Sponsored by the IBM Institute for Advanced Commerce, IBM Corporation, the iCities, EU Funded, IST-FET Project and ACM Press* (pending)

IBM T. J. Watson Research, Hawthorne, GN-F15.
19, Skyline Drive (10532)
October 11th (Friday), 2002
8.00 A.M. to 5.00 P.M.

In the coming years, we expect many kinds of large-scale information sites, portals, private business exchanges to emerge over the Internet, which will mimic small and large “physical” cities. They will provide local information, content and commerce services to registered businesses, consumers and local government offices. Just like physical cities, these “ information cities (iCities) will house "infohabitants" who will participate in activities such as information searching, information gathering, commercial transactions, commercial collaborations, and social interactions.

We are already witnessing the emergence of large-scale web portals (e.g NYC.gov) providing local information about their respective cities, access to local government services, community services and a place for businesses to advertise and attract consumers on-line. In the United States alone nearly 300 local cities have emerged over the last 5 years, and are owned by the respective mayors offices. These cities offer a range of services to city inhabitants and others. One can classify Yahoo and AOL as super-cities that attract tens of millions of inhabitants, and provide services such for inhabitants to socialize, interact, collaborate, transact and search for content. We envision that information portals of the future will contain very sophisticated social collaboration functions, cost-effective consumer access, commercial services (e.g. purchasing, personal finance and sales) and electronic services to leading virtual life over the Internet.

This workshop brings together a diverse group of scientists, academics and industry to understand the dynamics behind the creation, design, formation and survival of next generation of information portals, collaborative portals, Enterprise portals and information cities. In addition, our goals are to understand the design and architecture issues in building large-scale information portals and cities with the right open standards for socio-economic interactions and commerce. With the emergence of Web Services (e.g. SOAP, UDDI, WSDL), we envision future information cities to base their architectures on open Webservices standards to integrate people, small and medium businesses, local governments and large enterprises.

The Workshop aims to cover the following issues:
• Digital Cities and Cyber Cities
• Advanced Information, Enterprise Portals and Information Markets
• Social networks, interaction and collaboration
• Contextual and Collaborative Computing
• Service discovery, binding and advertising
• Web organization, web-geography, small world networks and structure
• Architecture of information cities (Webservices, J2EE and others)
• Virtual communities (spanning over Internet, ICQ and Mobile networks)
• Grid computing and service portals (hosting)

Workshop Program & Speakers:

Introduction and Kick-off (8:00-9:35 AM)
0. Introduction (8:00-8:10 AM)
J. Sairamesh, Alison Lee and Chung-Sheng Li, IBM Research
1. ICities: an Introduction (8:10-8:50 AM)
Stuart Feldman, VP, Internet Technology, IBM
2. Information and Enterprise Computing (8:50-9:35 AM)
Don Ferguson, IBM Fellow, Software Group, IBM.

Session 1: Information Markets, Cities and Social Interactions (9:35-12:30)
Chair: Alison Lee
Coffee Break: 10:30 AM
1. Making Infocities Livable
Prof. Lee Sproull, NYU Stern School of Business
2. Complex On-line Communities and Casinos without Borders:
A Financial, Legal and Organizational Geography of Online Gambling
Mark Wilson, Michigan State University (Organizer of Digital Communities 2001, 2003).
3. Information Economies
Jeff Kephart, IBM Research
4. Context-Aware Computing
Prof. Ted Selker, Media Lab. MIT.
5. Fostering Social Interactions
Alison Lee, IBM Research
Panel Session 1
Will Information Cities Emerge? Will they have millions of participants? What will they contain?
What are the boundaries? Who will manage them? What are the social, economic, technical
and design issues for creating and sustaining them?
Participants : Prof. Lee Sproull (NYU), Mark Wilson (MSU), Jeff Kephart (IBM Research),
Alison Lee (IBM Research), Petros Kavassalis (Ecole Poly and UoC), Ted Selker (MIT, Media Lab)

LUNCH: (12:30 - 1:45).

Session 2: Internet Portal Models, Economics and Emulation Environments (1.45-5.00 P.M.)
Chair: J. Sairamesh
Coffee Break: 3:00 PM
1. Web Dynamics (1:45-2:25)
Bernard Huberman, HP Labs,
2. Word-of-mouth Model and other models of information cities
Petros Kavassalis, UOC, Greece
3. Mozart: Framework for large scale simulations of enterprise and information cities
Seif Haridi, SICS, Sweden
4. Economics of competition in information cities
Herve Tanguy, and Jacques Laye, Ecole Polytechnique, France
5. Supply-chain portals
Andrew Whinston, UT Austin
Panel Session 2
Would Webservices open standards help in fostering information cities and commerce?
Would information cities encompass enterprises, markets, social interactions and collaborations?
Panelists: Seif Haridi (SICS), Chung-Sheng Li (IBM Research), J. Sairamesh (IBM Research),
Prof. Lee Sproull (NYU), Petros Kavassalis (Ecole Poly and UoC)
Program and Organizing Committee
J. Sairamesh, Rakesh Mohan, Chung-Sheng Li, Jeff Kephart and Alison Lee