Monday, February 15, 2010

HealthSec '10 - August 10, 2010, Washington DC

I'd like to tell the readers of my blog about a USENIX workshop that I am organizing with Kevin Fu and Yoshi Kohno on Health Security and Privacy. This is going to be a real WORKshop (emphasis on "work"). Unlike many workshops that are run like conferences, with paper submissions and presentations, we are organizing a day of discussions on key issues in the security and privacy of healthcare information.

The submissions are only two pages long. We want position papers not research results. The program committee (an all star cast of security researchers, healthcare specialists, doctors, and regulators) will review the submissions to determine which ones will foster the greatest discussions. At the workshop, we will break out into groups, and program committee members will chair discussions, led by the authors of accepted papers. Later, the results of these discussions will be presented to the entire workshop. The primary goals are to build collaborations, to discover new research ideas and directions, and to grow this nascent research community. From the CFP:


HealthSec is intended as a forum for lively discussion of aggressively innovative and potentially disruptive ideas on all aspects of medical and health security and privacy. A fundamental goal of the workshop is to promote cross-disciplinary interactions between fields, including, but not limited to, technology, medicine, and policy. Surprising results and thought-provoking ideas will be strongly favored; complete papers with polished results in well-explored research areas are comparatively discouraged. Position papers will be selected for their potential to stimulate or catalyze further research and explorations of new directions, as well as for their potential to spark productive discussions at the workshop.


I encourage anyone who is working in this area to submit, and I encourage anybody who is interested in this topic to attend. The submissions are due on April 9.