Panel Session 1: Security, Confidentiality and Ethics in e-Research

The e-Research ´vision´ of seamless access and linking of datasets raises profound challenges for security, confidentiality and the ethical handling of personal data. This panel will reflect on these challenges from a variety of perspectives and consider how they might be addressed, including developments in Grid security technologies and research policy responses.

Each panel member gave a five minute position statement addressing the panel´s topic. The panel then moved onto an open discussion question and answer session.

Panel Members

Mark Elliott

Dr Mark Elliot is a Senior Research Fellow at the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research which he will become director of from September 2005. His multidisciplinary background (Psychology/Artificial Intelligence/Data and Knowledge Engineering) has enabled him to bring a fresh approach to the disclosure control field since joining it 1996. He has frequent invitations to speak at international conferences on Confidentiality and Privacy and is consultant to several national statistical agencies including the Office for National Statistics in the GB, the US bureau for the Census and the Australian Bureau of Statistics. In October 2002 Dr Elliot founded CAPRI, the Confidentiality and Privacy research group at the University of Manchester (www.capri.man.ac.uk), which currently consists of four core staff and two doctoral students, and a further ten associated staff in departments across the University.

Simon Musgrave

Simon Musgrave works for KPMG in the Public Sector area of the IT advisory business.

Before joining KPMG (in May 2005), Simon was at the University of Essex, where for the last 2 years he was Director of Informatics Development at the Department of Health and Human Sciences. There he was course supervisor for the Master programme on public health (teaching statistics and informatics) as well as doing research and consultancy with local NHS trusts.

Previous roles at the University included working as Director of Sales and Marketing in a spin-out company (Nesstar Ltd.) that he co-founded from a series of successful EC projects. The company created software to find and use tables and surveys over the web and worked with organisations such as Health Canada, the World Bank, Department of Health and the Eastern Region Public Health Observatory.

Previous to that he was technical and deputy director of the UK Data Archive, an ESRC and JISC funded repository for government, market research and other data surveys, which are made available to the research community.

Richard Sinnott

Dr Richard Sinnott is Technical Director of the National e-Science Centre and Deputy Director of the Bioinformatics Research Centre both at the University of Glasgow. Dr Sinnott is involved in a range of Grid-based e-Science projects in the life science domain with particular focus on security.

Marina Jirotka

Dr Marina Jirotka is Director of the Centre for Requirements and Foundations, Lecturer in Requirements Engineering at Oxford University Computing Laboratory, and Associate Director of the Oxford e-Science Centre. She received her DPhil in Requirements from the University of Oxford in 2000. Her recent areas of research have focused on developing novel methods and techniques for requirements capture, particularly on workplace and practice driven requirements for e-Science applications. She has published refereed papers in international journals, conferences and books in the fields of computer-supported collaborative working, requirements engineering and workplace studies.