Biosphere Westworld?
A new safe place where we can break everything. HATLAB announces the Datasphere project. The MadHATTERs Editorial, 12 June 2019.
MadHATTERs Weekly
click here to subscribe
We do research sometimes (you may have heard?).
Personal data represents “a source of considerable economic utility” because it’s, you know, infinitely renewable and infinitely reusable.
Without oversight it tends to go all over the place, generating all kinds of content for this newsletter, and frequently the ICO and tech for good powers-that-be are frustrated by how hard it is to responsibly leverage the stuff.
How productive are the sectors that leverage this resource? Data’s increasingly relevant in both market and consumer contexts. You could argue the effective and efficient deployment of personal data is essential to resilient and profitable business ecosystems across the whole board, both small firms seeking to position themselves digitally and medium-sized and large scale businesses for whom it is / can be new revenue and reinforced customer loyalty.
Knowing the value and utility of personal data promotes efficient choice-making at the individual level and empowers intelligent consumerism within social networks, and macroeconomic observations of data trends provide collective insights at the societal level.
But learning how these things are going to work is haaaaaard. Combining a knowledge of the regulatory environment with an understanding of the economic incentives and opportunities around data is hard. Marrying these to the role played by digital technologies and data science is hard. Understanding them with an appreciation of modern digital personhood is hard. Identifying the interdisciplinary knowledge from the social sciences and humanities, computer science, and engineering that is needed to ensure good digital technology is created is hard.
Doing all of this to achieve maximum impact from personal data usage — it’s all very hard.
A project managing and coordinating a research initiative that creates a simulated digital environment called DataSphere: An Interdisciplinary and user-focused digital environment for data mobility is being pursued by researchers at the Universities of Cambridge, Warwick, Imperial, Exeter, and Surrey, with an expected to be 10,000 ‘netizens’ in simulo.
A briefing is to be held, announcing the project and expanding on some of these listed themes.
Let’s see where it takes us.
MadHATTERs is a weekly newsletter covering technology, personal data, and the Internet. Its perspective championing decentralised personal data is led by the Hub of All Things. Learn more about the HAT, subscribe, or read more MadHATTERs online at www.hubofallthings.com
