I’m absolutely delighted to announce that Julie Brill will be giving the closing keynote at our December 2015 membership meeting. I’ll have a bit more to say about this when we send out the meeting roadmap in a couple of weeks, but briefly, Julie is a Commisioner at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) who has been doing some absolutely extraordinary work on privacy and security in the digital world. I’ve had the opportunity to hear her speak on these issues several times over the past year, and she has a very deep understanding of the implications of “big data” and algorithmic decision-making and classification, particularly in the consumer context. There’s more bio on the CNI website.
Julie has very graciously agreed to join us and share some of her thinking about privacy and analytics in the higher education context. She’s titled her talk “Transparency, Trust and Consumer Protection in a Complex World.” Here is her abstract:
In a world that is becoming increasingly complex and data-intensive, trust is becoming ever more important. If consumers do not trust organizations and the systems that they use to collect, analyze, and use their personal data, consumers may reject technologies that could offer significant social and individual benefits. Transparency is a key element of building and maintaining consumer trust. Providing effective transparency, however, is a challenge for companies that are developing new connected devices and apps and predictive analytics services. Using a series of illustrations based on the Internet of Things and big data analytics, Commissioner Brill will discuss strategies for providing transparency in our interconnected, complex world, with a particular focus on the roles that researchers and consumer protection agencies like the Federal Trade Commission in putting these strategies into practice.
This should be a wonderful session. I hope to see you at our fall membership meeting.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
