The Second Interdisciplinary Summerschool on Privacy (ISP 2017)

Goal

The interdisciplinary summerschool on privacy provides an intensive one week academic post-graduate programme teaching privacy from a technical, legal and social perspective. The goal of the summerschool is to provide students with a solid background in the theory of privacy construction, modelling and protection from these three different perspectives. It also aims to help them to establish a first international network with peers and senior academics across these disparate disciplines.

Theme: Smart-X

The theme "Smart-X" addresses the privacy issues that arise with the advent of the Internet of Things and the resulting 'smart' infrastructures like smart grids, smart vehicles, and smart cities. The Internet of Things provides physical objects (like fridges, light bulbs, thermostats, doors, cars, roads, etc.) with networking and computational capabilities. These objects are not only sensors (measuring the contents of our fridge, or the bevaviour of people) but also actuators (ordering missing items, or switching on the heating). This creates a fundamental shift in the way the Internet-based services can influence our daily lives, deeply convoluting artificial distinctions that have typically been made between online and offline activities.

This influence can both be positive and negative: smart infrastructures promise higher efficiency (energy conservation, sustainability) and proactive assistance in our daily lives (care). However, they also further blur the boundaries between the public and the private space, and raise issues of ownership and control regarding the infrastructures that surround and permeate our lives.

The objective of the summer school is to map out the IoT landscape with a critical eye on privacy concerns, and to explore legal, technical, social, political and economic approaches to engage in the fundamental changes it is expected to bring to everyday infrastructures and services.

Format

The summer school is interdisciplinary, involving the following disciplines: computer science, law and social sciences / media and communication studies.

The school lasts one week, with nine scheduled lectures (five morning lectures and four afternoon lectures) of two hours each. These nine lectures are equally distributed over the three disciplines, with top-notch lectures from each of the disciplines. The lectures will lay the grounds for an interdisciplinary conversation among students and lecturers coming from a variety of backgrounds.

The remaining time is used for hands on working group sessions to study practical cases. The cases will be offered by businesses, governments, government related institutions (like DPAs) and civil society/NGOs. Groups of six students, ideally two from each discipline, are formed to tackle the cases and report back on their results in a plenary session.

The school is held in a location that encourages dialogue and social interactions between both the staff and the students, both during lectures and in the evening. Staff (i.e. lecturers) are encouraged to stay at the summer school for the whole length of the school. The summer school is foremost aimed at PhD students from computer science, law and social sciences.

Participants of the summerschool are awarded two ECTS (study credits) and receive a certificate of attendance issued by the Radboud University attesting this.