Security Watch | Matt Hines » CEAS Interview with Dr. Gordon Cormack

July 28, 2006 | Comments: (0)

CEAS Interview with Dr. Gordon Cormack

TAGS: Security

I recently had a chance to catch up with Dr. Gordon Cormack, a Computer Science Professor at the University of Waterloo and the chairman for the third annual Conference on Email and Anti Spam held this year in Mountain View, CA.

Garza: Can you give us a short synopsis on what CEAS is all about?
Cormack: There are many interesting scientific challenges in email communication and enhancing email communication and mitigating the abuse. I think that now we're in a position to look more carefully at these rather than just to fight to keep our heads above water. There are a number of scientific conferences on many of the technologies that we discuss at CEAS, but there is no scientific conference that is driven from the actual electronic communication application. So, there is a machine learning conference, but it would not be driven specifically by spam and email. And similarly there is an information retrieval conference and so what makes CEAS unique is that all of these investigations are driven, first and foremost, by the application of email.

Garza: There are a number of presentations being given here from academia as well as industry. Can you talk a little bit about the mix?
Cormack: Well, to start with, these are all scientific papers and peer reviewed. So contributors submitted a full paper that was submitted to three referees who then considered the scholarly merit of the paper and we chose from 79 submissions, we chose 27 contributed papers. Then we have two invited speakers as well. Invited to provide pizazz and provocative new ideas (laughter).

So in that sense there is no hard division between industrial papers and academic papers. They all had to jump the same bar. That said I'd say we have equal parts pure academics who are interested in science for science's sake, we have industrial research people and then we have more commercial industrial or operational industrial people so it's a fairly even mix.

Garza: We've seen a variety of different educational institutions and the large Cisco, Google, IBM and lots of other presenters from industry as well. What do you see as the overall theme for the show?
Cormack: Many technologies are used to fight email abuse and we're not strictly a spam conference even though there's a fair spam component.

Garza: And you were saying that spam is actually, or there is actually a larger spam component now…
Cormack: I would say that that happens to probably just be the mix of papers that were selected. I think maybe the whole effort to filter spam is becoming more consolidated. Maybe you seeing more of a standard method, more on spam testing corpora, and more on sober reflection on how to do this and how to measure whether its working or not. Maybe a couple of years ago it was still more of the 'wild west' where people are inventing new things and making extravagant claims but not backing up those claims. Again, more science coming in, and less, something else.

Garza: So there's more science method or methodologies trying to attack the problem of spam?
Cormack: Now I should repeat that there's more to email than spam. There are people investigating positive uses of email. You know, doing user studies, looking at social networks that arise from email. And there are forms of abuse other than spam, there's phishing and who knows what else. When you watch Rob Thomas' talk you'll see he talks about the underground economy and all the people that can compromise networks and how it works and how it's very much a social network of its own that's very well established and has pretty defined rules and its thriving.

Garza: And he talks specifically about using this for crime method?
Cormack: He's talking, yes, he's saying its basically an organized crime network but not organized in the normal hierarchical form but this is a kind of social network that has kind of evolved and there are 16 year olds and 14 year olds that are breaking into military computers or banks and they barter, but Rob expresses his better than I do…

Garza: In terms of the focus, I'm sure that we're seeing issues in terms of the presentations for short term implication, for people to actually modify their products to be better spam filters and anti-spam products as well as looking at the more future technologies to leverage anti-spam down the road and as it has been continues to be a growing issue.
Cormack: I think that's true. I think we're able now to start looking farther down the road and do more fundamental research, so, now that we're no longer just trying to keep our heads above water we can consolidate what we've learned and we can also start to look at what are the challenges and what are new technologies that might, as you say, really be embraced later on. And again, not just new technologies for fighting spam but new ways of organizing your mail. There's a paper her on suggesting that you might have forgotten to put an attachment on your email. How often do you send an email and say 'I'm attaching this' and then you forget. Well, there are technological algorithms that aren't so different from the spam algorithms that can help to suggest 'did you really mean to attach something,' but forgot.

Garza: So the future of email?
Cormack: The future of email, and more electronic communication broadly defined. Instant messaging for sure. Blogs, they're kind of on the, to the extent that they're used for two way communication maybe they'd be in scope as well. We're not particularly targeting electronic publishing, we're targeting electronic communication. Uses and abuses and how to counter and how to enhance the uses and how to mitigate the abuses.

Garza: Are you seeing your attendee numbers grow? You were saying there was about a hundred…
Cormack: No actually, it's down a bit and I would say it's mostly down because I think we're getting fewer operational and commercial people now than we were. Maybe this is related to, they don't have to swim so hard to keep they're head above water so they're employer's aren't as desperate to send them to find out what's new, but I'm not sure…

Garza: The presentations and papers are up on the CEAS web site?
Cormack: Yes, at least the full papers are up right now but I'll try to get the presentations up shortly.

Garza: I appreciate your time, Gordon.
Cormack: No problem.

Posted by Victor R. Garza on July 28, 2006 11:35 AM

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