The Third Annual Workshop on Frontiers
in Distributed Information Systems
FDIS '97

The Aspen Institute
Aspen Meadows, Aspen, Colorado
June 1 - June 4, 1997

The Frontiers in Distributed Information Systems workshop was held June 1 - June 4, 1997 at a new location, the Aspen Meadows Conference Center at the Aspen Institute in Aspen CO. The focus was on rapidly changing possibilities in the backbone and transport layers of the world's digital networks, and on the new services, new clients, and new communities that are coming into being as a result of their explosive growth. Attendance (see list below) was limited to less than 50 participants, and the program included short presentations by attendees.

Because of the explosion in computing and communication technology, many new products and services are now possible. However, many of the proposed visions for these new products and services are mutually inconsistent and some still have significant technical and social obstacles. Technical elegance will often not be the principal factor in determining success.

Many of us, in our own organizations, prepare "roadmaps" based on our guesses about where technology is going now and in the five to ten year future, using these roadmaps to identify critical areas in which research is needed to stay on track. In the workshop we will identify and critically examine such issues and opportunities in distributed information systems. The goal is to consider them with more vision and greater technical accuracy than we each bring to the discussion individually.

Schedule

Sunday June 1, 1997

  6:00 pm	Reception

Monday June 2, 1997

  8:00 am 	High Bandwidth Access 
  Moderator: Scott Kirkpatrick, IBM

     Wireless Local Loop, Paul Henry, ATT Labs
     High Speed Fiber Access and services, Nick Frigo, ATT Labs
     The Mega-Proxy Server, Dan Aronson, AOL
        Online Presentation
     Viruses, and the 5 Ages of their Evolution, Steve White, IBM
     Attendee Presentations:
        Howard Page, Sprint
        Chuanyi Ji, RPI

  Lunch 	

  Afternoon Free

  7:30 pm 	The Providers
  Moderator: Larry Jackel, ATT

     Internet in China (ChinaByte), Hyojong Kim, DomainAsia
     Starting Up as an ISP, Homayoon Beigi, Yorktown Heights, NY
     Attendee presentations:
        Larry Jackel, ATT Labs
        Jocelyn Cloutier, ATT
        Peter Danzig, Network Appliance
        Brewster Kahle, Alexa Internet

Tuesday June 3, 1997

  8:00 am 	The Middle Layer 
  Moderator: John Denker, ATT

     MPEG4 -- object oriented audio and video, Cliff Reader, Samsung
        Online Presentation
     "The Next Big Thing", Colin Harrison, IBM
        Online Presentation
     Attendee Presentation:
        John Denker, ATT
     Electronic Junk Mail, Jay levitt, AOL

  Lunch 	

  Afternoon Free

  7:30 pm 	User Communities 
  Moderator: Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive

     Scalable Internet Service, Mike Schwartz, @Home network
     Multi User Interaction in VRML2.0, Mitra, Mitra Internet Consulting
     Internet Go-Server and its community, Dave Marvit, Alpha World
     Atomicity in E-Commerce, Doug Tygar, CMU
     Attendee Presentation: 
        Norm Shryer, ATT Labs

Wednesday June 4 1997

  8:00 am 	New Services
  Moderator: Colin Harrison, IBM

     vBNS, Backbone Capacity Enhancements, Rick Wilder, MCI
     Issues in Privacy and Monitoring, Jim Pitkow, Xerox PARC
        Online Presentation
     Collaborative Filtering, PHOAK, Loren Terveen, ATT
     Intelligent Agents and Open Sesame, Alper Caglayan, Charles River Analytics
     Attendee Presentations:
       Josh Alspector, University Colorado
       Ron Ilgen, MCI

  Lunch

  Adjourn

Workshop Site, Accommodations, & Application Information

The workshop was held at the Aspen Meadows Conference Center of the Aspen Institute in Aspen Colorado. Rooms could be booked at the FDIS conference rate of $85/night, single or double occupancy, at 1-800-452-4240.

Flights to Aspen can be quite inexpensive if booked ahead. Aspen Central reservations (ACR) has contracted rates for round trips between major points and Aspen. As of April 14, examples of their rates for non-refundable round trips (June 1-4, same price for Saturday as for Sunday arrivals) were:

The carrier is United. To use ACR for flight reservations, call 1-800-262-7736, push option #2 for air reservations only, please ask for Betsy. (and mention FDIS97).

The conference room was equipped to handle projection of VGA screen-based presentations, had a T1 Internet connection, in- house PC, and of course the standard overhead projector.

Organizing Committee

Josh Alspector Gene Ball John Denker Bob Flynn
Univ of Colorado Microsoft AT&T Polytechnic Univ
Rich Howard Scott Kirkpatrick Larry Jackel Jim Pitkow
Lucent IBM AT&T Xerox PARC
Eric Sumner Rod Goodman Brewster Kahle
Lucent Caltech Internet Archives

Attendees

Josh Alspector
University of Colorado
1420 Austin Bluffs Parkway
Department of ECE
Colorado Springs, CO 80933-7150
email: josh@eas.uccs.edu

Dan Aronson
America Online
690 Fifth Street
San Francisco, CA 94107
email: dan@aol.net

Homayoon Beigi
International Business Machines
3616 Edgehill Road
Yorktown Heights
New York, NY 10598
email: beigi@watson.ibm.com

Alper Caglayan
Open Sesame
55 Wheeler Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
email: akc@opensesame.com

Calton Pu
Oregon Graduate Institute
20000 N.W. Walker Road
Beaverton, OR 97006
email: calton@cse.ogi.edu

Jocelyn Cloutier
AT&T Labs-Research
101 Crawfords Corner rd
room 4G312
Holmdel, NJ 07733
email: jocelyn@research.att.com

Peter Danzig
Network Appliance
2770 San Tomas
Santa Clara, CA 95051
email: danzig@netapp.com

John Denker
AT&T Labs-Research
P.O. Box 7033
100 Schulz Drive
Room 3-104
Red Bank, NJ 07701-7033
email: jsd@research.att.com

Nick Frigo
AT&T Laboratories -- Research
P.O. Box 400
HOH L-175
Holmdel, NJ 07733-0400
email: njf@research.att.com

Paul Fuoss
AT&T Laboratories
600 Mountain Avenue
Rm 2B-239
Murray Hill, NJ 07974
email: fuoss@research.att.com

Rod Goodman
California Institute of Technology
1200 E. California Blvd.
136-93
Pasadena, California 91125
email: rogo@caltech.edu

Colin Harrison
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
P. O. Box 704
Yorktown Heights, NY 10598
email: cgh@watson.ibm.com

Paul Henry
AT&T Labs
101 Crawfords Corner Rd
PO Box 3030
Room 4C502
Holmdel, NJ 07733-3030
email: psh@att.com

Ron Ilgen
MCI Telecommunication
5075 Cliff Point Circle East
Colorado Springs, Co. 80919
email: Ronald P. Ilgen @ MCI.com

Larry Jackel
AT&T Labs-Research
P.O. Box 7033
100 Schulz Drive
Room 3-140
Red Bank, NJ 07701-7033
email: ldj@research.att.com

Chuanyi Ji
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
ECSE, RPI
Troy, NY 12180
email: chuanyi@ecse.rpi.edu

Brewster Kahle
Alexa Internet
Bldg 116 Sheridan and Ord
Box 29141
San Francisco, CA 98122
email: brewster@archive.org

Hyojong Kim
DomainAsia
125 W 16th Street
Suite 167
New York, NY 10011
email: hyojong@domainasia.com

Scott Kirkpatrick
IBM Research
Route 134
Yorktown Heights, NY 10598
email: kirk@watson.ibm.com

Jay Levitt
America Online, Inc.
8619 Westwood Center Drive
Vienna, VA 22182
email: jay@aol.com

Mitra
ParaGraph International
77 Bosque
email: mitra@earth.path.net

Abbas Ourmazd
Institute for Semiconductor Physics
Walter-Korsing-Str. 2
Frankfurt (Oder)
D-15230
Germany
email: ourmazd@ihp-ffo.de

Howard G. Page
Sprint Advanced Technology Laboratories
1 Adrian Court
Burlingame, CA 94010
email: hpage@sprintlabs.com

Jim Pitkow
Xerox PARC
3333 Coyote Hill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94304
email: pitkow@parc.xerox.com

Cliff Reader
Samsung Semiconductor Inc.
3655 N 1st St.
San Jose , CA 95134
email: creader@samsung.com

Franco Savadkouhi
Northern Telecom
2201 Lakeside Blvd.
mailstop G-201
Richardson, TX 75082
email: francos@nortel.com

Norm Schryer
AT&T Laboratories Research
600 Mountain Ave
room 2T-402
Murray Hill, NJ 07974
email: nls@research.att.com

Mike Schwartz
@Home Network
385 Ravendale Dr
Mountain View, CA 94043
email: schwartz@home.net

Loren Terveen
AT&T Labs - Research
600 Mountain Avenue
Room 2C-401
Murray Hill, New Jersey 07920
email: terveen@research.att.com

Doug Tygar
Carnegie Mellon University
Computer Science Dept
5000 Forbes Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891
email: tygar@cs.cmu.edu

Steve R. White
IBM Research
P.O. Box 704
Yorktown Heights, NY 10598
email: srwhite@watson.ibm.com

Andreas Weigend
Stern School of Business, New York University
Information Systems Department
Stern School of Business
44 W 4th St, MEC 9-74
New York, NY 10012
email: aweigend@stern.nyu.edu

Winfried Wilcke
IBM Research
650 Harry Road
D2-246
San Jose, CA 95120
email: wilcke@ricochet.net

Rick Wilder
MCI
2100 Reston Parkway
Reston, VA 22046
email: wilder@mci.net

Conference Administration

Sandi von Pier
ATT Laboratories
Room 4G-315A
Holmdel NJ, 07733
1-908-949-2783

Email: Sandi@research.att.com