SCSSE Seminar

Title:  The future of privacy

Time: 12:30 - 1:30 pm

Day:  Wednesday 15 February
Speaker:  Prof. Mark Ryan

Location:  Building 3. Tearoom

Abstract: Computers have brought about enormous changes in all aspects of our lives over the last 20 years. The next 20 years are likely to see changes of even bigger magnitude. Soon, every fact about us, and every one of our movements, our utterances, and perhaps even our thoughts, will be routinely recorded by computers. Controlling who has access to this information is becoming a great technological challenge, as mobile and cloud-based services are adopted widely. The information may be deliberately or inadvertently made available on a wide scale. The lecture will discuss these problems and some relevant research being conducted in Birmingham.

About the Speaker: Mark was an undergraduate at Cambridge and did his PhD at Imperial College. Now he is professor of computer security at University of Birmingham, and also EPSRC Leadership Fellow. (EPSRC is the national science funding agency.) He founded in 2006 and now leads the security group, which consists of 5 academics and 20 postdocs and PhD students. Mark has recently worked in protocol analysis, electronic voting, access control, cloud computing security, TPM analysis, privacy, and process calculus. In 2008 Mark spent seven months at Hewlett Packard, on a secondment from the University funded by the Royal Academy of Engineering. This experience changed his life.