The Internet offers unprecedented capabilities as a distribution channel for digital assets. Digital asset management over the internet today requires technologies for:

        - asserting intellectual property rights;
        - protecting intellectual property;
        - managing the intellectual property value chain;
        - efficient storage and retrieval of digital assets;
        - verifying the source of the assets (authentication);
        - secure distribution of digital assets to end users;
        - effective distribution of digital assets to end users.

The goals of this workshop are to formulate and begin to solve these and related challenges. The workshop will bring together, in an intense mathematical environment, mathematical scientists, engineers and computer scientists, including software architects, who are involved theoretically or practically with designing and building digital asset management systems.

In more detail, the challenges are:

Asserting intellectual property rights - Because digital assets are easy to copy and redistribute, ownership information must be embedded into content in a way that can tolerate tampering, editing and other forms of modification.  Digital watermarking of audio, images and video is a technology that addresses these problems.

Protecting intellectual property - Techniques for efficient encryption of digital content is one technique for ensuring that assets are available to the appropriate end users.   Many advanced mathematical methods are using to encrypt digital assets.

Managing the intellectual property value chain - Authoring and distributing digital content, such as video and audio, are only two stages in the value chain. Rights negotiations are a time consuming and complex part of digital asset management.  Software agents can be used to implement bargaining strategies and mathematical theory is currently being developed to automate bidding.

Efficient storage and retrieval of digital assets - Digital assets must be compressed, indexed, retrieved and uncompressed efficiently.  These are often conflicting goals and new mathematical ideas are needed to index and retrieve compressed content. Efficient translation between formats is an important issue.

Verifying the source of the assets (authentication) -  Digital signatures, public key encryption and digital steganography can be used to authenticate the origin of digital content.

Secure distribution of digital assets to end users - Digital assets must be securely delivered to end users, requiring session oriented crypographic techniques and session keys for efficient encoding and decoding.

Efficient distribution of digital assets to end users - The owners of digital assets are typically not the owners or operators of the networks over which the content is distributed.  In fact, the internet is a highly decentralized, international telecommunications infrastructure that is increasingly being targeted by criminals, hackers and terrorists. Mathematical models for distributed communication, management, monitoring and control of large networks will be discussed.

WORKSHOP SCHEDULE

LIST OF CONFIRMED PARTICIPANTS
(in addition to postdocs and long term participants)

Material from Talks     Abstracts

2000-2001 Program: Mathematics in Multimedia

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