Blogs

Athens.
The next speaker at WebSci '09 is Alison Powell, and she focusses on the debate around net neutrality and the behaviour of net neutrality lobbies in this context. The debate stems from a US court ruling classifying Internet services as information rather than communication services, which eliminated the requirement of common carriage - ISPs would now be able to privilege certain types of traffic or slow down others. This became a major public debate during 2006 and 2007, driven in part by the 'Save the Internet' coalition backed by Google.

Athens.
The next speaker here at WebSci '09 is Wolf Richter, who shifts our attention to the 'dark side' of the Web. He links back to John Perry Barlow's 1996 declaration of the independence of cyberspace, and points out how much in spite of such rhetoric the regulation of online spaces has continued - but at the same time, anti-'piracy' and anti-spam measures have had only a very limited effect. There is also a thriving culture of self-regulation online, of course, with a number of organisations (some with government involvement) having emerged to drive this.

Athens.
The next session at WebSci '09 deals with questions of openness and control. We begin with Imma Rodriguez-Ardura, who connects Web science to marketing and consumer behaviour research. If the Web really poses new marketing paradigms, the marketing modelling for the Web can enrich the Web science field as well.

There are several studies of Web-based purchasing processes, which relate consumer behaviour to a number of factors, attempt to understand consumer satisfaction and loyalty, and address the question of consumer confidence as a determinant of purchasing behaviour. Additionally, classical models for explaining consumer actions are also being applied to the study of online consumer behaviour. And finally, the Web is also perceived as a source of consumer empowerment by providing greater transparency for interactions and information.

Athens.
Finally for this trust and security panel at WebSci '09 we move on to Pavlos Spirakis. He begins by noting that the Web was initially invented as a tool for researchers who trusted one another implicitly, so no security was built in from the beginning. This is no longer the case, of course, and so theer is a need fro privacy protection and for the protection of the freedom of its users. Layers of trust must therefore be engineered into Web technology.

Trust, however, is the belief of one party in another, and distrust is not simply the lack of trust, but the belief that the other partner explicitly cannot be trusted. Such distrust is an important notion in its own right, then. Trust is a relation between two parties, then, is context-specific, and exists in varying degrees of strength. This means that trust is measurable, Pavlos suggests, and that it can be expressed mathematically (algorithms such as Google's PageRank build on this).

Athens.
The next speaker at WebSci '09 (via video) is Ann Cavoukian, the Toronto privacy commissioner. She suggests that we need to think differently to protect privacy - there is a need for strong legislation and other forms of protection. but most of all privacy also needs to be embedded into technology; without privacy, she says, there is no freedom.

This may need a substantial change of attitudes amongst technology companies,but it is possible and necessary - riffing off the Obama slogan 'yes we can', Ann suggest that for this issue, it's 'yes we must', and she has been pushing for the recognition of an international data privacy day.

Athens.
The trust and security keynote at WebSci '09 is followed by a panel on the same topic, which starts with Kai Rannenberg. He begins by referencing the Internet of Things, and by way of example shows a prototype of a high-tech toilet (a washlet) that monitors the user's health condition on the basis of their, um, bodily products and reports such data to their doctor or other health authorities where necessary. Another key area of new Internet-based services is location-specific and builds on mobile devices to determine location, time, and identity of the user, and of course there is a wider range of datamining-based applications online.

Athens.
The post-lunch (mmmh, baklava) session on this first day here at WebSci '09 returns us to the question of trust; the keynote speaker is Jacques Bus, head of the European Commission unit "Trust and Security" within the directorate for the Information Society and Media. He begins by noting that we have moved from a walled fortress to an open metropolis model for digital information; this is a move from securitisation, isolation, walls, and the protection of everything, to trust, agreement, communication, and the protection of goods. In this digital world, there is as yet no adequate identity management for persons and artificial entities; the protection of data is the key.

Athens.
I'm now in the business session of this first day of WebSci '09 - it brings together a variety of Greek business leaders and politicians. The session will be in Greek, but there's a simultaneous interpreting service - we'll see how that turns out. The first speaker is the representative of the Greek Minister for Development, who points to the importance of life-long learning, the decline of distance, and new modes of working which are associated with the move to a digital economy; this is also associated with new forms of e-commerce and electronically mediated cultural activity.

Athens.
The next speaker at WebSci '09 is Kieran O'Hara, who begins by noting the perception of an increase in the activity of extremist groups on the Web, but with very little clear actual evidence supporting that perception. (Extremism is defined here as living in great tension within an embedding society.) How do extreme ideas - for example of a religious kind - spread on the Web?

One approach to this is to view this - with David Hume - as a marketplace of religious ideas, in which the most extreme are the most visible. But against this, Adam Smith suggests that there is also a drive to the centre in the contest of religious ideas, with the aim to attract a larger number of followers. There may be, in fact, a church/sect cycle, and Kieran points to the Mormons as a former sect which has become an established church, while new more extreme splinter groups have also hived off from this church in recent time. Religious moderation means a lower cost of participation for church members, while extremism means higher costs, but also greater cohesion and contribution from the smaller number of committed supporters.

Athens.
Up next at WebSci '09 is Patricia Victor, who begins by noting the growth in recommendation systems, including, for example, the advanced functionality on Amazon and in other e-commerce applications. Some 60% of Netflix users, for example, base their viewing on recommendations, and Netflix has offered a US$10m prize for an algorithm that improves its recommendation system by 10%.

There are two classes of recommendation systems: systems which are content-based and systems which are collaborative filtering-based. The latter focusses on similarities in the rating behaviour of users, and trust-based systems are often based on such algorithms. Epinions offers such a social trust network, and also allows users to evaluate other users by placing them in their network of trust, thereby conferring particular importance on these users' trust ratings. This also alleviates the 'cold start' problem with new users; it provides more reliable and accurate recommendations and leads to a kind of trust propagation through the network.