You have reached the blog for CS 8803 at Georgia Tech: Graduate Seminar on Virtual Blight, Causes and Solutions . If you are enrolled in the seminar, subscribe using the button at the left. If you are not enrolled, feel free to participate by adding comments to posts, downloading course materials and clicking on links that you will find embedded in our blogs. Our aim is to expand the community of those interested in this important topic. You might want to begin by visiting the site that originated the term “Virtual Blight”. Also to the right you will find recent posts and tweets, a complete course calendar, archives, companies that address the virtual blight problems, and other materials.
The rapid expansion of web presence into many new kinds of social networks has by far outpaced our ability to manage (or even understand) the community, economic, demographic and moral forces that shape user experiences.
Online ticket queues, communities of online gamers, online retail malls and checkout sites, Facebook or MySpace communities, web-based town hall discussions, and Second Life destinations are just a few examples of places that users have come to regard as neighborhoods. They are virtual neighborhoods. They begin as attractive destinations and attract both visitors and inhabitants.
Some users spend money, and some put down roots in the community. But like many real neighborhoods, virtual neighborhoods all too often turn into frightening, crime-ridden, disease- (or malware-)infested eyesores. Most users are driven away, real commerce is replaced by questionable transactions and billions of dollars of value is destroyed in the process. In blighted inner city neighborhoods you can find a familiar array of bad actors: loan sharks, vagrants, drug dealers, vandals and scam artists.
Online neighborhoods fall prey to virtual blight:
Bot Blight, where the bad actors use bots and other non-human agents to overwhelm systems that are designed for human beings,
Human Blight, where individuals ranging from hackers to sociopaths and organized groups deliberately degrade a virtual neighborhood,
Entropy Blight, where abandoned property accumulates dead-end traffic of various kinds.
The simple first-generation tools that were deployed to protect online properties have failed — the collapse of Geocities and the recent apparent defeat of other technologies intended to let only humans enter the neighborhood, are evidence of that failure.
There is a growing realization of how easily bad actors can create the virtual version of urban blight and how ineffective existing approaches to identity, trust and security will be in
battling it.
In this course, we will examine the dimensions of the problem of “Virtual Blight” in online properties, and through readings, group discussions and projects we will examine critically the growing research literature in the area. This course will be of interest to graduate students in computer science, web science, information security, human-centered computing, management, architecture, public policy, ISYE, and enterprise transformation,
economics, management or sociology.
