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:

* Ashish Goel: Incentives based robust reputation and recommendation
systems
* Maurizio Lenzerini: Integration and filtering of heterogeneous information
* S. Muthukrishnan: Streaming and sampling algorithms for information
aggregation in networks
* 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