$1.2M NSF Award to Study Privacy in the Context of Wearable Cameras

$1.2M NSF Award to Study Privacy in the Context of Wearable Cameras

PIs Apu Kapadia and David Crandall at IU, and Denise Anthony at Dartmouth College, have received a $1.2M collaborative NSF award (IU Share: $800K) to study privacy in the context of wearable cameras over the next four years. The ubiquity of cameras, both traditional and wearable, will soon create a new era of visual sensing applications, raising significant implications for individuals and society, both beneficial and hazardous. This research couples a sociological understanding of privacy with an investigation of technical mechanisms to address these needs. Issues such as context (e.g., capturing images for public use may be okay at a public event, but not in the home) and content (are individuals recognizable?) will be explored both on technical and sociological fronts: What can we determine about images, what does this mean in terms of privacy risk, and how can systems protect against risk to privacy?

Read more about this grant, and our project. Here is a 90-second video!

A rise in public image gathering with wearable technologies -- called "lifelogging" -- has complex privacy implications for both individuals and society. Indiana University researchers, funded by the National Science Foundation, are studying the privacy implications from both a sociological and technological perspective. Their goal is to design new tools to help people manage their personal privacy in a camera-rich world. For more information on this research, see http://go.iu.edu/nQR. Video by Milana Katic for the IU Newsroom

Description of the video:

wearable cameras are opening a new paradigm of photography called life logging automatically capturing
thousands of photos of wednesday from a first person perspective a sudden rise in such image gathering has novel privacy implications for both individuals and society our challenge is to understand these privacy implications from both the sociological and technical perspective in a society with ubiquitous cameras unlimited memory and powerful data mining tools the context of all kinds of social interaction is changing new technologies often affect cultural expectations about privacy not to mention individual perceptions of what should and should not be private we seek to understand not only how life logging technologies and perceptions of privacy but also how expectations of privacy can inform technology design and development so we're investigating computer vision techniques that can automatically find private content and images so that users can block recording or sharing based on policies that they define well we've already created a tool that people can train to identify and respect private spaces like bathrooms or bedrooms and private objects like computer screens but this is just a starting point in our goal of laying the foundation for understanding and protecting privacy in a camera-rich world