PEPR '20 Call for Participation

Sponsored by USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems Association.

The 2020 USENIX Conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect (PEPR '20) will take place as a virtual event on October 15–16, 2020.

Important Dates

  • Submissions deadline: Friday, February 21, 2020
  • Notification to presenters: Friday, March 13, 2020

Conference Organizers

Program Co-Chairs

Lorrie Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University
Lea Kissner, Apple

Steering and Program Committee

Lorrie Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University
Debra J. Farber, AWS
Casey Henderson, USENIX Association
Lea Kissner, Apple
Naomi Lefkovitz, NIST
Florian Schaub, University of Michigan
Lawrence You, Google

Overview

The 2020 USENIX Conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect (PEPR ’20) is a single-track conference focused on designing and building products and systems with privacy and respect for their users and the societies in which they operate. Our goal is to improve the state of the art and practice of building for privacy and respect and to foster a deeply knowledgeable community of both privacy practitioners and researchers who collaborate towards that goal.

We view diversity as a key enabler of this goal: effectively building for privacy and respect is a challenge in and of itself; attempting this without a range of perspectives is harder still. Thus, we encourage and welcome participation from all employment sectors, racial and ethnic backgrounds, nationalities, genders, disability statuses, ages, and all those other differences which make us richer as humanity.

PEPR '20 is committed to fostering a respectful and collaborative environment.

Call for Participation

PEPR '20 is soliciting proposals for 25 minute original talks, 10-minute short talks, and 45-60 minute panels featuring discussions with 3-5 speakers. (Additional time will be added for Q&A.)

The steering and program committee will select talks which best illuminate topics in the fields of practical privacy engineering and building systems that respect their users. We can’t build respectful systems without understanding how. PEPR is tilted towards constructive solutions but also includes the illumination of challenges. We’re interested in talks from both practitioners and researchers about design proposals, research, deployed systems, case studies, and experience reports.

We are particularly interested in talks addressing the following themes:

  • Focused on building. Usability, crypto, and anonymization are all important, but they’re only a small slice of what is needed to build for privacy and respect. PEPR is designed to take a comprehensive view, including topics like architecting large-scale systems for reliable and measurable data deletion, end-to-end consent (from the user all the way to infrastructure), data access and handling (how do you grant it, how do you understand it, how do you enforce it, how do you build a system so you can debug without granting too much, etc.), how to do a privacy review (design and code), privacy red-teaming, incident management, root cause analysis and coming full-circle, how to run an engineering-focused privacy program, and many, many, many more.
  • Focused on practice. PEPR focuses on building for privacy and respect in real-world systems. Everything technical is messier when it hits the real world, but privacy is messier than most because: 1) there are a lot of humans and the safety of their personal information involved and 2) there are more regulatory and legal requirements than in many other technical fields.

Talks may include demos, if appropriate. New talks on previously published materials are also welcome.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit talk proposals via the submission form.