UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE

    COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM


		presents

           "Blind Publication
       (A copyright library without
          publication or trust)"

		speaker:

	     James Malcolm
       Computer Science Department
       University of Hertfordshire


	 19 March 2003 (Wednesday)

	  Lecture Theatre E351
	    Hatfield Campus
		3 - 4 pm


 Coffee/tea and biscuits will be available.


	Everyone is Welcome to Attend
	    [Space Permitting]


Abstract:

When a copy of a book is placed in a copyright library, there is some
physical record of when it was put there, and it is there for all to
see.  But the documents placed there are publicly accessible and thus
easy to copy.  An alternative is that a document is given to some kind
of notary and it is kept secret.  But we have to trust the notary both
to keep the documents secret and equally to provide the evidence we
require should a dispute arise.

Ideally, we would like to be able to register a document in some kind
of system without having to trust that system both to keep it a secret 
and to take our side in any future dispute.

From a consideration of digital signatures, it becomes apparent that
often it is not the document which is to be protected in a copyright
marking scheme but the salient features of that document: if we take a
well-known story and change one word it is clearly the same story --
but a digital signature of the document would be quite different.

If we can extract the salient features of a document and construct a
feature set, then this can be placed in a library, possibly widely
distribute.  We propose to publish these feature sets using Bloom
filters.


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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium Abstracts
On-line: http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/colloq/