Dr. Michele Nati is Lead Technologist for Personal Data and Trust at Digital Catapult. He works on a number of projects and initiatives to increase transparency and individuals control on how personal data are collected and shared. His aim is to increase users’ trust in the creation of new personalised services. He is exploring the legal, technical and commercial barriers to create a personal data ecosystem, controlled by the users with privacy and trust. He liaises with SMEs, Universities and Corporates to explore the different technologies and identify the required collaborations and interventions. He is currently working on the introduction of a standardized Personal Data Receipt and corresponding provisioning and management framework, to increase transparency, track personal data sharing transactions and provide General Data Protection Regulation compliance. 

On a technology side he focuses on digital identity, context-aware privacy, consent, auditability. He is exploring the role of blockchain and other decentralized technologies to achieve transparency and (democratic) trust, in particular in the digital health and manufacturing sectors. As part of the EU H2020 Synchronicity project, he is also defining the role of blockchain to create decentralized, interoperable and trusted smart cities market data.

Before joining DIGICAT, Michele matured over 10 years of research and development in Wireless Sensor Networks and Internet of Things, both in Academia and SMEs. He was Senior Research Fellow at ICS, University of Surrey, leading a number of European Projects on Internet of Things, including SocIoTal (http://sociotal.eu) and IoT-Lab (http://www.iotlab.eu), working on privacy issues in mobile phone sensing and crowdsensing area.