Temporal Factors to evaluate trustworthiness of virtual identities

In this paper we investigate how temporal factors (i.e. factors computed by considering only the time-distribution of interactions) can be used as an evidence of an entity’s trustworthiness. While reputation and direct experience are the two most widely used sources of trust in applications, we believe that new sources of evidence and new applications should be investigated [1]. Moreover, while these two classical techniques are based on evaluating the outcomes of interactions (direct or indirect), temporal factors are based on quantitative analysis, representing an alternative way of assessing trust. Our presumption is that, even with this limited information, temporal factors could be a plausible evidence of trust that might be aggregated with more traditional sources. After defining our formal model of four main temporal factors - activity, presence, regularity, frequency, we performed an evaluation over the Wikipedia project, considering more than 12000 users and 94000 articles. Our encouraging results show how, based solely on temporal factors, plausible trust decisions can be achieved

Trust and Reputation for Successful Software Self-Organisation

Abstract An increasing number of dynamic software evolution approaches is com- monly based on integrating or utilising new pieces of software. This requires reso- lution of issues such as ensuring awareness of newly available software pieces and selection of most appropriate software pieces to use. Other chapters in this book dis- cuss dynamic software evolution focusing primarily on awareness, integration and utilisation of new software pieces, paying less attention on how selection among different software pieces is made. The selection issue is quite important since in the increasingly dynamic software world quite a few new software pieces occur over time, some of which being of lower utility, lower quality or even potentially harmful and malicious (for example, a new piece of software may contain hidden spyware or it may be a virus). In this chapter, we describe how computational trust and reputation can be used to avoid choosing new pieces of software that may be malicious or of lower quality. We start by describing computational models of trust and reputation and subsequently we apply them in two application domains. Firstly, in quality assessment of open source software, discussing the case where different trustors have different understandings of trust and trust estimation methods. Sec- ondly, in protection of open collaborative software, such as Wikipedia

Building trust in cross-cultural relationships: Active trust through culture mobilisation in Finnish-Indian project teams

This thesis examines trust building in Finnish-Indian distributed teams engaged in knowledge-intensive project work. To understand how actors build trust in the context of cultural distance and virtual collaboration, dynamic approaches to trust building and culture were adopted. The data were collected through interviews and observations in both geographical locations. In distributed project teams, static and slowly evolving trust creation models are not sufficient in explaining the ways trust is built to meet the needs of temporal project teams working distantly in a cross-cultural environment. Thus, this study suggests active trust as a solution in this challenging context of trust creation and places the main emphasis on the role of an active trustor. In doing so, this research challenges the static and passive trust models where trust development is focused on the trustee and their trustworthiness. Moreover, the study challenges the static culture approaches and adopts a dynamic mosaic perspective to culture as a collection of various cultural identities and elements that are used as resources. This allows for the examination of the agentic view of culture mobilisation. The findings illustrate how trusting parties are capable of mobilising various cultural elements and engage in purposeful trust-building practices to lessen the vulnerability caused by the unfamiliarity due to cultural differences and virtual communication. The agency in constructing actions to build trust is a central feature of collaborators who are successful in active trust building. Furthermore, researching the mobilisation of cultural elements in trust building revealed that the collaborators were not only drawing on existing cultural similarities but also engaged in a process of adjusting and adopting new cultural elements. The co-created third culture acted as the strongest nominator for active trust development in Finnish-Indian project teams. This thesis contributes to business practitioners working in the context of global teams where practices of active trust are needed to allow collaboration on complex and novel tasks that require efficient knowledge transfer. The findings guide team members to actively invest in the co-creation of shared culture elements and proactively shape the conditions for trusting

A context-aware approach based on self-organizing maps to study web-users\u27 tendencies from their behaviour

In the context of a highly volatile web of uneven quality, the identification of content deemed valuable by end users is of paramount importance. Where page content undergoes rapid change, this issue is particularly challenging. Web browsing activity represents a unique source of context by which the value of web pages can be determined via an assessment of individual user interactions, such as scrolling, clicking, saving and so forth. Over time, this data set forms a pattern of activity which can be mined for meaning. In this paper we present an approach to web content, based on Kohonen mapping, used to generate a topological model of users\u27 behaviour over web-pages. Each web-document can thus be represented as a semantic map built by adopting unsupervised techniques where similar users\u27 behaviour are mapped close together, with identification of information stability emerging as a by product of the identification of similarity in user activity over content. In this model, the more similar the outputs of the map for each user who has endorsed a web-page, the more the web site is considered current or in context with changing information. We illustrate the potential application of this approach to our ongoing work in social search

Analysing Trust Issues in Cloud Identity Environments

Trust acts as a facilitator for decision making in environments, where decisions are subject to risk and uncertainty. Security is one of the factors contributing to the trust model that is a requirement for service users. In this paper we ask, What can be done to improve end user trust in choosing a cloud identity provider? Security and privacy are central issues in a cloud identity environment and it is the end user who determines the amount of trust they have in any identity system. This paper is an in-depth literature survey that evaluates identity service delivery in a cloud environment from the perspective of the service user

User Satisfaction with Virtual Social Community: The Case of Bulletin Board Systems

Building upon expectation confirmation theory and elaboration likelihood model, this study proposed and empirically tested a research model of user satisfaction with virtual social community. An online questionnaire was posted in the Bulletin Board Systems of a local university in Mainland China. A total of 240 online questionnaires were collected, and the data was analyzed using partial least squares. The research model provided over 70 percent of variance explained in user satisfaction with virtual social community. Relevance and comprehensiveness of messages, and disconfirmations of relevance and accuracy of messages are found statistically significant. The dimensions of perceived source credibility (including source expertise and source trustworthiness) are not found significant, but their disconfirmations are found statistically significant. Implications of this study are noteworthy for both researchers and practitioners

Social perception in the real world : employing visual adaptation paradigms in the investigation of mechanisms underlying emotion and trustworthiness perception

Social context can substantially influence our perception and understanding of emotion and action of observed individuals. However, less is known about how temporal context can affect our judgement of behaviour of other people. The aim of this thesis was to explore how immediate perceptual history influences social perception. Further aims were: (i) to examine whether prior visual experience influences the perception of behaviour of other individuals in a naturalistic virtual environment resembling the real world; (ii) to determine whether our judgement of emotional state or trustworthiness of observed individuals is influenced by perceptual history, and (iii) by cognitive processes such as mental state attribution to the observer; (iv) to investigate whether processing of emotion information from dynamic, whole-body action is dependent on the processing of body identity, and (v) dependent on the body part that conveys it. Here, visual adaptation paradigms were used to examine systematic biases in social perception following prior visual experience, and to infer potential neural mechanisms underlying social perception. The results presented in this thesis suggest that perception and understanding of behaviour of other individuals in the naturalistic virtual environment are influenced by the behaviour of other individuals within the shared social environment. Specifically, in Chapter 3, I presented data suggesting that visual adaptation mechanisms examined thus far in laboratory settings may influence our everyday perception and judgement of behaviour of other people. In Chapters 4 and 5, I showed that these biases in social perception can be attributed to visual adaptation mechanisms, which code emotions and intentions derived from actions with respect to specific action kinematics and the body part that conveyed the given emotion. The results of experiments presented in Chapter 4 demonstrated that emotions conveyed by actions are represented with respect to, and independently of, actors’ identity. These finding suggest that the mechanisms underlying processing of action emotion may operate in parallel with the mechanisms underlying processing emotion from other social signals such as face and voice. In Chapter 6, I showed that cognitive processes underlying Theory of Mind, such as mental state attribution, can also influence perceptual processing of emotional signals. Finally, results presented in Chapter 7 suggest that judgments of complex social traits such as trustworthiness derived from faces are also influenced by perceptual history. These results also yielded strong sex differences in assessing trustworthiness of an observed individual; female observers showed a strong bias in perception resulting from adaptation to (un)trustworthiness, while male observers were less influenced by prior visual context. Together these findings suggest that social perception in the real world may be sensitive not only to the social context in which an observed act is embedded, but also to the prior visual context and the observer’s beliefs regarding the observed individual. Visual adaptation mechanisms may therefore operate during our everyday perception, in order to adjust our visual system to allow for efficient and accurate judgement of socially meaningful stimuli. The findings presented in this thesis highlight the importance of studying social perception using naturalistic stimuli embedded in a meaningful social scene, in order to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms that underlie our judgement of behaviour of other people. They also demonstrate the utility of visual adaptation paradigms in studying social perception and social cognition

Towards Dynamic Interaction-Based Reputation Models

In this paper, we investigate how dynamic properties of reputation can influence the quality of users’ ranking. Reputation systems should be based on rules that can guarantee high level of trust and help identify unreliable units. To understand the effectiveness of dynamic properties in the evaluation of reputation, we propose our own model (DIB-RM) that utilizes three factors: forgetting, cumulative, and activity period. In order to evaluate the model, we use data from StackOverflow which also has its own reputation model. We estimate similarity of ratings between DIB-RM and the StackOverflow reputation model to test our hypothesis. We use two values to calculate our metrics: DIB-RM reputation and historical reputation. We found out that historical reputation gives better metric values. Our preliminary results are presented for different sets of values of the aforementioned factors in order to analyze how effectively the model can be used for modeling reputation systems