Talks, Panels, Lectures
Giving talks and guest lectures is a great opportunity to structure my knowledge and dig deeper into the topic. Here you can find a list of my most recent engagements:
2021
Panel on compliance challenges at "Startup Conference 2021" (June 16, 2021)
Speaker on the topic "Startup Compliance Challenges" at the "Startup Conference 2021" organized by the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
Information Technology in Practice, ETH Zurich (March 22, 2021)
Guest lecture at the ETH Zurich as a part of the course Information Technology in Practice" held by Dr. Marc Brandis.
Theory: Compliance for IT - Privacy, Security, and Legal Compliance applied to software engineering processes.
Home assignment: Hardware sizing task for an instance of Milvus (Open Source Vector Similarity Search Engine) as well as an introduction into Universal Sentence Encoder.
Some interactive feedback from students:
2020
Privacy Connect (October 22, 2020)
Speaker at Privacy Connect organized by OneTrust.
Topics: AI, profiling and HR - current and future regulatory requirements, frameworks for implementation of such requirements; electronic signatures for legal documents; Schrems II decision and impact on the data transfer.
Privacy Connect (June 17, 2020)
Speaker at Privacy Connect organized by OneTrust.
Topics: Key privacy challenges of 2020; the effect of COVID-19 on the compliance program; major milestones of building a compliance program in a company; audit and monitoring of compliance programs; how to monitor and react to regulatory changes in light of the recent changes; the role of the DPO in modern corporate structures.
MAS in Applied Technology (November 27, 2020)
Guest lecture at the ETH Zurich as a part of the CAS Program "Master of Advanced Studies in Applied Technology (MAS AT)".
Topic: Compliance for IT - Privacy, Security, and Legal Compliance.
Group assignment: Study of showcases of data privacy law inforcement with high fees and estonishing mistakes made by companies in Europe and the USA.
Some interactive feedback from students:
Case Studies from Practice Seminar - Semester Project (September-December, 2020)
Seminar: The Case Studies from Practice Seminar (ETH Zurich, Computer Science Department, Dr. Marc Brandis) is an extension of the successful Case Studies from Practice lecture series providing computer science students with insights into problems faced in practice, and allowing companies to interact with students and ETH faculty, making students aware of different fields of work, and fostering cooperation between industry and academia. The seminar deepens the interactions between industry and students and allow case topics to include questions to which the solutions are not yet known.
My role: Supervisor of a semester project (with great support of AI and Product Management colleagues from Starmind).
Goals of the semester project:
- Data analysis: The first necessity of top managers in big companies with regard to skill planning is to gain an insight into which skills does their entire workforce have. Starmind has provided a sample set of skill profiles (e.g. employee “John Smith” has skills in “Project management: 80%”, “AI: 60%”) in a JSON format. Students had to visualize this information in an aggregated manner to give transparency to a top manager of the company about the skills of their workforce and allow for interactive analysis of this data.
- Coding and frameworks: Students implemented a prototype for the project marketplace tool using the No-Code Framework bubble.io.
2019
Privacy + Security Forum (October 15, 2019)
Speaker at Privacy + Security Forum.
Topic: A Path to Anonymization: Through the Telecom, Health, AI, and Other Lenses
Content: Anonymized data, including under GDPR, the CCPA and HIPAA, is a preferred solution to avoid privacy law compliance burdens. Anonymizing data involves various steps, including: (i) understanding if the process of handling identifable data to anonymize it is problematic; (ii) choosing an anonymization technique; and (iii) performing a risk analysis for confidence that the data is sufficently anonymized for regulators or customers. In this talk, we will guide you through these issues in various sectors.
VIScon (October 12, 2020)
Speaker at VIScon Symposium at ETH Zurich.
Topic: Implementing a privacy- compliant software - practical experience
Content: Many cloud services nowadays collect and process a lot of photos, documents, ratings and other personal data. Data protection has changed a lot over the course of the past 2 years - not only in Europe. It became a tough job for programmers to build the software and stay compliant. This talk focused on how and when you can collect personal data, what you can and what you cannot do with it and what may happen if the topic of data protection gets forgotten.
Major questions addressed in the talk:
- What has changed in Europe in the past 2 years in the area of data protection?
- How does Switzerland fit into this picture? Then we will focus on:
- Which types of personal data do exist?
- How are you allowed to process this data in your software?
- What is profiling and when is it allowed?
- When and how should you anonymise the data?
- Can you keep the data forever? If not, when should you delete it?
- What you should notify your users about and when?
