Technology and the World Around Us

You may think you have nothing to fear, nothing to hide, nothing to worry about but we all have personal connections to the internet and, increasingly, the things we own are connected, too. That includes everything from light bulbs to cars, from smartphones to printers. Of course these inanimate objects are incapable of being against us, unless they have been pitted against us. In this talk, I will look at some of the common attack vectors used against connected devices and the strategies which designers are using to combat them.

Don't let all those big faceless corporations collect data about you, collect it for yourself! Allow me to take you through the process, using a DIY ethos. My story starts with an aversion to crowds in town on a Saturday afternoon, and ends with semi-autonomous (ground-based) drones that follow me around to collect personal data. Throughout the journey, we will solve problems of detecting how many people are in an area, realise everyone is asking the wrong questions and turn some of this personal environment data into music.

Improvements in the speed and efficiency with which genomes can be sequenced mean a growing tide of data that promises to supersede the computing capacity of Twitter and YouTube. The DNA that is the subject of those sequencing efforts may also be key to solving the challenges that accompany the growing mountain of big data. I will explain why and how DNA can be used to encode data.