PT-IoT 2014 - International Workshop on Privacy, Trust, and the Internet of Things

The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) is a dynamic global network based on standards and interoperable communication protocols where physical and virtual things have attributes, identities, and capabilities and are seamlessly integrated into the existing Internet infrastructure. The range of devices deployed as part of the IoT range from passive radio tags to embedded computer systems. Deploying such devices to obtain real-time information for decision making has become common practise in many different domains, such as smart homes, e-health, automotive, transport and logistics, and environmental monitoring. However, due to the variety of devices, organisations, and social structures involved in the IoT, the reliability and usefulness of data generated by IoT devices depends on evaluating its trustworthiness.
For example, individuals might have to make important decisions based on information from devices with whom they may have never interacted with. Moreover, the deployment of IoT devices could pose threats to the privacy and security of individuals including unlawful surveillance, active intrusion in private life and data profiling. User may lose track of which devices are connected to the Internet, what kind of information these devices collect and transmit and who receives this information. It is therefore important to provide a mechanism for organisations and individuals to understand and control how such devices behave and how they can be used. In this context we are particularly interested in the role of provenance (information about entities, activities, and people involved in producing a piece of data or thing) which can be used to form assessments about quality, reliability or trustworthiness of things.
Semantic Web Technologies play an important role in the context of the IoT as they can be used to describe data from the devices in a way to facilitate aggregation, cross-referencing and to enable services and applications to make intelligent decisions. However, the perceived quality of data may vary dramatically due, for example, to data obfuscation. For instance, a device may only expose a limited description of the aggregated data for a particular individual due to policy constraints. There is also a lack of public awareness of these issues, and social policy struggles to keep pace with this rapidly evolving landscape. Such emerging problems require new ways of thinking about trust in the digital age, and new approaches to design technologies for IoT such that managing trust and helping to mitigate risk is made easier and transparent.
With this workshop we aim to draw together academics and professionals of all disciplines and backgrounds to discuss the key problems of privacy and trust in the IoT, and explore methodologies, technologies and tools for addressing them. We seek contributions that highlight/discuss challenges in IoT and solutions that may benefit from knowledge driven approaches.
With the current interest shown by the community of researchers working on these topics, we expect the attendance to be in the range of 20 - 30 participants. We are intending to solicit the following categories of papers: full papers, short papers and demonstration papers presenting application scenarios.
This workshop is co-located with the 4th International Conference on the Internet of Things (IoT2014) Mit Media Lab, Cambridge, MA, October 7-8, 2014 http://www.iot-conference.org/iot2014/