Speakers

Speakers

Speaker - Blaine Price

Blaine Price, Professor of Computing at the Open University, will deliver a speech with the working title ‘Smart Homes for Older Adults: Supporting Grandad or Spying on Granny?’

The decreasing cost of internet connectable sensors makes it relatively cheap and easy to instrument at home with off the shelf devices resulting in the ability to collect vast amounts of data from a single home. Advances in machine learning can allow us to process this data to infer what the occupants are doing at a given time and to recognize when they deviate from normal patterns. With our aging population and pressures on medical and care home facilities, these technologies have the potential to help more older adults age safely at home through automatic monitoring to catch a possible decline before it results in a hospital or care home admission. Blaine will be talking about some of the technical, social and legal challenges of these technologies and how they might be resolved.

Blaine Price is a Professor of Computing at the Open University. For the last decade he has contributed to research in privacy, especially applied to the Quantifed Self. His current research centres on the human side of wearable and ubiquitous computing technology applied to health and wellbeing. He was Principal Investigator on the EPSRC funded project ‘Monetize Me: Privacy and the Quantified Self in the Digital Economy’ and is currently PI on the STRETCH project using socio-technical systems to help older adults live longer in their own homes.


Speaker - DC Patrick McBrearty

Detective Constable Patrick McBrearty is a Cyber Protect Officer within the Regional Organised Crime Unit for the West Midlands (ROCUWM). WMROCU has the responsibility of protecting the communities in the West Midlands from serious and organised crime. 

Patrick will be talking about the current cyber threat landscape, the threat actors and their methods.  He will discuss the UK Cyber Strategy, whilst also providing a description on how the national strategy is being delivered more locally. He will conclude with some advice around what businesses and the public can do to protect themselves against the majority of cyber-attacks.

He has served within the Police for sixteen years in a variety of Intelligence and Investigation departments pursuing those engaged in serious and organised criminality. Prior to this Patrick has served in a variety of public services, including reserve and regular military service.

Patrick has a good understanding of Cyber security from an academic standpoint having studied a BSc Risk and Security Management followed by an MSc Criminal Investigation and Cyber security. In addition to his day job Patrick is an associate lecturer part time at the University of Worcester within the Criminology Department.


Speaker - Dr Samuel Fosso Wamba

Dr Samuel Fosso Wamba is Full Professor at Toulouse Business School, and will present at the conference on Big Data Analytics, Blockchain and Supply Chain Optimisation: Concepts, Theories and Research Agenda.

Big data analytics (BDA) is emerging as an important topic among scholars and practitioners because of its high operational and strategic potentials. In this talk, after proposing a definition of BDA, Dr Wamba will present some of his recent work on the topic at the organizational and inter-organizational levels. Then, he will introduce his latest research on blockchain-enabled supply chain optimization and end with some promising research avenues.

Prior to becoming a Professor at Toulouse Business School, Dr Wamba was Associate Professor at NEOMA Business School and Senior lecturer in the School of Information Systems & Technology, University of Wollongong, Australia. Dr Wamba successfully defended on September 2015 his Habilitation of Conducting Research in Management Science at the Telecom Business School, France. He earned his PhD in industrial engineering at the Polytechnic School of Montreal, Canada. He also holds two Masters degrees: one MSc in mathematics, from the University of Sherbrooke in Canada and another MSc in electronic commerce from HEC Montreal, Canada. He is CompTIA RFID+ Certified Professional, Academic Co-Founder of RFID Academia.


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