and the Digital Divide' (2006, with David Stevens); and 'The Spy in the Coffee Machine: The End of Privacy As We Know It' (2008, with Nigel Shadbolt), as well as 'A Framework for Web Science' (2006, with Tim Berners-Lee, Wendy Hall, James A. Hendler, Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel J. Weitzner), for the journal 'Foundations and Trends in Web Science'. He has also written extensively on British politics and political theory, and is a research fellow for the Centre for Policy Studies. He writes frequently for popular journals and newspapers, has appeared several times on radio and television, and regularly blogs for the British Computer Society and the Centre for Policy Studies.
Qualifications
MA (Philosophy, 1st class hons, University of St Andrews)
MPhil (Logic & Metaphysics, University of St Andrews)
MSc (Computation, University of Oxford)
DPhil (Literae Humaniores, University of Oxford)
Official Website: http://www.dorset.bcs.org/events/100126privacy.htm