With penalties including fines of up to €20 million, people are realising that they need to take data protection much more seriously.
- Jat Singh
Dr Jat Singh is familiar with breaking new ground and working across disciplines. Even so, he and colleagues were pleasantly surprised by how much enthusiasm has greeted their new Strategic Research Initiative on Trustworthy Technologies, which brings together science, technology and humanities researchers from across the University.
In fact, Singh, a researcher in Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology, has been collaborating with lawyers for several years: “A legal perspective is paramount when you’re researching the technical dimensions to compliance, accountability and trust in emerging ICT; although the Computer Lab is not the usual home for lawyers, we have two joining soon.”
Governance and public trust present some of the greatest challenges in technology today. The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into force this year, has brought forward debates such as whether individuals have a ‘right to an explanation’ regarding decisions made by machines, and introduces stiff penalties for breaching data protection rules. “With penalties including fines of up to 4% of global turnover or €20 million, people are realising that they need to take data protection much more seriously,” he says.
Singh is particularly interested in how data-driven systems and algorithms – including machine learning – will soon underpin and automate everything from transport networks to council services.
As we work, shop and travel, computers and mobile phones already collect, transmit and process much data about us; as the ‘Internet of Things’ continues to instrument the physical world, machines will increasingly mediate and influence our lives.
It’s a future that raises profound issues of privacy, security, safety and ultimately trust, says Singh, whose research is funded by an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Fellowship: “We work on mechanisms for better transparency, control and agency in systems, so that, for instance, if I give data to someone or something, there are means for ensuring they’re doing the right things with it. We are also active in policy discussions to help better align the worlds of technology and law.”
What it means to trust machine learning systems also concerns Dr Adrian Weller. Before becoming a senior research fellow in the Department of Engineering and a Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute, he spent many years working in trading for leading investment banks and hedge funds, and has seen first-hand how machine learning is changing the way we live and work.
Image credit: Daniel Werbrouck
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge