January 2015 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

Call for Papers - "2nd International Conference on Internet Science" (28-29 maggio 2015)
by Giuseppe Futia Jan. 7, 2015

Jan. 7, 2015

Gentilissimi, abbiamo il piacere di segnalarvi la call for papers per la conferenza sul tema Internet Science organizzata dal network EINS (http://www.internet-science.eu/) I dettagli sono disponibili in calce alla mail. Cordiali saluti, -- ------------------------------------------------- Giuseppe Futia Communication Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24 - 10129 Torino web: http://nexa.polito.it mail: giuseppe.futia(a)polito.it tel. +39 011 090 7219 ================== Call for Papers The 2nd International Conference on Internet Science "Societies, Governance and Innovation" ------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------- VENUE: Flagey – Rue du Belvédère 27 – 1050 Ixelles – Brussels – Belgium DATE: 28th – 29th May 2015 WEBSITE: http://www.internetscienceconference.eu/ CONTACT: cfp(a)internet-science.eu The 2nd International Conference on Internet Science aims at progressing and investigating on topics of high relevance with Internetβ€™s impact on societies, governance, and innovation. It focuses on the contribution and role of Internet science on the current and future multidisciplinary understanding of societies transformations, governance shifts and innovation quests. Its main objective is to allow an open and productive dialogue between all the disciplines which study the Internet as a socio-technical system under any technological or humanistic perspectives. We invite both research papers presenting new results, and extended abstracts with provoking ideas and work-in-progress, shedding light on Internet Science from all involved disciplines and especially papers crossing rigid disciplines boundaries. POSSIBLE TOPICS FOR SUBMISSION (not limited to) Internet and Society -------------------- - Internet and political participation - Internet of things and society - Digital competences and participation - Virtual communities and behavioral patterns - People-driven Internet technologies and applications, including collaborative platforms & social search, open data and new interfaces - Knowledge, education, and societal Web impact on Internet evolution - Offline and online human behavior with emphasis on social media and online interactions Internet and governance ----------------------- - Internet governance and evolution - Internet economics and new business models - Social sciences and ethics for Internet use - E-democracy and e-participation - Identity, Trust and Privacy - Internet governance and legal policies - Security, Resilience and Dependability Aspects - Internet solutions for Sustainability Internet and innovation ----------------------- - Collective intelligence for innovative solutions - Internet, society, and innovation - Novel network analytics on the Internet - Intellectual property and the commons - Design, implementation, and analysis of novel platforms - New collaborative markets analytics - New research and technical questions and thought-provoking ideas (intersection of design, arts and social interactions) - Economic aspects of the Internet IMPORTANT DATES February 20th 2015: Submissions of papers March 10th 2015: Notification of acceptance for papers March 20th 2015: Camera-ready version of papers INITIAL PAPERS SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS Submissions must represent original work and papers should neither have been published nor be under review elsewhere. All submitted papers must: - be written in English and be submitted in PDF format; - contain author names, affiliations, and email addresses; - be formatted according to the Springer's LNCS format Proceedings template. Information about the Springer LNCS format can be found at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html ; - Three to five keywords characterizing the paper should be indicated at the end of the abstract; - The type of paper (technical/empirical or evaluation/experience/exploratory/position paper) should be indicated in the submission. - Full paper submissions should not exceed 15 pages and short paper should not exceed 8 pages (including all text, figures, references and appendices) ; - Submissions not conforming to the LNCS format, and exceeding the submission pages limits or being obviously out of the scope of the conference, will be rejected without review. Submissions should be made electronically in PDF via the electronic submission system of the EINS 2015 Conference Management system at: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eins2015 CAMERA-READY SUBMISSION CONDITIONS Camera-ready submissions should corrected by following the remarks of the referees and submitted in zip format including (1) the camera-ready version of the authors' work in pdf format, (2) the camera-ready version of the authors' work in editable sources format as well as (3) the Consent to Publish signed in ink and scanned to image file. The results described must be unpublished and must not be under review elsewhere. Submissions must conform to Springer's LNCS format and should be, including all text, figures, references and appendices: - 15 pages, for the regular papers, - 8 pages, for the short papers. Information about the Springer LNCS format can be found at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. Submissions of camera-ready should be made electronically in ZIP (including the aforementioned files) format via the electronic submission system of the EINS 2015 Conference Management system at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eins2015 by submitting a new version to the original. PUBLICATION Accepted papers will be presented at EINS 2015 and published in the conference proceedings Volume, which is published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). Authors of selected best papers from the conference will be contacted in order to consider submission of an expanded version of their papers for publication in Internet science inter-disciplinary Journal(s). The papers in all the categories should describe original results that have not been accepted or submitted for publication elsewhere. All submissions will be evaluated by at least three members of the international program committee. ORGANIZER The EINS Network of Excellence in Internet Science (www.internet-science.eu) is supported by the European Commission under its FP7 research-funding programme (ICT theme). It aims to strengthen scientific and technological excellence by developing an integrated and interdisciplinary scientific understanding of Internet networks and their co-evolution with society, by addressing the fragmentation of European research in this area, at geographical and disciplinary levels. GENERAL CHAIR Thanassis Tiropanis, University of Southampton, UK PROGRAMME CHAIRS Athena Vakali, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece Laura Sartori, University of Bologna, Italy PROCEEDINGS CHAIR Pete Burnap, Cardiff University EVENT COORDINATOR Roger Torrenti, Sigma Orionis, France ORGANISING COMMITTEE Anna Satsiou, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Greece (Chair) Stavroula Maglavera, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Greece Franco Bagnoli, University of Florence, Italy Hugo Vivier, Sigma Orionis. France

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Special Issue Eurozine: "The politics of privacy: Claiming a European value"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Jan. 7, 2015

Jan. 7, 2015

Eurozine Editorial <http://www.eurozine.com/authors/eurozine.html> Privacy politics today We have entered a new phase of debate about privacy – about its sociological definition and ethical value vis-à-vis contemporary communications technologies and the behavioural changes connected to them; about the political value of privacy as a civil right, in the light of secret-service surveillance of the Internet and the securitization of the public sphere; about privacy as a consumer right, given Internet companies' customer profiling and the marketization of personal data; and accompanying all of these, about the legal definition of privacy, how it should be protected by laws and how those laws should be enforced. The politics of privacy This article is part of the Eurozine focal point *The politics of privacy: Claiming a European value* <http://www.eurozine.com/comp/focalpoints/privacy.html>. We have entered a new phase of debate about privacy: about its sociological definition vis-à-vis contemporary communications technologies; about its definition as a civil and consumer right; and about how it should be protected by laws and how those laws should be enforced. *[more]* <http://www.eurozine.com/comp/focalpoints/privacy.html> Clearly, privacy understood in classical liberal terms as a right of withdrawal from the public sphere or "right to be let alone" by the state is no longer adequate to the diversity of fields of social activity opened up by the Internet. If the right to privacy and personal autonomy exists, so to does a right to free participation in social life, which today entails using digital media. The injury to democratic society brought by a collective loss of privacy cannot be resolved through insistence on separate spheres of state and society, public and private. On the other hand, as the NSA leaks in 2013 brought home, liberal rights retain a core validity. As *William E. Scheuermann* <http://www.eurozine.com/authors/scheuerman.html> writes in his *article* <http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-04-18-scheuerman-en.html>, Edward Snowden was able to his establish credibility for his actions as a case of civil disobedience by referring to constitutional protections of individual freedom against state tyranny. According to Scheuermann, Snowden's current predicament makes clear that the jurisdiction of individual civil rights must be extended from the national to the global level. It is not information technologies per se that endanger privacy, but the disparities of social power that emerge from the concentration of knowledge they facilitate. That much was already recognized forty years ago, when electronic data processing became ubiquitous in government to meet the planning challenges of modern, socially complex welfare states. The concept of "data protection" was developed in response to the threat of data misuse by the public authorities, particularly the de-anonymization statistical data – a threat that was by no means new, but that was magnified immeasurably by the processing and aggregating capacities of the new computer technology. In his seminal work /Privacy and Freedom/ (1967), the US constitutional lawyer Alan Westin defined the right of privacy in the computer age as "the claim of individuals [...] to determine for themselves when, how and to what extent information about them is communicated to others". In Europe, Westin's concept was taken up and developed by a generation of politicized jurists and information scientists, particularly in West Germany. The innovation of data protection was to move the definition of privacy away from notions of "retreat" and "refuge" towards those of "action", "participation" and "communication". Made equivalent to data autonomy, or "informational self determination", privacy became a prerequisite for social and political freedom and thus of democratic functioning. However, several key developments in connection with the rise of the world wide web have caused the concept of data autonomy to become a limited instrument with which to confront range of new threats to privacy. In a digital public sphere whose infrastructure is under private ownership, "classical" state surveillance combines with new forms of commercial data profiling and traffic filtering. To meet the civil rights threats posed by this new constellation of power, concepts of entitlement need to be developed and deployed that combine rights of privacy with those of communication and freedom of information. The principle of net neutrality has emerged as precisely such a composite "digital rights" concept. In his article, *Joe McNamee* <http://www.eurozine.com/authors/mcnamee.html>, the director of the European Digital Rights initiative, *explains* <http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-12-22-mcnamee-en.html> the political and structural developments that have prompted the call for net neutrality. Another development brought by the explosion of data-volumes held online is the issue of data security, in other words the protection of data against unauthorized, illegal or criminal use. Here the issue is not whether a right of privacy can be legally claimed, so much as how that right can be enforced given the inherent vulnerabilities of web-based data. Informational privacy becomes dependent on the encryption of communications; until now introduced at user-end, encryption is increasingly becoming a default technology or aspect of "privacy by design" (built-in privacy protections). Nevertheless, a coalition of interests in the private and public sectors also creates hostility to encryption: as Joe McNamee writes, encryption presents a hindrance to the marketization of data, something that states are happy to allow, since they also benefit from the identifiability of data. The danger is then that data security becomes a marketable commodity; that online privacy ceases to be a basic standard of the open web but is sold to users as a "special service". In terms of implications for privacy, the marketization of personal data is probably the single most significant development brought by the web. It is the social networks that are the major exploiters of the economic potential of mass social data, although access providers are catching up. In his article on social networks and the science of Big Data analysis, the media scientist *Ramón Reichert* <http://www.eurozine.com/authors/reichert.html> *describes* <http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-12-23-reichert-en.html> Facebook as "a company-controlled social media platform with a primary interest in a user-generated data flow". Today's social media, he argues, represent the most important source of knowledge for control and governance. Not only do social media act as an indicator of "good government"; government itself adapts to the "moods" divined by the data analysts at the "back-end" of social networks. The meta-knowledge derived from Big Data analysis creates a digital divide not only between users and programmers, but also between "industry" and public-interest science. In this context, the value at stake is less the privacy of the individual web-user, so much as transparency and the equal distribution of knowledge derived from aggregated personal data. This shift of focus away from individual rights of privacy to structural inequalities facilitated by Big Data analysis responds to the fact that, in the case of social networks, personal data are voluntarily released. Reichert uses the term "participatory surveillance" to describe the co-opting of individual consent in processes of governance and social control. As the biometric and sensor-technology connected to mobile devices enable the personal and physical self to be tracked with ever greater proximity, this monitoring of the social becomes all the more pervasive, so that the term "bio-surveillance" is apt. The question becomes not so much how to protect individual privacy from individuals themselves, with the paternalist associations that brings, as what participatory surveillance means for the constitution and preservation of social and economic power. *Elmar Altvater* <http://www.eurozine.com/authors/altvater.html>'s political-anthropological *perspective* <http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-12-19-altvater-en.html> on the implications of NSA leaks steps outside the usual parameters of the privacy debate. For him, the worldwide spying operation is about more than security and counter-terrorism; rather, it forms part of a geo-engineering strategy aimed at controlling the global flow of information on issues that will determine the global future. Attempting to reign in the US security services by appeals to reason ignores that human rights law has failed to restrain these over the last fifty years. Opposition to secret service surveillance must therefore combine historical experience with a grasp of the significance of the planetary data theft for the "geological" future. Unquestionably, privacy is a global issue: developing a privacy framework in keeping with technological development in societies such as China or India will be a major challenge of the future. In the global campaign for data protection and digital rights, European standards can serve as a point of reference. Nevertheless, privacy law is far from being a shoe-in in Europe: as a number of recent developments show, it is among the most controversial policy areas there are. These developments include: 1) The ongoing process within the EU to agree on the Data Protection Regulation, which would replace, update and in key respects strengthen the current 1995 Directive. Most significant is its creation of a centralized European data protection authority, which would prevent international companies exploiting weaker jurisdictions. The political importance of this piece of legislation is demonstrated by the fact that the members of the parliamentary Committee for Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs responsible for drafting the bill have been subject to an unprecedented degree of lobbying, overwhelmingly from the private sector and MEPs acting in its interests. A "strong" draft agreed by the European Parliament before the end of the legislative period in 2014 is currently held up in the Council of Ministers. The form the Regulation finally takes will determine European data protection arrangements for the private sector for the foreseeable future. 2) The decision of the European Court of Justice in April 2014 that overruled the EU's 2006 Data Retention Directive. Preparations are now underway for a new data retention directive. It remains to be seen how pressure from member states in favour of greater state surveillance powers – such as the UK, which in September 2014 flouted the ECJ ruling in order to pass its own "emergency" Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill – makes itself felt in the new directive. As opposed to the debate on the Data Protection Regulation, opposition to which comes from industry, this issue is essentially one of national sovereignty on security policy. 3) The ECJ's recognition of a "Right to be Forgotten" in May 2014. Many have claimed the RTBF clashes with freedom of speech and information, ranging from the liberal press and Wikipedia, to major aggregators such as Google with huge lobbying resources at their disposal. In practice, however, the RTBF has so far been brought to bear primarily on social media sites rather than media outlets with a clear public interest role. Nevertheless, concerns that the Internet companies are poorly suited to adjudicating on RTBF claims are well-founded. The draft Data Protection Regulation also contains guarantees of a right to be forgotten; that the RTBF develops in conformity with other informational rights will be crucial. 4) The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations between the EU and the US and the multilateral negotiations on the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) that would replace the GATS agreement. As *Ralf Bendrath* <http://www.eurozine.com/authors/bendrath.html>, senior advisor to MEP Jan-Philipp Albrecht, explains in his *article* <http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-12-19-bendrath-en.html>, the EU has seen heavy pressure on Europe to relax its restrictions on data sharing with non-EU countries. Here, EU data protection arrangements have been criticized as illegal trade barriers, an argument that, were it to prevail, would mean the subordination of fundamental rights to economic interest. As the title of this focus suggests, to claim a right of privacy is to insist on a European value. This is not to say that privacy pertains to Europe alone, of course. Undoubtedly, rights of privacy are inseparable from a certain liberal tradition in Europe: one that has been hard fought and is by no means assured. Yet privacy is not a cultural given. Rather, it is an argument that needs to be put to power. If privacy standards can be legally established and defended in Europe, then those standards can be invoked worldwide. *Simon Garnett* <http://www.eurozine.com/authors/garnett.html>

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Paper: "Does Cheap Access Encourage Science? Evidence from the WWII Book Replication Program"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Jan. 7, 2015

Jan. 7, 2015

Does Cheap Access Encourage Science? Evidence from the WWII Book Replication Program Barbara Biasi <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=2189380> Stanford University - Department of Economics; Bocconi University Petra Moser <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=345952> Stanford University - Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) December 26, 2014 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2542879 *Abstract: * Policies that reduce the costs of accessing prior knowledge (which is covered by copyrights) are becoming increasingly prominent, even though systematic empirical evidence on their effects continues to be scarce. This paper examines the effects of the 1942 Book Republication Program (BRP), which allowed US publishers to replicate science books that German publishers had copyrighted in the United States, on the production of new knowledge in mathematics and chemistry. Citations data indicate a dramatic increase in citations to BRP books after 1942 compared with Swiss books in the same fields. This increase is larger for BRP books that experienced a larger decline in price under the program. We also find that effects on citations are larger for disciplines in which knowledge production is less dependent on physical capital: Citations to BRP books increased substantially more for mathematics (which depends almost exclusively on human capital) than chemistry (which is more dependent on physical capital). *Number of Pages in PDF File:* 61 *Keywords:* Science, knowledge, human capital, cumulative invention, copyright, open access *JEL Classification:* J24, N32, O14, O31, O34 working papers series

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"The Emerging Science of Human-Data Interaction"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Jan. 7, 2015

Jan. 7, 2015

*The Emerging Science of Human-Data Interaction* The rapidly evolving ecosystems associated with personal data is creating an entirely new field of scientific study, say computer scientists. And this requires a much more powerful ethics-based infrastructure. […] Continua qui: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/533901/the-emerging-science-of-human-d…

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Stallman: "Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Jan. 7, 2015

Jan. 7, 2015

*Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)* Written by Richard Matthew StallmanSoftware developer and software freedom activist December 31, 2014 It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app). As always, a nonfree program tramples its users’ freedom. I’m not talking about the software that Uber itself runs; if Uber runs nonfree software, that tramples Uber’s freedom, and Uber deserves our sympathy for that. The injustice here is that Uber requires its users to use special software and digital services that attack their freedom in various ways. […] Continua qui: http://qz.com/319592/why-you-should-not-use-uber-the-car-ride-brokering-com…

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Forbes: "What Happens To Uber Drivers And Other Sharing Economy Workers Injured On The Job?"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Jan. 7, 2015

Jan. 7, 2015

*What Happens To Uber Drivers And Other Sharing Economy Workers Injured On The Job?* Ellen Huet /Forbes Staff// / Omar, a 32-year-old Uber driver, was working a typical late-night shift in Los Angeles last month when his ride veered from pleasant to violent in just a few minutes. When he pulled his SUV full of passengers up to the Hollywood Tower apartments around 2:30 a.m., two of the riders refused to leave his car. An argument broke out, and Omar said one of the passengers hit him with a shiny object, broke his jaw in two places and landed him in the hospital for a week. Omar’s not the only worker to find that a newfangled job like driving for Uber comes with some very old dangers: on-the-job injuries. On Sunday, an off-duty Boston cop assaulted his Uber driver, yelled racial slurs at him and stole his car. In Los Angeles, people stabbed an Uber driver in the face and neck in November and choked another driver on New Year’s Day, though in both cases the attacker was likely not the passenger Uber assigned the driver. A San Francisco passenger attacked his Uber driver in November, landing him in the hospital with facial injuries. A Lyft passenger punched his driver and broke his nose in May. And it’s not just headline-grabbing assaults — if any Homejoy cleaner falls while mopping or any Instacart shopper throws out their back while carrying groceries, they’re in the same boat. […] Continua qui: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2015/01/06/workers-compensation-uber-…

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Talk: " net neutrality: days of future past? Taking stock after two years of net neutrality in the Netherlands"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Jan. 6, 2015

Jan. 6, 2015

Talk di 60' (video) http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6170_-_en_-_saal_g_-_201412… net neutrality: days of future past? Taking stock after two years of net neutrality in the Netherlands Rejo Zenger and Thomas Lohninger <http://media.ccc.de/search/?q=Rejo%20Zenger%20and%20Thomas%20Lohninger> Our talk will highlight the current debates surrounding net neutrality in Europe, the United States and other parts of the world. We will look at the results of the SaveTheInternet.eu <https://savetheinternet.eu> campaign which was lunched a year ago on 30c3. We will discuss various legal protections for net neutrality, look closer at the experience of the Netherlands and we will give an overview of all important open ends of the debate.

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NYT: "Her Task Is to Wean the White House Off Floppy Disks"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Jan. 4, 2015

Jan. 4, 2015

*Her Task Is to Wean the White House Off Floppy Disks* By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS JAN. 3, 2015 WASHINGTON — President Obama’s top technology adviser cringes when she hears highly educated adults say how bad they are at science and math, particularly when they do so in front of children. “That has to change,” the adviser, Megan J. Smith, firmly told a group of teachers at the White House not long ago. “We would never say that about reading.” Ms. Smith, 50, an M.I.T.-trained mechanical engineer and former Google executive, is working hard to bring her Silicon Valley sensibility to the Obama administration. But four months into her job as the chief technology officer of the United States, the woman whose division at Google dreamed up Google Glass and the driverless car is facing culture shock in a federal bureaucracy ruled by creaky technology and run in part on the floppy disk. […] Continua qui: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/us/politics/her-task-weaning-the-white-ho…

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Morozov_digital sovereignty
by Alessandro Mantelero Jan. 4, 2015

Jan. 4, 2015

Interessante riflessione sullo scenario globale Who’s the true enemy of internet freedom - China, Russia, or the US? However, Russia, China and Brazil are simply responding to the extremely aggressive tactics adopted by none other than the US. In typical fashion, though, America is completely oblivious to its own actions, believing that there is such a thing as a neutral, cosmopolitan internet and that any efforts to move away from it would result in its “Balkanisation”. But for many countries, this is not Balkanisation at all, merely de-Americanisation. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/04/internet-freedom-china… -- Alessandro Mantelero Aggregate Professor, Politecnico di Torino Director of Privacy and Faculty Fellow, Nexa Center for Internet and Society http://staff.polito.it/alessandro.mantelero

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Smithsonian rende disponibili online 40.000+ immagini ad alta resoluzione (per usi non commerciali)
by J.C. DE MARTIN Jan. 4, 2015

Jan. 4, 2015

http://www.asia.si.edu/collections/edan/default.cfm Welcome to Phase 1 of Open F|S, the complete digitized collections of the Freer and Sackler Galleries and the Freer Study Collection. With more than 40,000 works being made available for high-resolution download—expanding regularly with our new acquisitions—you can explore the Smithsonian's museums of Asian art from anywhere in the world, whenever you like. Images can be used for all non-commercial purposes, from desktop wallpapers to artistic gifts for family and friends. Send us your creations and your feedback about this beta version at openfs(a)si.edu! For permission to use high-resolution images commercially, contact Rights and Reproduction. Articolo di commento: http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/3/7485921/see-the-massive-stunning-collectio… juan carlos

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