Announcement and Preliminary Call for Participation,
First USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce (EC 95)
July 11-12, 1995
New York, New York
The First USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce will provide the
major opportunity for researchers, experimenters, and
proto-practitioners in this rapidly self-defining field to
exchange ideas and present results of their work. This meeting
will set the technical agenda for work in the area of Electronic
Commerce by deriving and/or certifying the most urgent questions,
discovering directions in which answers might be pursued, and
revealing cross-connections that are otherwise might go
unnoticed. Marketing hysteria this is not; technical direction
setting it is.
FORMAT
This four-day event has an unusual structure; its first two days
will follow a workshop format at which attendance is by
invitation, while the latter two days will be tutorial in nature
and open to all. The multi-tracked seminar will feature refereed
and position paper presentations, reports of works-in- progress,
technological debates, and identification of hard-to-impossible
problems. Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, a dinner speaker, and a
Keynote speaker will round out these two very full days and
nights.
The following two days, July 13-14, will offer four half-day
tutorials bracketing an evening session of free-form Q&A with
technical experts, called a "Guru is In" session as at other
USENIX meetings. The half-day tutorials will be repeated on a
rolling basis, so that participants will be able to attend most of
them. Acknowledged leaders in this critical, cutting-edge
technology will lead the tutorials and serve as sounding boards
during this portion of the Workshop.
TOPICS
The Workshop on Electronic Commerce will address a wide range of
issues and ongoing developments, including, but not limited to:
- Mutual authenticity
- Integrity
- Confidentiality
- Non-repudiability
- Cryptographic mix and match
- APIs of appropriate abstraction level
Business security
- Insurance
- Bonding
- Liability
- Prompt revocation guarantees
- Counterparty identification
- Credit history
- Integrity requirements for long term record retention
Finance & Payment
- Digital cash and credit
- Trans-border clearance commerce
- Direct, broker-less markets
- Auditability versus privacy
- EDI and its role, ditto X9.17
The Commons
- Address management problems, IP addresses going fast
- Threats to 'flatness' -- hidden spaces and toll roads
Legal matters
- Border-less-ness of an electronic marketplace
- Crimes of the future
Potential mass audiences
- EMail-enabled business
- Internet service for technically unsophisticated clients
- Management by subscription and other invasive conveniences
Service level guarantees in Internet service settings
- Latency
- Privacy
- Outages/downtime
- Bandwidth to specific customers
- Cross traffic and guarantees thereon
- Mobility/intermittency
- Time synchronization and absolute ordering
Advertisement & Service Access
- Discovery: White Pages/ Yellow Pages
- Competitive issues
- Interaction with intelligent agent search
- Active advertisements & payment mechanisms
Services and Their Components
- What is salable: if content becomes free, indexing becomes dear
- Franchising and delegation
- Reliability
- Transactional services
PARTICIPATION IN THE WORKSHOP (JULY 11-12)
In a departure from usual USENIX events, attendance will be by
invitation and we will cap attendance at 100. All persons wishing
to attend are requested to submit a formal paper (via extended
abstract) for a conventional referee process or, where less formal
submission is desirable, a position paper, a statement of intent,
a description of work in progress, or, some other communication of
the nature of their contribution.
We seek original and innovative papers, demonstrations,
videotapes, position papers and general smart work about current
developments in electronic commerce, its precursors and/or its
infrastructure. We are especially interested in reports on
practical experiences with such systems, if indeed there yet be
any. Formally refereed papers will be published in the
Proceedings, distributed free to attendees of the Electronic
Commerce Workshop, and later made available for purchase from the
USENIX Association and over the net. Non-refereed papers,
broadsides, commercial siren songs and more, all likely to be in
evidence, are appropriate and encouraged, and will be praised or
debunked as they warrant.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
(1) Refereed papers - For those with formal papers for inclusion
in the Proceedings, the referee process will take place in a
conventional manner:
- Submission of an extended abstract of 1500-2500 words (9000-
15000 bytes or 3-5 pages) is recommended. Shorter abstracts run a
greater risk of rejection as there will be little on which the
program committee can base an opinion.
- For administrative reasons, please include a separate page or
(preferably) e-mail message giving the title of the paper, the names
and affiliations of the authors, and the name of the author who will
act as the single point of contact for the Organizing Committee. For
the contact person, also include a daytime telephone number, postal
address, e-mail address and FAX number if possible.
- If you would like to receive detailed guidelines for submission
and past examples of accepted extended abstracts, you may telephone
the USENIX Association office at +1 510 528 8649, or email to
ec95authors@usenix.org.
- Dates for refereed paper submissions
Extended abstracts due: May 8, 1995
Notification to authors: May 22, 1995
Camera-ready final papers due: June 15, 1995
(2) Non-Refereed submissions - All persons who do not have
available a reviewable paper must submit a position paper, a
statement of intent and direction, a short description of work in
progress to varying degrees that can be discussed with the other
attendees, or, in some other way, demonstrate your resolve to
contribute substantially and insightfully to this Workshop. There
are no hard and fast rules here and we by no means wish to
discourage any tentative interest, but the Organizing Committee
anticipates that the program will fill quickly and encourages you
to anticipate our need to make the meeting itself as successful as
possible. This is a first meeting in this topic area, it will
almost surely not be the last, and we intend that it set the
agenda for further work and progress.
USENIX symposia, like most symposia and journals, require that
papers not be submitted simultaneously to more than one conference
or publication and that submitted papers not be previously or
subsequently published elsewhere. Submissions accompanied by
"non- disclosure agreement" forms are not acceptable and will be
returned to the author(s) unread. All submissions are held in the
highest confidentiality prior to publication in the Proceedings,
both as a matter of policy and in accord with the U.S. Copyright
Act of 1976.
For questions about submissions and other program concerns,
contact the Program Chair, Dan Geer.
Submissions should be sent to:
ec95papers@usenix.org
in electronic form. Failing that, send hardcopy to the program
chair at the postal address below.
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
REGISTRATION INFORMATION
Materials containing all details of the technical and tutorial
programs, registration fees and forms, and hotel information will
be available in mid-April, 1995. If you wish to receive the
registration materials, please contact USENIX at:
USENIX Conference Office
22672 Lambert Street, Suite 613
Lake Forest, Calif. 92630
+1-714-588-8649, FAX +1-714-588-9706
conference@usenix.org
For more information about the USENIX Association and its events,
access the USENIX Resource Center on the World Wide Web. The URL
is
https://www.usenix.org.
OR send email to our mailserver at
info@usenix.org. Your message
should contain the line: "send catalog"; a catalog will be returned
to you.