How can researchers protect people’s geoprivacy when using individual-level geospatial data to gain insights into the dynamics and patterns of infectious diseases?

What disease control measures have higher risk of geoprivacy violation, which may significantly affect people’s acceptance of these measures and undermine their effectiveness in controlling the spread of COVID-19 or future pandemics?

How can public health authorities balance the need for disease control and individual geoprivacy protection?

What are the legal and technical issues in data sharing?

How to minimize the unintended negative consequences such as the stigmatization of and discrimination against infected persons as a result of geoprivacy breaches or location disclosure?

Mei-Po Kwan The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Mei-Po Kwan (Chair, speaker) is Director of the Institute of Space and Earth Information Science and Choh-Ming Li Professor of Geography and Resource Management of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Prof. Kwan is a Fellow of the United Kingdom Academy of Social Sciences, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and American Association of Geographers. She was awarded many Outstanding Academic Achievement Awards by the American Association of Geographers, including the Distinguished Scholarship Honors, the Wilbanks Prize for Transformational
Research in Geography, the Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography, the Edward L. Ullman Award for Outstanding Contributions to Transportation Geography, and the Melinda Meade Award for Outstanding Contributions to Health and Medical Research. She also received the U.S. University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) Research Award.

Song Gao University of Wisconsin-Madison

Song Gao (speaker) is an Assistant Professor in GIScience at the Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he leads the Geospatial Data Science Lab. His recent research utilizes deep learning approaches to geoprivacy protection for mobile phone data.

Maged N. Kamel Boulos Sun Yat-sen University | Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Int J Health Geogr

Maged N. Kamel Boulos (speaker) is a Digital health (informatics) scientist with >30 years of clinical and informatics experience, working as Medical Doctor (Dermatologist), Researcher, then Lecturer, then Assoc Professor, then Professor of Health Informatics (Digital Health) at City, University of London, and Universities of Bath, Plymouth, and UHI in UK, before moving to Guangzhou, CN, as Professor of Digital Health Systems at SYSU. >170 publications; GS h-index: 48. Founder of the MEDLINE-indexed Int J Health Geogr (2002).

Matthew Zook University of Kentucky

Matthew Zook (speaker) studies the intersection of digital technologies, cities and the spatial economy. An exciting part of this work are the ways that geo-referenced big data provides us the opportunity to have a more spatially and temporally granular approach to research urban geography and city planning. At the same, these research opportunities must be balanced with a careful approach to personal privacy and preventing harm to individuals and social groups.

Bruce Schneier Inrupt, Inc. | Harvard University

Bruce Schneier (panelist) is a public-interest technologist, working at the intersection of security, technology, and people. Schneier has been writing about security issues since 1998. Schneier is a fellow and lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School, a board member of EFF, and the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc.

Ada Chung Lai-ling Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data, Hong Kong

Ada Chung Lai-ling (panelist) was appointed as the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data of Hong Kong in September 2020. Ada was qualified as a barrister-at-law and a Certified Public Accountant. She has solid legal expertise and abundant administrative experience. Before her appointment as the Privacy Commissioner, Ada was the Registrar of Companies and had held various posts in the Department of Justice, including the Deputy Law Officer (Civil Law). In her role as the Registrar of Companies, she contributed significantly to the rewrite of the Companies Ordinance in Hong Kong and she spearheaded the implementation of the new Companies Ordinance in Hong Kong.

James Winterbottom Deveryware

James Winterbottom (panelist) is the Chief Architect and Product Manager for Deveryware’s GHALE product suite. Considered by some as the “Father of PEMEA”, James has extensive experience in protocol development, location platforms and system deployments for use in emergency communications. He sees general communication applications as being the predominant form of communication for millennials and subsequent generations and that access for these application to emergency services is crucial for public safety. To achieve this access James continues his involvement in the development of the PEMEA standard to better define advanced capabilities through Web Services, while maintaining strong privacy and data protection for those in vulnerable situations. As a disruptive technologist, James is committed to WEB-112 services ensuring reliable and cost-effective emergency solutions meeting the needs of current and future generations that are using application-based communications.

Douglas Richardson Harvard University

Douglas Richardson (panelist) is the Distinguished Researcher at the Harvard University Center for Geographic Analysis and the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS). His research focus is on frontiers of international, interdisciplinary and multi-sectoral geospatial research in areas such as health, sustainable environments, economic development, human rights, new geographic technologies, geoprivacy, and more recently the integration of spatial concepts, data, and analysis in the humanities and social sciences.

Bethany Deeds National Institutes on Drug Abuse (National Institutes of Health)

Bethany Deeds (panelist) is the Deputy Director the Division of Epidemiology, Services, and Prevention Research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) at the National Institutes of Health and the Program Official for the Adolescent Behavioral Cognitive Development Study. Her research focus is on the social epidemiology of drug use which includes geospatial research, new methods in drug abuse epidemiology, improved measurements of the social environment, social network/social media research and public health law and policy research related to substance use.