Workshop on Information Filtering
                       Hong Kong, May 1-5, 2001
        http://www.cs.dal.ca/~shepherd/www10/filtering_workshop/
  Held in conjunction with the 10th International World Wide Web
Conference

                Call for Participation

Workshop Topic

As the content base of the Internet grows past the billion document
mark, much of which is created dynamically, demands for automatic
filtering based on content is also growing.  These demands come from a
broad spectrum of interest groups including parents, businesses, special
interest groups, and governments. While regulation is not an effective
way to control content on the Internet, algorithmic approaches have also
not been successful to date. Filtering technologies should prevent
unintended access to objectionable but possibly legal material, while
enabling Internet users to make choices about the content that they
access on the Internet.  In this workshop we will concentrate on an
integration of perspectives of those working on new approaches to
content filtering and of those involved with policy impacted by the
deployment of these technologies.

The goal of this workshop is to promote discussion and awareness of the
impact filtering technologies have on interest groups such as parents,
business and governments.  The workshop will produce a report on how
these and future filtering technologies can be used to achieve the goals
of these interest groups and support an overall ethical framework.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to technology and policy
issues related to:

*       label bureaus and rating schemes
*       authentication
*       identity hiding
*       privacy
*       metadata generation
*       content filtering algorithms
*       ethical frameworks for filtering


Participant Requirements and Submission

This workshop will be a combination of short presentations and
discussions of related topics.  Participants who would like to
contribute a short paper or a position paper (maximum1500 words) for
presentation at the workshop should send their paper to Carolyn Watters,
watters@cs.dal.ca, by January 31, 2001. Other participants are asked to
submit a short statement of interest to the same email by January 31,
2001 in order to be included in the conference material.


Workshop Organizers

Carolyn Watters and Michael Shepherd are the co-directors of the Web
Information Filtering Lab and professors in the Faculty of Computer
Science at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada.  In the past, they
have helped organize successful workshops at the WWW7 and WWW8
conferences. This year, they were commissioned by the Government of
Canada to prepare a
report on Content Filtering Technologies and Internet Service Providers,
the results of which were presented as the Opening Lecture at the
KnowRight 2000 + InfoEthics Europe Conference in Vienna.

Contact Information:

Email:  watters@cs.dal.ca, shepherd@cs.dal.ca
Phone:  902-494-3686
Fax:    902-492-1517

Co-Chairs:  

Carolyn Watters and Michael Shepherd
Faculty of Computer Science
Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, B3H 1W5.

Further Information:    
http://www.cs.dal.ca/~shepherd/www10/filtering_workshop