Jean-François Blanchette recently published a new book, "Regulating the Cloud," coedited with Joseph S. Yoo, that takes both a social and technical look at the cloud's role in everyday life, and features more than a dozen contributions from experts that examine cloud computing from the angles of privacy, geography and health.
Blanchette is an associate professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from the University of Montreal, before completing Ph.D. and postdoctoral work at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute and the University of British Columbia. Blanchette's research interests include authenticity of electronic information, social and political dimensions of information security, and the sociology of mathematics.
"Regulating the Cloud" is Blanchette's second book. "We don’t have a sense of where the cloud actually is located," he said. "In the past, we couldn’t necessarily see our data, but at least we knew that it was on our desktop. If we took the hard drive away, we knew it was there. Now we have no idea. But it is somewhere … in some physical location.”
A longer piece on Blanchette and "Regulating the Cloud," can be found in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies' news magazine Ampersand.
