A formal account of dishonesty

International audienceThis paper provides formal accounts of dishonest attitudes of agents. We introduce a propositional multi-modal logic that can represent an agent's belief and intention as well as communication between agents. Using the language, we formulate different categories of dishonesty. We first provide two different definitions of lies and provide their logical properties. We then consider an incentive behind the act of lying and introduce lying with objectives. We subsequently define bullshit, withholding information and half-truths, and analyze their formal properties. We compare different categories of dishonesty in a systematic manner, and examine their connection to deception. We also propose maxims for dishonest communication that agents should ideally try to satisfy

Energy-aware Demand Selection and Allocation for Real-time IoT Data Trading

Personal IoT data is a new economic asset that individuals can trade to generate revenue on the emerging data marketplaces. Typically, marketplaces are centralized systems that raise concerns of privacy, single point of failure, little transparency and involve trusted intermediaries to be fair. Furthermore, the battery-operated IoT devices limit the amount of IoT data to be traded in real-time that affects buyer/seller satisfaction and hence, impacting the sustainability and usability of such a marketplace. This work proposes to utilize blockchain technology to realize a trusted and transparent decentralized marketplace for contract compliance for trading IoT data streams generated by battery-operated IoT devices in real-time. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: (1) we propose an autonomous blockchain-based marketplace equipped with essential functionalities such as agreement framework, pricing model and rating mechanism to create an effective marketplace framework without involving a mediator, (2) we propose a mechanism for selection and allocation of buyers' demands on seller's devices under quality and battery constraints. We present a proof-of-concept implementation in Ethereum to demonstrate the feasibility of the framework. We investigated the impact of buyer's demand on the battery drainage of the IoT devices under different scenarios through extensive simulations. Our results show that this approach is viable and benefits the seller and buyer for creating a sustainable marketplace model for trading IoT data in real-time from battery-powered IoT devices.Comment: Accepted in SmartComp 202

Lex Informatica: The Formulation of Information Policy Rules through Technology

Historically, law and government regulation have established default rules for information policy, including constitutional rules on freedom of expression and statutory rights of ownership of information. This Article will show that for network environments and the Information Society, however, law and government regulation are not the only source of rule-making. Technological capabilities and system design choices impose rules on participants. The creation and implementation of information policy are embedded in network designs and standards as well as in system configurations. Even user preferences and technical choices create overarching, local default rules. This Article argues, in essence, that the set of rules for information flows imposed by technology and communication networks form a “Lex Informatica” that policymakers must understand, consciously recognize, and encourage

A review on trust propagation and opinion dynamics in social networks and group decision making frameworks

On-line platforms foster the communication capabilities of the Internet to develop large- scale influence networks in which the quality of the interactions can be evaluated based on trust and reputation. So far, this technology is well known for building trust and harness- ing cooperation in on-line marketplaces, such as Amazon (www.amazon.com) and eBay (www.ebay.es). However, these mechanisms are poised to have a broader impact on a wide range of scenarios, from large scale decision making procedures, such as the ones implied in e-democracy, to trust based recommendations on e-health context or influence and per- formance assessment in e-marketing and e-learning systems. This contribution surveys the progress in understanding the new possibilities and challenges that trust and reputation systems pose. To do so, it discusses trust, reputation and influence which are important measures in networked based communication mechanisms to support the worthiness of information, products, services opinions and recommendations. The existent mechanisms to estimate and propagate trust and reputation, in distributed networked scenarios, and how these measures can be integrated in decision making to reach consensus among the agents are analysed. Furthermore, it also provides an overview of the relevant work in opinion dynamics and influence assessment, as part of social networks. Finally, it identi- fies challenges and research opportunities on how the so called trust based network can be leveraged as an influence measure to foster decision making processes and recommen- dation mechanisms in complex social networks scenarios with uncertain knowledge, like the mentioned in e-health and e-marketing frameworks.The authors acknowledge the financial support from the EU project H2020-MSCA-IF-2016-DeciTrustNET-746398, FEDER funds provided in the National Spanish project TIN2016-75850-P , and the support of the RUDN University Program 5-100 (Russian Federation)

Trust-sensitive belief revision

Belief revision is concerned with incorporating new information into a pre-existing set of beliefs. When the new information comes from another agent, we must first determine if that agent should be trusted. In this paper, we define trust as a pre-processing step before revision. We emphasize that trust in an agent is often restricted to a particular domain of expertise. We demonstrate that this form of trust can be captured by associating a state partition with each agent, then relativizing all reports to this partition before revising. We position the resulting family of trust-sensitive revision operators within the class of selective revision operators of Fermé and Hansson, and we examine its properties. In particular, we show how trust-sensitive revision is manipulable, in the sense that agents can sometimes have incentive to pass on misleading information. When multiple reporting agents are involved, we use a distance function over states to represent differing degrees of trust; this ensures that the most trusted reports will be believed

The Paperless Letter of Credit and Related Documents of Title

A normative analysis of paperless letters of credit that will categorize the various transactions and delineate the boundaries and relative standing of the competing sets of rules is now appropriate. The analysis will suggest when an official rule is needed and what its character should be