FutureID3: Biometrics & automated decision making

Cambridge St. John's College

It has been a pleasure to be part of FutureID3 at Jesus & St. John’s Colleges at Cambridge as a speaker, thanks for having me.

Part of the journey were many interesting and meaningful insights into biometrics in ID registration, automated decision making, its applications in the field, policy making, but also its societal effects, and challenges. Highly recommended to anyone who engages in that area.

My part was about the relevance of social acceptance of variables in credit scoring, and their actual predictive power when calculating a credit score. An appendix to that was about how we apply some of the resulting principles at awamo in East Africa.

Overall a very interesting event, with lots of insights from recent research, and the actual field applications, with lots of inspiring participants from all over the world. Special thanks go Keith Breckenridge from University of Witwatersrand (South Africa) for organizing the event, and to Simon Szreter for giving us the grand tour on Jesus & St. John’s Colleges.

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Hand-picked software for work & office

Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash

I’ve been building my personal Windows-toolchain for more than 20 years, and that is why people approach me frequently to ask for tools for this and tools for that. Find here my toolchain, which should make things easier for everyone.

In general, I will prefer open source or freeware tools, unless a commercial solution is clearly superior in my eyes. For most of my recommendations, there are also versions for Mac, and Linux.

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Founder paperwork

This may happen to your personal document stash if you decide to start a company .
Unless you’re following some super-duper “get your shit done with this morning ritual and habits”.
BUT: it’s strictly chronological 2016-2017;)

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Has my email address been hacked?

Update 16 Jan 2019

Security researcher Troy Hunt reports a huge leak of 773m leaked email addresses, including 21m unique email/password combos. This will be one of the biggest bubbles in the data-leak-top-list right away.

What to do now?

  1. Check your email addresses in the HIBP database (“Have I Been Pawned”) if they appear in any so-far discovered leak, including this one.
  2. Put your email address in the free HIBP notification service which will inform you in case your email address will be affected from future leaks.
  3. If in doubt about any specific password, check your passwords if they appear in any discovered leak. (Normally, you should NEVER, NEVER EVER post any password anywhere on the net, but Troy Hunt employs the concept of k-anonymity which makes sure that no clear-text will ever be revealed to any third party -not even the HIBP service itself. In the end, it is a matter of trust.)
  4. If not already in place, go ahead and use a password manager like BitWarden, LastPass, or 1Password.

Beyond that, you should consider using unique yet easy to remember passwords for every single service you use. This will save you hours of work and some sleepless nights easily, just in case 🙂

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