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

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 ?

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

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

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