William Seymour

Research Associate at King’s College London

Research Interests

The modern connected home can be a busy and confusing space. My research uses a diverse set of methodologies to understand the concerns that people have when they use smart/IoT devices, both for themselves and their families. This insight is used to develop solutions and design artefacts that empower people to take control of their privacy, security, and autonomy, allowing them to shape their usage of technology to better support them.

Many of the questions asked by my research are centred around the nature of people’s understandings of and concerns about digital technology; fundamentally, what is it that makes people uneasy about using these systems, and what can be done to mitigate concerns both now and in the future? In many cases this requires both helping people to form effective mental models, as well as addressing problems with platforms and devices.

Projects

2021 - 2023 Secure AI Assistants, EPSRC

Secure AI Assistants (SAIS) is a cross-disciplinary collaboration providing an understanding of attacks on the AI assistant ecosystem, exploring the feasibility and severity of potential attacks from a strategic threat and risk approach, methods to specify & verify the security behaviour of AIS, and the generation of co-created privacy/security explanations for AIS behaviour. I am conducting the human-factors research for the project.

2018-2019 Respectful Things in Private Spaces, EPSRC and Building Research Establishment

I led a study exploring people’s perceptions of ‘smartness’ with respect to connected devices in the home, and how these perceptions relate to ethical concerns about the use of these devices. Drawing on thinking from Kant to the present day, I also conducted a preliminary exploration of how philosophical accounts of respect might be integrated into the design of devices for the smart home.

2019 IoT in the Home Demonstrator, EPSRC

I led a study exploring privacy-empowering technologies for the connected home, including the development of the Aretha smart home network disaggregator. Aretha analyses and visualises network traffic flows in the home, presenting users with a breakdown of the companies to which their devices send data, as well as their geographic location. Aretha was deployed to three families over a period of six weeks, and was also demonstrated to members of the public at the BRE Watford smart home test bed.

Education

2016 - 2021 DPhil Cybersecurity University of Oxford

2012 - 2016 MEng Computer Science University of Warwick

Awards, Talks, Positions, and Outreach

2022 CUI Best Short Paper Award

Consent on the Fly: Developing Ethical Verbal Consent for Voice Assistants

2021 Is it Time Our Devices Showed a Little Respect? Informing the Design of Respectful Intelligent Systems

Judge, ACM SIGCHI Student Research Competition

Program Committee, International Workshop on Privacy Engineering

2019 Winner, ACM SIGCHI Student Research Competition

Smart-Home Study Weighs the Privacy Risks Involved

Digital Privacy and Wellbeing

2018 Runner Up, ACM SIGCHI Student Research Competition

Who’s Storing your Conversations?

Can a Machine Pick a Perfect Christmas Gift?

2016-2020 EPSRC PhD Studentship

Teaching and Supervision

Lecturer Security Management

AI and Ethics

Supervisor MSc Dissertation Projects

Undergraduate Group Projects

Teaching Assistant Advanced Security, Imperative Programming I & II

Interaction Design and Structured Data

Internships

2016 Context Information Security, System Administrator

2015 Civil Service, Software Developer

2014 NextJump, Web Developer

Research Skills

Methodology

Software

Publications

2022 Can you meaningfully consent in eight seconds? Identifying Ethical Issues with Verbal Consent for Voice Assistants

When It’s Not Worth the Paper It’s Written On: A Provocation on the Certification of Skills in the Alexa and Google Assistant Ecosystems

Respect as a Lens for the Design of AI Systems

2021 Exploring Interactions Between Trust, Anthropomorphism, and Relationship Development in Voice Assistants

2020 Informing the Design of Privacy-Empowering Tools for the Connected Home

Strangers in the Room: Unpacking Perceptions of ‘Smartness’ and Related Ethical Concerns in the Home

‘I Just Want to Hack Myself to Not Get Distracted’: Evaluating Design Interventions for Self-Control on Facebook

Strangers in the Room: Unpacking Perceptions of ‘Smartness’ and Related Ethical Concerns in the Home.

2019 Aretha: A Respectful Voice Assistant for the Smart Home

IoT Refine: Making Smart Home Devices Accountable for Their Data Harvesting Practices

2018 Respectful Things: Adding Social Intelligence to Smart Devices

Workshops & Abstracts

2022 Consent on the Fly: Developing Ethical Verbal Consent for Voice Assistants

2020 A Design Philosophy for Agents in the Smart Home

Does Siri Have a Soul? Exploring Voice Assistants Through Shinto Design Fictions

Responsibility and Privacy: Caring for a Dependent in a Digital Age

Beyond the Individual: Exploring Data Protection by Design in Connected Communal Spaces

2019 Privacy Therapy with Aretha: What if your firewall could talk?

Informing The Future of Data Protection in Smart Homes

The Internet of Kant: Respect as a Lens for IoT Design

2018 How loyal is your Alexa? Imagining a Respectful Smart Assistant

The Need for Sensemaking in Networked Privacy and Algorithmic Responsibility

Social Acceptability and Respectful Smart Assistants

Detecting Bias: Does an Algorithm Have to Be Transparent in Order to Be Fair?

Software

Aretha: Smart home network disaggregator and data flow visualiser

Oxford Human Centred Computing Group Blog