A Trust Management Framework for Decision Support Systems

In the era of information explosion, it is critical to develop a framework which can extract useful information and help people to make “educated” decisions. In our lives, whether we are aware of it, trust has turned out to be very helpful for us to make decisions. At the same time, cognitive trust, especially in large systems, such as Facebook, Twitter, and so on, needs support from computer systems. Therefore, we need a framework that can effectively, but also intuitively, let people express their trust, and enable the system to automatically and securely summarize the massive amounts of trust information, so that a user of the system can make “educated” decisions, or at least not blind decisions. Inspired by the similarities between human trust and physical measurements, this dissertation proposes a measurement theory based trust management framework. It consists of three phases: trust modeling, trust inference, and decision making. Instead of proposing specific trust inference formulas, this dissertation proposes a fundamental framework which is flexible and can be adapted by many different inference formulas. Validation experiments are done on two data sets: the Epinions.com data set and the Twitter data set. This dissertation also adapts the measurement theory based trust management framework for two decision support applications. In the first application, the real stock market data is used as ground truth for the measurement theory based trust management framework. Basically, the correlation between the sentiment expressed on Twitter and stock market data is measured. Compared with existing works which do not differentiate tweets’ authors, this dissertation analyzes trust among stock investors on Twitter and uses the trust network to differentiate tweets’ authors. The results show that by using the measurement theory based trust framework, Twitter sentiment valence is able to reflect abnormal stock returns better than treating all the authors as equally important or weighting them by their number of followers. In the second application, the measurement theory based trust management framework is used to help to detect and prevent from being attacked in cloud computing scenarios. In this application, each single flow is treated as a measurement. The simulation results show that the measurement theory based trust management framework is able to provide guidance for cloud administrators and customers to make decisions, e.g. migrating tasks from suspect nodes to trustworthy nodes, dynamically allocating resources according to trust information, and managing the trade-off between the degree of redundancy and the cost of resources

INFORMATION DISSEMINATION IN SUPPLY CHAIN: FACTORS AND MODELS INFLUENCING WAREHOUSING EFFICIENCY.

Purpose: Based on relationship-specific perspective and the systems of information dissemination in supply chain, this paper explores how these models facilitate the warehousing efficiency in a company that has more than two suppliers in different countries. The study examines how information flow and functioning supply chain could develop a relationship with suppliers and how those specific models and factors contribute to the firm`s inventory management. Current study is conducted from company’s point of view on supply chain management in comparison to the supplier specific requests for logistics operations. Design/methodology/approach: In order to link theoretical part with empirical research, current study uses exploratory design and due to direct number of survey participants, research method is considered as qualitative survey method with semistructured interviews. Deductive and inductive approaches were applied in the thesis. Findings: The result shows that factors of trust and collaboration along with implementation of information dissemination models between company and suppliers have significant importance in supply chain and might reduce the need for inventory. Improving information flow between parties in supply chain contributes to warehousing efficiency through more frequent deliveries and appropriate logistics planning. Research limitations/implications: Study scope is limited to a single case company as well as from companies’ suppliers were chosen only five operating in different countries. Furthermore, the research focuses on one country of the case company: Finland. However, survey was conducted with suppliers from different countries and different background; the findings cannot be generalized to all the companies working in a wide supply chain. Implications of the study are presenting that information flow and such factors as trust and collaboration should be recognized as a crucial part of developing supply chain and increasing the warehousing efficiency.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Assessing the impact of e-commerce on individual performance : integrating information system’s success measures and overall trust

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Marketing IntelligenceE-commerce is changing the way we buy. From amazing flow experience to outstanding customer support, all with integrated security and payment systems, shopping online has never been so easy. But what exactly are the benefits for individuals within these magic 3-click distance purchases? This study aims to fill in the extant gap in the literature about the relationship between ecommerce and individual performance, as well as contributing to a new consistent research model that integrates information systems success dimensions and user behaviour in the form of trust. Data collected from 437 questionnaires provide strong support for the research model. Results show that overall quality and overall trust are important to explain use and user satisfaction in the context of ecommerce, which further leads to individual performance. Our findings indicate that a higher level of use and user satisfaction increase individual performance. We expect that this study can enrich the understanding of the importance of considering both technological and behavioural factors to increase the success of e-commerce. Implications for theory and practice and suggestions for future research are also discussed

Managing Supply Chain Risk – Role of IT/IS

Measures aimed at making supply chains more efficient and responsive have also made them more vulnerable and exposed to disruptions. These measures include increased off-shoring and outsourcing of manufacturing and product development activities, contract manufacturing, global sourcing, lean operations with reduced inventories, centralised distribution and warehousing, reduction of supplier base and tightly integrated supply chains. In addition to this increased sensitivity of supply chains, a significant increase in the frequency and number of events leading to major disruptions, and their magnitude is forcing organizations to take supply chain risk more seriously. This paper discusses the concept of supply chain risk, supply chain risk management, its dimensions and the role of information technologies in general, and enterprise systems in particular. It will discuss the challenges faced by business organizations in leveraging existing and future information technologies and systems and their double-edged role. While industry reference models have the potential to internalise supply chain risk management processes, their ability in identification and mitigation of the supply chain risk is limited and depends upon other IT-dependent factors, such as information visibility, trust, security of intellectual property information, ability to collect snapshots of demand, inventory and capacity at key nodes in the supply chain, and the sense and respond capability of the organization to deal with material flow disruptions

Formal Aspects in Security and Trust

his book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Formal Aspects in Security and Trust, FAST 2005, held in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK in July 2005. The 17 revised papers presented together with the extended abstract of 1 invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 37 submissions. The papers focus on formal aspects in security and trust policy models, security protocol design and analysis, formal models of trust and reputation, logics for security and trust, distributed trust management systems, trust-based reasoning, digital assets protection, data protection, privacy and ID issues, information flow analysis, language-based security, security and trust aspects in ubiquitous computing, validation/analysis tools, web service security/trust/privacy, GRID security, security risk assessment, and case studies

Verification of temporal-epistemic properties of access control systems

Verification of access control systems against vulnerabilities has always been a challenging problem in the world of computer security. The complication of security policies in large- scale multi-agent systems increases the possible existence of vulnerabilities as a result of mistakes in policy definition. This thesis explores automated methods in order to verify temporal and epistemic properties of access control systems. While temporal property verification can reveal a considerable number of security holes, verification of epistemic properties in multi-agent systems enable us to infer about agents' knowledge in the system and hence, to detect unauthorized information flow. This thesis first presents a framework for knowledge-based verification of dynamic access control policies. This framework models a coalition-based system, which evaluates if a property or a goal can be achieved by a coalition of agents restricted by a set of permissions defined in the policy. Knowledge is restricted to the information that agents can acquire by reading system information in order to increase time and memory efficiency. The framework has its own model-checking method and is implemented in Java and released as an open source tool named \char{cmmi10}{0x50}\char{cmmi10}{0x6f}\char{cmmi10}{0x6c}\char{cmmi10}{0x69}\char{cmmi10}{0x56}\char{cmmi10}{0x65}\char{cmmi10}{0x72}. In order to detect information leakage as a result of reasoning, the second part of this thesis presents a complimentary technique that evaluates access control policies over temporal-epistemic properties where the knowledge is gained by reasoning. We will demonstrate several case studies for a subset of properties that deal with reasoning about knowledge. To increase the efficiency, we develop an automated abstraction refinement technique for evaluating temporal-epistemic properties. For the last part of the thesis, we develop a sound and complete algorithm in order to identify information leakage in Datalog-based trust management systems

Disaster Communications for Handling Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Indonesia

Communication is an important part of handling any disaster, including coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic that has hit Indonesia and more than 190 other countries. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, communication is needed to build public trust and also to prevent mass hysteria. Two first cases of COVID-19 in Indonesia were announced on March 2, 2020. The news was announced directly by President of Republic of Indonesia, Joko Widodo with Minister of Health, Terawan Agus Putranto. This research explained various measures and policies of Indonesian Government in dealing with COVID-19 pandemic, especially in managing the flow of information and keeping a good communication to the public in order to maintain transparency and prevent mass hysteria. This study was a descriptive, exploratory analysis of all cases of COVID-19 diagnosed nationwide in Indonesia. This study contributes that communication during and after a disaster is an important component in response and recovery. Communication can connect patients affected by COVID-19, families, and the community with medical staff, support systems, and other family members. The availability of reliable information and communication systems is also important in disaster management. The government must be able to ensure that people can easily get information about the development of COVID-19. This can help strengthen the resilience of the community in facing disasters and undergo a recovery period afterwards

Psychological elements explaining the consumer's adoption and use of a website recommendation system: A theoretical framework proposal

The purpose of this paper is to understand, with an emphasis on the psychological perspective of the research problem, the consumer's adoption and use of a certain web site recommendation system as well as the main psychological outcomes involved. The approach takes the form of theoretical modelling. Findings: A conceptual model is proposed and discussed. A total of 20 research propositions are theoretically analyzed and justified. Research limitations/implications: The theoretical discussion developed here is not empirically validated. This represents an opportunity for future research. Practical implications: The ideas extracted from the discussion of the conceptual model should be a help for recommendation systems designers and web site managers, so that they may be more aware, when working with such systems, of the psychological process consumers undergo when interacting with them. In this regard, numerous practical reflections and suggestions are presented