"Empowering Users with Access Control in the Hurricane of Digital Privacy and Security"
-- Stefano Foresti, founder, Globaldea
Abstract
With the explosion of cloud services and mobile connected devices, user information is captured both actively and passively at very fast rate, mixing multiple activities and goals in everyone's digital life. This talk will first explain the status quo of data collection and life cycle in light of commercial service agreements and the Snowden revelations, and overview the type of efforts to fix the problems. The presentation will describe the user's viewpoint of sharing and access control in many scenarios, and show the applications or channels used to handle information at hand and the sharing intentions. The xap.io system, currently in private beta, was designed to capture and connect the user's information and knowledge across applications and devices, and make it immediately web available with object level permissions (who exactly can and must not find this). The design and engineering of the xap.io system will be discussed to show how users can express permission intentions in their digital life, and how the trade-offs among privacy, security and usability are addressed.
Biography
Stefano Foresti is the founder of Globidea, an NSF-SBIR-funded startup launching an innovative knowledge-capture and permission system. Foresti was the director of the University of Utah's Center for Representation of Multi-Dimensional Information (CROMDI), a Utah State Center of Excellence in information design, bringing together scientists and students in computing, architecture, psychology, medicine communication and business. He led the development and commercialization of data intensive user interfaces, including the new generation display for the Operating Room licensed by GE Medical; VisAlert, a visual correlation tool for network security, developed for the U.S. intelligence community; and Xapio's Captmail, a technology for email security.
As a postdoctoral fellow at IBM and as senior scientist at the Center for High Performance Computing, University of Utah, Foresti was involved in the design of parallel numerical methods and software for distributed scientific computing. He received a doctorate in mathematics from the Universita' di Pavia, Italy. He also teaches computer science at the University of California, Merced, and is adjunct research professor at the University of Utah. He was in the founding team of Internet companies, including the Italian portal Kataweb, and Xoopit, an email an company sold to Yahoo in 2009.
Presentation Download [PDF]
