Prof. Glenn Parry has accepted the position of Academic Director, HATLAB
Developing a better understanding of how firms and individuals can work together to co-create value from personal data
6 February — The Hub of All Things HATLAB, a research consortium, has announced the establishment of its first Academic Director, Professor Glenn Parry of the University of the West of England, Bristol.
The HATLAB under the academic direction of Prof. Parry will be a collision of Data, Ethics, Law, and Innovation. Academic research conducted will seek to provide understanding and guidance for firms working in this rapidly developing space.
The use and abuse of personal data has become headline news as journalists have given insight into how large organisations have exploited personal data to influence national elections. Paradoxically, in practice digital platforms have become extremely useful in our lives. A better understanding is required to help firms and individuals work together in a trusting relationship to co-create value from personal data and develop personalised services.
The lab is in pursuit of three areas of underpinning research. Systematic literature reviews [SLR] are collecting secondary data and knowledge on the current state of data law and privacy, the variables required to improve performance, and the trade-off between personalisation and privacy. The project research will explain legally what can be done, what is best for learning, and the privacy trade-offs that may be encountered.
Prof. Parry is a Professor in Strategy and Operations Management at the Faculty of Business and Law (FBL) in Business and Management. His current interest is in value, service and business models. His current project work includes personalisation, privacy and data in digital business, business models for individualised gene therapy cancer treatment at scale, and developing engineering transdisciplinary working.
A team of academics will be working with Prof. Parry to deliver the research work. Current researchers are from UWE and Warwick.
Dr Mingwei Hsu at the Bristol Business School in UWE is developing the Smart HAT Engine (SHE), experimenting with interfacing with HATs and generating outputs for data. A recently completed application is visual “word cloud” generation from text that gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source. This application counts the frequency of word use and may have uses in text analysis. The current application being developed is an “emotion engine” that associates a number to the emotions expressed in text. Words linked to positive emotions give positive numbers and negative emotions negative numbers. The application allows tracking of changes in emotion expressed overtime in text. Sources held in our HAT may include diary entries, or our twitter, facebook etc. Expressed emotion can be correlated to other data streams such as exercise, health, food, TV viewing etc. to show what has influence over us. We may also see differences in how we express our emotional state across different platforms, both public and private.
Dr Hsu is also working on an SLR on data personalisation, focussed in the field of information systems. This review aims to answer the question: How do we manage the personalisation-privacy paradox of digital services?Personalization generally refers to the activity of providing products, content or services that are customised based upon knowledge of an individual, drawing upon their preferences, behaviours and locations.
Personalized services are often offered free of charge, but in return for the service consumers need to agree to share their personal information. The underlying reasons for free services existence are often based on the secondary exploitation of personal data, such as pricing and targeted advertising, which leads to privacy concerns. Privacy concerns are considered as general worries over potential loss of privacy across contexts due to the individuals inherent need to maintain privacy. Privacy concerns mostly focus on the collection of personal information, unauthorized exploitation of personal information and awareness of privacy practices. Whilst individuals like personalized products and services, don’t like to give out their information, which creates the personalization-privacy paradox.
This review aims to provide suggestions to mitigate the paradox from the perspective of legislation/regulation and firm practices. Literature in this area divides into two. The first category examines the effect of personalisation on consumer behaviour. The second category focuses on the trade-off between personalisation and privacy. The analysis of literature will inform what can and should be done in the design of digital systems to maximise the benefit of personalisation whilst minimising any incursion on privacy.
Dr Anna Chatzimichali is a Lecturer in Design in the department of Architecture and the Built Environment here at UWE. Dr Chatzimichali, previously a PQ Patent Attorney working in a large private practice, is undertaking an SLR to examine IP and data rights in dynamic digital spaces. The research questions that will be answered are: what data rights architectures are used?; how are those architectures structured and what is their legal underpinning?; and how do they function within dynamic digital environments? Initial studies suggest that IP literature does not cover digital right architectures. The work builds a bridge between the legal and the technical considerations of ownership in dynamic digital environments and focuses specifically on data ownership generated within a collaborative personalisation space. The main scope of the SLR is to understand the legal underpinning of digital privacy rights in dynamic environments.
Further work seeks to define the digital self in transit, examining personal data transactions and law. Questions to address include: who owns personal data in transit? And who holds the liability when they are scattered in various jurisdictions? Future work will examine the possibility of using the existing IP regime to define rights of using data, and how a new class of IP rights is established. The ambition is to shape personal data rights as a new class of Intellectual Property rights and redefine the future of digital freedom.
Dr L Dhamotharan is a Research Fellow at WMG Warwick. She is working on the variables that drive personalisation. Initial work examines Designing Children’s Ebook Platform: The impact of Single vs. Bundles of books on Reading Performance. Her SLR is on the variables that create personalisation. The study seeks to address the following research questions: 1. Does exposure to the same ebook help improve reading ability more than increasing exposure to a variety of ebooks within the same level of difficulty? 2. Is there an attrition on a particular task while interacting with the ebook? If yes, how does personalisation attributes improve the reading performance? Work explores what variables are employed and for what outcome.
There is a pragmatic understanding that one can expose a child to the same book until they master all the words before moving onto another book. Alternatively, a child exposed to a series of books moves from one to another without the need to master a book before moving onto the next.
Research has yet to look into the reading exposure strategies of children and their affect reading performance. In tailoring use or children’s reading habits over an ebook platform, one needs to investigate the factors that work best under those two main reading strategies. This has implications for the design and use of a platform if a certain bundling of items can maximise a child’s reading ability. Hence, this study is interested in how to optimise context by the programming and homogenization of data from the perspective of the layers in design hierarchies.
Together this work may help business and government in working more ethically and legally with data exchanges. We want to enable extensive data exchanges that enable firms to build more useful and creative service offers for individuals and organisations to benefit from data.
HATLAB is founded at the University of Warwick HATLAB in concert with HAT Data Exchange Ltd and the HAT Community Foundation to champion the decentralised personal data economy as established on Hub of All Things technology.
ENDS
For more information:
Jonathan Holtby
Community Manager
jonathan.holtby@hatdex.org
Hub of All Things
HATLAB
HAT Data Exchange Ltd
