On Monday, December 20, 2004, 11:34:34 PM, Daniel Quinlan wrote:

William Stearns wstearns@pobox.com writes:

...

I'll be attending the MIT spam conference this year, Jan 21st, 9-5. Details at http://www.spamconference.org/ . The registration is free, but they suggest an early registration before the conference fills up.

Last year, it was awesome to meet up with SpamAssassin developers and other anti-spam folks, but the MIT spam conference itself was disappointing for the second year in a row. It:

• was full of poorly reviewed papers of anecdotal information
• was unbelievably cold (both inside and outside)
• uncomfortable to sit in circa-1965 wood chairs

...

I'd love a chance to meet other people working on spamassassin and surbl. Is anyone else planning on attending?

I'd love to meet you and other SURBL/SA people. If you want to attend a peer-reviewed anti-spam conference with heating, a pleasant climate, and comfortable seating, I can definitely recommend CEAS.

If you're ever in the SF Bay Area and would like to get together, drop me a line. I've met with Jeff a few times.

Daniel

Yes, CEAS was pretty good and it was nice to meet some of the SA and anti-spam folks from around the world. One of the flaws is that it's not strictly focussed on spam, but some of the related topics are at least tangentially interesting.

FWIW here's the Call for Papers from CEAS: __

Subject: Conference on Email and Anti-Spam Preliminary Call for Papers Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 10:44:43 -0800 From: "Joshua Goodman" (MicroSoft) To: <ceas-announce at lists.Stanford.EDU>

The Second Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS) In Cooperation with The International Association for Cryptologic Research and The IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy

Preliminary Call for Papers

July 21-22, 2005 (Thurs,Fri) Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA http://www.ceas.cc

General Conference Chair: Joshua Goodman (Microsoft Research)

Program Co-Chairs: * Josh Alspector (AOL) * Tom Fawcett (HP) * Andrew McCallum (UMass)

The Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS) invites the submission of papers for its second meeting. Papers are invited on all aspects of email, instant messaging, cell phone text messaging, and voice over internet protocol (VoIP). This includes spam, spit (spam over internet telephony), spim (spam over instant messenger), phishing and identity theft via messaging, viruses, spyware, etc. including research papers, industry reports, and law and policy papers.

Research: Computer science oriented academic-style research Industry: Descriptions of important or innovative products Law, Policy, and Economics: Legal, policy, and economic papers

* Research papers include experimental or theoretical, academic-style papers on all aspects of messaging and abuses, including but not limited to:

Techniques for stopping email, VoIP and IM spam, including Machine learning techniques Postage techniques Proof-of-work Challenge-response Human Interactive Proofs (or CAPTCHAs) Disposable email addresses Protocols for sender authentication and verification Digital signatures Proof of group membership Role of spam as a malware vector Spam traceback New features for email and messaging systems Automatic foldering of email Categorizing messages Message search Clustering messages Advanced calendaring and scheduling Digital rights management for email and digital messages Public Key Infrastructure for messaging

* Industry papers describe products or systems (commercial or open source) and matters of commercial or practical interest. Papers claiming excellent results should include good experimental or theoretical evidence supporting the claims. Example topics include:

Industry cooperation for stopping messaging abuse New standards and interoperability For spam, spit, spim filters and authentication For calendaring and scheduling Public key infrastructure for encryption and identity Digital rights management New products, especially those with novel features

* Legal, policy and financial papers focus on topics such as

What new laws or social institutions are most appropriate for messaging? Legal strategies against spam, phishing, and spyware The CAN-SPAM act and potential FTC regulations International legal approaches What should be done about phishing and other message scams? The economics of spam, spim, spit, phishing The economic effects of per-message charges (postage) Email, IM, VoIP and identity: who should control it? Privacy for email, IM, VoIP, and chat Messaging in the workplace.

* In all three areas, submissions closely related to messaging, viruses attached to messages, chat rooms, usenet groups, and mailing lists will be given full consideration.

KEY DATES: Paper Submission Deadline: March 15 Notification of acceptance: May 16 Final camera-ready version of papers: June 16 Conference: July 21 and 22

REQUIREMENTS: Papers may be of one of two types: extended abstracts (two pages) or full papers (eight pages, including appendices and bibliography). Work may not have been previously published in any conference or journal, and simultaneous submissions are not allowed. The style will be the Morgan-Kaufmann two-column, 8.5 by 11 inch format as specified in the style files available at http://www.ceas.cc for both submissions and final papers.

Papers will be reviewed by a committee from academic and industrial research centers. Accepted papers will be made freely available on the web, and will be published on CD-ROM. Authors will retain copyright of their work.

A call for workshop proposals will follow this call for papers. Suggestions for panel discussions are also welcome, and should be sent to the Program Chairs at information at ceas.cc.

Program Committee at time of writing:

Ion Androutsopoulos (Athens University) Olle Baelter (NADA, KTH) Paula J. Bruening (Center for Democracy and Technology) Vitor R. Carvalho (CMU) Richard Clayton (University of Cambridge) Bruce Croft (Univeristy of Massachusetts, Amherst) Nicolas Ducheneaut (PARC) Natalie Glance (Intelliseek) David Heckerman (Microsoft Research) Haym Hirsh (Rutgers University) Thomas Hofmann (Brown University) Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Research) Geoff Hulten (Microsoft) Eric S. Johansson (CAMRAM project) Jon Kleinberg (Cornell Univeristy) Aleksander Kolcz (AOL) Barry Leiba (IBM T.J. Watson) John R. Levine (ASRG, CAUCE, and Taughannock Networks) Miles Libbey (Yahoo! Inc.) Christopher Lueg (Charles Darwin University) Kevin McCurley (IBM Almaden) John Mitchell (Stanford University) Andrew Ng (Stanford University) David Pennock (Yahoo! Research Labs) John Platt (Microsoft Research) Jon Praed (Internet Law Group) Isadore Rigoutsos (IBM T.J. Watson) Gordon Rios (Proofpoint Inc. and SRI) Mehran Sahami (Google and Stanford University) Ken Schneider (Symantec Inc.) Richard Segal (IBM T.J. Watson) Diana Smetters (PARC) Ian Smith (Intel Research Seattle) Theo Van Dinter (SpamAssassin) Scott Wen-tau Yih (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) Andy Wick (AOL) Hongyuan Zha (Pennsylvania State University) [...]

Jeff C. -- "If it appears in hams, then don't list it."