FIMN 2008

Foundations of Information Management in Networks

July 6th, 2008, Reykjavik, Iceland

1-day workshop to be held in conjunction with the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, ICALP 2008.

Confirmed Speakers:

systems aggregation in networks
 * Ashish Goel: Incentives based robust reputation and recommendation
 * Maurizio Lenzerini: Integration and filtering of heterogeneous information
 * S. Muthukrishnan: Streaming and sampling algorithms for information
 * Giuseppe Persiano: Security of networks of low capability devices
 * Christian Scheideler: Algorithms for scalable and robust information systems

SCOPE: Network information management is a growing area of research at the attention of several communities: Algorithms, Formal Methods, Information systems, Data mining, Networks and Distributed Systems. The reason of this interest is given by the recent emergence of information systems distributed across the network, pervasive systems, physical mobile and virtual networks of users. These systems are often self-organized, interconnected, highly dynamic, expand up to include the users as source of content and intelligence, ask for a unifying view of data, services and users. Query, search and retrieval of structured and unstructured information in such systems has already prompted a large body of research at the intersection between databases, information retrieval and networks. Examples are peer-to-peer systems, distributed hash tables, distributed information retrieval, filtering and integration of information, representation, query processing and compression of structured data. Computing aggregate information and statistics in these systems require novel sampling, hashing and streaming techniques that operate with limited storage and computational resources and/or   by looking only at a suitable subset of the data. In pervasive systems and networks of sensing  entities, local statistics often need to be computed  at several vantage points in the network with even more severe restrictions. These network systems are open and thus prone to manipulation of malicious individuals and collectives. Mechanisms that protect the system against manipulation using incentives, reward and penalties are a wide subject of study as well as the equilibria they induce. On the other hand,  the devise of trust and reputation mechanisms  that cannot be manipulated by users and coalitions of users are also an important field of investigation. We also observe a growing role of the players in performing fundamental  tasks of the network. Users provide tags, annotation, feedback in terms of  preferences and opinions. Modelling user behaviour and learning  about user profiles from  logs and past behavior is therefore becoming  crucial in several applications.

These challenges  ask for  a more solid asset of the theoretical foundations  of information management in networks. A number of position papers and recent results will be presented by key researchers in the area that will be invited to this workshop. Several of these subjects are already of interest of the ICALP community, all tracks. However, we believe that a more focussed and thorough presentation of the main challenges of these areas will make an original contribution to the conference.

Organizers:

Stefano Leonardi (Sapienza University of Rome) Friedhelm Meyer auf der Heide (Heinz Nixdorf Institute - University of Paderborn)

For further information and registration, see http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~leon/fimn08.html This CfP was obtained from WikiCFP