This paper offers a brief history of, ConfSys, a conference management system, that has been used for over 15 years to support a number of international academic conferences. It is a complete system that has all functions automated with the possibility of the program chair overriding any of its decision. We have found that in most instances, the decisions made by the system need very minor changes. This paper describes another step in its automation process involving the submission made by authors and its processing by a proposed intelligent module. The new module will extract the salient metadata which we believe are more relevant than the ones entered by authors. This would ensure reliable paper-related details like title, author, coauthor, organization, abstract, keyword, etc. are being captured instead of users adding these details first-hand. The system requires users to verify the extracted information and correct them if required, further improving the paper allocation process to reviewers based on matching the reviewer’s interests with extracted keywords and topics, thus improving the quality of relevance of the reviews and comments to the authors. This in turn would improve the quality of the publications.

This paper offers a brief history of the information age in order to demonstrate how the loss of user control and the increase in certain forms of automation have metastasized into imminent and ongoing threats to social order and the democratic way of life.

The current pandemic has led to increased use of online learning and calls for innovative self-learning techniques. Since contact with educators is limited, students are required to become more self-reliant. This endeavour includes using self-assessment tools to measure the learning progress and uncover the areas for further studies. In this paper, we focus on a system that automatically generates various types of questions from the recommended course material. The system applies the most recent machine learning techniques, such as transfer learning, natural language generation methods and finding semantic similarity. We propose a human-in-the-loop approach where the instructor can provide his guidance. Our system would help students to calibrate themselves in a typical remote learning environment.

The internet was introduced to connect computers and allow communication between these computers. It evolved to provide applications such as email, talk and file sharing with the associated system to search. The files were made available, freely, by users. However, the internet was out of the reach of most people since it required equipment and know-how as well as connection to a computer on the internet. One method of connection used an acoustic coupler and an analog phone. With the introduction of the personal computer and higher speed modems, accessing the internet became easier. The introduction of user-friendly graphical interfaces, as well as the convenience and portablility of laptops and smartphones made the internet much more widely accessible for a broad swath of users. A small number of newly established companies, supported by a large amount of venture capital and a lack of regulation have since established a stranglehold on the internet with billions of people using these applications. Their monopolistic practices and exploitation of the open nature of the internet has created a need in the ordinary person to replace the traditional way of communication with what they provide: in exchange for giving up personal information these persons have become dependent on the service provided. Due to the regulatory desert around privacy and ownership of personal electornic data, a handful of massive corporations have expropriated and exploited aggregated and disaggregated personal information. This amounts, we argue, to the colonization of the internet.

This year marks the silver anniversary of IDEAS. It has been an exciting quarter century to shepherd this meeting through good times and not so good ones. We have survived Ebola, MERS and SARS. Whereas the others were local, the COVID pandemic, which still rages, has forced us to move to an on-line version, but thanks to the participants and the dedicated program committee we have continued. This paper is a photographic journey through the years of IDEAS. Unfortunately we have not been able to have the images of all participants over the quarter century oi IDEAS. This is just a sampling of some of the fond moments during the social gatherings of the IDEAS family.

Having been an observer and user of computing devices from slide rules, analog computers, early monstrous digital machines, to sleek, hand held digital ones: seeing the shift of the computing and data 'ownership' paradigms over the last six decades one wonders at the enormous size, power and market capitalization of a fistful of companies that have existed for only a couple of decades. Now the world is groaning under the corona virus pandemic mismanaged by most governments, health officers and organizations. Are these not perfect examples, ad- infinitum of the Peter principle? At the same time big tech is benefiting from the pandemic and preparing to take a central role to harvest more data, to be mined in the future for more revenue streams. This paper looks at the recent push by big tech to push its agenda to reach into all aspects of human life. The current opportunity presented by the Covid-19 pandemic and the fear of future pandemics is being seized to lay the ground work, at the public's expense and their privacy.

The internet was supposed to be an interconnection of independent distributed computer and information systems; the web was formally introduced in 1994 at the first conference now known as WWW1 in Geneva, It was supposed to make easier access to a trove of decentralized, independently owned information, The web has made it possible for billions of users to access the internet and its resources. As with any project, whether software or not, unless it is thoroughly thought out, the final outcome has bugs, commissions, omissions, vulnerabilities, and shortfalls. The web has made it possible for a small number of corporations to amass huge quantities of private information and mine them for profit. In this survey paper, we have shown how some of these shortfalls of the web and have impacted CrsMgr, an online course management system and what has been attempted to address these issues.

This paper raises the privacy issues related to information that is accessible about individuals from their mobile devices and that which is collected when they interact with and use so called "free" services provided on the web. The importance of privacy has been ignored by most legislation and any laws passed have no teeth. The only exception is the privacy protection that is embedded in the EU's General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR). GDPR gives control to individuals over their personal data and requires any organization which collects and controls personal information to have in place appropriate measures both technical and logistic, to implement the data protection principles. In this paper, we propose a technical solution to provide a personal email and web server with complete control of all correspondence and contents. This would liberate users from fake free services and provide privacy and security.

The classic case pattern mining is a fundamental subject in data mining and big data science. The goal of the mining is to find correctly from a given dataset the patterns and their respective intrinsic frequentness. This paper examines two important yet misused instruments, the pattern frequentness measure "support" and the full enumeration pattern generation mode, which cause serious Overfitting thus deviate from the mining goal. A theoretic combined solution for the two critical issues is then proposed. This solution plus the equilibrium condition introduced in this paper forms a set of three fundamental rationality check criteria that every mining approach should observe. As such, the rationality of the mining theory and the reliability of the mining results would be substantially improved from the previous work. These together promise a significant change towards more effective pattern mining.

The web was ushered in with great expectations, formally in May 1994, in a conference called World Wide Web I, This event, in hindsight, is sometimes referred to as the Woodstock of the web. The web and Mosaic, the graphical browser, which was announced soon after has revolutionized the internet. For most people, the internet is the web, while one of the monopolist tech-corporations wants the world to view their platforms to be not only the web but the Internet! The web has given rise to a number of rich powerful corporations which did not exist before its advent. The easy to use graphical interface and the cell phone with its tiny screen have become the de-facto interface to all kinds of applications and have provided new methods of communication and connections. The control of all this by a small number of monopolistic corporations, who have amassed last quantities of data on people, has created a situation which has become a web of betrayal of the promise of sharing and providing information, freely. We also consider the remote possibility of a new freer web without monopolies

Internet of things (IoT) is the current trend to connect all types of devices to the internet with the purpose of making remote control of these devices possible from anywhere. This allows for convenience, efficiency and the benefit of collecting data from these devices. However, as has been pointed out, there is an imminent threat to privacy, security and personal control including the threat to real ownership. Concerns ought to be raised, not only with respect to matters of privacy and security of personal information, but also in light of the trend whereby devices and appliances, including software, are not owned but rented with the real owner making changes at their convenience; the rental being a constant cost.

This panel critically examines the state of data: how its growth and ubiquity have confronted the computer science and particularly the database community, with new challenges. These challenges require practitioners and teachers to learn new skills and engage with other disciplines in ways they had not done before. Panelists will examine the impact of the 'bigness' of data, and its importance for an ever-increasing array of applications, as well as the implications for traditional ideas of privacy and person-hood. By bringing together data specialists with those trained in social and human sciences, this panel aims to initiate discussion about the new social role the computer scientist and the database community have begun to play.

The internet was developed to share information among widely distributed computing systems without much thought about security, privacy or its commercial exploitation. The development of the web changed the dynamics of the internet as it was perceived by the business community as a immense opportunity to monetize the network by harvesting the information entrusted and being transmitted on it. The web, only an application of the internet, has become for most users the internet itself. In this paper we look at the privacy and security issues related to the changing face of data storage, transmission, mining and even computing itself on the internet, barely half a century from its inception. We provide some suggestions in the conclusion of the paper.

Over the last few decades, there has been considerable change in the way we work, play and live. The internet, invented for sharing information and allowing researchers to collaborate, has evolved into a medium used by humanity all over the globe. The concept of packet switching, proposed in the 1960s has been applied, not only to the internet, but also to telephony. Voice-over internet protocol (VOIP) and the web have evolved as applications of the internet. Packet oriented technologies have made it possible to allow the use of cell phones and their integration for internet access without the need for extensive wired networks. Database systems, information storage and processing technology have also advanced rapidly in the last few decades. These have taken over many of the manual data capture, storage, search, retrieval and processing tasks, and at a speed not possible using human effort. A further advance in artificial intelligence (AI) technology is poised to take over many of the intellectual tasks as well. Currently, increasing attention is being turned to a specific technology singularity associated with AI; the emergence of an AI based system, which will exceed human intelligence. In this position paper, we explore some past technological singularities and their effect on human lives; we will then look at the afore mentioned singularity and conclude with some observations.

We are currently experiencing an extraordinary acceleration in the growth rate of digital data. One of the reasons for this increase is the digitization of virtually all communications and records. This exponential growth is evidenced by the fact that the sum total of data produced in the last year or two would exceed all data that existed in digital form prior to that time. Just as the Industrial Revolution created an entirely new urban way of life for what is now more than half of the population of the planet, the Big Data revolution will dramatically alter the ways in which we interact, not only with each other but with all of the institutions which mediate our lives. Our age has come to be known as the era of Big Data and we are only beginning to understand its opportunities and challenges. This position paper underlines some of these emerging promises and threats, as well as their implications for researchers and scientists across the database community.

With the wide deployment of smart card automated fare collection (SCAFC) systems, public transit agencies have been benefiting from huge volume of transit data, a kind of sequential data, collected every day. Yet, improper publishing and use of transit data could jeopardize passengers' privacy. In this paper, we present our solution to transit data publication under the rigorous differential privacy model for the Société de transport de Montréal (STM). We propose an efficient data-dependent yet differentially private transit data sanitization approach based on a hybrid-granularity prefix tree structure. Moreover, as a post-processing step, we make use of the inherent consistency constraints of a prefix tree to conduct constrained inferences, which lead to better utility. Our solution not only applies to general sequential data, but also can be seamlessly extended to trajectory data. To our best knowledge, this is the first paper to introduce a practical solution for publishing large volume of sequential data under differential privacy. We examine data utility in terms of two popular data analysis tasks conducted at the STM, namely count queries and frequent sequential pattern mining. Extensive experiments on real-life STM datasets confirm that our approach maintains high utility and is scalable to large datasets.

This paper provides a summary of the pre-teen years of IDEAS from 1997 through 2008. Many people have been involved in organizing the annual meeting. Theses include the program chairs, members of the program committee, local organizing committee, support staffs ate the institutes that have hosted the meetings over the years and last but not least the thousands of authors who submitted their work to IDEAS. I would like to thank all these colleagues.

With the explosion of the Web, focused Web crawlers are gaining attention. Focused Web crawlers aim at finding Web pages related to the pre-defined topic. CINDI Robot is a focused Web crawler devoted to finding computer science and software engineering academic documents. We propose a multi-level inspection scheme to discover relevant Web pages. Through this multi-level inspection scheme, the text feature of the content contributes to the classification; furthermore other Web characteristics, such as URL pattern, anchor text and so on, assist the decision process. The experiment result demonstrates this multi-level inspection method outperforms other traditional methods.

Text categorization is a very effective way to organize enormous number of documents in Digital Libraries. Accurate classification of documents is able to not only enhance document search precision, but also facilitate browsing-by- topic functionality. It is, nonetheless, difficult to obtain a satisfactory categorization accuracy compared to the corresponding results given by professional catalogers. This is due largely to the complexity of the pre-defined large-scaled category hierarchies that makes it difficult for learning algorithms to distinguish among categories. This paper describes a top-down document classification approach which takes advantage of the hierarchical structure, more specifically, in two ways: identifying the number of independent local classifiers and guiding top-down classification procedure. We finally evaluate it within the CINDI Digital Library applying ACM Classification System as targeted hierarchy. Experimental results show the promise of this approach.

This paper presents a fusion-based similarity matching framework for content-based image retrieval on a combination of global, semi-global and local region specific features at different levels of abstraction. In this framework, an image is represented by global color and edge histogram descriptors, semi-global color and texture descriptors from grid based overlapping sub-images and local color features from a clustering-based segmented regions. As a result, image similarities are obtained through a weighted combination of overall similarity fusing global, semi-global and local region-based image level similarities. This fusing approach decreases the impact of inaccurate segmentation and increases retrieval effectiveness as constituent features are of a complementary nature. The experimental results on a general-purpose image database indicate that the aggregation or fusion-based technique provides an effective and flexible tool for similarity calculation based on a combination of descriptors from different levels of image representation

This paper presents an image retrieval framework with scalable image representation and inverted file-based indexing by incorporating automatically generated visual keywords. A codebook of visual keywords is implemented adopting a self-organizing map (SOM)-based vector quantization on the feature space of segmented image regions. The codebook is utilized to represent images by calculating the keyword statistics in the individual images as well as in the collection as a whole. To reduce the dimensionality of the sparse feature vector, latent semantic indexing technique is applied and a similarity matching function is proposed by exploiting the correlation between visual keywords. A query expansion strategy is also proposed in the inverted index based on the topology preserving structure of the SOM. Experimental results over a collection of 5000 general photographic images demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach compared to the low-level histogram-based approaches

In our increasingly wired world, there is a stringent need for the IT community to provide uninterrupted services of networks, servers and databases. Considerable efforts, both by the industrial and academic community have been directed to this end. In this paper, we examine the requirements for high availability, measures used to express it, and approaches used to implement this for databases. We present a high availability solution, using off the shelf hardware and software components, for transactions based applications and give our experience with this system.

In managing an academic conference, the program chair (PC) is required to deal with many repetitive administrative tasks such as: interaction with authors and program committee members (reviewers), paper collection, paper allocation, distributing the paper to the reviewers, collating, sorting and tabulating the evaluations, orchestrating the debate of controversial evaluation of some of the papers, making the final tabulation and preparing the notification and comments to the reviewers and authors. The Conference Management System (ConfSys) presented here is a entirely a Web-based system which provides facility for the program chair(s) to set up the details for a meeting, allows authors to register and submit papers to the system on-line; records the topic of expertise of the members of the program committee members (reviewers); helps the PC by performing an automatic allocation of the submitted papers to the reviewers. The reviewers have a facility to bid in an auction for papers to review and later to download and review the assigned paper via the Internet. The ConfSys uses the DBLP database in the automatic assignment of papers to avoid any conflict of interest and thus helps in the allocation of papers to the reviewers for a fair and impartial review of each paper.

A data modeling perspective on computer support for collaborative writing is given. In particular, the problem is identified as a temporal database application. The solution proposed is based upon a design system architecture, the repository of which uses the GENREG historical data model. GENREG uses event graphs to provide a group memory. The nodes represent the design objects (documents, references, etc.) and the edges represent the processes by which they are created. A particular strength of this solution is the ability to represent multiple contexts and perspectives of the collaborators within a single instance of the data model. A prototype Java-based implementation is described.

A software development environment is a collection of tools that support various phases of its development. The environment wherein an application is developed may have a larger effect on the programming process than does the language used for the application. As such, tools are very important; Graphical Development Environment for Postgres (GDEP) is such a tool which enables OODB developers to be more efficient and productive. It allows Postgres users to create, edit, view, import and export classes to and from the database without knowing the syntax of Postquel, the query language for Postgres. Also, GDEP provides developers with an interface window allowing them to issue direct Postquel commands. We discuss the functionalities of GDEP, as well as the enhancements GDEP adds to Postgres. In addition, GDEP has the ability to show properties as a flat class as well as a regular class with inheritance properties.

It is well known that selectivity leaves a lot to be desired in searching for information resources on the Internet with existing search systems (Desai, 1995c). This has prompted a number of researchers to turn their attention to the development and implementation of models for indexing and searching information resources on the Internet. In this article, 1 we examine briefly the results of a simple query on a number of existing search systems and then discuss two proposed index metadata structures for indexing and supporting search and discovery: The Dublin Core Elements List and the Semantic Header. We also present an indexing and discovery system based on the Semantic Header.

Individualized data structures and operations have been devised for the various application areas of textual data. Consequently, their ability to integrate with other applications by sharing their data objects has been lost. In this article we present a data model based on the text data model, universal relation model and nonfirst normal form relations, and discuss the applicability of this data model to text processing and document retrieval systems. © 1986 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.