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FOCI '11 Call for Papers
USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet
(FOCI '11)
August 8, 2011
San Francisco, CA
Sponsored by USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems Association
FOCI '11 will be co-located with the 20th USENIX Security
Symposium (USENIX Security '11), which will take place August 8–12, 2011.
Important
Dates
- Submissions due: May 8, 2011, 11:59 p.m. PDT Deadline Extended!
- Notification to authors: June 15, 2011
- Final paper files due: July 11, 2011
Workshop Organizers
Program Co-Chairs
Nick Feamster, Georgia Institute of Technology
Wenke Lee, Georgia Institute of Technology
Program Committee
Dorothy Chou, Google
Richard Clayton, Cambridge University
Jed Crandall, University of New Mexico
Nicolas Christin, Carnegie Mellon University
George Danezis, Microsoft Research
Roger Dingledine, Tor Project
Mike Freedman, Princeton University
Krishna Gummadi, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
Alex Halderman, University of Michigan
Josh Karlin, BBN Technologies
Jennifer Rexford, Princeton University
Hal Roberts, Berkman Center, Harvard University
Pablo Rodriguez, Telefónica
Wendy Seltzer, Princeton CITP and Berkman Center, Harvard University
Paul Syverson, United States Naval Research Laboratory
Santosh Vempala, Georgia Institute of Technology
Joss Wright, University of Oxford
Overview
The first USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI) seeks
to bring together researchers and practitioners from both technology and policy
who are working on policies or technologies to detect or circumvent practices
that inhibit free and open communications on the Internet.
The growth of the Internet offers great promise for improving the communication
capabilities of many users, but our increasing dependence on networked
communications also makes it easier for organizations to control, monitor, or
block user communications. ISPs and governments routinely restrict access to
Internet content and services, either by censoring access to the information or
by degrading the performance of various services (e.g., violating network
neutrality). Indeed, although we think of the Internet as enabling the
"democratization" of communications, free and open access is at risk: the Open
Net Initiative reports that nearly 60 countries censor some access to
information on the Internet. Similarly, ISPs can degrade network performance
for certain subsets of users for some or all services. For example, some ISPs
have been found to routinely block or throttle certain application traffic
(e.g., BitTorrent). This growing trend towards blocking, tampering with, or
otherwise restricting communications on the Internet calls for better
techniques for both monitoring the state of restrictions on Internet content
and communications (i.e., improving "transparency") and circumventing attempts
to censor, degrade, or or otherwise tamper with Internet communications. In
many cases, this technology must be both deniable (i.e., it must allow the user
to deny knowledge about using the technology) and robust to blocking.
Topics
We encourage submissions of new, interesting work on a wide variety of
topics of interest, including but not limited to the following areas:
- Evaluation or analysis of existing anti-censorship systems
- Comparisons of existing performance-measurement tools that might be used to detect tampering (e.g., violations of "network neutrality")
- Studies and findings on censorship or tampering from field deployments (e.g., what content various countries are currently censoring, the extent to which ISPs are degrading certain types of content)
- Analysis of the economic impact of censorship
- Metrics for deniability and robustness
- Performance metrics and benchmarks for detecting content tampering or performance degradation
- Detecting and measuring the censorship of search results
- The design of network protocols and topologies that resist tampering or censorship
- Techniques to counter mass surveillance
- Policy-related issues
What to Submit
We invite short position papers or work-in-progress reports. The workshop will
have no printed proceedings, and we do not regard appearance at FOCI to be
prior publication for future submission purposes. FOCI will favor interesting
and new ideas and early results that lead to well-founded position papers. We
envision that work presented at FOCI will ultimately be published at relevant,
high-quality conferences. Papers will be selected primarily based on technical
merit and originality, with additional consideration given to their potential
to generate discussion at the workshop.
Submission Guidelines
Submitted papers must be no longer than six 8.5"
x 11" pages, based on the standard USENIX format. Specifically, your
paper should be typeset in two-column format in 10-point type on 12
point (single-spaced) leading, with a text block of no more than 6.5" wide
by 9" deep. Submissions are single-blind; authors should include their
names and affiliations as part of their submissions. Papers must be
submitted via the Web submission form.
All accepted papers will be available online to registered attendees before the workshop. If your paper should not be published prior to the event, please notify production@usenix.org. The papers will be available online to everyone beginning on the day of the workshop, August 8, 2011.
Simultaneous submission of the same work to multiple venues, submission of previously published work, or plagiarism constitutes dishonesty or fraud. USENIX, like other scientific and technical conferences and journals, prohibits these practices and may take action against authors who have committed them. See the USENIX Conference Submissions Policy for details. Questions? Contact your program co-chairs, foci11chairs@usenix.org, or the USENIX office, submissionspolicy@usenix.org. Note, however, that we expect that many papers accepted for FOCI '11 will eventually be extended as full papers suitable for presentation at future conferences.
Papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms will not be considered. Accepted submissions will be treated as confidential prior to publication on the USENIX FOCI '11 Web site; rejected submissions will be permanently treated as confidential.
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