TRUST in social and sensor networks

Abstract

<p>Trust is becoming increasingly important in diverse areas such as search, e-commerce, social media, semantic sensor networks, etc. In social networks, it is important to determine whom to trust and on what topic, before making a decision. In sensor networks, the trend is towards using large numbers of cheap low quality sensors rather than a few expensive high-fidelity sensors, and relying on the middleware for aggregating, mediating, and determining trusted sensors and trustworthy sensor data. Thus, both humans and machines use some form of trust to make informed and reliable decisions, or resolve conflicts, before acting. As agents providing critical content and services continue to become distributed and remote from the agents that consume them, and as miscreants attempt to corrupt, subvert or attack existing infrastructure, the issue of trust aggregation, propagation, inference, and update will continue to remain significant. Unfortunately, there is neither a universal notion of trust that is applicable to all domains, nor an explicit description of how one arrives at trust information in many situations, much less its automation. In this presentation, we review past work and explore future research issues relevant to trust in social/sensor networks and interactions. We advocate a balanced, iterative approach to trust that marries both theory and practice. On the theoretical side, we investigate models of trust to analyze and specify the nature of trust and trust computation. On the practical side, we propose to uncover aspects that provide a basis for trust formation and techniques to extract trust information from concrete social/sensor networks and interactions. We expect the development of formal models of trust and techniques to glean trust information from social media and sensor web to be fundamental enablers for applying semantic web technologies to trust management.</p><p>This presentation occurred at the Wright State University Campus-Wide Celebration of Research, Scholarship and Creative Activities on April 16, 2010</p>