Recent Stories
- Unborn babies 'practise' facial expressions in the womb
- Lancaster leads the way in cyber security bursary scheme
- Physicists gain insight into the UK's biggest killer
- Engineering students make finals of national start-up business competition
- Social media plagued by privacy problems, say researchers
- Lancaster Environment Centre conducts roadside pollution research for BBC
- Lancaster set to receive funding boost to stimulate UK's economy
- Billion-year-old water could hold clues to life on Earth and Mars
- How do we find out about cyber criminals?
- First, carbon footprints... now you can calculate your 'nitrogen footprint'
Protecting Children Online
Story supplied by LU Press Office
Online child protection experts will meet in London next week to discuss ways in which technology can help keep children safe on the internet.
Police, politicians, researchers, children's charities and computer scientists will discuss the future challenges and opportunities technology offers parents and law enforcers working in this complex and challenging area.
Leading experts from different fields will discuss their perspectives, and showcase the latest technological developments in child online safety. This conference is aimed at people working in law enforcement, child protection, education, internet governance, and to anyone who is interested in the latest technologies that can be used to help protect children online.
Speakers include:
- John Carr OBE, Secretary of the Children's Charities' Coalition on Internet Safety who will Chair the meeting
- Alex Nagle, Head of Strategy, Policy, Partnerships and Governance at the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP)
- Professor Julia Davidson, Co-Director of the Centre for Abuse and Trauma Studies
- Jon Taylor MSc, who researched online sexual grooming and sex offender behaviour having worked covertly for UK Law Enforcement
- Professors Awais Rashid and Matt Jones Isis Project (Protecting Children in Online Social Networks) Lancaster and Swansea Universities
The conference has been organised by a team led by Professor Awais Rashid of Lancaster University.
His team is heading up project Isis - a study developing a tool which can work out a person's age and gender using language analysis techniques. They hope it will eventually be used to help police and law enforcement agencies spot when an adult in a chartroom is masquerading as a child as part of the victim "grooming" process. The tool can also be used to build general language profiles of paedophiles and paedophile groups to assist police in apprehending them online.
The study also addresses the ethical issues inherent in policing online social interaction.
Professor Rashid said: "Recent years have seen a rapid rise in the number and use of online social networks. These social networks pose two significant risks in terms of child exploitation: paedophiles predating on children in chat rooms and distributing and sharing child abuse media through online file sharing.
"Effectively policing the Internet is a challenging and resource intensive task. This conference will discuss the direction for future technologies that will seek to support law enforcement in order to protect children online."
Thu 21 October 2010
Associated Links
- InfoLab21 - The UK's centre of excellence for ICT
- Isis - Protecting Children in Online Social Networks - The EPSRC/ESRC funded Isis project aims to develop an ethics-centred monitoring framework and tools for supporting law enforcement agencies in policing social networks for the purpose of online child protection
- School of Computing and Communications - a multi-million pound centre for study and research in the fields of computer science, ICT and communications engineering
Latest News
Unborn babies 'practise' facial expressions in the womb
Researchers from Durham and Lancaster Universities suggest that a foetus's ability to show a "pain" facial expression is a developmental process which could potentially give doctors another index of the health of a foetus.
Story supplied by LU Press Office
Mon 17 June 2013
Lancaster leads the way in cyber security bursary scheme
Lancaster is one of four UK universities selected to take part in an 'industry first' sponsorship initiative encouraging students to take up Masters-level cyber security degrees.
Story supplied by LU Press Office
Mon 10 June 2013
Physicists gain insight into the UK's biggest killer
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the UK, accounting for a third of all fatalities through illnesses such as stroke and heart disease.
Story supplied by LU Press Office
Wed 29 May 2013
Engineering students make finals of national start-up business competition
Engineering students Scott Nash, Daniel Richardson and Aaron Aboshio have won the northern heat of the Youth Entrepreneurs Scheme 'Engineering YES' competition for their spin-out renewable energy company Atlantis.
Thu 23 May 2013