Next Generation Information Systems

1
Next Generation Information Systems

• Current state of affairs
• Information explosion
• Web search becoming the new normal, but limited
  to kw search
• Democratization of content creation (blogs,
  wikis, bulletin boards)
• Web mediated communities
• Uncoordinated, egoistic development
• Very little understanding of privacy implications
  (on both consumer and providers side)
• Rapidly changing social legal landscape, many
  open questions

2
Information, economics, privacy

• Joint theory of privacy, economics, and computing
• Quantify loss of privacy, value received
• Theory of information that includes cost of
  discovery
• Examples phone book vs reverse number look up,
  ssn on a house deed in the courthouse vs on the
  web.
• Ease of information access should play a role in
  a theory of privacy.
• Quantify cost of discovery
• Computational cost of privacy ?

3
Information quality

• Can this be quantified?
• Reliability of information
• Interplay between democratization and
  authenticity
• Anybody can contribute information and
  misinformation
• Create mechanism for social certification of
  authenticity

4
Information finding

• Enhancing power of search
• Putting structure on information
• clustering
• Semantic search and content analysis
• Create economic incentives for producing metadata
• Human aided computing
• Yahoo questions
• CMU image game ESP
• CAPTCHAs
• Folksonomies, del.icio.us
• Use to provide better data resources

5
How NSF can help?

• Need repository of real data to support research
  in all three areas
• Information privacy economics
• Information quality
• Information finding
• Two ways to help
• Research in
• Anonymization
• Privacy presrbing sxampling
• Create repository under NSF aegis that would
  encourage companies to supply data
• Safe harbor provisions
• Tax incentives