End Date: 2010-12-15

Location: Paris

Country: France

Description:

The 4th Joint Working Group Workshops of the Action’s WGs will be held in Paris France, co-located with EUMAS-2010.

End Date: 2010-12-14

Location: Paris

Country: France

Description:

The Action’s 5th Management Committee meeting will take place on December 14th, 2010 at the  Paris Descartes University in Paris (France), colocated with EUMAS-2010.

End Date: 2010-09-10

Location: Desenzano del Garda

Country: Italy

Description:

We are pleased to announce a special Panel Session on the uses of argumentation in agreement technologies at the COMMA 2010 conference. Website.

The panel will be held after the main conference on Friday 10th September from 5 to 7 pm, and will provide a forum for discussing latest developments and challenges for argumentation models and technologies in the COST actions five key areas of semantics, norms, organisations, negotiation and trust.

The following leading researchers have agreed to participate in the panel:

• A. Hunter, University College London (Argumentation and Semantics)
• H. Prakken, Utrecht University and University of Groningen (Argumentation and Norms)
• I. Rahwan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Masdar Institute (Argumentation and Organisations)
• L. Amgoud, IRIT, Université Paul Sabatier  (Argumentation and Negotiation)
• F.Toni, Imperial College London (Argumentation and Trust)

Note that limited funds are available for postgraduate students and young researchers to attend the panel session.

For further information please contact Sanjay Modgil.

THIS IS AN EARLY VERSION OF PAPER PUBLISHED IN
Mathematical and Computer Modelling 49 (2009) 226–233, Elsevier
(this early version is made available due to copyright reasons)

A Formal Apparatus for Modeling Trust in Computing Environments

Denis Trček
Faculty of computer and information science
Laboratory for e-media
Tržaška cesta 25, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
Tel.: +386 1 4768 918 / Fax: +386 1 4264 647
E-mail: denis.trcek@fri.uni-lj.si

Abstract
Recent research in computer systems security has evolved into trust issues, which are now becoming an important topic. Majority of approaches for trust modeling addressed trust by actually focusing on security, and some of them addressed also trust as such. This paper presents a formal apparatus that concentrates on trust as such. It is flexible enough to accommodate the driving factors behind trust and consequently different trust-focused methodologies and technologies. The basic goal of work presented in this paper is definition of qualitative trust modeling methodology for trust management in contemporary computing environments that efficiently complements existing quantitative methodologies. Further, an open conceptual model for trust management is presented that accommodates various qualitative and quantitative trust management methodologies. This model has also been implemented in web services environment, and it is discussed in this paper as well.

Article

Demo + Code:
http://www.l3s.de/~kaerger/spox/

Paper:
http://www.l3s.de/~kaerger/publications_pdf/iswc09_demo.pdf

SPoX is a tool that allows to define the behaviour of Skype based on reactive Semantic Web policies and trust negotiation. It enables users to define policies stating, for example, who is allowed to call and whose chat messages show up. Moreover, SPoX reacts to arbitrary events in Skype’s Social Network as well, such as on-line status changes of users or the birthday of a friend. The decisions about how SPoX reacts are defined by means of Semantic Web policies that do not only consider the context of the user
(such as time or on-line status) but include Social Semantic Web data into the policy reasoning process. By this means, users can state that, for instance, only people defined as friends in their FOAF profile, only friends on Twitter, or even only people they wrote a paper with are allowed to call. Further, SPoX exploits Semantic Web techniques for advanced negotiations by means of exchanging policies over the Skype application channel. This procedure allows two clients to negotiate trust based on their SPoX policies before a connection - for example a Skype call - is established.

The first International Conference on Reputation: Theory and Technology provided a ground for the scientific discussion on Reputation Systems, with a perspective on policy and e-Government.
Themes of the conference included:

Theory-building, namely formulating hypotheses concerning the generation, spreading and impact of reputation under given social and technological conditions; Theory of reputation as an intelligent artefact
Testing of hypotheses on the grounds of cross-methodological experiments
Planning and implementing innovative, theory-based Reputation Systems
Accounting for mechanisms, properties and social dynamics of reputation
Allowing a theory-driven design of emergent technologies of reputation for solving societal problems
Innovative applications of reputation technologies in business networks, ICT networks and electronic markets

Conference web page
Proceedings

Intelligent agents are computer programs that act as surrogates for users. Instead of a human having to carry out time-consuming activities, an agent can do it in their place. The agents can typically be aware of more resources than the user would be aware of, and can exploit this knowledge to carry out (repetitive, lengthy) activities that might be difficult for a person to perform. The more sophisticated we can make these agents, the more they can do automatically for people.

The Multiagent Systems Research Group (a.k.a. Critical MAS) explores how to build intelligent agents that can work together. These agents might be cooperative, and looking for ways to help one another, or they might be competitive, and need to consider how they can resolve conflicts that arise. The MAS Research Group made its mark in early work on game theory and mechanism design as applied to multiagent negotiation and planning. More recent work has branched out into a variety of additional MAS research areas.

Here are some topics that the Critical MAS group is investigating; they include issues in Computational Social Choice, Computational Economics, and other Artificial Intelligence areas:

• Incentive Compatible Regression Learning and Classification
• Complexity of Manipulation, Control, and Winner-Determination in Single Winner and Multiwinner Elections
• Average-case Complexity of Voting Manipulation
• Coalitional Manipulation of Voting
• Power Indices and their Efficient Computation and Approximation
• Information Elicitation
• Automated Design of Voting Rules via Learning
• Robustness of Preference Aggregation
• Adding Incentives to Trade in Peer-To-Peer Systems
• Dynamics Based Control and Extended Markov Tracking applied to Robotics
• Focal Point Learning to Improve Tactic Coordination
• Adversarial Environment Models
• Multiagent Graph Coloring
• Distributed and Peer-to-Peer Resource Allocation
• Adaptive Reconsideration, Cooperation, and Exploration

More information

Projects Desription Page

The European Union has a specific funding schema for projects centred on Trust and Security.

http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/security/home_en.html

End Date: 2010-09-12

Description:

Date: 10th September 2010 - 5pm to 7 pm

Location: Desenzano del Garda (Italy)

Wiki about Use Cases

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