Call for Papers

9th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium
Seattle, WA, USA
Aug 5 – Aug 7, 2009

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Important Dates:

All deadlines are FIRM — no extensions.

Privacy and anonymity are increasingly important in the online world. Corporations, governments, and other organizations are realizing and exploiting their power to track users and their behavior. Approaches to protecting individuals, groups, but also companies and governments from profiling and censorship include decentralization, encryption, distributed trust, and automated policy disclosure.

The 9th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium addresses the design and realization of such privacy services for the Internet and other data systems and communication networks by bringing together anonymity and privacy experts from around the world to discuss recent advances and new perspectives.

The symposium seeks submissions from academia and industry presenting novel research on all theoretical and practical aspects of privacy technologies, as well as experimental studies of fielded systems. We encourage submissions from other communities such as law and business that present their perspectives on technological issues. As in the past, proceedings will be published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Like last year, the symposium proceedings will be available at the event, rather than after it.

Suggested topics include but are not restricted to:

General Chair:
Adam Shostack, Microsoft
Program Chairs:
Ian Goldberg, University of Waterloo
Mikhail Atallah, Purdue University
Program Committee:
Alessandro Acquisti, Carnegie Mellon University
Michael Backes, Saarland University and Max-Planck Institute for Software Systems
Mira Belenkiy, Microsoft
Alastair Beresford, University of Cambridge
Nikita Borisov, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Lorrie Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University
George Danezis, Microsoft Research Cambridge
Sabrina De Capitani di Vimercati, Università degli Studi di Milano
Claudia Diaz, K.U. Leuven
Roger Dingledine, The Tor Project
Alexandre Evfimievski, IBM Almaden Research Center
Philippe Golle, Palo Alto Research Center
Rachel Greenstadt, Drexel University
Thomas Heydt-Benjamin, IBM Research Zurich
Apu Kapadia, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Bradley Malin, Vanderbilt University
Tal Malkin, Columbia University
Nick Mathewson, The Tor Project
David Molnar, University of California, Berkeley
Steven Murdoch, University of Cambridge
Andreas Pfitzmann, Dresden University of Technology
Len Sassaman, K.U. Leuven
Andrei Serjantov, The Free Haven Project
Paul Syverson, Naval Research Laboratory
Marianne Winslett, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Matthew Wright, University of Texas at Arlington
Ting Yu, North Carolina State University
HotPETs chairs:
Thomas Heydt-Benjamin, IBM Research Zurich
Andrei Serjantov, The Free Haven Project

Papers to be submitted to the PET Symposium must be at most 15 pages excluding the bibliography and well-marked appendices, and at most 20 pages total. Submission of shorter papers is strongly encouraged whenever appropriate. Papers must conform to the Springer LNCS style (in which the text area per page is a little smaller than 5" x 7 3/4"). Follow the "Information for Authors" link at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. Papers not following these instructions risk being rejected without consideration of their merits.

Submitted papers must not substantially overlap with papers that have been published or that are simultaneously submitted to a journal or a conference with proceedings.

Reviewers of submitted papers are not required to read the appendices and the paper should be intelligible without them. The paper should start with the title and an abstract. The introduction should give some background and summarize the contributions of the paper at a level appropriate for a non-specialist reader. Submitted papers must not be anonymized. Proceedings will be published by Springer and made available at the symposium.

By submitting a paper, you agree that if it is accepted, you will sign a paper distribution agreement allowing for publication, and also that an author of the paper will register for the symposium and present the paper there. Our current working agreement with Springer is that authors will retain copyright on their own works while assigning an exclusive 3-year distribution license to Springer. Authors may still post their papers on their own Web sites. See http://petsymposium.org/2008/2008-springer-form.pdf for the 2008 version of this agreement.

Paper submissions must be received by March 2nd, 2009 at 23:00 UTC. Details about the paper submission process will appear on the PETS web site. Notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent to authors by April 24th, 2009 and authors will have the opportunity to revise their papers for the proceedings version due on May 19th, 2009.

HotPETs

As was done last year, part of the symposium will be devoted to HotPETs—the hottest, most exciting research ideas still in a formative state presented in 10–20 minutes for discussion and feedback from the audience. Submissions need not be technical in nature; we welcome challenges from other fields whereby our audience may learn about real world needs that require new research and solutions. Our intent is to bring new questions, approaches, and problems to our privacy community for discussion, feedback, and consideration of new approaches based on the diverse expertise of our attendees.

Submissions to HotPETs may be in either a 1 to 4 page extended abstract format, or a full length paper format. We prefer extended abstract format, and all accepted full length submissions must be converted to extended abstract form prior to the camera ready deadline. Successful submissions will have their abstracts printed for hard copy distribution at the event. The abstracts will not be part of the PETS proceedings in order to ensure authors may subsequently publish the expanded work, either in a future PETS or elsewhere. HotPETs submissions are due May 8th, 2009 at 23:00 UTC; submission instructions will appear on the PETS web site.

Panels

We also invite proposals of up to 2 pages for panel discussions or other relevant presentations. In your proposal, (1) describe the nature of the presentation and why it is appropriate to the symposium, (2) suggest a duration for the presentation (ideally between 45 and 90 minutes), (3) give brief descriptions of the presenters, and (4) indicate which presenters have confirmed their availability for the presentation if it is scheduled. Submit your proposal in the same manner as a PET Symposium paper, by the same deadline. The program committee will consider presentation proposals along with other symposium events, and will respond by the paper decision date with an indication of its interest in scheduling the event. The proceedings will contain 1-page abstracts of the presentations that take place at the symposium. Each contact author for an accepted panel proposal must prepare and submit this abstract in the Springer LNCS style by the "PETS camera-ready deadline for proceedings" deadline date.