"The Lifelong Contextual Footprint" Summer School for Doctoral Training Centre & Digital Economy Ph.D. Students

We are perhaps already familiar with the idea that many of our everyday interactions with computers, from browsing the Web to shopping in the supermarket, are recorded and that the resulting data is mined and used to market new services to us.

The spread of Ubiquitous Computing seems likely to greatly extend this practice, potentially recording many of our

ongoing activities to build a lifelong contextual footprint that may well begin before we are born and be preserved long after we die. While this brings the potential to create new more personalised and adaptive digital economy services across a range of sectors including transportation, healthcare and the creative industries, it also raises profound challenges for our society concerned with identity, privacy and the ownership and use of personal information.

The Summer School will bring together students and researchers from across the Digital Economy DTCs to address this topic from multiple perspectives spanning the development of the underlying technologies, the potential for innovative new services, and the human challenges that these raise.

The two day Summer School will be hosted by the Horizon Doctoral Training Centre on 15th-16th July 2010.

For more information please contact - Dr Claire Thorne (c.thorne@abdn.ac.uk) or Jennie Dick (jennie.dick@abdn.ac.uk) at dot.rural, or Emma Juggins (emma.juggins@nottingham.ac.uk) at Horizon DTC