Hey Siri, Google: "Where's my personal data?"

Web browsers and search engines have become part of our everyday routine of reading news, finding information, internet shopping, and interacting on social media via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others. All of these technologies shape our digital culture and seamlessly draw us into the digital economy. Typically these essential services are free, but have you ever wondered why? Tonight you will find out how our data is being shared invisibly by businesses, advertisers, e-commerce sites, and ad service providers; and be able to answer the question “what is our role in the digital economy?”

Computing technology is everywhere - in our homes, cars, on, and in, our bodies - and with the coming Internet of Things we expect to see even more. These systems constantly capture and process personal data to provide functionalities we deem as essential parts of our life. More often than not, that data is also shared with a technology provider, but why? Tonight we address the mixture of technical, commercial and sociological factors at work (with everyday examples!) and how our research attempts to empower the consumer in the encroaching Internet of Things age.

Natural language interfaces have recently made it into popular commercial products from smartphones to standalone devices such as the Amazon Echo. In this talk I will use examples from our research in which we examine how people talk to these devices in real life. Yet, the broken interactions we have recorded can hardly be described as ‘conversation’. I will discuss why it is so hard to build conversational interfaces and share some ideas of what we would need to do to change this.