With an increasing use of robotics in various fields, more and more vital information are being transferred to these bots. Sharing information with these machines might seem grandeur but its brings along the challenge to safeguard the information stored in the robots from being hacked or being shared by others. British researchers to explore different ways of preventing these stored data are carrying out a three-year project worth 2 million pound.
In the field of robotics, humanoid robots are fast emerging and are playing an important part in assisting people in some or the other ways in their daily lives, such as humanoid robots are programmed to assist elderly people in their daily house-hold chores. And this association of people with sociable humanoid bots, transfers important, private data that gets stored in the robots and can have major concern if not guarded properly.
Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, Dr Brown who is also an Associate Director of Oxford University’s Cyber Security Centre is exploring ways to empower these robots to extract information without trading off user’s confidentiality. He says that the humanoid bots are capable of gleaning, saving and analyzing information about the people day-to-day activities and movements. And hence it is important to conceptualize a bot that have an in-built privacy design for securing the stored data and limiting to what is required for carrying various day to day tasks.
As per Dr Brown, these robots did make our lives convenient, but a supervision is required to control any unwanted sharing of these data. And so he and his team at Oxford is looking for options that can enable individuals to take control of data about themselves, along with harnessing the promising benefits of robotic technology.
As per one such technique that is under development, requires to group people who share similar interests thus revealing personal interests of each individual, either at social functions or online.
Dr Brown is also a part of a bigger project that plans to measure the people responses towards robotic substitutes in public areas. An exceptional programmed humanoid robot named Nao designed by various researchers from the Universities of Oxford, Exeter, Bath, Queen Mary University of London and the Bristol Robotics Laboratory is going to be introduced publicly in Bristol by 2015.
Dr Brown in the Oxford London Lecture that would take place next month at Church House, Westminster, will be investigating wider privacy concerns that revolve around computing technologies.
Source: The Telegraph
