First day of IEEE Social Computing - Keynote 1

After a series of introductionary remarks to the conference (there are multiple conferences here of which IEEE Social Computing is one), now there is a keynote speech by Stephen Lau on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust in Service-Oriented Environments. Alex Pentland of MIT introduced the IEEE Social Computing conference of which my paper is part of the SIN workshop (Social Intelligence and Networking). If you're in the conference, then please talk to me, I will give a talk in SIN at the last session on Monday called "Finding Cohesive Subgroups and Relevant Members in the Nokia Friend View Mobile Social Network".

Dr. Lau is talking about information assurance in Service-Oriented Environments. Now, we are entering service-oriented computing. This is nothing new, IBM Research has advocated service-oriented computing for many years, and in academia and research, service-oriented computing is very important. However, there are challenges in service-oriented computing environments, like for example system reliability, must be easy to use, privacy, trust and tracking users. There are XML-based policies to help with this and software engineering is being used to tackle this.

So, what is Dr. Lau's research to address these issues? They have developed a framework for systematically managing and enforcing security policies and a model for flexible security policies. He just showed the workflow of the architecture of their framework. The complicated part of this research is the integrated framework for managing and evaluating security, privacy, trust and risk. We need to have new models for trust and risk considering technical, human and social aspects.

Mesh08 - Day 1 - Private vs. Public

I'm now in the last session of the first day of Mesh08 which is on Private vs. Public. There is the question of regulation in a public space. There is an issue now where people who are not who they are, post fake pages, there was this case with a Toronto local councillor who was bad mouthing others, according to Ken Anderson, assistant privacy commissioner for Ontario. You have to understand the ramifications of posting content online, according to philosophy professor and author Mark Kingwell. Rachel Sklar, the moderator, is addressing about how people use handles to be anonymous and not reveal their identity. An audience members is addressing how whether we can use a Creative Commons notion for acknowledging privacy and asking if it would be viable, because it is the case now that we have to be aware of what is being said in surroundings and how content about yourself can easily be posted online. Ken addressed how surveillance is something you can't control and he is talking about sousveillance where people monitor their surroundings like Professor Steven Mann's work on wearable computers.

Another question being addressed by an audience participant is how to guarantee that the information being captured using cameras is used for just for the purposes intended for, but what guarantees that it is not being used elsewhere. Another question is that whether we should get rid of privacy because everything is being made public and it is difficult to regulate and control privacy. According to Ken Anderson, not all websites are the same.

On Technorati: Mesh08, Mesh 2008