I am a CoI on the new Kaken Kiban C project International Comparative Study on AI Ethics in Business Environment (PI: Prof K. Murata).
I am Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics (CBIE) at Meiji University in Tokyo. I also teach on a contract basis at the Graduate School of Business Administration at Meiji University. My email address is aaa at Meiji (which uses an ac.jp domain name).
My office is Rm 408G of the Global Front Building on Meiji's Surugadai Campus.
I am a member of the following professional societies:
The British Computer Society, through whom I hold the status of CITP (Chartered Information Technology Practitioner)
The ACM: I am currently a member of the Ethics and Plagiarism Committee which reports to the Publications Board. I was previously on the Executive Committee of SIGCAS, the ACM Special Interest Group on Computers and Society, as Chair (from 2011-14) and Past Chair (from 2014-17).
The IEEE
I am also a member of the Asian Privacy Scholars Network, and a co-opted member of its secretariat.
I am a Fellow of the Open Forum Academy.
I have profiles on LinkedIn, Community of Science and Academia.edu.
I have a BSc in Mathematics and Computational Science from the University of Leeds, an MSc in Computer Science also from the University of Leeds, a PhD in Computer Science from the University of St Andrews and an LLM (Masters in Law) in Advanced Legal Studies from the University of Reading.
This is my work page. I maintain a personal stuff page (links for my hobbies and interests, that sort of thing) as well as a blog.
I am a multi-disciplinary researcher looking at social, legal, and ethical aspects of computer and communications technologies.
I previously engaged in research in computational logic and computer mathematics. See below for details.
Here are details of my current research projects, with details of funding where they are specifically supported. See below for details of completed projects.
Privacy, and related questions of surveillance and security is one of my core interests and areas of expertise.
I have been researching Japanese government identity systems since 2007. As part of this I hosted a JSPS Visiting Fellowship (L12535) by Prof Graham Greenleaf of UNSW from September to December 2012. See my publications list for an article about the new Japanese My Number system. I presented some early work on this at the Net-ID 2009 conference and more recently I presented a talk on An Annotated Timeline of Japanese Government Citizen Registration Schemes at the Third Asian Privacy Scholars Network Conference.
Together with Prof Shirley Williams and Prof Naz Rassool of the University of Reading I supervised the PhD of Dr Tharindu Liyanagunawardena on Information communication technologies and distance education in Sri Lanka: a case study of two universities. We also published a number of other papers together.
I continue to be interested in and study issues of the interaction of computer and communication technologies (such as remote learning and AI) and education.
In 2010, the KDDI Research Foundation funded the CBIE to perform "A Comparative Study of Young People's Online Behavior between Japan and the United Kingdom". The primary output of this project was a translation (linguistically and culturally) of the work of Prof Shirley Williams and her team at the School of Systems Engineering, University of Reading on training materials for students about managing their digital identity. In addition to translating their original material into Japanese for university students, the CBIE produced a version for junior high school and high school students in Japan.
I have run a number of conferences and workshops related to my SLE research, and am on the steering committees of some.
Conferences I have organised include:The Asian Privacy Scholars 4th International Conference on Easy Privacy was held at Meiji University in Tokyo in July 2014.
I am a co-opted member of the APSN secretariat, which oversees membership and conference organsation.
The Asian Privacy Scholars 2nd International Conference on Privacy in the Social Networked World was held at Meiji University in Tokyo in November 2012.
USEC 13: The 2013 Workshop on Usable Security was held in Okinawa in April 2013 as a workshop of the Financial Crypto and Data Security 2013 conference.
I regularly attend the following ongoing series of conferences/workshops:
Here are details of my prior research projects, with details of funding where they are specifically supported. See above for details of my current projects. My move from the UK to Japan in April 2010 means that some of these projects were completed by others after I left.
I was the co-Investigator and research fellow at Meiji University on the EU Horizon 2020 RRING project
This project investigated international equivalent approaches around the world to the EU's RRI (Responsible Reseearch and Innovation) concept. It created an international network of organisations involved in RRI, including organisations funding research, performing research and innovation, and deploying the end results of research.
I was the Principal Investigator on a JSPS grant Easy Security and Privacy (Kakenhi (B) 15H03385) (2015-2018).
I was a CoI on the JSPS "Cross-cultural analysis on alienation caused by ICT-based services and organisational social responsibility" (Kakenhi (B) 25285124, PI: Prof K. Murata) (2013-2016).
The CBIE had a contract from 2014-2018 with KDDI Research Inc. to support user acceptability research of user-managed personal information usage systems. We continue to collaborate with researchers there and at ATR on an unfunded basis.
I was one of the co-Investigators on the MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan) Programme for Strategic Research Bases at Private Universities (2012-16) project "Organisational Information Ethics" (S1291006).
I was the Principal Investigator on a JSPS grant Organisational and Individual Behaviour, and Personal Information Protection in the Age of Social Media (Kakenhi (B) 24330127) investigating the legal, business, technological and social rules influencing issues of privacy.
The UK's EPSRC supported visits to Meiji University from 2008-2010 to collaborate with Prof Murata and Dr Orito with the grant Anglo-Japanese Information Ethics: Comparisons and Cross-Fertilisation (EP/G069808/1).
The Royal Academy of Engineering supported a sabbatical visit to Tokyo in 2007 via a Global Research Award. During this time I was also a Visiting Professor at Meiji University.
EPSRC Project REASON (EP/C533402)
Dr Ferryman, Dr Wei and I collaborated at the University of Reading on this EPSRC project, along with academics at UCL and Kingston University, looking at the social, legal and ethical implications of video analytics applications.
EU Framework 7 Security Theme project SUBITO (FP7-218004)
Partners included: SELEX S&AS (part of Finnmeccanica), the French Atomic Energy Commission and the University of Leeds.
EU Framework 7 Security Theme project EFFISEC (FP7-217991)
Partners included: SAGEM Defense and Security division, Thales, the Swedish Defence Research Agency, the Romanian Border Police and the Port of Lisbon.
EU Framework 7 Security Theme project IMSK (FP7-218038)
Partners included: Saab AB, Telespazio, the French Ministry of the Interior and the German Football League.
EU PASR Project BIO3R (2007-9)
Partners included Universitaetsklinikum Bonn and Nomisma S.p.A..
EU PASR Project EuropCop (2007-8)
Partners included FRS, TNO and the French Interior Ministry.
EU PASR Project ISCAPS (2005-7):
I was the co-Investigator and research fellow at Meiji University on the EU Horizon 2020 EU-Japan.AI project
This project aimed to establish and strengthen links between various stakeholder groups based in Europe and Japan working on research, innovation and deployment of AI for manufacturing.
The French CIGREF funded the CBIE to investigate the emerging ethical values of digital object usage in Southeast Asia as part of their ISD research programme.
I collaborated with Dr Ian Brown (at that time of the the Oxford Internet Institute) on copyright issues, and on the ethical questions raised by ubiquitous computing in healthcare systems.
I co-authored (with Dr Rachel McCrindle of the University of Reading) a text book on the social and professional issues of the information society. Pandora's Box published by Wiley in December 2007.
I gave a University of Reading Public Lecture in November 2004 on "Copyright v Creativity".
I promote the digital rights of ordinary people wherever I can in my work and am involved in a small way in various approaches to this.
I am one of the Founding 1000 of the Open Rights Group (ORG).
I'm a supporter of the
Creative Commons
concept and release some of my work under CC licences, such as
this image.
I used to be an individual member of the Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC), part of the The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)).
I used to do research in Computer Mathematics, although my focus has now switched to social, legal and ethical implications.
I worked with Dr James Anderson (The University of Reading) and Dr Norbert Voelker (University of Essex) on formal presentations of the TransNumbers related to Dr Anderson's Perspex Machine model of computation.
Higher Order Theorem Proving:
I have worked with a number of different systems including
The Coq System (in which I did my
PhD)
and PVS.
I was involved in the
Calculemus Initiative
on combining the facilities of theorem provers and computer algebra systems.
I was a research fellow at the
Universitaet des Saarlandes in 2001 on
the EU 5th Framework Calculemus project and held a grant from the UK
EPSRC (GR/S15044/01)
to continue collaboration with the group of
Prof Siekmann there.
Mathematical Knowledge Management:
I was a member of the EU 5th Framework project
MKMNet
(including UK EPSRC funding on grant
GR/S10919/01)
which performed initial investigation into the new area of
Mathematical Knowledge Management. See my paper from the MKM '03 conference:
Digitisation, Representation and Formalisation for my views on the
general direction of this work, called "a manifesto for MKM" by one of
the conference referees.
I was the conference chair of the 2006 MKM conference MKM 2006.
My Publications (list is up to date as of 13th May, 2024).
The theses for my graduate degrees are all available:
INDUCT: A Logical Framework for Induction Over Natural Numbers and Lists Built in SEQUEL (MSc Thesis in Computer Science, The University of Leeds, 1995)
Tools and Techniques for Machine-Assisted Meta-theory (PhD Thesis in Computer Science, The University of St Andrews, 1997)
The Road to the EUCD (LLM Thesis in Law, The University of Reading, 2005)
Unfortunately, my current position at Meiji University does not allow me to supervise research students. There may be possibilities at the CBIE.
I do not have any interest in undergraduate student interns. Emails from Indian Institute of Technology (or similar) students looking for an internship will be ignored.
I have previously taught classes ranging from Information Society (to a range of graduate students at Meiji University) to technical subjects including discrete mathematics, programming design methods and functional programming (to computing and other systems engineering students at the University of Reading).
My email address is aaa at Meiji (which uses an ac.jp domain name).
