Last Wednesday was the day of the second uTrust seminar. Prof. Ogryczak from the Warsaw University of Technology talked about Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) and WOWA as methods to reduce uncertainty and manage risk. Both of these methods can be used in Trust Management, for example for the calculation of reputation, taking into account the credibility of reports and the pessimism of the decision maker.
While this is a difficult topic, it is also one of the promising approaches that change automatic TM into an interactive decision support process. The user is able to express his preferences (for example, his pessimism or trust aversion) and this would have an impact on the calculated reputaiont (or trust).
There are a few updates since the beginning of the semester in the uTrust project. First, we have purchased our future Planetlab servers, and are in the process of connecting them. Second, we have worked on a design of the uTrust library, and are ready to start the implementation effort. We hope to complete a first, functional version of the library in June.
Several interesting research efforts are underway. We are investingating the emergence of fairness as a result of trust management, and we are studying a method for a distributed selection of most trusted of all agents. Keep tuned for future updates on these projects, as well as for a description of new projects now under consideration.