Like Smart Cities initiatives, smart campus initiatives have also been gaining a significant attention of Universities aimed at bringing optimisation and efficiencies in the operations of Universities and contributing to the sustainability drives. Smart campuses basically utilises the similar (or same in many respects) infrastructures to provide innovative solutions to address socio-techincal challenges and improve students and staff quality of experience. Smart campuses actually can be more readily designed and built as most of the required  Information and communication technologies are usually already present in Universities. Smart campus services are also designed and provisioned using the data gathered from end users through their usage of on campus wifi and other data collection devices. The automatic data collection from the usage and movements of students and staff – however, there has been concerns with regards to the privacy of the students and staff and a term Dataveillance has been used for automatic data collection.

Given the sensitivity of privacy issues involve and potential security and safety issues that may arise as a result of privacy breaches, t is very important to understand users’ understanding and concerns about privacy issues that may be involved in building smart campuses. A good amount of knowledge and deep understanding of the privacy concerns can enable researchers to provide advice to the smart campus designers and technological experts and providers. We have started a summary project that purports to understand privacy concerns of students. For this project, I’m very glad to collaboration with Professor Melissa Zwart and Ms. Beatrix Dissel from the School of Law Faculty of Professions at the our University. We will be finishing the project by the end of March 2016 and will be disseminating the findings. I’m very excited on being involved in this very interesting project that is expected to provide us with valuable insights into some aspects of conceiving, building, and providing services for a smart campus.