UCREL’s CRS and FORGE are delighted to announce a joint talk by our upcoming internal speakers: Matt Edwards and Steve Wattam (Computing & Communications). Details of their talk are below:

TITLE
Why privacy makes privacy research hard

ABSTRACT
Identity resolution capability for social networking profiles is important for a range of purposes, from open-source intelligence applications to forming semantic web connections. Yet research in this area is hampered by the lack of access to ground-truth data linking the identities of profiles from different networks. Almost all data sources previously used by researchers are no longer available, and historic datasets are both of decreasing relevance to the modern social networking landscape and ethically troublesome regarding the preservation and publication of personal data. We present and evaluate a method which provides researchers in identity resolution with easy access to a realistically-challenging labelled dataset of online profiles, drawing on four of the currently largest and most influential online social networks. We validate the comparability of samples drawn through this method and discuss the implications of this mechanism for researchers and potential alternatives and extensions.

TIME & PLACE
1300-1400, Mon 06^th Feb, County South B89

NOTE
Though the speakers are computer scientists, they are aiming this talk at a non-technical audience. This presentation may be of interest to audiences beyond linguistics and/or computing, including those researching big data, online privacy, internet law/criminology, psychology, sociology, digital anthropology and culture, and so forth.

All are welcome to attend.