Recording
Speakers
Aad van Moorsel is a Professor in Computer Science specialising in cyber security, specifically interdisciplinary research at the intersection of computing, psychology, and social sciences. He has been Principal Investigator of several interdisciplinary projects, funded by UK, EU, and USA funding bodies. His work includes the study of economic mechanism design to incentivize healthy security behaviour, the research in choice architecture for that purpose and more recently the study of trustworthy AI systems.
Karen Elliott is an Associate Professor in Enterprise/Innovation, specialising in socio-technical interdisciplinary research between business, technology, and social sciences. Named ‘Standout #35 Women in FinTech Powerlist by Innovate Finance’, she is the Co-Investigator of FinTrust (EPSRC) and Finclusion (Gates Foundation/Turing Institute) projects with Prof van Moorsel and forms part of the IEEE Ethical AI and ForHumanity Committees. Her work examines FinTech, trust, digital ethics, and Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR), to promote an equitable digital society.
Summary
The online world is for many people a curious but uncertain one. It enriches many facets of life but at the same time exposes citizens to a variety of threats that may cause harm to them, their loved ones and wider society. There is growing evidence that many such harms result from a complex interaction of societal processes driven by diverse stakeholders (e.g., Mehrnezhad 2021). These complex harms tend to happen to citizens, and, in most cases, they are not purposely caused or easily controlled by citizens. The AGENCY project is motivated by the firm belief that establishing citizen agency is a sine qua non for any transformative approaches that reduce these complex harms. That is, citizens need to be empowered through technologies and user-centred tools that enable them to gain a sense of control, ownership, security, and consequently trust and assurance in their online activities. Engaging with the general UK population and identifying demographic markers that intersect with complex harm, AGENCY aims to establish interdisciplinary co-design principles, technology foundations and collaborative governance procedures to assure online citizen agency in the presence of multiple stakeholder interests. If AGENCY succeeds, it will provide a profound understanding of the role of agency in reducing complex online harm and will deliver collaborative methods, technological building blocks and scientifically grounded best practices for our society to provide more proactive and structured approaches to protecting citizens online.