Catherine Mason

Catherine Mason

This paper considers Ecogame, an innovative art project of 1970, whose creators believed in a positive vision of a technological future; an understanding, posited on cybernetics, of a future that could be participatory via digital means, and therefore more democratised. Using simulation and early machine learning techniques over a live network, Ecogame combined the power of visual art with cybernetic concepts of adaptation, feedback, and control to propose that behaviour had implications for the total system. It provides an historical precedent for contemporary AI-driven art about using AI in a more human-centred way.

Nikolaus von Bomhard, Bernd Ahlborn, Catherine Mason et al.

A growing framework of legal and ethical requirements limit scientific and commercial evalua-tion of personal data. Typically, pseudonymization, encryption, or methods of distributed com-puting try to protect individual privacy. However, computational infrastructures still depend on human system administrators. This introduces severe security risks and has strong impact on privacy: system administrators have unlimited access to the computers that they manage in-cluding encryption keys and pseudonymization-tables. Distributed computing and data obfuscation technologies reduce but do not eliminate the risk of privacy leakage by administrators. They produce higher implementation effort and possible data quality degradation. This paper proposes the Trusted Server as an alternative approach that provides a sealed and inaccessible computational environment in a cryptographically strict sense. During operation or by direct physical access to storage media, data stored and processed inside the Trusted Server can by no means be read, manipulated or leaked, other than by brute-force. Thus, secure and privacy-compliant data processing or evaluation of plain person-related data becomes possible even from multiple sources, which want their data kept mutually secret.