Mini Tracks – Calls for Papers

Data surveillance
Information age war propaganda
The human/social aspects of psychological operations and their civilian and military impact
Resilience and susceptibility of “Service Oriented Architectures” (SOAs)

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Mini track on Data Surveillance 

Track chair: Dr Henrique Santos, University of Minho, Guimarães, Portugal

In this information era where data is generated, stored and consumed at an impressive rate and affect most aspects of live, there is a challenge to keep webs and nets safe as well as useful. People behave almost the same way as they did in the past, sharing information and secrets, or doing any kind of transactions, using the same communication channels for good and bad purposes. However, nowadays they do it faster, with much more multimedia information, targeting wider geographical areas and using sophisticated ubiquitous resources. As before, to keep a certain confidence level, surveillance is required but this time over a highly complex and dynamic information matrix. Besides the basic save guard function, surveillance can also be useful to find new and less obvious relations between data, allowing, for instances, to discover traces of new disturbances all over the world, before they start to produce serious damages. Defined this way, Data Surveillance (DS) has a potential impact in a wide range of important real-world applications, including (but not limited to) security, information services, finance, public health, environmental science, business and economics.

One big issue concerning Data Surveillance (DS) is where it starts to imply loss of privacy or confidentiality. These values have different meanings for different communities that, despite their differences, share the same technological infrastructure, being exposed to each other. The multi-nature of data sources (information collected nowadays includes multivariate records, images, audio, spatial and spatio-temporal data, text documents, and even relational data) also imposes new challenges well behind current data mining and text mining techniques. The volume of data to analyse demands for automatic approaches and machine learning techniques should contribute for this purpose. But, again, the peculiarities of DS violate the typical requirements of machine learning. So, new approaches, architectures and algorithms are required for adequate defence mechanisms.

The aim of this mini track is to bring together different communities researching in areas that may affect DS, such as social and behavioural science, information security, information warfare, information society, data mining and machine learning, to share their ideas and experiences. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Methodologies, architectures and computational tools for data surveillance systems
• Privacy issues and implications in data surveillance
• Ontology based frameworks for specific data surveillance applications
• Event detection in complex data such as video, audio and spatio-temporal data
• Event detection based on multiple data sources
• Data mining techniques and expert knowledge for data surveillance
• Application of learning algorithms for data surveillance
• Application of data surveillance in safety-critical environments

§         Algorithms and tools for online data surveillance

• Reducing false alarm rates and analysis of error tradeoffs within data surveillance applications
• Validation and testing of data surveillance systems, including metrics for performance evaluation
• Novel application domains

For mini track submission details, see the call for papers page.

Henrique Santos

Mini track on Information Age War Propaganda 

Track chair: Jari Rantapelkonen, Finnish Defence Forces, Finland

This mini track is interested on papers on information war and security focused on discussing propaganda in current and future war. Information Age War is characterized by words, pictures, and images that have strong effects on how war is seen, how war is waged and how war is experienced. Propaganda as a “bad term” has been placed with examples such as information operations, perception management, marketing, public relations, persuasion, etc. With the help of globalisation and information technology propaganda is present world-wide in Internet, Mobile Telephones, etc. Governments, military, media, industry, business, and entertainment activities are conducted with information age professionals skilled on various kind of communications. Mini track invites submissions of papers on both the theory and practice of all aspects of Information Age War Propaganda. Mini track looks for the papers that are both philosophical and practical, operational and theoretical, qualitative and quantitative, academic and military. Mini track is interested in paper in the following areas, but not necessarily limited to:

• Language and communications of War
• Images of War
• Media Wars
• News Agencies in Wars
• Psychological War and Psychological Operations
• Cultural issues of Global War On Terror
• Information Age Weapons, e. g. videoclips and videotapes
• Manipulation and Internet
• Marketing War and Business
• Advertising War Zone Security, e.g. Private Military Companies
• Ads in War
• Lies in Wars and Their Effects
• Information Technology and Propaganda

For mini track submission details, see the call for papers page.

Jari Rantapelkonen

Mini track on The human/social aspects of psychological operations and their civilian and military impact. 

Track chair: Dr Andy Jones, Security Research Centre, BT, UK and Edith Cowan University, Australia

The role of Psychological Operations (PsyOps) in Information Operations (IO) and Information Warfare (IW) is well established and is fundamental to achieving the IO objective.  While the technical and technological issues related to IO can be described and measured, the effect of PsyOps is more difficult to evaluate. Different cultures have a range of views on the importance and potential effects that can be achieved by the use of PsyOps and are also affected in different ways by its use.

People at all levels need to understand both the potential benefits and the implications of PsyOps and how the issues may affect them. This mini track within the conference will specifically address the human/social issues of PsyOps and will explore the relationship of these issues with the Information Warfare technologies that are examined in the main conference. The conference welcomes papers addressing research and case studies on any aspect that is related to the human/social issues of information warfare.

Examples of indicative themes in this area:

• The media and its effect on perception;
• The management of Psychological Operations;
• The integration of Psychological Operations into conventional military operations;
• The credibility of Psychological Operations techniques;
• Cultural impacts of Psychological Operations;
• Psychological Operations form the viewpoint of other cultures;
• Legal and ethical issues;
• The assessment of impact resulting from Psychological Operations;
• Ontology;
• Legal and ethical issues;
• The language of Psychological Operations.

For mini track submission details, see the call for papers page.

Andy Jones

Mini track on Resilience and Susceptibility of "Service Oriented Architectures" 

Track chair: Tim Parsons, Detica, Guilford, UK

With the ability to map Enterprise business processes and governance models to a decoupled underlying layer of business information services, Service Orientated Architectures have matured rapidly since early 2000 and are increasingly central to the business transformation plans of organisations across many sectors.

Business information services, typically provided as web services, can be diverse in nature, originating from within or outside of the Enterprise (which may itself be decentralised), across the supply chain and wrapping legacy systems. Under these conditions issues of Trust, Identity Management and Message Security are paramount to the integrity of the system and ultimately the Business.

This mini-track calls for papers which explore issues of resilience, and susceptibilities of SOA including, but not necessarily limited to, Trust, Identity Management and Message Security.

For mini track submission details, see the call for papers page.

Tim Parsons