BPH welcomes new visiting scholar Timothy Kariotis (3-7 June 2019)

Timothy Kariotis will be visiting the Brussels Privacy Hub for the first week of June 3rd - 7th. He will be presenting a doctoral seminar on Monday the 3rd of June on "Information Continuity in the Digital Age: Co-Developing the Socio-Technical Design Requirements for Integrated Electronic Health Records to Uphold Contextual Privacy". Ahead of his planned visit, let´s get to know Timothy!

Tell us a few words about yourself and what you are up to right now.

I'm currently a PhD candidate at The University of Melbourne (Victoria, Australia), School of Computing and Information Systems. My broad interests are the ethics of data-centric and automated technologies in mental health contexts. This stems from my background as a carer for someone with a complex mental health issue. My PhD looks specifically at how we design privacy into integrated electronic health records for mental health contexts. I also have a background in public health and health promotion, and I'm really interested in the impact of the 'digital society' on the social and ecological determinants of health. I've recently had two conference papers accepted looking at information exchange between the health and social care system, and another looking at the contextual privacy of Australia's national electronic health record (My Health Record). I'm also working on three big pieces of work at the moment. One is a paper exploring privacy by design from a contextual privacy perspective. The other paper is looking at the alignment of privacy law in Australia with the needs of an increasingly digitised health system. The final piece is the data collection and analysis for my PhD, which includes interviewing clinicians and service users. 

What do you expect out of your study visit at Brussels Privacy Hub?

I'm really excited to be visiting Brussels Privacy Hub, especially with the two papers I'm currently working on. I'll be presenting a doctoral seminar on Monday the 3rd of June which will hopefully generate some interesting discussion. I'm also hoping to meet with as many people across the institute during the week to discuss the current privacy narratives in the EU since the adoption of the GDPR.

Future plans?

I'll be heading to Saxion Uni after Brussels to visit a few colleagues in the digital health and creative arts space. Next, I'm heading down to Berlin to mentor students at an eHealth event looking at the role of eHealth in air quality and non-communicable diseases. Then finally, I'll be spending two weeks in Switzerland collaborating with colleagues on topics around the ethics of digital health technologies. Then back to Melbourne for a bit before heading to Adelaide to present several pieces of work at our national primary health conference. In August I'm fortunate enough to have been invited to speak and attend several conferences and professional symposiums, including Health Informatics Conference (Melbourne Australia), Contextual Integrity Symposium (Berkeley, CA), Context Sensitive Health Informatics Conference (Lille, France), and the UX Design Conference (Sydney Australia). This is going to be a whirlwind trip but an awesome opportunity to showcase the interdisciplinary nature of my PhD research.

How can we reach you?

You can email me at timothy.kariotis@unimelb.edu.au, find me on twitter @timothykariotis and find me on LinkedIn. I'm keen to collaborate on any projects looking at privacy or ethics in relation to technology.

Interested in applying for a study visit with the Brussels Privacy Hub? You can learn more about the Brussels Privacy Hub visiting scholar programme here.