Designing Incentives Enabled Decentralized User Data Sharing Framework

Abstract: Data sharing practices are much needed to strike a balance between user privacy, user experience, and profit. Different parties collect user data, for example, companies offering apps, social networking sites, and others, whose primary motive is an enhanced business model while giving optimal services to the end-users. However, the collection of user data is associated with serious privacy and security issues. The sharing platform also needs an effective incentive mechanism to realize transparent access to the user data while distributing fair incentives. In this talk, I will provide an engineering approach for specifying the operations for designing incentives and user-controlled data-sharing platforms based on blockchains and smart contracts. I will also present an augmented technology acceptance model to study the initial adoption of the blockchain-based data-sharing system.

Biography: Ajay is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science (MADMUC Lab) at the University of Saskatchewan, he is supervised by Dr. Julita Vassileva. Ajay previously obtained an MSc in Ethical Hacking and Computer Security from the University of Abertay Dundee, Scotland. He specialized in applied cryptography, cybersecurity, blockchains and data privacy. During his Ph.D. Ajay was awarded an International Dean’s Scholarship in 2016, and a Teacher-Scholar Doctoral Fellowship in 2019. He has worked in collaboration with ARTiFACTS, a U.S. based company, to evaluate the effectiveness of using blockchain-based solutions for sharing research data. Currently, Ajay is a part-time faculty in the Department of Computer Science at Vancouver Island University.