This keynote will introduce some of the key concepts of European data protection law, and clarify how and why this is not equivalent with privacy law. Next, I will explain why and how EU data protection law could enhance the methodological integrity of machine learning applications, also in the domain of multimedia.

Multimedia research has now moved beyond laboratory experiments and is rapidly being deployed in real-life applications including advertisements, social interaction, search, security, automated driving, and healthcare. Hence, the developed algorithms now have a direct impact on the individuals using the abovementioned services and the society as a whole. While there is a huge potential to benefit the society using such technologies, there is also an urgent need to identify the checks and balances to ensure that the impact of such technologies is ethical and positive. This panel will bring together an array of experts who have experience collecting large-scale datasets, building multimedia algorithms, and deploying them in practical applications, as well as, a lawyer whose eyes have been on the fundamental rights at stake. They will lead a discussion on the ethics and lawfulness of dataset creation, licensing, privacy of individuals represented in the datasets, algorithmic transparency, algorithmic bias, explainability, and the implications of application deployment. Through an interactive process engaging the audience, the panel hopes to: increase the awareness of such concepts in the multimedia research community; initiate a discussion on community guidelines all for setting the future direction of conducting multimedia research in a lawful and ethical manner.

Recommendations are meant to increase sales or ad revenue, since this is the first priority of those who pay for them. As recommender systems match their recommendations with inferred preferences, we should not be surprised if the algorithm optimises for lucrative preferences and thus co-produces the preferences they mine. In this talk I will explain how the GDPR will help to break through this vicious circle, by constraining how people may be targeted.