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Today’s students are putting their minds together to solve some of the world’s toughest challenges. The students at Toronto Metropolitan University are no exception. With more than 48,000 students enrolled, the university offers an innovative, career driven curriculum, with programs spanning science, engineering, management and technology. The university recently collaborated with IBM to support emerging technology research.

Led by Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd, the university’s Social Media Lab, part of the Ted Rogers School of Management, recently launched a new multi-year research initiative funded by the Canada Chair Research program to study the adoption and use of privacy-preserving and blockchain technologies.

Data privacy is a trending topic when it comes to both businesses and consumers. Businesses are striving to comply with changing data privacy regulations, while consumers are questioning how secure and accessible their personal and sensitive data is. And with rising cyber-attacks, the stakes have never been higher.

Spurred by this increasing consumer distrust toward third party usage of sensitive personal information, the research team at the Social Media Lab chose the IBM LinuxONE platform to support testing of open source data privacy solutions. These include user-contributed data clearance repository, blockchain-based social networking, and differential privacy tools.

“We’re excited to kick off research of emerging data privacy technologies with the IBM LinuxONE platform,” said Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd, Canada Research Chair in Privacy-Preserving Digital Technologies. “Ultimately, we hope this research will help bring open-source data privacy tools to consumers who may not have the resources to set up solutions on their own.”

Combining IBM’s experience with secure infrastructure with the openness of the Linux operating system, the system will form the core of a new data innovation hub at Ted Rogers School of Management for the study of data privacy technologies and their implementation in Canada. A highly scalable Linux and Kubernetes based platform, LinuxONE offers a unique architecture engineered to meet the needs of clients in highly regulated industries.

At the Social Media Lab, the team will install and evaluate various open-source blockchain-based technologies such as Hyperledger Fabric, Subsocial, Steemit, Helios, BigchainDB, Corda, Busy, Moralis on the server.

As emerging technologies open up new possibilities for data privacy solutions, research in this area has the potential to benefit Canadians and organizations, especially in the areas of social networking, digital scholarship, scholarly practices, data exchange and more broadly the area of digital citizenship.