The UMD Transatlantic Privacy Project

Katie Shilton is an associate professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and leads the Ethics & Values in Design (EViD) Lab. Her research explores ethics and policy for the design of information technologies. She is the PI of the PERVADE project, a multi-campus collaboration focused on big data research ethics. Other projects include developing privacy-sensitive search for email collections; analyzing ethical cultures in computer security research; and building tools to facilitate ethics discussions in mobile application development.

Jessica Vitak is an associate professor in the College of Information Studies and an affiliate professor in the Communication Department at the University of Maryland. Her research evaluates the privacy and ethical implications of big data, the internet of things, and other “smart” technologies. She seeks to understand how privacy concerns play a role in technology adoption and use, and she develops tools and resources to help children and adults make more informed decisions when using technology and sharing sensitive data.

Paul Ohm is a Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. Professor Ohm’s research and teaching bridges computer science and law, utilizing his training and experience as a lawyer, policymaker, computer programmer, and network systems administrator. His research focuses on information privacy, computer crime law, surveillance, technology and the law, and artificial intelligence and the law. He serves as a faculty director for the Institute for Technology Law and Policy; the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law; and the Georgetown University Tech & Society Initiative. He has testified before committees of both houses of Congress and advised numerous government agencies including the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission, and several state Attorneys General. He has also served as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at both Georgetown Law and the University of Colorado Law School and currently serves as Georgetown Law’s first Chief Data Officer. Professor Ohm received a law degree from UCLA and degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Yale University.

Trent D. Buskirk, Ph.D.,  has recently joined the new School of Data Science at Old Dominion University as one of several founding faculty members. Prior to this appointment, Trent was the Novak Family Distinguished Professor of Data Science and outgoing Chair of the Applied Statistics and Operations Research Department at Bowling Green State University. Dr. Buskirk is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and his research interests include big data quality, recruitment methods through social media, the use of big data and machine learning methods for health, social and survey science design and analysis, mobile and smartphone survey designs and in methods for calibrating and weighting nonprobability samples and fairness in AI models and interpretable ML methods. When Trent is not geeking out over data science, big data or survey methodology, you can find him playing a competitive game of Pickle-ball!

Olga Kononykhina, a mid-career PhD researcher at LMU Munich, holds degrees in Applied Mathematics and Sociology. Over the past 15 years, she has actively engaged in research and consulting, focusing on the development of measurement systems and indicator frameworks, as well as the integration of data analysis into social and political contexts. She is keen on improving data literacy and data communication, particularly through the creation of interactive data platforms. In terms of her academic specialization, she focuses on enhancing the quality of occupational data for machine learning (ML) classification, while also exploring the intersections of ML and data biases, ML and official statistics, and AI governance and privacy.