martintoreilly
commented
4 years ago Acceptance email
I responded that I would be attending both days.
From: Rachael Ainsworth xxx@manchester.ac.uk Date: Monday, 10 February 2020 at 15:39 To: Martin O'Reilly xxx@turing.ac.uk Subject: Collaborations Workshop 2020 - session proposal accepted!
Dear Martin O'Reilly,
Thank you for submitting a proposal to facilitate the mini-workshop or demo session at Collaborations Workshop 2020 (CW20, http://bit.ly/ssi-cw20) titled "Productive research on sensitive data using cloud-based secure research environments" - I am delighted to let you know that your session has been accepted!
Due to the large number of high-quality submissions that we believe our participants will find of interest, we will be replacing the panel sessions in the agenda with more workshop/demo sessions. We can offer you a single session slot of 40-55 minutes, and we will confirm the exact date, time and length of your session by Friday, 21 February, taking into account the information provided in your proposal.
Can you please confirm by this Friday, 14 February if you or a session collaborator are able to attend CW20 to facilitate your accepted session? If your attendance is dependent on session date (either Day 1 or Day 2 of CW20), please let me know.
You can find the details of your session proposal attached.
Thank you and best wishes,
Rachael
jemrobinson
JulesMarz
bw-faststream
Our submission for a demo / mini-workshop at the SSI Collaborations Workshop 2020 was accepted.
CW20 Mini-workshop or demo submission form
Submitted at 12:25 Fri 31 January 2020 (25 mins late)
Organisers
Submitter: Martin'O'Reilly (The Alan Turing Institute) Session collaborators: James Robinson (The Alan Turing Institute)
TODO: Check if this should this be all contributors rather than just those delivering the CW20 workshop and, if so, add the full contributor list.
Session title
Productive research on sensitive data using cloud-based secure research environments
Session abstract
Many of the important questions we want to answer for society require the use of sensitive data. In order to effectively answer these questions, the right balance must be struck between ensuring the security of the data and enabling effective research using the data.
Imposing insufficient security measures results in unacceptable risks of data exposure. However, excessively stringent security measures will often result in significant detrimental impact on the effective use of the data.
Agreeing the right balance between security and productivity is a challenging and nuanced process. Doing this in an ad-hoc way for each research project and dataset is time consuming and requires a shared understanding between data provider and researcher of both the data and the available security measures.
Additionally, most existing secure research environments (Safe Havens) are configured as organisational or regional level facilities. These are complex, risky and expensive to set up and run and are often configured with a fixed set of security measures, meaning that all projects are subject to the most restrictive security measures required for the most sensitive data the Safe Haven supports.
In consultation with the community, we have been developing recommended policies and controls for performing productive research on sensitive data, as well as a cloud-based reference implementation in order to adress some of the above challenges. We have developed:
A shared model for classifying data sets and projects into common sensitivity tiers, with recommended security measures for each tier and a web-based tool to support this process.
A cloud-based Safe Haven implementation using software defined infrastructure to support the reliable, efficient and safe deployment of project specific secure research environments tailored to the agreed sensitivity tier for the project.
A productive environment for curiosity-driven research, including access to a wide range of data science software packages and community provided code.
In the first half of this session we will present an overview of our recommended policies and controls and demonstrate of the systems we have developed to support the effective implementation of these in practice. The second half of the session will be an open discussion on how these fit with the needs of the participants and how we can work together as a community to develop these further to cover to best meet our collective needs.
Session themes
Sessions required:
Session description
In the first half of this session we will present an overview of our recommended policies and controls and demonstrate of the systems we have developed to support the effective implementation of these in practice. The second half of the session will be an open discussion on how these fit with the needs of the participants and how we can work together as a community to develop these further to cover to best meet our collective needs.
We are also looking to use this session to engage strongly with the community and move our work from being a Turing project to a sustainable community platform that is widely used and collaboratively developed by the community.
Our policy paper has been developed in the open as a pre-print on arXiv, and we will be opening up our software defined cloud-based safe haven implementation under an MIT licence on Github for ongoing collaborative community development either just before this workshop or as soon after as possible, depending on the outcome of a security review in March.
We feel that this work connects strongly with the Data Privacy, Open Research and Software Sustainability themes, as well as the broader goal of the Collaborations Workshops in fostering collaborations.