Speaker: Dr. Xiao Ma
Topic: How the Hub of All Things aims to change the landscape of the data economy.
Date: Wednesday 19th May 2021
Time: 18:00 start
Location: N/A – webinar – slides available from here
Synopsis:
The Internet that we use today is really very much “work-in-progress”, and the problems we face mostly revolve around what we call “personal data.” Even the WWW inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee thinks his creation is out of control, and is planning to help us reclaim our personal data from Silicon Valley.
What is personal data?:
Everything on the Internet that is personal to you is your data: words, photos, music, locations, financial transactions – everything. You generate this data when you fill out forms, create user accounts on apps and websites, interact on them, or use social media or e-commerce websites.
So, the problem is ownership and control:
Today the companies that give us websites, mobile applications and more, store and protect our personal data for us (we call them “centralised” systems). Our data sitting in these systems become stale, non-representative, more vulnerable to hacking and we can’t even reuse it if we wanted to. But there are initiatives such as Solid (https://solidproject.org/ ) and the HAT (https://www.hubofallthings.com/). These technology offers new systems aiming to drastically decentralise the web. At its core, it’s a platform allowing you to store your private information in Personal Data Stores (PDS) which you have full control of, therefore you can store all the data within it. By having our own PDS, we are able to legally contract with the websites and apps that we want to, storing the data for ourselves, and also holding organisations to account for the usage of our data.
This is the first time, we, any consumer, can exercise our “data right” over highly valuable 1PORCHE data – 1st party authenticated, Privacy preserved, On-demand, Real-time, Contextual, Holistic and Ethical personal data.
This talk is from one of the co-founders of the HAT project, to bring a live discussion around what the data exchange may look alike, and how opportunities may emerge in various data related industries in a era of 1PORCHE data.
Dr. Xiao Ma is an Associate Professor at WMG (formerly the Warwick Manufacturing Group), at the University of Warwick. His expertise is in the area of (personal) data economy, business transformation, innovation and entrepreneurship. He has been a bridge between industry and academia, by grounding practitioners’ knowledge and expertise into education and research programmes. Xiao is the head of the WMG Accelerator programme to fast-track growth for innovative businesses. He is a seasoned Entrepreneur, a 5-time founder to start, grow and exit ventures in UK and China. He also sits on the investment committee for Touch Stone Capital.