User:GingerThomas/Dawn Jutla

Dawn Jutla is a Full Professor at the Sobey School of Business at Saint Mary’s University and an adjunct professor of the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada. She received her Bachelor degree in Natural Sciences in 1987 from the University of the West Indies, in St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, and her Master and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the Technical University of Nova Scotia in 1992 and 1997 respectively. Her PhD work on a Multiview Model for Protection and Access Control has been cited in 10 different US technology patents.

Dawn is the Founder and Director of the Master of Technology Entrepreneurship (MTEI) Program at the Sobey School of Business. Under her leadership, the MTEI Proposal was developed and written within 5 months, and the program approved to start within a year - a near record for a university program. In the capacity of its founding Director, she stood up the Sobey MTEI program in the marketplace within 25 days of the university receiving its Maritimes Provinces Higher Education Council (MPHEC) approval. The MTEI program proposal has become a template for subsequent Master degree program development. In 2015, Scotiabank donated 1M to the Sobey School for Dawn to continue supporting the MTEI Program through her appointment as the Scotiabank Professor of Technology Entrepreneurship.

She serves as Treasurer on the Board of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), and chairs the OASIS Privacy by Design Documentation for Software Engineers Technical Committee with Ann Cavoukian, the former Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner. Dawn also served on the Board of Governors at Saint Mary’s for 6 years.

Early Life and Career
Born in London, England to mixed-race parents, Jutla moved to Trinidad and Tobago where she was raised by her maternal grandparents. She is the eldest daughter of William Gordon Thomas, British inventor of the Bitubale. Her sister, Fiona Thomas Saura, is Managing Director of the privately-held Eastern Petroleum Construction LLC. In Trinidad, she attended Grant School, during elementary years, and the Naparima Girls High School where she was secretary of the Chess Club. She subsequently attended the University of the West Indies in Trinidad. Jutla moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1989 and completed her advanced degrees in Computer Science. After her first degree, Jutla gained experience in business in her role of marketing computer solutions, across seven business sectors, when she worked at McEnearney Business Machines, a company of the ANSA McALGroup, the second largest group of companies in the Caribbean. Then she taught university-level business and computer science courses while completing her PhD degree. When she joined the Sobey School of Business in Halifax in 1997, Jutla initially focused on electronic commerce research and teaching.

In 1998, aided by software donated to her research project by Jim Gray of Microsoft Research, she designed, and with her students, Yie Wang and Shaohua Ma, implemented benchmark software for electronic commerce that was an alternative for TPC-W’s design and implementation. The business model she designed for the e-commerce benchmark resembles many of today’s models in two-sided e-commerce platforms. The 1999 paper which described the benchmark was in the top 25 most downloaded for Elsevier Information Systems journal in 2005. She also first-authored a paper entitled Making Business Sense of Electronic Commerce, discussing e-commerce business models, which appeared in IEEE Computer in 1999. It was translated to Japanese at the request of Nikkei Computer. Another of her popular papers describes a model for governments to understand how to increase and measure e-business adoption.

Research in Privacy
After completing their book E-business Readiness: A Customer Focused Framework with James Craig in late 2000, Dawn and colleagues proposed a well-cited model and metrics for governments to use to build digital, legal, and human infrastructure to support businesses in adopting e-commerce/e-business practices on a national scale. Examples of innovative initiatives, circa 2001, were provided from Canada, The Netherlands, Norway, and Singapore.

Recognizing gaps in current digital infrastructure, Dawn next focused her research efforts throughout the first decade of the 21st century on maintaining online personal privacy. She saw online privacy as a need of growing importance in evolving societies. In an ideal world she states, there would be no conflict among privacy and e-commerce, high-quality health care, security, and the tracking of personal movement. But, the reality is different.

Esther Dyson, serial entrepreneur and philanthropist, in a keynote article of Scientific American’s September 2008 special issue on privacy sums up a key privacy issue that Dawn had been addressing for many years. Dyson says: “ Rather than attempting to define privacy for all, society should give individuals the tools to control the use and spread of their data. The balance between secrecy and disclosure is an individual preference, but the need for tools and even laws to implement that preference is general.”

Jutla has led several student and faculty research teams working on designing and developing software to fill this need for tools to allow users to control and manage their private data online according to their individual preferences across contexts of usage, space, and time. The technical details of her privacy software architectures have been freely disseminated to the R&D community in about two dozen scholarly articles.

According to Elsevier's ScienceDirect Top 25, her article on Privacy-aware Electronic Commerce User Contexts was the number 14 most downloaded article for the Fall 2005 after it was released online through ScienceDirect, and was the number 2 most downloaded article, in the April to June quarter in 2006, after it was released in print. The article describes a comprehensive system to allow users to manage her/his private data online, including services to log what data has been given to which organizations, under what terms, and what the user believes about the organization.

Jutla creates privacy software solutions that allow each stakeholder to win. Based on her teams' research results on user behaviour, researchers expect those users who employ mediating privacy mechanisms will be more trusting of online business and the Internet. To support privacy during e-commerce transactions, she proposed a platform architecture called PeCAN, which supports among other things, a collaboration between a personal context agent and a P3P agent to apply context-specific privacy rules during a user’s electronic commerce transaction with an organization’s Web site or Web service. The personal context agent manages dynamic changes of the context, informs the user about the current privacy-related context for decision support, and automatically generates user preferences. Fully compliant to the P3P privacy platform, the context management system supports the storage, index, retrieval, and switch of user contexts in response to users’ changing tasks and visits to different online sites. PeCAN is unique in that it allows a user to specify different privacy preferences in multiple contexts, e.g. according to which organization the user is interacting, or to transaction type (e.g. browse, purchase, register), or even to what time of day it is, and so on.

Jutla also designs privacy Web services for managing users’ social, ethical, and economic preferences for an individual’s private data management. She describes how the user can control the spread of their private information to what they consider to be unethical or environmentally-unfriendly businesses, or to organizations that shares customer data with a third party partner originating from a country with human rights abuses, or poor privacy laws .Dawn’s R&D team implemented a web agent prototype for providing some of these examples of novel privacy services within the Semantic Web.

Jutla, and fellow researcher, Peter Bodorik, have also designed other general purpose, online, user privacy services. For example, it would be useful for a user agent, upon reading in Business Technology Services’s (BTS) privacy statement that the company “may share consumer information with its strategic partners,” to find out who its partners are. For a more complex scenario, the user agent could ask, “who are and where are BTS’s partners based?” If answers include that one partner is in Japan, another in India, and a third in England, external and internal regulatory agents in the PeCAN architecture will become involved. PeCAN’s integration service agent that synthesizes various layers of a country’s privacy acts or laws could be invoked before the user personal context agent decided on an appropriate action.

Jutla and her teams' Web privacy services are useful not only for enabling for three-way comparisons among user, government, and business stakeholders, but also for single stakeholder comparisons. For example, a business policy comparison service can be useful in several areas. One such area is that of multiple jurisdictions where users might deal with a Web multinational, that is, with a company doing electronic commerce through subsidiaries in many countries (for example Amazon Japan or Amazon UK). A Web service doing such a comparison would tap resources, such as the Safe Harbor initiative, which lists membership information of companies who abide by other countries’ privacy laws when doing business in those countries. Another area could be a Web service in which a user can compare many business’ privacy policies to determine which of them handle personally identifiable data in a manner that is appropriate to the user.

To increase the usability of the web privacy services, and to bring privacy management to mobile voice commerce, in 2005, fellow faculty researcher Vlado Keselj and Jutla developed QTIP, a high-level conceptual multi-agent software architecture which integrates natural language capability to be used in Internet Information Retrieval (IIR) tasks and privacy management. As a side-benefit, they showed how all other integrated IIR and natural language processing software systems, in the research literature, could be described as instances of a base QTIL multi-agent architecture.

In 2006, Jutla shared a best paper award for privacy work on a co-authored paper on “auditing and inference control for privacy preservation in uncertain environments” in the European Conference on Smart Sensing and Context. In that paper, her postdoctoral student, Xiangdong An, proposed to make context sharing among agents privacy-conscious, particularly knowing that a users’ released contexts could be used to correctly or incorrectly derive yet unreleased information. The team presented a Bayesian network-based inference control method to prevent privacy-sensitive contexts from being derived from those released in ubiquitous software-enabled environments.

Since then, she and IBM Scientist Dimitri Kanevsky have described usable SPACE (Security, Privacy and Context) for the mobile user, specifically exploring privacy needs in mobile investing and emergency management. The latter were described in IBM T.J Watson’s research reports. One recent work is the design of a Service Oriented Architecture-based system, which synthesized and packaged a number of IBM software technology assets, for transformative applications for persons with disabilities. The SOA architecture is described in a Communications of the ACM article on “Wise pad services for vision-, hearing-, and speech-impaired users”. Jutla is currently examining adding privacy to these Wisepad services. She sees privacy controls as an enabler to information accessibility and instrumental to the inclusion of all persons on the Web.

In November 2009, on an invitation from Ann Cavoukian to present to international privacy commissioners and experts at Dr. Cavoukian's Madrid Workshop on Privacy by Design: The Definitive Workshop, Jutla described a privacy life cycle from the user perspective, and suggested that there is a powerful social role that social networks could play in educating users about privacy. Her life cycle proposal classifies privacy technologies according to user behavioral phases, that is, when the user:

(a) Becomes Aware of privacy issues and rights

(b) Acts to protect her/his privacy

(c) Detects privacy violations or potential privacy violations, and

(d) Resolves privacy conflicts.

The privacy life cycle of Aware, Act, Detect, and Resolve asserts at least the following:

1) Users’ knowledge of privacy issues and readiness to act on protecting privacy change over time and hence pass through different phases, each posing different challenges and opportunities in the changing online environment,

(2) Protecting privacy requires different, yet sometimes overlapping, strategies and tools in each life cycle stage, and

3) Protecting a user’s privacy continues indefinitely, so the phases will cycle or repeat continuously throughout her/his lifetime, and for those affected (e.g. family members), beyond the lifetime.

Further at the Madrid workshop, she presented a design for providing privacy protection via layering privacy platforms. The multi-layer privacy technology platforms and their services may map to one or more of the lifecycle phases: Aware, Act, Detect, and Resolve. She proposes that privacy advocates can accomplish wide-scale pervasiveness of privacy services through a design to layer privacy platforms onto existing popular platforms, such as Facebook. With a platform-based strategy, the popularity of social networks, and a growing suite of online privacy services to meet the needs of the phases of the privacy life cycle, in coming years, billions of users may have access to and may adopt the tools to take control and maintain their privacy online.

Jutla advocates that end-user privacy management will be an important enabler to adoption of tomorrow’s transformative technology applications. Her tools are for the pragmatic majority, those people who don’t necessarily feel the need to operate under anonymity, but who would like to maintain reasonable control over their private data in the open. In the Fall of 2010, she was invited to join the OASIS Privacy Management Reference Model (PMRM) Technical Committee (TC) in which she maintains active membership. The OASIS PMRM TC has produced a 2013 approved standard-track committee specification to help stakeholders add security and privacy to their operations. In late 2012, she convened the OASIS Privacy-by-Design Documentation for Software Engineers Technical Committee that she now co-chairs with Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner, Dr. Ann Cavoukian. She and her students are helping design next-generation software to meet users’ privacy needs across business, government, and health sectors. Jutla received the World Technology Award for her work on privacy software, in the Information Technology Software category, in 2009.

Awards
World Technology Award, IT Software, 2009

SimplyCast's Jutla Scholarship Award, 2011

Board Memberships
OASIS Board of Directors, 2012-2014.

Board of Governors, Saint Mary's University, 2012-2015.

Nova Scotia's Math Provincials and Sci-Tech Expo
2011 Grade 9 Math Provincials First Place Winners - Logan Olmstead and Riely de Witt

2013 Grade 8 Best Use of Math and/or Computer Science Special Award - Julia Olmstead

Entrepreneurs
James Craig, General Manager at Career Beacon, co-founder, former President, and CEO of Diaphonics, New Brunswick, Canada

Andy Osburn, CEO of Equals6, former CEO of Diaphonics, Halifax, Canada

Peter Hickey, President and CEO of 2nd Act Innovations, former Director, Technology and Business Innovations at Global Sage, former President and CEO of CoEmergence

Peter Bidgood, VP Service Provisioning Solutions at Abridean, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Rafiy Saleh, Founder, Rana Technologies Limited, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO, SimplyCast, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

IT Professionals and Managers in Industry
Sheila He, Ecommerce Developer/Analyst at Travelex, Toronto, Ontario

Murthy Devulapalli, FS-CD Lead at Wipro Technologies, New York, USA

Yie Wang, Software Engineer, General Dynamics Canada, Ontario.

Shaohua Ma, Sr. Software Engineer at Applied Biosystems, San Francisco Bay Area, USA

Liming Xu, Senior Testing Automation Engineer at HP, Seattle, USA

Nolan Zhang, Software Developer at IBM, Ottawa, Ontario

Ruth Harding, Manager, Capital District Health Authority, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Colleen Arnold, Director, Corporate Services, College of Registered Nurses of NS, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Kim Parkhill, Governor Gold Medal Winner, Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Center, Halifax, NS