Hello,

TICS has a new call for papers that may be of interest to some of you.

Please feel free to share widely. Thank you!

Online version: https://tics.site/cfp/

# TICS 2020

**Co-located with the [2020 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT 2020)](http://wi2020.vcrab.com.au/), to be held online.**

## Introduction

Over the past years there has been a greater demand from large-scale players such as governments and dominant media companies for online censorship and surveillance, as an understandable reaction against hate speech, copyright violations, and other cases related to citizen compliance with civil laws and regulations by national authorities. Unfortunately, this is often accompanied by a tendency of extensively censoring online content and massively spying on citizens actions.

Numerous whistle-blower revelations, leaks from classified documents, and a vast amount of information released by activists, researchers and journalists, reveal evidence of government-sponsored infrastructure that either goes beyond the requirements and scope of the law, or operates without any effective regulations in place. In addition, this infrastructure often supports the interests of big private corporations, such as the companies that enforce online copyright control.

Mobile networks are particularly vulnerable to the above points. Due to the nature of their deployment, few actors can achieve far-reaching results, and end-users are left unprotected; we are interested in tracking developments that, without sacrificing functionality and convenience, allow end-users to get control on the amount and breadth of information generated, stored and processed on them.

TICS is a special track the area of Internet censorship, surveillance and other adversarial burdens to technology that bring in danger; to a greater extend the safety (physical security and privacy) of its users. Proposals for TICS 2020 should be situated within the field of Internet censorship, network measurements, information controls, surveillance and content moderation.

## Workshop topics

The goal of TICS is to raise awareness around the implications of network interference, by inviting researchers from complementary disciplines to consider the effect of their own domain on online censorship and surveillance. Along those lines, we invite submissions that address the following topics:

* Research on technologies and policies that build upon advancements on the field of web intelligence to imply blocking, limitation or distortion of the availability of network services and online content * The application of web intelligence concepts such as behavioral modeling, data mining, and social network analytics to target groups and individuals by law enforcement agencies and private corporations * The implications of algorithmic and AI-assisted user content classification (such as for identification of hate-speech, copyright, or disinformation) * Novel techniques that leverage web intelligence to defend netizens against censorship and surveillance, or privacy enhancements to the existing AI infrastructure to mitigate these threats * Measurement methodologies that detect network interference or content moderation based on crowd knowledge or web analytics * The socio-economic consequences and implementation limitations and fallacies of upload filters and recommendation systems * Business models and amendments to legal frameworks which promote the use of web intelligence in ways that build a pluralistic, private, and human-centric experience without violating user freedoms * Privacy on mobile networks * Network measurements * Radio frequency communications * Data leaks * Surveillance * Backdoors into carrier equipment (base stations, antennas, switches, software) * Law enforcement * Telcos security and advance persistent threats * Network espionage and nation state threats (e.g. "operation Soft Cell") * Middleboxes / DPI * Content regulation * Wiretapping * Net neutrality * Data retention * GDPR * Device/radio blocking (Network IMEI) * Ownership of infrastructure, and community-operated networks * Spectrum sharing * License-exempt spectrum

## Important dates

* Paper Submission due: September 15th, 2020 * Notification to authors: October 15th, 2020 * Final, camera ready papers, due: November 15th, 2020 * Workshop date: December 14th, 2020

## Paper Submission

**[Paper Submission Page](https://wi-lab.com/cyberchair/2020/wi20/scripts/submit.php?subarea=S07&u...

Submitted papers should be limited to a maximum of 8 pages in the standard ACM 2-column format.\ The ACM Proceedings Manuscript Formatting Guidelines can be found at: https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template

## Committees

### Program Chairs

* Vasilis Ververis, Humboldt University Berlin, vasilis@tics.site * Marios Isaakidis, University College London, marios@tics.site * Gunnar Wolf, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, gwolf@tics.site

You can contact all of the chairs by addressing your mail to: chairs@tics.site

### Program Committee

* Chrystalenni Loizidou, University of Nicosia * Keith McManamen, Psiphon * Will Scott, University of Michigan

## Past Workshops

- [2019 (Valencia, Spain)](https://tics.site/2019)

Best regards, ~Vasilis