Computers and networks now mediate a tremendous amount of our daily activity, ranging from shopping to health care to political engagement and even to friendship and romance. This trend of pervasive computation is expected to continue and even to accelerate for the foreseeable future. The primary currency of the internet – private information used by advertisers and others to gain insight into our lives – is a dangerous one and has meant that large companies devote significant resources to the procurement and analysis of such data.
Nation-state actors, now empowered by the same computational scaling factors and advances that have enabled a new generation of industry, are quickly using the same (and their power over these industries) to gain more power over their citizens. AI and pervasive computing now allows for tyranny at scale, facilitating bulk surveillance and individual-granularity profiling. Current legal structures are woefully inadequate to handle what is coming. In this talk, the speaker aims to outline this background, describe what rights we should even be looking for, and then suggest legal, technical, and civic measures we can take to ensure stable, long-term protections.
Register here: Where the mind is without fear: Using encryption to ensure freedom
Date and Time: 15th August, 12PM
Know Your Speaker:
Debayan Gupta is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Ashoka University, where he teaches a course on security and privacy as well as an introductory programming class. He is also a visiting professor and research affiliate at MIT and MIT-Sloan.
Before coming to Ashoka, Debayan held an Extraordinary Faculty position in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, where he taught courses like 6.042, 6.006, and 6.046. He has a PhD from Yale and a bachelor’s degree from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata.
Debayan’s primary areas of interest include secure computation, cryptography, and privacy. He also occasionally dabbles in number theory, complexity theory, robotics, and machine learning (and, on rare occasions, economics). He has helped start a number of companies in India and abroad, and as such, holds board positions in a number of start-ups. He also consults for and advises companies on cybersecurity, helping c-suite individuals understand and mitigate cyber-risk.