The Workshop
The second Workshop for Formal Methods on Privacy will be held in Porto, Portugal as an event part of the FM 19 symposium.
The Workshop explicitly focuses on formal foundations for privacy inside information systems. The workshop aims to promote the topic of applying formal methods to describe the processing of private data by systems. It is an opportunity for researchers to exchange their ideas within a narrower and interested audience on a topic that is gaining an increasing attention and promises high impact results for the society.
Formal Methods on Privacy
The right to privacy is a fundamental atomic right in today's society, and as such, it has been an object of study within humanitarian disciplines, such as philosophy, politics, law, and culture. Despite being a fundamental notion, privacy does not have a single and acceptable definition, rather that its analysis reveals a dynamic concept strongly dependent on cultural norms and evolution.
Privacy as a Challenge in Information Systems: Society today is evolving steadily into a information era , where people's life, and thus privacy, is dependent on computer systems being able to aggregate huge volumes of personal data. Interaction of individuals with such systems is expected to reveal new limits of tolerance towards what is considered private, which in turn will reveal new threats to individual privacy. In terms of information systems a huge new challenge arises, which is the need to develop information systems that preserve individual privacy. So far the establish techniques that ensure that a system handles information in a privacy respecting manner are reported as partial and unsatisfactory.
Formal Methods and Privacy: One suggestion to overcome the new challenge in information systems is to propose an approach to the problem of preserving privacy, based on formal methods. Such an approach may provide solid and rigorous foundations towards understanding and handling privacy related situations. The experience in computer systems asserts that rigorous analysis gives rise to a numerous practical framework and techniques for developing sound systems with respect to privacy specifications.
Privacy and LawA most recent example to integrate privacy in the legal framework is the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR clearly states cases, such as user consent and purpose of usage, that might benefit from a formal description and study. The use of formal methods for studying privacy is expected to provide high impact results that will benefit the development of privacy respecting software and society as a whole. It can also promote the education of the public in issues concerning the privacy of the individual. The need for addressing privacy in information system is crucial for the future of the society, and already many researchers from different disciplines started converging towards this direction. This effort is also followed by researchers in the formal methods area, following the intuition described above. It is therefore important to take the initiative in order to allow formal methods researchers that are interested in privacy to interact and exchange knowledge. To this reason, we propose the event of a workshop on formal methods for privacy as part of the 3rd FM 2019 . This is the second time a workshop on formal methods for privacy is taking place.
Call for Papers
(Full and short papers, and extended abstracts are accepted)
We invite authors to submit full research papers describing original research and technical results. Extended abstracts that summarize research under development and new ideas are also welcome. Note that the workshop proceedings will only publish full research papers.
Topics
- Principles of privacy in information systems
- Computational models for privacy
- Formal methods on privacy - includes logic foundations, type systems, validation and verification
- Differential privacy
- Cryptographic methods for privacy
- Privacy in information systems - including social network, databases, network applications, \dots
- The legal aspects of privacy in information systems
Submission Guidelines
High quality, original papers, max. 15 pages can be submitted. Short papers and extended abstracts up to 6 pages are also invited. Papers should be written in English and submitted electronically in PDF format.
Important Dates
| Submission deadline: | TBA |
| Notification of acceptance: | TBA |
| Camera-ready deadline: | TBA |
Program Committee
Chairs
Petros Stefaneas, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Dimitrios Kouzapas, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Committee
Christian Colombo, University of Malta, Malta
Silvia Ghilezan, University of Novi Sad, Serbia
Petros Kavassalis, University of Aegean, Greece
Dimitrios Kouzapas, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Tiziana Margaria, University Potsdam, Germany
Anna Philippou, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Gerardo Schneider, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Petros Stefaneas, National Technical University of Athens, Greece