Tristan Henderson

Accepting Postgraduate Research Students

PhD projects

I am broadly interested in supervising students in the areas of privacy, law and technology, digital rights, data protection or similar. I am happy to supervise interdisciplinary projects if possible (this may depend on finding suitable expertise in other Schools in the University or elsewhere).

Here are some high-level questions that I am currently interested in. Prospective PhD students with similar interests might use these as starting points for developing a research project.

i) Technology law is often aimed to be technology-neutral in order to be long-lived. But in reality, how technology-neutral is technology law? And how can technology-neutral technology design meet the objectives of technology-neutral law design?

ii) We have proposed <a href="https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/human-data-interaction">human-data interaction</a> (HDI) as a framework for understanding how people interact with data about them. How can HDI help protect data subjects? In particular, how can HDI be best incorporated into data protection (if at all)?

iii) How can ethical principles drive the design of distributed systems? In particular, I am interested in how ethics might help us decide between centralised and federated systems. How might ethics be incorporated into the design process, and how might we evaluate its
effectiveness?

See my personal website for further information: <a href="https://tnhh.org/research/">https://tnhh.org/research/</a>.