Agreement Technologies - Trust and Reputation
Agreement technologies aim at developing techniques that enable software components to reach agreements on the mutual performance of services, hence supporting the development of large-scale, open distributed systems. Hence, agreement technologies propose a new paradigm for next generation distributed systems. The new paradigm is structured around the concept of agreement between computational agents. These agreements must be consistent with the normative context where they are established and permit, once accepted, that agents call for mutual services and honour them. An entity, by the fact of being autonomous, may choose whether to fulfil an agreement or not, and it should fulfil them when there is an obligation to do so derived from the standing agreements. Autonomy, interaction, mobility and openness are the characteristics that the paradigm covers from a theoretical and practical perspective. We have identified negotiation, semantic alignment and trust as the key enabling agreement technologies.
- Negotiation techniques allow agents to reach agreements on the terms of their interactions.
- Semantic alignment techniques allow agents using different ontologies to understand one another.
- Trust is the technology that complements traditional security mechanisms by relying on social mechanisms that interpret the behaviour of agents.
The research in the area of computational trust and reputation mechanisms for virtual societies is a recent discipline oriented to increase the reliability and performance of electronic communities by introducing in such communities these well known human social control mechanisms.
Computational trust and reputation systems have been recognized as key factors for successful electronic commerce adoption. These systems are used by intelligent software agents both as a mechanism of search for trustworthy exchange partners and as an incentive in decision-making about whether or not to honour contracts. Reputation is also used in electronic environments as a trust-enforcing, deterrent, and incentive mechanism to avoid cheaters and frauds. Another area of application in agent technology is teamwork and cooperation.
We have developed several state of the art models (ReGreT, Repage, Sierra-Debenham) and we are now working in different aspects of the use and application of trust and reputation mechanisms in virtual societies. Among other aspects we are studying:
- Cognitive models of reputation and its full integration in cognitive agents.
- Reputation as a social norm adoption mechanism for virtual societies.
- Argumentation on trust and reputation.
- Integration and use of trust and reputation mechanisms in e-institutions.
- Liquid Publications: Scientific Publications meet the Web01/04/2008 - 31/03/2011
The Liquid Publications Project is a Framework Program 7 (FP7) funded research project in the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) – OPEN series. This introduction to the project is intended to describe what we’re trying to accomplish in a more publicly accessible form. In the following sections we’ll cover the Liquid Publications Project’s motivation, objectives, potential benefits, challenges, and research plans.
MotivationThe production of scientific knowledge in the form of conference papers, journal articles, and textbooks has failed to keep pace with advances in Information and Communications Technology (ICT). The World-Wide Web and other advances in computer technologies have had noticeable effect on the ways scientific activity is conducted, but little effect on the ways scientific knowledge is produced, disseminated, evaluated, and consumed.
The Liquid Publications Project is based on the primary intuition that the evolution and use of scientific knowledge objects is similar to the evolution and use of open-source software. Both scientific knowledge and open-source software are complex, malleable, artistic creations of the human mind that evolve in multiple directions through collaboration. Further, just as computer software has become de-coupled from specific computer hardware, scientific knowledge has become de-coupled from the specific physical aspects of a scientific field through storage, manipulation, simulation, and recombination in electronic form.
While scientific collaborations and collaboration technologies have advanced, the collaborative evaluation of scientific knowledge has not. Scientific communities continue to evaluate scientific knowledge using essentially the same peer-review techniques used 100 years ago.
Project Objectives and Benefits
This project will explore how ICT and lessons from the software engineering and social web communities can be applied to provoke a radical paradigm shift shift in the way scientific knowledge is created, disseminated, evaluated, and maintained. This new paradigm will transform a scientific publication from a static artifact to a Liquid Publication that can take multiple forms, that evolves continuously, and is enriched by multiple sources. The expected benefits of this transformation are:
- Earlier and greater circulation of innovative ideas, hence, more effective dissemination.
- Collaborative research efforts built on previous knowledge.
- Optimization of the time researchers spend creating, assessing and disseminating knowledge while improving the quality of the paper selection processes for conferences and journals.
- Rationalization of credit attribution processes based on social networks, team and community work, collaborative problem solving, social reputation, and distribution of knowledge.
- Delivery of innovative products and services for publishers that add value to their traditional businesses.
Research ChallengesAchieving program objectives and realizing the benefits presents both technical and social research challenges. Technical challenges include how to identify a model for scientific knowledge creation and dissemination that encourages early release of results, facilitates collaboration, assigns credit fairly, and simplifies dissemination; how to model and structure digital objects that embody a variety of evolutionary and collaborative knowledge creation processes; and how to identify social, low-effort, and continuous quality assessment methods. The primary social challenge is to gain support from the scientific community who will have to depart from the current publication selection models and embrace a radical change in the way scientific contributions are created, managed, and evaluated.
Research Plan
We aim to overcome the research challenges and achieve the project objectives by modeling the three main interacting components: Scientific Knowledge Objects, People, and Processes.
Scientific Knowledge Objects (SKO for short) embody the digital aspects of a traditional scientific paper, plus the evolutionary, social, collaborative, composable, and evolving nature of scientific knowledge creation processes. Defining, implementing, and testing SKOs will form the basis of the research.
People are the agents involved in the scientific knowledge processes, playing various cooperating and competing roles. Investigating roles and role interations will be a primary research activity of the project.
Processes govern the creation, evaluation, and evolution of SKOs and, hence, manage their lifecycle. These processes include modification, evolution, management (for example: access, intellectual property concerns, or legal aspects), and assessment.
In summary, this project will examine the complex web of interactions between SKOs, people, roles, and processes.
UDT-IA Project: - Social Knowledge for e-Governance01/04/2006 - 31/03/2009
Reputation is a social knowledge on which a number of social decisions are accomplished. Regulating society from the morning of mankind (Dunbar, 1998), it becomes more crucial with the pace of development of ICT technologies, dramatically enlarging the range of interaction and generating new types of aggregation.
Despite its critical role, reputation generation, transmission and use are unclear.The project aims to an interdisciplinary theory of reputation and to modelling the interplay between direct evaluations and meta-evaluations in three types of decisions, epistemic (whether to form a given evaluation), strategic (whether and how interact with target), and memetic (whether and which evaluation to transmit).
Finally, current technological developments of reputation are dusting off traditional remedies like word of mouth and chatty talk. The theory in question will be shown to help design reputation technology. The proposed project will benefit from a synergy between experts in an innovative methodology, i.e. agent-based social simulation, and in computational modelling and software development, all good representatives of the European community in these fields of science.
UDT-IA Project:
