Information Ethics and the Future

Organisers

George Buchanan, University of Melbourne; george.buchanan@unimelb.edu.au

George directs the Melbourne iSchool and is a world-leading researcher on how people interact with information. He is current chair of the CHISIG of the Human Factors & Ergonomics Society of Australia, and past research chair of the BCS Interactions Group. He previously led the Centre for HCI Design at City University, one of Europe’s largest HCI groups. He is an Honorary Life Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

George has previously run several workshops on HCI at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, the ACM Conference on Hypertext and other international venues. In his various roles as SIG chair, he has served ex-officio on the ethics boards of professional bodies, and is the Deputy Chair of the Melbourne School of Engineering Human Ethics Advisory Group. Buchanan’s recent work on medical device interaction provided a number of cases where ethical challenges arose not only in preparing research prototypes, but in gathering user data and working with operational IT systems.

Dana McKay, University of Melbourne; dana.mckay@unimelb.edu.au

Dana is currently completing her PhD on information interaction after ten years working as a user experience researcher in an academic library. Dana has a long standing public interest in how people find, use, share and manage information. Lesser known, though no less deeply held is Dana’s interest in ethics—including the ethics of finding and using information, professional ethics and research ethics. It is this interest that is at the core of Dana’s research approach and agenda.

Dana has done research in both commercial and academic contexts, often crossing from one to the other and back again within a single project. Dana has used data she has gathered herself, publically available data, and commercially gathered data, encountering different challenges with each. Dana has been the workshops chair for the Australian conference on human computer interaction for nine out of the past ten years, and is the program co-chair this year.

Cosmin Munteanu, University of Toronto Mississauga; cosmin.munteanu@utoronto.ca

Cosmin is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at University of Toronto Mississauga and Co-Director of the Technologies for Ageing Gracefully lab. His multidisciplinary research includes speech and natural language interaction for mobile devices, mixed reality systems, learning technologies for marginalized users, assistive technologies for older adults, and ethics in human-computer interaction research. In particular, Cosmin has conducted research on the ethical aspects of technology-centric ethnographies and fieldwork and on issues of digital divides and interactive technologies for marginalized populations. Cosmin is an organizer for the Workshop on Ethical Encounters in Human-Computer Interaction (held at ACM CHI 2015, 2016, and 2017), which aims to engage multidisciplinary researchers in a dialogue about the ethical challenges faced in fieldwork with emerging interactive technologies. He has served as scientific reviewer for ethics applications during his tenure at the National Research Council Canada, is currently a member of the ACM SIGCHI Committee on Ethics, and is actively conducting research in the field of ethics as a recipient of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Knowledge Synthesis Grant.