Baras presents distinguished lecture at UC Irvine

Professor John Baras (ECE/ISR) recently gave a distinguished lecture, “Trust and Reputation in Networked Systems: Social, Information, Communication, Control,” at the University of California Irvine. The lecture was part of the distinguished lecture series of the Networked Systems Program, a joint program between the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences. The program is also part of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a two-campus multidisciplinary research institute that integrates UCI and UCSD faculty expertise with industry insight. Calit2 seeks innovative information technology approaches that will benefit society and ignite economic development in a wide range of areas, including the environment, transportation, emergency management, healthcare, global economics, education and entertainment.

A brief abstract of the November 20, 2009 lecture
Trust and reputation are critical concepts in networks—communication, control, computer, social, web-based social, economic, biological. Trust evaluation leads to the development of relations and collaborations. These evaluations are based either on direct ‘communal’ monitoring and inference by the nodes, or on indirect references and credentials. We describe new fundamental ways for analyzing and evaluating trust in autonomic networked systems. The indirect evaluation process is modeled as a path problem on a directed graph, where nodes represent entities, and edges represent trust relations. We develop a novel formulation of trust computation as ‘linear’ iterations on partially ordered semirings. The direct trust evaluation process is modeled as iterated games on dynamic graphs. We present several explicit examples. We present the methodology of constrained coalitional dynamic games that we have developed for studying the effects of trust on collaboration. We provide several examples with quantitative evaluation of trust on distributed inference and control systems using a combination of these new algebraic and analytical methods.

Published December 18, 2009