Keynote

Trust (and Commitments) as a Unifying Basis for Social Computing

Munindar P. Singh

Recent research into trust has yielded a variety of approaches that consider several relevant aspects of trust, including evidence, incentives, cognitive states, and social relationships. At the same time, trust is increasingly being employed as an integral component of solutions in important practical applications, ranging from electronic commerce to assessing the credibility of information to achieving agreement among disparate agents.

On the theoretical side, we emphasize that although recent approaches have focused on particular aspects of trust, they have largely ignored the key foundational aspect of trust in their technical development. Specifically, the key aspect of trust is that trust reflects a dependence of one agent on another for a purpose. The mutual dependence of agents and their successes or failures pertaining to it may be reflected in social relationships, expressed cognitively, motivated by incentives, or recorded in evidence. But the representation and reasoning about dependence is a central concern that merits serious study in its own right.

On the practical side, we observe an increasing number of social applications, which involve trust in some shape. However, today's applications are usually implemented in an ad hoc manner and usually are closed, meaning that they do not have an interoperable notion of the underlying relationships and in particular treat trust in a purely heuristic, nonportable manner. Therefore, motivated by the above and (at least loosely) based on the above unification, we motivate a trust middleware as a crucial software architecture component for social computing.

In simple terms, the middleware we envision would assist agents by providing support for bookkeeping their trust relationships. The middleware would help realize application-specific architectures that support diverse social computing applications, such as those involving personal, communal, organizational, and contractual relationships. For instance, conducting and publishing scientific research and judging its contributions would emphasize the personal and communal aspects, potentially augmented with some organizational considerations. Commerce would emphasize the contractual and personal or organizational aspects. And, agreement technologies would emphasize the organizational and contractual aspects.

Bio

Dr. Munindar P. Singh is a professor in the department of computer science at North Carolina State University. Munindar's research interests include multiagent systems and service-oriented computing, with a special emphasis on the challenges of contracts, governance, and trust in large-scale open environments.

Munindar's research has been recognized with awards and sponsorship by the ARO, Cisco Systems, DARPA, Ericsson, IBM, Intel, National Science Foundation, and the Ocean Observatories Initiative. Sixteen students have received Ph.D. degrees and 22 students have received M.S. degrees under Munindar's direction.

Munindar is a Fellow of the IEEE. He serves on the Board of Directors of IFAAMAS, the International Foundation of Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems. Munindar is a former editor-in-chief of IEEE Internet Computing. He is also a founding member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, the Journal of Web Semantics, the International Journal of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, and IEEE Internet Computing.

Munindar obtained a B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and a Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the University of Texas at Austin.