International Conference on Privacy-friendly and Trustworthy Technology for Society

The current pandemic has, even more, increased the need to invest in Active and Assisted Living (AAL) technologies. Thanks to their high potential in enabling remote care and support, AAL has the potential to improve the European healthcare system. However, the success of such technologies highly depends on their trustworthiness and ability to process information in a privacy-friendly manner.

The conference on ‘Privacy-friendly and trustworthy technology for society’, aims to advance the knowledge on critical ethical concepts such as privacy, trust, and transparency of (AAL) technologies, contributing particularly by extending emerging concepts and themes such as privacy-by-design, overtrust, transparency-by-design, and personalized transparency. Moreover, it explores links, overlaps, and solutions between current proposed regulations such as the AI Act and other enforced regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation and the Medical Device Regulation. We invite interdisciplinary approaches spanning the social sciences, legal scholarship, ethics, and research in computing and engineering.

The conference will select extended abstracts to be presented in sessions organized by topics. We welcome and encourage interdisciplinary research and collaborations among researchers active in different working groups. The presentations will be short (10-15 min), followed by a brief Q&A. The focus will rest on the discussions among participants and establishing potential links among ongoing research activities within the COST Action and beyond. The conference will end with a workshop session where participants will be encouraged to draft research agendas for important topics that are currently not well explored. Please note that the conference will take place in a hybrid format, with participants and keynote speakers on-site and online - the organizers will ensure that remote participants will be able to ask questions and provide inputs during the workshop session.

This workshop is organised by the GoodBrother COST Action (CA19121) on Privacy-Aware Audio- and Video-Based Applications for Active and Assisted Living.

Topics

How can we design technology that is privacy-friendly and trustworthy and benefits society?

The topic of the conference is: “Privacy-friendly and trustworthy technology for society”. We encourage you to submit your contributions that combine different perspectives on privacy (enhancement), trust, and automation, which can be applied to different sectors, such as healthcare, education, leisure, or work.

We are interested in contributions that focus on how privacy and trust are challenged and conceptualized through the increased reliance on automated systems and its implications on design approaches. A particular focus can be made on emerging automated systems applied to vulnerable groups such as seniors and children, with AAL technologies (i.e., audio-based and video-based applications to monitor elderly or frail people).

The call for papers includes but not limited to the following areas of interest:

• Research on system trust (i.e., trust between humans and automation) and link to privacy

• Ethical, legal, and societal aspects of trustworthy and privacy-friendly automation

• Empirical studies of privacy and trust of interactive systems

• Design approaches to support system trust and trustworthy design

• Personalization of privacy and transparency requirements and its impact on system trust

• Design for privacy and transparency

• Usable privacy and security and their implications for systems trust

• Overtrust in automation and its implications

• Issues of unequal access to and benefits from privacy-friendly and trustworthy automation among different population groups

Submission guidelines

The extended abstract (max. 1000 words excl. references) must be sent in the PDF format to privacy-conference@goodbrother.eu by 12 of April 2022. You will be notified if the abstract was accepted and if you can present by 30 April 2022.

Please use the following MS Word template for your extended abstracts. The selected abstracts will be published before the conference on the COST Action website.

Special Issue at Science and Engineering Ethics

The conference organizers have submitted a proposal to create a special issue to the journal Science and Engineering Ethics from Springer, with the same topic as the conference. In your submission, please indicate if you are interested in submitting a full paper to the special issue. Submitting a full paper to the special issue is completely optional. Presentation at the conference does not require submitting a full paper for the journal special issue and not participating in the conference does not preclude submitting to the special issue.

Important dates

Conference dates:

• Paper Submission Deadline: April, 12, 2022

• Notification of acceptance: April, 30, 2022

• Camera ready: June 1, 2022

(optional) Special Issue dates:

• Full Paper: October, 31 2022

Invited speakers

To be confirmed

Organising committee

• Anton Fedosov, University of Zurich, Switzerland

• Eduard Fosch-Villaronga, Leiden University, the Netherlands

• Christoph Lutz, BI Norwegian Business School, Norway

• Aurelia Tamò-Larrieux, University of St Gallen, Switzerland

• Anto Čartolovni, Catholic University of Croatia, Croatia

Registration

To be announced

Venue

The conference will take place at the Catholic University of Croatia in Zagreb, Croatia. The conference host is the Digital healthcare ethics laboratory (Digit-HeaL) – a research unit of the Catholic University of Croatia engaged in analyzing the ethical, social, and legal aspects of digital technologies (e.g., Big data, Artificial intelligence, etc.) used in healthcare.