2015 Visioning Activities

Computer-Aided Personalized Education

/

The demand for education in STEM fields is exploding, and universities and colleges are straining to satisfy this demand. In the case of Computer Science, for example, the number of US students enrolled in introductory courses has grown three-fold in the past decade.

Workshop Report

Promoting Strategic Research on Inclusive Access to Rich Online Content and Services

/

This workshop will address challenges and opportunities surrounding access to online content and services, including rich, non-text content. Consumers are increasingly relying on online information for guidance on matters of health, education, and other important topics. Our ability to provide online access for consumers generally, including people with disabilities, must keep pace.

Workshop Report

Privacy by Design – Engineering Privacy

/

This workshop will survey emerging challenges in engineering privacy from applications of cryptographic protocols and privacy-preserving databases, to formal notations and programming languages in identity management, de-identification, and software specification. This survey will review known challenges, such as understanding privacy policies (e.g., privacy laws in regulated sectors like healthcare and finance; privacy promises in self-regulated sectors like Web services) in computational terms so that tools can be developed to help with their enforcement, which includes conflicts introduced by cross-references from one legal text to another, difficulties reflecting use based models, modeling business process’ compliance with the law; and policy weaknesses exposed by computer scientists that limit the utility of translation for privacy protection (e.g., the atomic view of information types that ignores statistical correlations leading to weak de-identification requirements and ineffective approaches to privacy-preserving big data analytics).

This is part of a series of workshops - view the series page.

Workshop Report

Theoretical Foundations for Social Computing

/

Social computing encompasses the mechanisms through which people interact with computational systems---for instance, crowdsourcing platforms, ranking and recommendation systems, online prediction markets, or collaboratively edited wikis. Social computing is blossoming into a rich research area of its own, with contributions from diverse disciplines spanning computer science, economics, sociology, systems research, and HCI, to name just a few.

Workshop Report

Privacy by Design – Privacy Enabling Design

/

This workshop covered the latest research results in user interface design, usability and human factors including studies of user behavior and recent findings in privacy displays, nudging, privacy preference modeling, to name a few. While regulators attempt to drive privacy-by-design, there is little evidence that the class of professionals who consider themselves designers are engaged in the conversation. Workshops at CHI, and SOUPS continue to generate interesting research and spark conversation, however our efforts to identify designers in industrial innovators who are fluent in privacy—in any form—has come up relatively empty. Surely privacy, like other human values, is a source of norms and expectations that influences how designers approach their work, however, we do not have a good sense of how they approach it, whether they use distinct methodologies or tools to do so, and what concepts guide their inquiries.

This is part of a series of workshops - view the series page.

Workshop Report

Privacy by Design – State of Research and Practice

/

Regulators, academics and industry have called for privacy-by-design as a way to address growing privacy concerns with rapidly developing technology. The public and private sector are responding — hiring privacy engineers to join the ranks of privacy-oriented professionals, often working under the guidance of a chief privacy officer. Yet, implementing concepts of privacy through design is an open challenge and research area. There is a limited, disparate, and fragmented body of research affirmatively positioned as privacy-by-design. The first workshop of the series, highlighting the key insights, questions, themes, disagreements, and further barriers to actionable progress.

This is part of a series of workshops - view the series page.

Workshop Report

2025 Roundtable

/

The Visions 2025 initiative is intended to inspire the computing community to envision future trends and opportunities in computing research. Where is the computing field going over the next 10-15 years? What are potential opportunities, disruptive trends, and blind spots? Are there new questions and directions that deserve greater attention by the research community and new investments in computing research?

Extensible Distributed Systems Workshop

/

A Distributed System is a system consisting of multiple computers communicating through message passing. In the past 50 years, distributed systems have evolved from being a novelty to a fact of life---a very large fraction of computers today are part of a distributed system.

Through five sessions, the workshop will (a) discuss the gap between the current foundations that the distributed systems community has developed and the challenges and opportunities offered by today’s applications and infrastructure, and (b) identify possible solutions.