FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Membership
If you would like to become a Member of the IAC, please fill out a registration form (http://www.ibm.com/iac/
member-registration). Benefits of membership include this newsletter, early information about meetings and important events, and a forum for discussion of hot topics in electronic commerce.

This Newsletter
This is the first edition of the Newsletter of the IBM Institute for Advanced Commerce. We will provide our members and associates a regular view of our research in electronic commerce. We will discuss recent work sponsored by the Institute, give early information about conferences that we are sponsoring, and provide highlights of recent meetings and technical papers. We will also invite researchers from universities to contribute thoughts about developments in the field.

We will distribute Newsletters by e-mail. They will be short -- we all get too much mail as it is -- and provide URLs to further information.

The Institute's web site is http://www.ibm.com/iac.

What Is the Institute?
We are an organization at IBM dedicated to accelerating progress in technology and use of advanced techniques in commerce. We sponsor projects within IBM, with partners in universities, and with leading edge customers. Our focus is on increasing understanding of the fundamentals of e-commerce as a research discipline, and in the early application of results in the marketplace. To those ends, we organize traditional academic style symposia (open attendance, papers selected by program committee) as well as invitational conferences (attendees and speakers selected for maximum impact).

We have identified seven themes that will have long-term impact, require both long-term study as well as offer immediate practical opportunities. The work of the Institute will focus on these themes, and each newsletter will discuss work relating to one of them:

• Privacy
  
• Variable Prices and Negotiated Dealings
  
• Evolving Marketplace
  
• Dynamic Business-to-Business
  
• Managing the End Customer
  
• Impact of Globalization
  
• System Foundations for Electronic Commerce
  

Recent Activities
The Institute started at the beginning of 1998.

We cosponsored the Conference on Electronic Marketplace and Economics (CEME'98, University of Texas - Austin, February 16-17). (http://www.ibm.com/iac/events-crec-conference.html)

We provided support for the IEEE Workshop on Dependable and Real-Time E-Commerce Systems (DARE'98, Denver, June 2). (http://www.eng.uci.edu/
faculty/klin/DARE98.html)

We ran an invitational IAC Symposium on Privacy In a Networked World - Demands, Technologies and Opportunities (New York City, May 18-19). (http://www.ibm.com/iac/events-iac-symposium-
privacy.html)

The Advisory Board met for the first time on April 29, and had an opportunity to review IAC directions as well as several projects. Advisory Board members concurred with the IAC's plan.

We are sponsoring new projects, both within IBM and with universities. We will discuss some of the projects in future newsletters and on the web site.

We have given grants to several universities to support electronic commerce research in specific areas. These efforts will be described in future newsletters and in technical reports.

Upcoming Events
We are cosponsors of the First International Conference on Information and Computation Economies (Charleston, October 25-28). (http://www.ibm.com/iac/events-ice98-
conference.html)

We are sponsoring an invitational research conference for European academics in November at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory. Details will appear later on the web site.

We are organizing a conference on technologies to support negotiated pricing for the Fall.

Topic of the Month: Privacy
We held an exceptional conference on Privacy in May. Privacy and control of consumer information is a burning topic because of rising political concern and specific governmental actions. Transcripts and audio clips of several of the presentations are available on the web site. (http://www.ibm.com/iac/transcripts/internet-privacy-
symp/index.html)

The conference was opened by a presentation by Ira Magaziner (who is responsible for Internet policy for the Clinton Administration), and included addresses by Esther Dyson, Deborah Hurley, David Medine, Joel Reidenberg, Alan Westin, and others. We also had four excellent panel discussions with representatives from important organizations and businesses.

The basic message from the political front is that enterprises must quickly decide on a formal privacy policy, that much tighter regulations take effect in the European Union in October and these will have worldwide impacts, and that American firms have been asked to regulate themselves or risk becoming the target of Federal laws. Such rules can have a significant impact on the direction of electronic commerce: the promise of targeted marketing and carefully modulated close relationships with customers will be difficult to realize if customer data are too tightly controlled.

There will be a rapid rise in demand for privacy auditing activities and technologies to support such audits, as it becomes more important to be able to show that private information is maintained in concordance with stated policies and laws. There is also likely to be a rise in customer control over their information, taking advantage of P3P and new tools. In the longer run, there will be a convergence, mediated by technology, between the rights and preferences of the individual and the use by organization of knowledge about individuals.

Closing
We plan to distribute issues of this newsletter regularly. They will include more technical material about research directions and projects, conference plans and results, and also periodic discussion groups and technical trials. Please let us know what you think of this newsletter, what you want to see in future. Also, please tell your colleagues about us, and subscribe to future issues.

Stuart Feldman, Director, IAC
Bill Rubin, Operations Manager, IAC
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