On Monday, November 6, 2017, Lehigh is hosting a DataX Fall Symposium entitled “TMI: The privacy risk of social media addiction” in STEPS 101 (1 West Packer Ave in Bethlehem) from 4:00pm to 5:30pm.
 
The symposium is co-sponsored by Seton Hall School of Law. Representatives will be available to meet with attendees who are interested in pursuing a law degree.
 
The keynote speaker, Heng Xu, is an associate professor in Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. Her research, focusing on understanding and assuring information privacy in different contexts, has been published in Business, Law, Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction, among other outlets. Xu served as a program director at the U.S. National Science Foundation from 2013-2016.
 
Other symposium panelists include:
 
Eric P. S. Baumer, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Lehigh University
Haiyan Jia, Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism and Communication, Lehigh University
Rebecca Wang, Assistant Professor, Department of Marketing, Lehigh, University
Gaia Bernstein, Michael J. Zimmer Professor of Law, Director of the Institute for Privacy Protection and Co-director of the Gibbons Institute for Law Science and Technology, Seton Hall Law School
Najarian (Jari) Peters, Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow, Institute for Privacy Protection, Seton Hall Law School
 
The symposium addresses the overuse of social media — some might call it addiction — that challenges our traditional notions of privacy and exposes large segments of our population to a new set of risks for which we are not yet well-prepared. What are these risks and what can we do to confront their growing impact? Social media powerhouses like Facebook and Twitter have fundamentally changed the ways consumers interact with businesses and with each other. Limited ability to control one's own social media use has varying implication for different facets of privacy that involve your friends and family, government, and the online companies you buy from. Laws to increase public awareness, especially of parents currently isolated in failing home battles, could result in market pressure to design our devices for contained use and increased user autonomy. Symposium panelists will discuss the importance knowing and understanding privacy loss and its implications, as well as the consequences of being too obsessed or too optimistic to correctly assess privacy risks in social media use.
 
DataX, launched in 2015, is a strategic Lehigh University initiative intended to significantly expand Lehigh’s capacities for teaching and learning in computer and data science, while increasing access to such courses for students, regardless of their major. DataX enables Lehigh to recruit and hire new faculty in computer science and related fields, infuse the concepts of computer science into areas of study across the university, and position Lehigh as a leader in an increasingly essential field.
 
DataX is led by Daniel Lopresti, professor and chair of Lehigh’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Lopresti is a widely respected researcher whose work in fundamental algorithmic and systems-related questions in pattern recognition, bioinformatics and computer security has placed him at the forefront of his field.
 
The broader goals of DataX are to build upon Lehigh’s existing core of computer science, develop relevant connections across the university’s four colleges and support cutting-edge research in a variety of fields. At the core of the initiative is an effort to expand Lehigh’s faculty working in these areas.
 
November 3, 2017