Professor Katina Michael and Dr M.G. Michael who chaired the Social I...

From roboethics to ‘drones’ . . .

The Fifth Workshop on the Social Implications of National Security was recently chaired by Associate Professor Katina Michael and Dr M.G. Michael as part of the program of the international IEEE Symposium on Technology and Society.

This year’s workshop was on the theme of “The Social Implications of Location Based Services and Other Emerging Technologies” and hosted by the Centre for Transnational Crime Prevention, Faculty of Law, in conjunction with the School of Information Systems and Technology, Faculty of Informatics.

The closed workshop was held on the Innovation Campus and included three international speakers -- Professor Rafael Capurro, Distinguished Researcher in Information Ethics, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA; Assistant Professor Ulrike Gretzel, Director Laboratory for Intelligent Systems in Tourism; and Mr Amal Graafstra, author of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification)Toys from the USA.

Presentations were delivered by five UOW staff and students, including the Executive Director of the Centre for Transnational Crime Prevention (CTCP), Professor Andrew Goldsmith; the Director of the Centre for Digital Ecosystems (CDE), Professor Peter Eklund; and PhD students from the research strength --the Institute for Innovation in Business and Social Research (IIBSOR), Mr Alexander Hayes, Ms Roba Abbas, and Mr Anas Aloudat.

The workshop contained perspectives from law and society studies, ethics, information systems, and marketing. The presentations addressed diverse topics including roboethics, RFID implants, location enabled body worn technologies, civil liberties and national security (e.g. privacy in emergency situations), social media mining, policing’s new visibility and the SMART mobility digital ecosystem.

Professor Michael said that new and emerging technologies were affecting the way in which business were operating.

It included Google employees doing drive-by street view photo captures in cars rigged up with GPS receivers and high definition cameras that can do 3D mapping, to online sites offering social networking applications to customers as part of product branding strategies.

“It also involves police having an ability to capture citizen incidents using in-car video recording equipment and body wearable voice-activated audio-recording systems,” Professor Michael said.

“Of greatest concern perhaps are the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as ‘drones’, and their ability to conduct blanket-coverage surveillance in a predefined airspace. Small UAVs are suspended in the air with as little as four rotor blades and come equipped with a selection of different cameras, including thermal-imaging equipment and standard CCTV. These kinds of drones have already been deployed in places like London City,” Professor Michael said.

“Increasingly information is also finding its way into private organisations where there is now a plethora of content that is collected from individuals, households and the public space.

“How this datum is collected, how it is used, and how it may be disclosed to other organisations are all important topics for discussion when considering the social implications of location-based services and other emerging technologies on national security.

“At the same time, citizens are becoming empowered through the use of powerful and affordable new technologies. Most Australians have the ability to record their version of events using simple smart phones which have video/audio/photo recording capabilities,” Professor Michael said.