On May 27th 2015, Cathal Gurrin and Rami Albatal visited the Programmable City Project and delivered a seminar on lifelogging, covering the history of creating lifelogs, technological developments in the field, the current state of the practice and future possibilities for comprehensive personal data.
The talk was extremely well received, and this video of the event should be of interest to anone interested in lifelogging, the quantified self, personal or wearable technologies or the emergence and possibilities of personal data.
The event will bring technologists, legal practitioners, technology companies and academics together in order to address the common issues faced by the different parties. The goal is to facilitate the communication of differing perspectives in an effort to formulate a unified approach to developing privacy issues.
Confirmed speakers for the event are:
Keynotes Dara Murphy, TD – Minister for European Affairs and Data Protection. Helen Dixon – Data Protection Commissioner of Ireland.
Confirmed speakers for the first session of the event, “Privacy in a digital world: notions and understandings of privacy in a digital infrastructure”, are:
We are delighted to welcome Rami Albatal and Cathal Gurrin to Maynooth on Wednesday 27th May at 4pm, Iontas Building room 2.31 for the third of our Programmable City seminars this semester. Dr. Rami Albatal is the lead postdoctoral researcher of the Lifelogging team at Insight Centre for Data Analytics at Dublin City University, and received his Ph.D. in Computer Vision in 2010 from Grenoble University, France. His research focuses on three main areas: Lifelogging, Computer Vision and Machine Learning. Currently he is working on new generation of Quantified-Self technologies that employ contextual data gathering and analytics, in the goal of building advanced data-driven decision-making, planning and recommendation platforms. Cathal Gurrin is a lecturer at the School of Computing, at Dublin City University, Ireland and he is an investigator at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics where he leads a research group of 10 people. He is also a visiting scientist at the University of Tromso, Norway. His research interest is personal analytics and lifelogging (a search engine for the self). He has gathered a digital memory since 2006 (including over 15 million wearable camera images) and hundreds of millions of other sensor readings. He is the founder of the world’s first dedicated lifelog meetup group.
The session will introduce the topic lifelogging, explore the current state-of-the-art technology and look forward to a future in which lifelog archives may become commonplace. The current approaches to semantic enrichment will be explored, along with applications and user interfaces. In an era of personal data, Facebook, Twitter, digital photos and many other activities all leave significant trails of personal data. One aspect of personal data gathering that is receiving increasing attention is the concept of lifelogging. Lifelogging is concerned with utilising sensors to create a large archives of personal data, or a surrogate memory for the individual. Applying semantic enrichment and organisational software over this data results in the creation of a lifelog for the individual. Lifelogging has been described as an inevitability and is expected to change life experience for all. Finally, lifelogging raises many societal issues, among them privacy and data security, which will be explored and solutions proposed. This session should be of interest to a wide range of academics and interested parties.
This morning Rob Kitchin presented a keynote talk at the New Techniques and Technologies for Statistics conference in Brussels. The presentation examined the potential impact of the unfolding data revolution – big data, open and linked data, data infrastructures, and new data analytics – on the production of official statistics and the work of national statistical institutions. The slides that accompanied the talk are below.
Conference of Irish Geographers 2015, Queens University Belfast, 21-24 May 2015
This session aims to think through the complex relationship between space and technology. The proliferation of smart phones and city-scale embedded devices is reshaping homes, work places and cities. Rather than focus explicitly on how technologies might autonomously and automatically produce such spaces, our focus is the broader imaginaries which pre-empt and prefigure sociotechnical systems. We are interested in submissions that explore how space is produced or performed through contested relationships between technologies, imaginaries and situated practices. This might mean, on the one hand, to approach technologies by reflecting on cultural representations or utopian visions of the future. On the other hand, imaginaries might be understood through the ways communities, social groups or initiatives think about already existing technologies. We are open to a broad range of theoretical and methodological approaches.
Contributions may respond to various topics, including but not limited to urban planning, surveillance, emergency response, energy management, sustainable transportation or everyday consumption and mobility. The following questions might be addressed:
what kinds of urban futures are being imagined and what are the technologies mobilised for such imaginaries?
how are technologies evoked as a solution to contemporary problems or perceived threats?
what space-times are evoked or rearranged?
what forms of resistance to dominant visions are being practiced or displayed?
how are politics articulated within utopian and dystopian imaginations?
how are the coupling of bodies, technologies and data imagined, planned and enacted?
how is human and nonhuman agency perceived and practiced in relation to technological imaginaries?
Potential contributors are free to contact us prior to submission of their abstract. Contact email: james.white.2014@nuim.ie.
On February 25th 2015, Mark Maguire visited the Programmable City Project and delivered a seminar on counter-terrorist techniques that are increasingly becoming (or have become) techno-scientific processes.
The talk was extremely well received, and offers a detailed, critical and timely appraisal of current developments in counter-terrorism.
