The Digital Decameron, Developing an Understanding of your Online Identity during Covid-19

The Decameron was a medieval book, written by Giovanni Boccaccio, composed of 100 tales told by 10 people who were escaping plague-stricken Florence and who isolated themselves in a house in the countryside. Similarly, this project recounts the stories – only 10 of them – of 10 people before, during and after the Covid-19 quarantine period through their data. The project’s aim is two-fold. In the first place, we want to make people more aware of the value of their data and its importance in their daily life. In the second place we want to use commonly available data in a privacy-safe way to improve every user’s life significantly. We will focus mainly on productivity and basic health parameters. The 10 stories will appear on a series of blog-posts on AI for People’s Medium publication. This project is conducted in collaboration with Rita Data, a start-up aimed at empowering internet users by providing a privacy-safe way of understanding and managing personal data. This project aims to develop a better understanding of online identities through multiple approaches: Confrontation, Explanation and Solution. The concrete application aims to provide a web-service that can generate a detailed, yet brief report about the most unique facts retrieved from the internet. This confrontation includes all of the basic information (gender, language, job, location) and more personalized information (friends, shopping preferences, language use). As there are already services in place to provide this information from separate social media sites (Facebook, Twitter etc), the implementation focuses on the connection of this information and on its visualization. Furthermore, the retrieved data should be explained to the user (how did the algorithm find the data) and finally offer ways to hide or delete the data.

Team

Project Lead: Gabriele Graffieti
Members: Marta Ziosi, Lorenzo Tosi, Guglielmo Schenardi (Rita Data), John Arts (Rita Data)

Are you interested in this project? Contact us at research@46.101.110.35