Untitled PRIVACY ENHANCING TECHNOLOGIES SYMPOSIUM 2008

Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium 2008

The 8th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2008) is held in Leuven, Belgium on July 23rd - 25th. It aims to bring together anonymity and privacy experts from around the world to discuss recent advances and new perspectives in privacy for the Internet and other communication networks. The symposium proceedings will be subsequently published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

The symposium is of great relevance to the going work of FIDIS, and has been recognised as a worthwhile event to attend in the past. Of benefit here, this year’s event is being organised and hosted by K.U. Leuven, a FIDIS consortium member, and held in a good geographically central location. Typically the symposium takes the form of a standard conference which lessens its appeal to those with less mature work to present. As such we have supported the idea of the addition of a new feature at this year’s event called ‘Hot-PETs’ which, although still requiring peer review, invited submissions of the ‘hottest most exciting ideas that are still in a formative state’. Such an endeavour opens up the event for students with ongoing work, and gives them access to expert advice and feedback at an earlier stage in their studies.  

Importantly for FIDIS, not only submissions technical in nature were sought, instead challenges from other fields whereby the audience may learn about real world needs that require new research and solutions were especially encouraged. The intent was to bring new questions, approaches, and problems to the privacy community for cross-disciplinary discussion, feedback, and consideration of new approaches based on the diverse expertise of the attendees. While Hot-PETs speakers still present their work, and then have time for discussion, the presentations will not be published in the proceedings. This has been a deliberate decision such that authors can subsequently publish the work either in a future PETs event or elsewhere when it is further developed. 

While the additional session serves to widen the appeal of the event to the FIDIS DC, WP15 has additionally negotiated a 40% reduction in registration for up to 10 FIDIS members submitting work to the Hot-PETs session. While all of the administration related to this event is all being handled by the symposium organisers, it is known that 8 of these places were taken by the registration deadline. Feedback received will be reported as part of D15.6.