Abstract:  Our online presence is composed of the data about us and our activities, collected or inferred by thousands of third party aggregators, complemented by the data produced by us – both public and private. Yet, we do not know about the types of valuable, detailed, and private information collected and traded by different third party analytics services, and we have no way of benefiting from this ecosystem. In this talk I discuss the Databox, an open-source device and suite of personal services and applications that collate and mediate access to our personal data across different sources, allowing us to benefit from these rich data. The Databox is a first step to bringing together the elements for placing the individuals at the centre of the personal data ecosystem: so one has awareness, and effective control of, data generated about them, while providing mechanisms for interacting with these data explicitly. http://www.databoxproject.uk

Bio:  Hamed is the Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at EECS School in Queen Mary University of London. He is interested in Networked Systems & Social Computing. He enjoys designing and building systems that enable better use of our digital footprint, while respecting users' privacy. He is also broadly interested in sensing applications and Human-Data Interaction. He is currently serving as the Information Services Director for the ACM SIGCOMM Executive Committee.  http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~hamed/