We are delighted to announce that the ITA 07 programme will include keynote addresses by Don Gotterbarn, Professor of Software Engineering Ethics at the East Tennessee State University, Simon Shepherd, Professor of Computational Mathematics, University of Bradford and Dr. Kevin Doughty, Deputy Director of the Centre for Usable Home Technology, part of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation at the University of York, UK. Full details: titles, outlines and biographies, to be published shortly.

10:00-11:00am, Tuesday 4th September:

Professor Don Gotterbarn, East Tennessee State University

“10 Commandments of Ethical Internet development: Don’t Soil the Commons”

Cyberspace, a potential home for creative development and enhancement of the human condition, is rapidly becoming a vast dangerous wasteland. Internet 2.0’s Blogosphere is rapidly becoming the “CLOGosphere”: MySpace, YouTube, shills making false product testimonials, and online (Un)civil rights. Unplanned and unregulated development of our central common space is destroying our Cyber commons. The risks to the cyber commons are described and some suggestions are offered to help application developers and vendors exercise their responsibility not to soil the commons. Responsible self-regulation is needed before the Clogosphere becomes either unusable or external regulation takes away the Internet’s potential for enhancing the human condition.

Biography

Don Gotterbarn, the Director of the Software Engineering Ethics Research Institute at East Tennessee State University, is also a visiting professor at the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility in England and a Professorial Fellow at Auckland University of Technology He is an ACM Distinguished National Lecturer. He worked as a computer consultant on software projects for the U.S. Navy, the Saudi Arabian Navy and developed an interactive crime reporting system. He has also worked on the certification of software for vote counting machines, missile defense systems and software development decision support tools. He was a member of the British Computer Society Ethics Expert Panel and was awarded the “Making a Difference” award by the ACM special interest group on Computing and Society in 2002 and in 2005 received the Outstanding Contribution award from the ACM for promoting ethical behavior of professionals and organizations.

9:30-10:30am, Wednesday 5th September:

Professor Simon J. Shepherd, Bradford Infection Group (BIG), Leeds-Bradford Medical School

"What are the Main Routes of Hospital Acquired Infection?"

The title of this talk may, at first sight, seem an unusual topic for a conference on Internet Technologies and Applications! However, the same technology that underlies the Internet is being applied by the Bradford Infection Group (BIG) to uncover the main routes of Hospital Acquired Infection (HAI) that is the cause of so much government and public concern.

All Internet search engines retrieve lists of potentially relevant pages in response to keyword queries. Far and away the most popular of the search engines is Google?, with more than 70% of all searches. Google’s success is based on its unique ability to rank search results in a manner that users find particularly helpful. As Google’s spiders crawl the Web, they build a “connectivity matrix” of which pages point to which other pages. Google’s engine then uses the “PageRank” algorithm (named after Larry Page, one of Google’s founders) to analyse the principal eigenvector of this matrix. This eigenvector is then used to decide the order in which the pages are presented to the user.

In a technology transfer research programme, BIG have developed a methodology to apply the same ideas to infection networks in hospitals. We have carried out studies in several hospital wards where interactions between human agents such as patients, nurses, doctors, visitors, porters, etc as well as inanimate agents such as light switches, hand washing stations, etc are monitored. From this, we build a connectivity matrix very similar to that for the Web. Using sophisticated eigensystem analysis of this matrix, we can discover the relative importance of the interactions between agents, and hence know where to focus (often limited) infection control measures. Thus far, studies have proved very encouraging with infections being reduced substantially by nurse cohorting, as reported by ourselves recently in the American Journal of Infection Control.

This talk will look at the use of this technology transfer from Internet search engines into the clinical infection control environment.

Biography

Simon Shepherd was educated at Edgbaston College, Kenilworth School, the Royal Naval Air Engineering School Lee-on-the-Solent, the Britannia Royal Naval College Dartmouth and the Royal Naval Engineering College Manadon.

He served as a Commissioned Officer in Her Majesty's Navy as a weapons and communications specialist where he held a number of appointments ranging from sea-going front line duty in aircraft carriers to shore duties in Naval Intelligence. He then joined British Aerospace plc where he was Senior Systems Engineer in the Special Projects Division responsible for computer modelling and development of future systems. He was appointed Lecturer in the University of Bradford in 1993 and elevated to a Personal Chair in 2001 with the title of Professor of Computational Mathematics.

Professor Shepherd is a Chartered Engineer, a Chartered Mathematician and was recently one of the first in the UK to be awarded the title of Chartered Scientist in recognition of his contributions across a very wide range of disciplines. He is a Member of the London Mathematical Society, a Senior Member of the Institution of Electronic & Electrical Engineers, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics.

His interests include early music as principal harpsichord of the Bradford Chamber Ensemble, singing with the Bradford Chorale and as Cantoris Countertenor in the Choir of the Cathedral of St. Peter. He has a passion for the music of Ludwig van Beethoven and has recently performed several of the early sonatas. His hobbies include cooking and technical analysis and modelling of the stock market, where he holds an "interesting" portfolio.

9:30-10:30am, Thursday 6th September:

Dr. Kevin Doughty, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, University of York

“The Emerging Role of Internet Technologies in Supporting the Independence of Vulnerable People”

An ageing population may lead to a pensions crisis within the next 25 years – but this may be dwarfed by the effect of having too few people to care for an army of older and disabled people. Many of these people, who will make up between a quarter and a third of the population of the developed world will have physical, sensory or cognitive impairments. They will expect to be more independent whilst maintaining a higher quality of life through improved care services. Smarter working will be necessary, with technologies making healthcare systems more efficient and more cost effective.

This presentation will focus on three technologies which are likely to form the basis of future provision:

1. assistive technologies (including personal digital assistants and robots) within the home environment to manage unmet needs
2. remote monitoring of the home environment and personal well-being (i.e. telecare) to manage risk and to provide information, advice, health coaching and response to emerging problems, and
3. virtual presence interfaces and applications to overcome loneliness, isolation and depression and to enable people to socialise and share experience irrespective of their physical location and condition.

These technologies depend on the internet and on broadband technologies. Prototype hardware and software solutions are emerging from laboratories and will be appearing in pilot studies before the end of this year.

In the presentation, progress will be reviewed and predictions made on the research agenda required to address both technical and ethical needs.

Biography

Dr Kevin Doughty is a widely experienced consultant in telecare, currently advising the Centre for Usable Home Technologies (CUHTec) as its Deputy Director. Originally a physicist and electrical engineer by origin, he became interested in medical electronics. Via a research and then a lecturing career in sensor technologies and telecommunications, he established his own company Technology in Healthcare to enable direct and practical application of expertise to the running of a residential care home. As a former Director of Telehealth for the Tunstall Group, he now works with them to enable leading edge research to guide the design of telecare products.