Personal Containers

Project VRM

2011-08-30T00:00:00-07:00

“ProjectVRM seeks to improve markets by equipping customers with tools for both independence from vendors and better engagement with vendors.”

Internet Identity Commons

2011-08-30T00:00:00-07:00

“Identity Commons is a community of groups working on developing the identity and social layer of the web. We are loosely connected sharing a common purpose and principles. Our main community gathering is the Internet Identity Workshop that happens twice a year.”

Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium

2011-08-30T00:00:00-07:00

“The Consortium catalyzes a Personal Data Ecosystem where individuals control their own data by enabling a thriving network of businesses around personal data stores and services. Our three constituency initiatives:

The Startup Circle - for startups committed to putting people in control of their own data, open standards and interoperability
Industry Collaborative - for existing industries seeking to understand opportunities, launch pilot projects and ultimately offer services in the ecosystem.
1 Million People for Personal Data - gathers people enthusiastic about the vision and keen trying out new products and services.”

Dataware Networking

2011-04-13T00:00:00-07:00

Keeping it personal

2011-03-23T00:00:00-07:00

Computing is becoming pervasive. The development of commonly available platforms has opened ubiquitous computing to a massive and creative developer base. We see a common application template of smart phone and cloud computing service, bringing personalized experiences to the user while companies seek (often desperately!) to monetize the information derived from the use of the applications. This sharing of information and co-creation of value is at the heart of the digital economy, but implementation for ethical companies often hits a privacy brick wall, while others are blissfully unaware of the privacy minefield they are walking through. The talk will discuss some of the issues in personal information sharing, the deep social context in which this sharing takes place in the real world, present some challenges for the future in embedding this sharing in technology and some of our work in this field.

Unclouded Vision

2011-01-05T00:00:00-08:00

Current opinion and debate surrounding the capabilities and use of the Cloud is particularly strident. By contrast, the academic community has long pursued completely decentralised approaches to service provision. In this paper we contrast these two extremes, and propose an architecture, Droplets, that enables a controlled trade-off between the costs and benefits of each. We also provide indications of implementation technologies and two simple sample applications that substantially benefit by exploiting these trade-offs.

The Dataware Manifesto

2011-01-04T00:00:00-08:00

In this paper we concern ourselves with Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) in the “business to consumer” (B2C) arena. In particular we consider the services required to enable consumers to combine data they possess with data held about them by businesses and government. We introduce the concept of Dataware as the logical federation of data sources containing “my data” and discuss an SOA to deliver new and compelling services and applications able to reap the benefits of value-in-use for consumers.

Becoming Dataware--- Enabling third-party computation across persnonal data

2010-12-16T00:00:00-08:00

Modern life involves each of us in the creation and management of data, and specifically digital data. Data about us is either created and managed by us (e.g., our address books, email accounts), or by others (e.g., our health records, bank transactions, loyalty card activity). Personal Containers is a project investigating how to build an ecosystem around my data, supporting provision of novel, desirable applications and services by new and existing businesses. The key technical problem in supporting an ecology around my data is not one of containment (“how can I archive all of my data?”). The matter is complicated by the basic property of digital data, that it can be infinitely copied without loss of fidelity: once my data escapes my immediate purview, I cannot easily exercise further control over it; yet in order to generate significant value from my data, I must allow others access to it. I will describe our initial steps toward a system in which we are trying to enable third parties to compute over personal data while providing individually acceptable privacy guarantees.

Horizon--- Becoming Dataware

2010-11-18T00:00:00-08:00

As we go about our lives, each of us creates and manages personal digital data about our online and real-world activities. Horizon Digital Economy Research is an RCUK research hub investigating the many different challenges surrounding collection and exploitation of these personal contextual footprints. Currently, many companies exploit our contextual footprints for their own gain, often without much explicit understanding or involvement on our part. Building an ecosystem around exploitation of our contextual footprints that maintains acceptable levels of privacy, both when our data is being exploited individually and as part of a group, is key to enabling growth in value of our social and personal data. After introducing Horizon, I will describe our initial steps toward a system in which we are trying to enable third parties to compute over personal data while providing individually acceptable privacy guarantees.

Mirage, A New Multi-Scale Operating System for Clouds and Crowds

2010-10-22T00:00:00-07:00

Applications run on all kinds of environments these days: multicore desktops, virtual cloud infrastructures, smart-phones, and web browsers. These diverse environments make it worth rethinking the long-term future of our software stacks; do we really want to continue bundling gigabytes of general-purpose OS software with every single cloud image? Is there any point holding onto decades-old interfaces such as POSIX any more?

I will introduce Mirage, a new operating system built in the statically type-safe OCaml functional language. Mirage compiles high-level functional source code directly into a variety of targets such as:

small microkernels that run directly on the “bare-metal” Xen hypervisor;
Javascript for web browsers; or
embedded ARM devices; …and of course normal operating systems such as Linux.

Mirage provides a consistent, simple programming API across all of these diverse backends, which makes it a powerful foundation for constructing safe, complex distributed systems across a heterogeneous set of modern compute resources such as mobile devices or cloud computing infrastructure. Also, it’s just plain fun programming in OCaml.

Personal Containers or, Your Life in Bits

2010-10-11T00:00:00-07:00

Unclouded Vision

2010-10-11T00:00:00-07:00

Free the data

2010-10-01T00:00:00-07:00