Espresso Workshop on Decentralised Web Search

In a world where health data is at the forefront of our digital lives, the need for data privacy and control has become paramount. Today’s Web landscape confines user-generated health data within centralized data silos, limiting individuals’ autonomy and insight into the management and utilization of their own health information. These developments have highlighted the crucial importance of individual sovereignty when it comes to personal health data. This paradigm shift has given rise to new approaches in application development, focusing on personal online data stores known as “pods.” In these systems, individuals have full authority over which applications can access their personal health data and specify the purposes for which such access is granted. However, the journey toward decentralization presents its own set of challenges, particularly when it comes to enabling secure and efficient search and distributed queries over such decentralized platforms.

To this end, our workshop seeks to blend research and industry engagement, encouraging active participation from the public. Our primary goal is to collectively explore viable solutions and engage in fruitful discussions that address the challenges of decentralized web search and privacy-preserving information retrieval, especially in the context of health data. This workshop offers a structured and interactive platform, fostering knowledge exchange and collaboration within the specified timeframe and objectives. We firmly believe that workshops that bridge industry and academia will play a pivotal role in advancing our understanding and development of decentralized online services. Through these collaborative efforts, we aim to drive the creation of new techniques and technologies that can revolutionize the way we store and process our personal (health) data. Ultimately, this research trajectory has the potential to pave the way for innovative approaches that could influence the global adoption of transformative systems, revolutionizing how personal health data is managed and enhancing data sovereignty for individuals. Your participation is key to shaping the future of health data privacy and security.