The First Winchester Conference on Trust, Risk, Information and the Law will be held on Tuesday 29th April 2014 at the West Downs Campus, University of Winchester, UK.  The conference aims to explore the way that information is used and shared in today’s society, the challenges of the assessment of risk, the impact on privacy, the law’s response and the way that a multi-disciplinary approach can facilitate solutions.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words are invited for consideration.  Successful applicants will be allocated 15-20 minutes for presentation of their paper plus time for questions and discussion.  Abstracts, contained in a Word document or PDF, should be emailed to Marion Oswald at the address below.  Please include name, title, institution/organisation details and email correspondence address.  The deadline for submission of abstracts is Friday 6 December 2013.  Successful applicants will be notified by 31 December 2013.  Speakers will be entitled to the early registration discounted conference fee.

The conference and this call for papers is open to academics, postgraduate students and practitioners, and in particular those working in law, health and social care, law enforcement, information management, privacy, compliance, statistics, probability, data science and computer science.

Papers are particularly welcomed on the following themes:

  • Taking a risk: does the law deal with risk in the right way?
  • Trust & Transparency: freedom of information and open data as constitutional and democratic issues;
  • Probability, evidence and the law;
  • Information and protecting the sick and vulnerable: assessing risk & balancing privacy and the public good;
  • Crime, surveillance and data analysis;
  • Big Data, profiling and social media.

Other papers which are relevant to the overall theme of trust, risk, information and the law will also be considered.

Selected papers will be reviewed for publication in a special section/issue of the Web Journal of Current Legal Issues.

Conference Programme

Matthew Reed, Chief Executive of the Children’s Society, will open the conference with a plenary address on the role of trust and information in assessing risk and protecting the vulnerable.  Norman Fenton, Professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University, will provide a keynote speech on improving probability and risk assessment in the law.  The final plenary session will include discussion of anonymisation of personal data, led by a panel of experts in the statistical, computer science, technology and legal fields: Martin Borrett, (Director of IBM Institute for Advanced Security Europe), Dr Mark Elliot (Manchester University), Dr Kieron O’Hara (Southampton University) and Mark Webber, (Partner & Head of Technology, Osborne Clarke).

Full details of the conference programme will be published in due course. To view the programme and to book, please click here. For other queries and more information, contact Marion Oswald marion.oswald@winchester.ac.uk