Categories (tags):

Trust and Reputation

trust_and_reputation

Agent Reputation and Trust (ART) Testbed

Wow, I received an email with another trust-related project.
The Agent Reputation and Trust (ART) Testbed initiative has been launched with the goal of establishing a testbed for agent reputation- and trust-related technologies. The ART Testbed is designed to serve in two roles:
* as a competition forum in which researchers can compare their technologies against objective metrics, and
* as an experimental tool, with flexible parameters, allowing researchers to perform customizable, easily-repeatable experiments.
You can play with the code released on Sourceforge and you can also enjoy the explanation movie!

Categories (tags):

Trust and Reputation

trust_and_reputation

Another workshop: Reinventing trust, collaboration and compliance in social systems

Today is a day of interesting conferences about trust.
Reinventing trust, collaboration and compliance in social systems
A workshop exploring novel insights and solutions for social systems design
April - 2006 in conjunction with CHI 2006

Categories (tags):

Trust and Reputation

trust_and_reputation

More from del.icio.us/tag/trust

- 22nd Chaos Communication Congress - Private Investigations - Breaking Down the Web of Trust
Even with tutorials on the WoT and good trust policies the concept of "trust" can still be hard to grasp. Here we'll look at trust metrics, ways of using current trust systems better, and some non-crypto applications of trust.
- Microformats Proposal for Reputation and Trust Metrics By Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc. Very interesting!!!
[From http://del.icio.us/tag/trust, subscribe to the rss feed (http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/trust)]

Categories (tags):

Trust and Reputation

trust_and_reputation

Lies, damn lies, and facts found on the Web

"There are three types of lies - lies, damn lies, and facts found on the Web."
Dr. Tim Finin, paraphrasing the well known quotation by Benjamin Disraeli on Statistics

This quotation opens the "Workshop Motivation and Goal" of the Models of Trust for the Web (MTW'06), a workshop at the 15th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2006), May 23-26, 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland.
The workshop seems incredibly interesting.
(via del.icio.us/tag/trust)

Categories (tags):

Trust and Reputation

trust_and_reputation

The path to Identity (... 2.0 as everything these days)

I just saw the presentation by Dick Hardt at OSCON2005 about Identity2.0. The style of the presentation is great, it is almost a cartoon, check it. And it is a great for getting to know in a quick way many of the current efforts in providing an identity system that can really work on the Internet (decentralized, open, ...). I'm currently lurking the OpenID mailinglist and I discovered Passel that seems interesting. The presentation is available in WMV, QuickTime and as Flash, so you should have no problems. The last slide says that the presentation style was borrowed by Lawrence Lessig.
As the online world moves towards Web 2.0, the concept of digital identity is evolving, and existing identity systems are falling behind. New systems are emerging that place identity in the hands of users instead of directories. Simple, secure and open, these systems will provide the scalable, user-centric mechanism for authenticating and managing real-world identities online, enabling truly distinct and portable Internet identities.

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Presentation at the Web Intelligence conference

I just finished giving a presentation at the Web Intelligence Conference in Compiegne (France). I tried to push the concept of VoteLinks. The presentation is in S5 (so pure standard XHTML+CSS+JS) and CreativeCommons licenced: Page-reRank: using trusted links to re-rank authority (presentation) with the accompanying paper (pdf). Nothing earth-shaking at all, really. The main (simple) concept was that "Attention != Appreciation", the most linked to page is not necessarily the most appreciated: I might link to gwbush.com in order to criticize it but my link increases its PageRank (something I don't want). At the moment, HTML does not allow to express the reason behind a link, but VoteLinks microformats will allow to add some semantics to linking language. For example, you could say something like
<a href="http://forza-italia.it/" rev="vote-against">berlusconi</a>
<a href="http://romanoprodi.it" rev="vote-abstain">prodi</a>
<a href="http://ivanscalfarotto.info"rev="vote-for">scalfarotto</a>
In the paper I also give evidence of the (intuitive) fact that "Attention!=Appreciation" with a simple experiment on a real, huge community with positive and negative links.
I thought it would be good to have the Web Intelligence community knows about VoteLinks and other microformats. And actually only 1 person (out of a number of people raging from 10 to 30) had heard of VoteLinks before, so the goal of spreading knowledge was accomplished.
And feel free to link to the presentation of course ... hopefully not with a rev="vote-against" link!!
Tomorrow I go to Paris for giving a demo at SonyLabs and then meeting with Alf.
My trip was once more time sponsored by HospitalityClub/CouchSurfing: in Compiegne I was hosted by Jeremy and in Paris by Antonello. Too cool! Try it yourself, you always met great people!

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Presentation in standard format, S5

Some days ago I had to give a presentation for the 2K* symposium, a joint initiative of research groups from different IT institutions, based in Trento and in Genova. The 40 mins presentation was titled "Trust in Recommender Systems: an historical overview and recent developments" (check the source code!). It is heavily based on an old presentation, I just added some slides about microformats, a concept I wanted to convey to the audience.
Anyway, I took the occasion to try to create the presentation in HTML using S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System developed by Eric Meyer. I think I will create all my future presentation in S5 from now on. The advantages: it "forces" you to keep the slides simple (no unnatural flow of information) and short (however you can have animations, check this slide); it is easy to publish the presentation on the Web, anyone can link to a specific slide, search engines find the information and index them, it is highly standard, evolutionary and small-pieces-loosely-connected-philosophy-like (for exaple it would be possible to create a small piece of javascript code that collect slides from different presentations in some meaningful automatic way to create a new presentation, but the possibilities are endless of course, especially if using the S5 format based on XOXO microformat), I can create the presentation with whatever text editor (perfect if you are in text mode), it does not require the viewer to have some fancy program (openoffice for the freedom lovers, powerpoint for the others) but a browser suffices.
You can find many presentations in S5 format in the microformats wiki; I also liked this presentation of Firefox, with style vulpes-flagrans or with style greenery. Yes, I know the stile I used for my presentation is not that great, if someone with graphical skills would like to create a style for me, it will be very appreciated of course.
For starting playing with S5, I suggest you S5 primer (you need to download HTML code and edit it) or S5present, an open-source web-based slideshow application (you just create an identity there and then use the site for creating the presentation). Guess what? S5 Presents was written in under 10 hours and 500 lines of code using the fantastic Ruby on Rails framework.
[question about English: "take the occasion to"? "take the chance to"? I wanted to say that I used this fact as an opportunity to try the technique. How do you say it in English?]
Tag: s5

Categories (tags):

Humour	humour
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Am I a human? Well, I take the Turing Test

Very funny post: How I failed the Turing test. Actually, it raises a lot of metaphysical questions.
Some time around March, I started receiving a number of random instant messages from people I've never met before. Apparantly, my AIM alias had been added to at least two online lists and people all over the world were busy importing me as a buddy.
I say "at least two" because the people who contacted me fell into one of two camps: people who thought they were contacting a celebrity and people who thought they were contacting a robot. As I talked to more and more of these folks, I began to discover something really disturbing about myself:
I consistently fail to be perceived as human.
Since you are defined but what other people think of you, if the other people think you are not an human, what are you?
Read the entire post.

Categories (tags):

Future	future
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Trusted computing video

Marco Fabbri comments on my previous post about open standards and recommends me to check the Trusted Computing Video, since I'm interesting in Trust. The video overcame my attention threshold at least twice during this week but when I tried to watch it the site was always down. This time I was luckier and I must say the video is incredibly well done, and released under a Creative Commons licence!
Marco Fabbri (some initial pagerank for a new comer in the blogosphere) comments that I will find especially interesting the definition given: "Trust is the personal believe in correctness of s.th. . It is the deep conviction of truth and rightness, and can not be enforced. If you gain s.o. trust, you have estabilished an interpersonal relationship, based on communication, shared values and experiences. TRUST always depends on mutuality".
Idea: since the video is under Creative Commons, shall we be a bit Creative and enrich the Commons? Shall we translate and dub it in Italian so that non-English-speakers can get an idea of what this is about? I could easily translate the text but I don't have any device (trusted or not) for recording the audio.
And just in case you don't have handy plugins for playing videos (as me), here we have some direct links to the high quality video: http://www.lafkon.net/tc/trusted-computing.torrent, http://yafc.net/TrustedComputing_LAFKON_HIGH.mov

Categories (tags):

Blogging	blogging
Emergent Democracy	emergent_democracy
Italia	italia
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Problems with Beppe Grillo Blog

Beppe Grillo Blog is currently 66th on the Technorati list of top blogs. Pretty impressive if you think he only writes in Italian. However I see some problems with this blog I'll try to describe here.
Every daily post has around 1000 comments. This is not a problem per se, of course, if people want to write a lot of comments to every your post, this is good, you probably write something that is very interesting.
So today I wanted to alert Beppe (or who read all the comments) about this article on groklaw, so I went to beppegrillo.it and try to leave a comment and, surprise, you cannot leave as signature a link to your blog but only an email address! This is really against empowering communication in a decentralized manner! In this way, if I want to be heard on the Web I cannot write on my blog but I must come back to beppegrillo blog and leave a comment there. I cannot have a Web identity independently of beppegrillo.it domain!
I think Beppe speaks often of "Direct democracy" that is achieved through his blog. Well, this is not at all something new. Instead Beppe Grillo is becoming a leader of a face-less, identity-less crowd that exist only by commenting on his blog. It is not very different from a Prodi or Berlusconi leader whose followers are anonymous identities (you might even have doubts they exist at all).
So, enough criticisms and let start with the (hopefully) constructive part: Beppe, please, invite people who flock to your blog to have their Web presence. Let commenters leave a link to their Web identity (a blog). Place a very visible invitation (in the menubar and on top fo the right column) for visitors to open their own personal blog, with instructions on how to do it. The message could be something like this: (in Italian) "Sono molto contento di vedere cosi' tanti commenti ai miei post. Ma credo che la forza del Web sia nel fatto che ognuno puo' dire la sua. Ti invito quindi ad aprire un TUO blog e a postare in esso le TUE idee. Potrai ovviamente linkare i miei post quando lo ritieni opportuno o lasciare commenti con link alle TUE riflessioni sul TUO blog. Io ho tante cose da dire ma sono sicuro che anche tu hai tante cose da dire, e non e' affatto detto che quelle che dico io siano piu' interessanti di quelle che dici tu. Quindi ti consiglio di aprire un tuo blog. E' semplicissimo. Le istruzioni per farlo sono qui di seguito. (e nel seguito alcune semplici istruzioni su come creare un blog in splinder.com, blogger.com, ...)"
Another comment I wanted to leave on his blog was about GNU/Linux. He speakes a lot about the power of the new technologies and Internet but a search for linux on his blog returns zero results. I wanted to suggest to Beppe to speak about this alternative in the domain of software. Anyway I hope that in some decentralized way, he finds this post and comments here, here you can leave a link to your web presence.
And Beppe, since you are so intripped (yes, this is not English) with the power of the Web, I'm confident you'll be able to understand why I (try to) write in English even if I'm Italian.

UPDATE: a comment by Matteo lets me know that Massimo already wrote about it: crea il tuo blog.
"Tutto quello che pensi e scrivi lo ha gia' pensato e scritto qualcun altro" - Anonimo

Categories (tags):

Trust and Reputation

trust_and_reputation

Attention Trust and my cloud of related concepts

I was reading an explanation of AttentionTrust.org goals and got a bunch of related concepts on my mind. For now I throw them to you embedded in bold in this chaotic post, in future I guess there will be a microformat for giving semantics to the relationships between these concepts. [I also guess that for most of the concept words, you can lead to the related wikipedia page and find a compelling ongoing description (and probably a greasemonkey script that converts all the words that are no links to links to wikipedia page is already available somewhere)]

From AttentionTrust.org: a Declaration of Gestural Independence:
if the attention I pay to others is valued in proportion to the amount of attention earned by me, then an accounting system is set in motion which quotes something like the social share prices of individual attention.
PageRank of attention, actually better named AttentionRank.
Cyberspace is where the new kind of economy comes into its own. Like any economy the new one is based on what is both most desirable and ultimately most scarce, and now this is the attention that comes from other people.
Attention is scarce because each of us has only so much of it to give, and it can come only from us—not machines, computers or anywhere else.
Unlike the old matter-based wealth, the new wealth is nothing you can hope to put under lock and key. You get it by reaching out into the world.
Attention Economy, Whuffie
Wealth therefore comes to you by expressing yourself fully. The best guarantee you have for attention going to you for what you do is living your life as openly as possible, expressing yourself as publicly as possible as early as possible (hence it makes sense to put out drafts, early versions, so there are witnesses for everything you do.)
free software phylosophy, release early, release often
So the new privacy and the old are direct opposite. The new privacy means having no secrets, which you don't normally need to have, because little that was previously shameful or had to be concealed is so now...
sousveillance
What people do demand as privacy now is freedom from having to pay attention, not from being seen but seeing what they don't want to.
daily me / tiranny of the majority
The first move in establishing an open market for Attention was to declare a set of basic rights: Property: I own my attention and I can store it securely in private.
Mobility: I can move my attention wherever I want whenever I want to.
Economy: I can pay attention to whomever I wish and be paid for it.
Transparency: I can see how my attention is being used
These represent our rights as attention owners.
(...) In any case, by virtue of recognizing the above-listed rights, members of the AttentionTrust (both individual and corporate) express their participation in a free, open market for exchanging their attention.
alternative economy, emerging democracy
Like so many Web applications, but on a much grander scale, Google takes what I am looking for (literally my attention) and turns it into a commodity called a keyword, which in turn gets pooled and traded by advertisers and publishers who don't give me anything in return but do subsidize my use of Google search, my storage in Gmail, etc.
Interesting discussion of what Google company really is (related to the scary list of what Google knows about you).

And yes, I'm paying attention to the post I commented here and, recursively, if you paid attention to this post, I'm asking/suggesting to pay attention to the post I commented here. Are you paying something to me? Am I paying something to you? Is there anyone out there reading this? If not, who is paying who? Well, I guess some answers will come from AttentionTrust.org and for now I just paid attention...

Categories (tags):

Folksonomy	folksonomy
Free software	free_software
PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

AAAI05: terrific talk by Marty Tenenbaum

AI Meets Web 2.0: Building The Web of Tomorrow Today by Dr. Jay M. Tenenbaum.
Terrific terrific talk, fascinating. I should have podcasted it because you really missed something (except I have nothing to record audio on, would you consider sending me your old mp3 recorder pen?). I was so excited during the talk that I happened to take a photo of almost any slide. Actually the slides were 94 and I photoed 59 of them! Incredible to me as well.
Anyway, you might want to read the slides (pdf) or maybe you want to have a look at my pictures (possibly as a slideshow).
He introduced all the stuff I enjoy, such as Blogs, RSS, wiki (wikipedia), folksonomies, tags, flickr, Del.icio.us, microformats (aka Lower case semantic web), technorati, pubsub, greasemonkey (bookburro, greasemap) and much more; all tied together in a fascinating, convincing, making-sense manner!
After his presentation, we spoke about my research and he seemed interested. He invited me to visit commerce.net for one month or so and I have to say that I really like the idea. I spoke also with Rohit Khare that is actually working with Tenenbaum and he has a whole bunch of very clever, fascinating, realizable ideas that would really make an impact. They also underline more than once that this kind of architecture/language-of-web2.0 projects should be open source and I totally agree with them and like it.
Actually after the presentation, while I was speaking with Marty and Rohit, there was also Jesse Andrews, the creator of the mind-blowing book burro (actually he got most of the attention, totally deserved by the way). I guess it should be too cool having someone presenting your hack on a conference and then go to meet that person and say "You know the Book Burro extension you presented? Well, I'm the creator of it!". Cool! If you want to see how Jesse looks like, here is a picture of him and wait some more great hacks from him in few days.

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Off for AAAI 2005 conference in Pittsburgh

If you happen to participate in the AAAI 2005 conference (and read this post), pass by to say hello. The paper I'll present is "Controversial Users demand Local Trust Metrics: an Experimental Study on Epinions.com Community" (pdf). Ill be hosted by roder, a (new) friend found via HospitalityClub. Actually I received a lot of offers for hospitality (some via CouchSurfing). And also for hanging around: for example, Violet Law invited me for an Indian party/fundraiser for Indian children on Sunday evening. I guess we can meet there. What a strange, small world?!?
UPDATE: I just received an email from AAAI organizers: AAAI05 has a dedicated blog and an user on Flickr (monitor AAAI05 tag). W00t!

Categories (tags):

Future	future
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

SocialSearch: risk of moving from "tyranny of the majority" to "the daily me"

On Yahoo!Blog, while presenting its new MyWeb2.0:
The answer a web search engine delivers is what it believes is the correct answer for the majority of users – often referred to as "the tyranny of the majority". For example, when you search for 'apple', the first result on most search engines is Apple Computer. But you may have been searching for information about the fruit or Apple Records.
This is a point I'm making since some years and so I totally agree that this is a problem of current search engines and I totally agree that considering personal trust networks of users is the solution to go (actually this is my my PhD research topic).
But I want also to point out, as I already did some time ago, that on the other extreme (total personalization) there is another, maybe bigger, risk: "the daily me".
If you only see web sites, opinions, movies, etc of people you already agree with, you will never ever meet new, unexpected points of view, you will never ever need to argue your points with someone that thinks different (and possibly change your mind, at least a little bit), you will simply exacerbates your opinions, you will end up not even being able to understand the language used by people that are not in your "community" of like-minded friends!
If you are an anarchist speaking/reading only other anarchists, you will strengthen your opinions, they will become more extreme. Or if you are a catholic orthodox, or ... The same is true for every group: liberals watching and reading mostly or only liberals; moderates, moderates; conservatives, conservatives; neo-Nazis, neo-Nazis. The resulting divisions run along many lines--of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, wealth, age, political conviction, and more. Most whites avoid news and entertainment options designed for African-Americans. Many African-Americans focus largely on options specifically designed for them. So too with Hispanics

This will produce extremism and fragmentation of society and could have terrible, violent consequences.
The great book of Cass Sunstein Republic.com analyses this risk and more importantly tries to suggest a range of potential reforms to correct current misconceptions and to improve deliberative democracy and the health of the American republic.

(...)
First, people should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance. Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself. Such encounters often involve topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quite irritating. They are important partly to ensure against fragmentation and extremism, which are predictable outcomes of any situation in which like-minded people speak only with themselves. I do not suggest that government should force people to see things that they wish to avoid. But I do contend that in a democracy deserving the name, people often come across views and topics that they have not specifically selected.

Second, many or most citizens should have a range of common experiences. Without shared experiences, a heterogeneous society will have a much more difficult time in addressing social problems. People may even find it hard to understand one another. Common experiences, emphatically including the common experiences made possible by the media, provide a form of social glue. A system of communications that radically diminishes the number of such experiences will create a number of problems, not least because of the increase in social fragmentation.

I think it is time that everyone of us (especially those involved in creating personalized services, and hence in this case, especially Yahoo!) should start thinking about this problem before we are too ahead in the future. What do you think?

Categories (tags):

Trust and Reputation

trust_and_reputation

Social Search via Trusted Friends (by Yahoo!)

Via Many2Many, I learn that Yahoo has a new gift for us: My Web 2.0 BETA - A Social Search Engine.
On Yahoo! Search Blog there is an introduction to the new service:
Almost two years ago, one of our engineers was interested in buying a plasma TV and tried using web search to find a good site for reviews --- a quick search revealed that there were hundreds of sites offering to educate him on plasma TVs, yet short of visiting all the sites, it was difficult to figure out which site exactly was the 'best' site. So he did what millions of people do every day – asked a friend, who recommended two excellent sites for plasma TV reviews. He never ended up buying a TV (things just got too busy with search), but this was the moment of inspiration that lead us to build the product we are introducing today – a social search engine that enables people to search the expertise of their friends and community. [Read the rest on Yahoo! Search Blog]
All this trust-enhanced search and filtering and recommendations is what I'm trying to do with my PhD and I'm happy it is really taking off. About technology and metrics, they propose MyRank, as a successor of global trust metrics such as PageRank or the more recent TrustRank.
I didn't play with it for now. And I really hope that Yahoo! is going to embrace the Open Web with this new service by giving Open API and export facilities (at the moment it seems so and I'm sure Flickr guys are going to suggest the right moves about that).
Ken Norton is collecting reactions from the blogosphere, or you can monitor who is speaking about My Web 2.0 on Technorati or BlogLines.
Otherwise read My Web 2.0 Blog (first post is by our great flickresque friend Caterina Fake).

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Presentation on "Trust in Recommender Systems: an historical overview and recent developments"

I was invited by Stefano Mizzaro to give a lecture in his course in "Web Information Retrieval". I spoke about "Trust in Recommender Systems: an historical overview and recent developments". It was a lot of fun (at least for me). And I thought I could share the slides with you. They are in OpenOffice .sxi format (it is an open format, so if you program does not read a commonly used open format, you probably better change it). They are released under a Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons licence. This means that if you want to use them you just have to give credit to me and re-share your slides under the same licence. If you don't want to re-share your derivative work under the same Creative Commons licence, you are still free, free of not using them. Enjoy.

Categories (tags):

Free software	free_software
Metadata	metadata
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

My suggestion to Google: getoutfoxed('s author)

Google, do hire Stan before Yahoo! does it. Stan is the author of "Outfoxed - Personalize your internet." I didn't play with the code yet (seems a Linux version is not yet ready at the moment, but on the way). Yes, the code is open source (Mozilla Public Licence), sweet! Anyway, the detailed description is fantastic! It is a bit like what I want to do for my PhD thesis. The difference? Stan did it! Check the site: it has a lot of interesting pages such as The Outfoxed Idea (A collection of thoughts on the theoretical aspects of Outfoxed, and the whole idea of using social networks for metadata distribution). Or at least the page A Third Phase of Internet Search in which Stan pictiorally shows the 3 phases: Naive trust --> PageRank and inferred quality --> Social networks to determine subjective quality

Every search query is a question: "What pages are most related to X?" Current search engines assume there is a single correct answer to each query. But consider a query like "Britney Spears." (The most popular Google query for 2004.) If you're a fan, you probably want to see her official site and maybe lyric pages. If you're a musician, you probably want to see reviews and music tabs. Of course, current search engines can't do this because they only consider "objective" measures like the number of links to a page. (See The good, the bad, and the subjective) What is needed is subjective, trusted ratings of the pages.

Categories (tags):

Books	books
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Read the books people you dislike dislike

I know the title is hard to parse. Let use some parenthesis: Read [the books [people [you dislike] dislike]]. That is, there are people you dislike, they dislike some books, you possibly will like these books. Pietro Speroni reports that A right winged newspaper: Human Events online, asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th centuries. (here the list) and how "The list have it all, it’s the most complete list of texts I found that were really important to understand the world we are living in". The rationale behind is: if neocons believe these books are harmful and since I think neocons are harmful, I should read these books. While this is ok on real world, this reasoning does not work in Trust-aware Recommender Systems, topic in which I'm phding. In online communities (in which it is easy to create fake identities) this is subject to a simple attack and anyone could easily game the system. The idea: since I get recommended the items disliked by people I dislike, the user I dislike could pretend to "dislike" the item she wants I get recommended. Ex: a neocon identity could pretend to dislike the book "why bush is right" (hopefully this does not exist and it is just an example) and I get recommended it. For this reason, in algorithms I designed, I decided that the opinions of people you dislike should not influence your recommendations at all, they are simply discarded because otherwise they are able to influence your recommendations and hence game the system. Well, not sure, I'm good in explaining it (English is hard...). Maybe you want to check some papers of mine in which hopefully I was helped in writing in a clearer way. Since we are speaking of books, maybe you want to check the list of books I've read (actually it is not at all complete or updated, I was trying to keep it with allconsuming.net and to decentralized publish it also in semantic web formats (RSS | XML) but in fact I created it once and never updated ... maybe in a short future there will be a tool that will allow me to keep a list of read books, with comments and to automatically publish it on my blog, in that case I'll probably try again to keep it updated. Or such a tool is already there? If so, please let me know).
The list of books that neocons think are harmful is

# The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
# Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
# Quotations from Chairman Mao by Mao Zedong
# The Kinsey Report by Alfred Kinsey
# Democracy and Education by John Dewey
# Das Kapital by Karl Marx
# The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
# The Course of Positive Philosophy by Auguste Comte
# Beyond Good and Evil by Freidrich Nietzsche
# General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
# The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich
# What Is To Be Done by V.I. Lenin
# Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno
# On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
# Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner
# Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel
# The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly
# Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin
# Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault
# Soviet Communism: A New Civilization by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
# Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead
# Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader
# Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
# Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci
# Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
# Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
# Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
# The Greening of America by Charles Reich
# The Limits to Growth by Club of Rome
# Descent of Man by Charles Darwin
(I copied the list from Pietro Speroni's reading list)

Categories (tags):

Peer to peer	peer_to_peer
PhD	phd
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

School and Workshop on Structure and Function of Complex Networks: second day

In the following some comments about the Program of the second day.

Epidemics spreading
Alessandro VESPIGNANI
Indiana University, Bloomington, U.S.A.
Great Lecture! For now, Vespignani is my preferred lecturer. The lecture was very interesting and spoke about how to model deseases and their spreading and how you can immunitize nodes in order to stop the virus (immunize at random is not effective in general, immunizing the hub [nodes with a lot of connections] works very well [you immunize a tiny fraction of the nodes and the virus is stopped] but you have to have a global knowledge of the network that is often not the case. Taking node at random, asking to name a "connection" and immunize that connection works almost as well as immunizing the hubs but you don't need global knowledge: in fact you are probably going to reach the hubs with this strategy.
He was speaking about sex networks, with the (to be expected) note that, when asked explicitly abou the number of sexual connections, men tend to overstimate and women tend to understimate. He said that there are already data on sexual networks from Sweden, US, UK, Zimbabwe, Uganda. Remind for myself: I need to have a look at them and download the data.
[Everyone here is speaking of Mean Field, but I have no idea what this is. Most of the people here are physicists. I had a check on the Mean Field Wikipedia page but I didn't get it too much. I'll have to ask someone, even if this is a bit like asking "what do you mean by 2+2 after 5 years of math".]

Official visit - the Director General of UNESCO Mr. K. MATSUURA
I arrived late and it was boring.

Percolation on networks II
Shlomo HAVLIN
Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
Too mathematical for me. Certainly Havlin knows a lot about these things.

Models of scale free graphs
Guido CALDARELLI
Very good speaker as well! The slides were perfect. There was some speaking about fractals, about fractals networks and pseudo-fractal graphs. He spoke about cosing.org where there also some datasets to play with. He made some fun remarks at the end about the sexual networks but I can't remember them. I need to get the slides that were perfect.

Search in random networks
Lada ADAMIC
HP Laboratories, Palo Alto, U.S.A.
I read most of her papers and it was great to see that there is a real person behind the name. Her lecture was interesting and not too hard to follow. Tomorrow she will speak about search on scale-free networks. I need to understand better what are these cutoffs in powerlaw distributions.

Network visualization
Katy BORNER
Indiana Unviersity, Bloomington, U.S.A.
In the next days we will have 3 computer sessions with her in which we will play with datasets and she also asked to bring our datasets. I think it will be fun. I read a paper by her some time ago about activeWorld and visualizations of footprints in a virtual library: very interesting! Anyway this talk was very different from the previoous talk, it was much more graphical, sometime phychological and surely not at all a formulas-dense one!
I will try to get the slides of this as well. Interesting picture of sociogram from a 1934 (!) paper by Moreno. Red and green has swapped meaning in China, compared to Italy.
I suggested her to look at the TrustArt wiki page I somehow maintain, there could be some interesting visualizations she had missed.

Game theory
Fernando VEGA-REDONDO
Universidad de Alicante, Spain
He was great in condensing the all field in one hour and in doing it in a very intriguing way, basically only by examples. Very interesting and at the end he started explained how game theory relates to networks (formation). I took 6 pages of notes. The last line I wrote on my notes is "Economy is the science of greediness and egoism" (you know, all these assumptions about humans being rational, i.e. interested just in maximizing their instantaneous utility not caring for all the rest...)

Categories (tags):

Trust and Reputation

trust_and_reputation

School and Workshop on Structure and Function of Complex Networks: first day

I'll try to blog the entire School and Workshop on Structure and Function of Complex Networks. 12 days of great speakers. The school in ICTP, an UNESCO research center in Trieste. Since its mission is to foster advanced studies and research, especially in developing countries, there are many researchers from developing countries, as the list of participants shows. And tomorrow there will also be a special talk by UNESCO Director-General.
Following a short summary of the first day:

Very quick points:

Introductory Talk: Complex networks across disciplines
Alessandro VESPIGNANI
Indiana University, Bloomington, U.S.A.
Great talk, an introduction of Complex networks but a great introduction. Some of the questions he tried to cast: is this really new? Why is it so cool? Why is it so cool NOW? Well, now there is a great amount of data available (previously the data were available only via surveys with real people and so were scarse). A paper by Moreno (1934) is the first about this stuff: sociogram. He wrote a quotation about physicists being an hungry pack invading other disciplines (I need to get the slides so that I can cite it precisely). He also said something about the "complex" word: that is different from complicated but refers to complexity al all scales (geometric, infinite susceptibility, diverging fluctuations). An airplane is complex (lot of pieces) but there is a central authority that controls how to design and assemble it. Internet is simple but there is no central authority...
What is the success of the workshop? It depends on the number of good questions we are going to pose to the future! That is a good approach!!

Growing networks (I and II)
Jose Fernando F. MENDES
Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal
Really too complicated for my math ability and he gave a lot of concepts as granted (maybe they are for other people, since most of them are physicists but they were not for me). Anyway very interesting.

Random graphs
Ginestra BIANCONI
A survey on random graphs, very interesting but totally overlapping with Linked (the book by Barabasi) that I already read. Something very funny was the network of Italian Ministers which Ginestra said she played with. She showed it to us and showed how you can pictiorally detect the berlusconi clique.

Percolation on networks
Shlomo HAVLIN
Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
Very interestin talk, more abstract than the ones before, but I'm too late for the buffet for commentig on it. Maybe later...

Note for myself:
Some questions I want to try to get an idea about:
- Conflict with sociologists in past? In future? (people here are mainly physicists)
- Long tail economy?
- Directed Weighted Networks: how do they change everything?
- What best open source tool to quickly play with nets, powerlaws, ...?
- What when a nodes dies? What when an edge dies?
- Assertative? Disassertative?
- Do you have any question?

Next post about distribution in nations of participants, but now I'm off for the buffeeeeeeeet!

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Social Capital and Social Networks - Bridging Boundaries

Social Capital and Social Networks - Bridging Boundaries conference seems interesting. Moreover there is no registration fee and Junior scholars, graduate students and assistant professors, are invited to apply to attend the conference and receive lodging, meals, and up to $400 in travel expenses. The application deadline was May 5, 2005 (oops). I cannot make it but if you are in US, it is worth checking it.

Categories (tags):

Trust and Reputation

trust_and_reputation

Propagating Trust until I found gold: Ultra Gleeper

An email from Zbigniew pointed me to a Tribe.net discussion which pointed me to Personal Web Neighborhood: The Small Web project (very interesting read indeed) which pointed me to The Ultra Gleeper: A Recommendation Engine for Web Pages (pure gold!)
The UltraGleeper paper is the paper I could dream of writing but I will never be able to. Since the paper is released under a creative commons licence attribution/share-alike (and my blog too) I'm going to copy portions of it but of course giving credit to Leonard Richardson . Ooops, i was almost forgetting: Ultra Gleeper is Free software, so you have freedom of study and improving it. I will try to play with it really soon!

UltraGleeper homepage
There's a lot of interesting stuff on the web. Since the beginning, the hard part has been finding it. In the old days the only tools available were random browsing and directory sites like Yahoo!. These days it's more efficient to subscribe to weblogs that you've found are reliable sources of good links. But the web keeps growing; now it's hard to find the new interesting weblogs, much less all the other interesting pages.

The Ultra Gleeper runs on your server and shows up in your web browser or RSS reader. It's free software, so you're free to use and modify it.

The Ultra Gleeper: A Recommendation Engine for Web Pages
Recommendation engines enjoyed a vogue in the mid-90s. They would solve the problem of information overload by matching user preferences against a large universe of data. The ultimate realization of this strategy would be a recommendation engine capable of mining that Northwest territory of data, the World Wide Web.

A web page recommendation engine is now possible because a lot of the work is done elsewhere on the web and exposed to the public, because web surfers track new types of information, and because new ideas have taken root. Here are the tools and concepts used by my recommendation engine that didn't exist in the mid-90s, or weren't the juggernauts they are today:
* Millions more write for the web today
* Hundreds of thousands more have weblogs
* RSS, RSS aggregators, and OPML: structure for reading weblogs
* Google PageRank
* Publicly accessible search engine APIs, in particular, the Technorati and Google web APIs
* Social bookmark sites like del.icio.us

[Ok I stop here, I wanted to copy the interesting parts and ... I would have probably ended up copying every single pure-gold line.

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Trust Metrics Book

I'm thinking about writing a book on Trust Metrics, or maybe about Trust Metrics and Recommender Systems. (I need to write my PhD thesis anyway so if I can get it published, this is a plus). Well, a search inside-books on Amazon for "trust metric" reveals this is not a too covered topic. Good. Do you have any suggestion? Publisher, topics, whatever. Anyway being able to search inside (almost) every book in one second is astonishing, sometimes I forget about how astonishing the Web is...

Categories (tags):

Trust and Reputation

trust_and_reputation

Patenting the obvious: Google and how much a news source is trusted

Google had filed a patent for "ranking news according to quality (or at least NewScientist says so, I didn't check).
The database will be built by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources, along with average story length, number with bylines, and number of the bureaux cited, along with how long they have been in business. Google's database will also keep track of the number of staff a news source employs, the volume of internet traffic to its website and the number of countries accessing the site. Google will take all these parameters, weight them according to formulae it is constructing, and distil them down to create a single value. This number will then be used to rank the results of any news search.
So can you patent something so obvious? It is as trivial as "I take 2 parameters (how many words you say per minute and your height) and I do a weighted sum on them". Can it be reasonable that you patent weighted sums of A and B?
This is why we should say nosoftwarepatents.com.
Moreover the idea that FoxNews is a "trusted" source because many people visit its site is really bad for me. This is what I call a global trust metric. If I tell Google that I trust Indymedia, then I should receive personalized results (personalized in the sense that the weight given to FoxNews is 0!).

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Contact me if you'll be in Trieste next week for the School on Structure and Function of Complex Networks.

I'll be in Trieste at the Abdus Salam ICTP (Unesco funded school) during next 2 weeks (16 - 28 May 2005) for the School and Workshop on Structure and Function of Complex Networks (i was advertising about it time ago and I got accepted). I'm so excited. The list of speakers is simply great (see below) and there are participants from all over the world, in fact "Although the main purpose of the Centre is to help research workers from developing countries, a limited number of students and post-doctoral scientists from developed countries are also welcome to attend.".
If you happen to be there and want to discuss a bit about blogosphere, trust, reputation, social software, social networks, languages, globalization, ... just whatever, please contact me!

Main Topics:
- Characterization and modeling of complex networks;
- Socio-economic networks;
- Technological and communication networks;
- Biological and ecological networks.

This activity is divided into two parts, the first week being a School in which established results in networks will be presented by the Lecturers and the second week, a Workshop to discuss present problems in economical, biological and technological networks. The Organizing Committee promote a call for contributed talks: please send applications, with title and abstract of the proposed talk, only by email to G. Bianconi: gbiancon@ictp.trieste.it no later than 28 February 2005.

Categories (tags):

Free software	free_software
Mozilla	mozilla
PhD	phd
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

My first Firefox extension: SemanticLinks

For the previously mentioned paper, I created a small Firefox extension called SemanticLinks. The purpose? Showing VoteLinks, rel="nofollow" and information about the linked resource by appending a small icon near the link text (anchor text). SemanticLinks is a simple change of TargetAlert to which I just added a 1%. You can find more information about SemanticLinks and how to install it on the SemanticLinks page. You might also want to see some screenshots.

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

New paper: "Page-reRank: using trusted links to re-rank authority"

I uploaded another paper of mine in the papers section. This is still under review for the Web Intelligence 2005 conference and is titled "Page-reRank: using trusted links to re-rank authority" (pdf). Let me know what you think of it, if you like.

Abstract The basis of much of the intelligence on the Web is the hyperlink structure which represents an organising principle based on the human facility to be able to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant material. Second generation search engines like Google make use of this structure to infer the authority of particular web pages. However, the linking mechanism provided by HTML does not allow the author to express different types of links such as positive or negative endorsements of page content. Consequently, algorithms like PageRank produce rankings that do not capture the different intentions of web authors. In this paper, we review some of the initiatives for adding simple semantic extensions to the link mechanism. Using a large real world data set, we demonstrate the different page rankings produced by considering extra semantic information in page links. We conclude that Web intelligence would benefit in adoption of languages that allow authors easily encode simple semantic extensions to their hyperlinks.

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Reviews	reviews
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Paper accepted at AAAI05: "Controversial Users demand Local Trust Metrics: an Experimental Study on Epinions.com Community"

A paper of mine titled "Controversial Users demand Local Trust Metrics: an Experimental Study on Epinions.com Community" (pdf) got accepted for the Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05)! Cool! The email I received this morning says "Your paper was one of 148 accepted to AAAI-05, out of 803 submissions. AAAI is a highly selective conference, and you are to be congratulated on your paper's acceptance." This means acceptance rate is 18%. Let me know if you like/dislike the paper or want to discuss its topic a bit. I think controversiality is an important theme and I think there are too many papers that assume that every user/agent has a global goodness value that is the same for everyone (there are some users that are bad for everyone and the goal of the technique is to spot them out). This assumption is unrealistic: just think of Bush or Berlusconi ... some people like them (yeah, I know it's kinda incredible) and some other don't. My paper hopefully provide some evidence about this intuitive phenomena. You might also want to check other papers of mine.

Title: Controversial Users demand Local Trust Metrics: an Experimental Study on Epinions.com Community
Abstract: In today's connected world it is possible and very common to interact with unknown people, whose reliability is unknown. Trust Metrics are a recently proposed technique for answering questions such as "Should I trust this user?". However, most of the current research
assumes that every user has a global quality score and that the goal of the technique is just to predict this correct value. We show, on data from a real and large user community, epinions.com, that such an assumption is not realistic because there is a signicant
portion of what we call controversial users, users who are trusted and distrusted by many. A global agreement about the trustworthiness value of these users cannot exist. We argue, using computational experiments, that the existence of controversial users (a normal phenomena in societies) demands Local Trust Metrics, techniques able to predict the trustworthiness of an user in a personalized way, depending on the very personal view of the judging user.

Categories (tags):

Trust and Reputation

trust_and_reputation

From PageRank to TrustRank

It is good to know I've chosen an interesting research topic: Google is going to adopt/embrace TrustRank. See this article on searchenginewatch.
One more paper to read: Combating Web Spam with TrustRank; actually one of the author is Pedersen of Yahoo! (the other are from Stanford).

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Reviews	reviews
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Randomly-generated paper accepted for a conference!

Too funny, too sad. SCIgen is an Automatic Computer Science Paper Generator. The program (GPL-licenced and hence Free Software) generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. I was thinking about doing something like it since a lot of time, but wait ... one of the random paper got accepted for a conference!!!
One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to "fake" conferences; that is, conferences with no quality standards, which exist only to make money. A prime example, which you may recognize from spam in your inbox, is SCI/IIIS and its dozens of co-located conferences (for example, check out the gibberish on the WMSCI 2005 website). Using SCIgen to generate submissions for conferences like this gives us pleasure to no end. In fact, one of our papers was accepted to SCI 2005! See Examples for more details.
The accepted paper is Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy by Jeremy Stribling, Daniel Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn and the "authors" say We are currently working on the "camera-ready", and received many donations to send us to the conference, so that we can give a randomly-generated talk. Ehi, researcher! You can cite it! After all it is a published paper! Not the crappy stuff you find on blogs! Beware, never cite an online article, only articles published on the old paper at one of the millions of crappy iper-expensive conferences!
And, in case you want to cite a paper of mine, I just created "A Case for Randomized Algorithms" and "Comparing XML and Markov Models" or you can just generate a new paper for me. Writing a paper is now easier than ever!!! I need to click 8 more times on this link and then I can just spend one year on holidays since I already produced a good amount of papers.
[I found the news on BoingBoing, a blog reseachers should cite sometime...]

Categories (tags):

Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Attacking HITS (and not PageRank)

While I think PageRank is a very clever (though simple) idea, I'm not very sure about HITS. What this algorithms are for? For predicting the quality of a page on the Web based on all the links between pages. PageRank assumes that a page linked by many pages and linked by pages of high quality (recursive!) has a good quality, i.e. it is an authority. HITS is based on the notions of hub and authority: a good hub is a page that points to several good authorities; a good authority is a page that is pointed at by several good hubs.
So, why do I appreciate PageRank and less HITS? Because the latter can be easily attacked. The PageRank of this page depends only on the pages linking to this page and I cannot easily force everyone on the web to link to this page. It depends on what other pages decide to link and I have no power over it.
Conversely, according to HITS, the hubness of this page depend on the pages this page link to, and I have total power over the pages I link to! Do I want this page to become an hub about cars? It is enough to link to (what I think are) cars authorities: bmw, mercedes, ferrari, ford, renault, ... (fiat is better not). Then do I want to exploit the hubness score this page got? I would simply link also to crappyCarsISell.com. HITS thinks this page is an hub and, since an hub by definition points to authorities, hence HITS thinks crappyCarsISell.com is a car authority.
What matters is Direction of links! I have no control on links that go in my page but I have total control in links that go out of my page. Anyway I think the work by Kleinberg is simply great but HITS does not take into account the fact that users will always try to game systems (especially, but not only, if they have an immediate benefit).
... I was almost forgotting the initial reason of this post: I got remind about HITS reading Lexical authorities in an encyclopedic corpus: a case study with Wikipedia by my friend Francesco, whose blog I just discovered today via a comment he left here. And this means one less friend without a blog! Welcome Francesco!

Categories (tags):

Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

FlickrLand: network analysis

Graphs, Networks, PowerLaws, Relationships and everything you like.
Network analysis of the Flickr population, based on data collected on January 8th, 2005, and some additional analyses. There is also a March 2005 version.

Categories (tags):

Free software	free_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

GUESS the graph

GUESS: The Graph Exploration System by IBM seems a very interesting tool if you have fun managing and playing with graphs but I didn't have time to try it yet. They say Source code available soon, if you have some desperate need for it in the meantime just email me and GUESS uses some great open source software including Piccolo, JUNG, HSQLDB, Jython , and RServe. I use JUNG and it is a delicious piece of software. If GUESS is able to improuve it and to give something more, it is probably an astonishing piece of software (and it is open source)

Categories (tags):

Alternative Economy	alternative_economy
Humour	humour
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

"Serpica naro" is "San Precario"

This is pure genius! News from Repubblica.it (in Italian).
Serpica Naro, young anglojapanese artist and fashion-maker, was supposed to close the Milano fashion week (Settimana Della Moda) today. BUT (suspence ...) Serpica Naro does not exist!
The organizers were fouled by the creative Italian collective Chainworkers. Serpica Naro is in fact an acronym of San Precario (depicted in picture), the newest of a long list of saints but this time with a reason.

San Precario is the protector of all the atypical workers (co.co.co., co.co.pro., and in general everyone that has a job with zero labour rights). [In the last 5 years, in Italy, most of the new workers have lost all the labour rights that were conquered by previous generations].
Chainworkers activists created an interesting 'look book' of Serpica Naro and a cool official website (with fake fashion magazines reporting about Serpica) and a bunch of other sites speaking about her, and an Italian press office and an English one and a Japanese one and a fake showroom in Tokyo and in London.
More clever is the fact that the same Chainworkers started attacking Serpica Naro accusing her to exploit anti-globalizations mottos just to sell fashion. And they also spread on some homosexual mailing lists news about the fact Serpica Naro had fouled in 2001 the japanese homosexual community just in order to use it for self-promotion.
Let me close with this. I don't know if what I wrote is true: it is totally possible that Serpica Naro does exist and I have been fouled. Just remember that nothing you read/listen anywhere is necessarily true (not here, not on newspapers, not on television). You have been warned....

Some info:
The official Serpica Naro site is http://www.serpicanaro.com/

And here the biography of Serpica Naro from the site of SettimanaDellaModa: http://www.settimanadellamoda.it/serpica.htm

Biography from http://www.serpicanaro.com/

Tokyo based anglojapanese Serpica Naro has built up a strong reputation as a young designer who has consistently pushed the boundaries of fashion design.
She graduated from Bunka Fashion College and is internationally known for innovative use of high tech fabrics and unusual cutting techniques. Her experimentation in areas removed from the mainstream have included the invention of disguise clothing as well as pioneering the use of reflective fabrics and bandages in fashion collections. Her diffusion collections have included the legendary NonConform range, the indispensable work wear of the late 90's, now revered by collectors.

Why save the world if you can design it?

Categories (tags):

Trust and Reputation

trust_and_reputation

Will your friend ask "Are you buzzing me?"

Old but very interesting article The Hidden (in Plain Sight) Persuaders from NyTimes (link via NYTimes link generator).
Some companies, such as BzzAgent, sells as a service "viral social peer-to-peer marketing", that is normal people telling you (and many other people) how cool a certain product is. The interesting point is that those people are normal people (maybe your friend) and not some superpaid supermodel and also that those people volunteer (!) for spreading good reviews about a certain product, for example, the "Al Fresco" sausages (?!?).
The article raised in me a lot of questions. For example, while I can understand why activists want to spread their ideas (for example, Greenpeace, Attac, EFF, FSF, Engineers Without Borders just to mention some of them), why on hearth would someone (without being paid!!) fight for advertising "Al Fresco" sausages to her friends? There are so many good causes you can embrace, why on earth someone chooses to embrace "Al Fresco" sausages?
I simply don't get it, so I guess I should experiment it directly: anyone interested in setting up such a company in Italy? If yes, comment this post or send me email.
Below some excerpts from the article but I suggest you to read it all.

She and her many fellow agents have essentially volunteered to create ''buzz'' about Al Fresco sausage and dozens of other products, from books to shoes to beer to perfume. BzzAgent currently has more than 60,000 volunteer agents in its network. Tremor, a word-of-mouth operation that is a division of Procter & Gamble (maker of Crest, Tide and Pampers) has an astonishing 240,000 volunteer teenagers spreading the word about everything from toothbrushes to TV shows. A spinoff, Tremor Moms, is in the works.

Why, I asked Desjardins, did people join a group without even knowing what it was? Well, he explained, Wallace's theory was that they just wanted to be part of something.

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Trust competition testbed rules now available

Do you know RoboCup? In the software version, you can program your own football players and then have them competing against the players of someone else. You can use whatever technique and the goal is to score more goals that the competitor. "It is an attempt to foster AI and intelligent robotics research by providing a standard problem where wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined.".
With a similar goal, some researchers are working on a trust competition testbed. The idea? You program your player in the "social game", have it playing against (or with?) the other players and at the end evaluate in some way her performances (how well she reasoned about trusting other players and information in order to reach her objectives). And we can also evaluate how the "society", intended as the ecology of players, evolves (or not) based on the different, local behaviours. Anyway, if you are interested, check the Trust competition Rules (longer pdf version) and Trust competition FAQ. Want to play with the Java code? Unluckly, not yet possible but I guess you might obtain the code if you email them. Release of the testbed distribution is being withheld until July, 2005. At that time, the testbed will be publicly available for experimentation and competition practice.

Categories (tags):

Blogging	blogging
PhD	phd
Reviews	reviews
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Review of "Quality Control in Scholarly Publishing"

Some weeks ago, I received an email from Stefano Mizzaro asking my opinion about his paper Quality Control in Scholarly Publishing: A New Proposal (pdf). In the meantime he came to Trento and we discussed face to face but I want to share here some quick comments I wrote on my wiki about the paper. I liked it, it is very clearly presented, it addresses a real problem and a more and more important one. The math is very clear, sound and makes sense. [Yes he found me because of the blog and not because of my papers and this keeps telling me something]. Read the comments to the paper.

Paper:
Quality Control in Scholarly Publishing: A New Proposal by Stefano Mizzaro

Abstract:
The Internet has fostered a faster, more interactive and effective model of scholarly publishing. However, as the quantity of information available is constantly increasing, its quality is threatened, since the traditional quality control mechanism of peer review is often not used (e.g., in online repositories of preprints, and by people publishing on their Web pages whatever they want).

This paper describes a new kind of electronic scholarly journal, in which the standard submission-review-publication process is replaced by a more sophisticated approach, based on judgments expressed by the readers: in this way, each reader is, potentially, a peer reviewer. New ingredients, not found in similar approaches, are that each reader's judgment is weighted on the basis of the reader's skills as a reviewer, and that readers are encouraged to express correct judgments by a feedback mechanism that estimates their own quality. The new electronic scholarly journal is described in both intuitive and formal ways. Its effectiveness is tested by several laboratory experiments that simulate what might happen if the system were deployed and used.

My comments to the paper.

Categories (tags):

Free software	free_software
PhD	phd
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Eclipse trust framework

I found on SocialPhysics Wiki a very interesting proposal: Eclipse Trust Framework (ETF).
The goal of the ETF Project is to provide an open source framework to support the creation of applications on the Eclipse platform that manage a person’s online context (profile) and identity from the person’s or their agent’s perspective. (Eclipse is one of the most used tool for writing Java code, it is open source and funded mainly by IBM).

The description of the application that SocialPhysics wants to build is hyper-cool as well!

The base app is a downloadable application that helps you manage your identity and interactions with co-workers, customers, business associates and friends.

The app can be extended with context plug-ins that support new and different "social protocols"--cultural conventions about who can see what about whom, what's measured, what's private, what's shared. Using a community-of-interest plug-in, for example, communities can share insights into "what's hot," and who's working on what, or what's not happening that should be. It might provide community-wide and/or individual metrics of trust, connectedness, centralization and so on.

Categories (tags):

Alternative Economy	alternative_economy
PhD	phd
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

My first couchsurfing host

During past week I hosted in my house a russian girl I didn't know before. Why? She asked hospitality through CouchSurfing. I subscribed few months ago to CouchSurfing when I was looking for free hosting in Cyprus. In the meantime I also arranged to find hospitality in Paris. And of course I was very happy to host her (Anna is her name and here is her couchsurfing profile). Feel free to contact me if you pass near Trento, Italy (here is my CouchSurfing profile and it should be easy to find my email address around).
And as an example of how much information you leave behind yourself surfing the web, here you can see a map of places Anna has logged in from.
One evening she asked me to use Internet and I saw she was typing livejournal.com, and yes, she has a blog, though it is in Russian and I cannot understand it.
[CouchSurfing can be interesting also from a research point of view, see much below in the following text]

The Hospitality Club is a web site similar to Couchsurfing, although someone told me that the network is much bigger. And there is also Servas. However Servas was founded in 1949 and it is not a initiative born because of the new possibilities offered by the web. In fact they don't exchange or publish information electronically but you have to ask for the list of a certain country (you want to go) to the local responsible and she will send it to you (by normal mail) the dead-tree list, then you can contact people offering hospitality, Everything is highly certified (the local responsible gives you a sort of Servas Identity Card that certifies you are a good person). Servas is much slower, personally it does not fit at all my requirements, since I often decide to go somewhere less than 20 days before. I tried to use it in US, Belize and Guatemala, always without success. Anyway if you want something slower but more sure and certified, Servas can be your choice.

Ok, so what is CouchSurfing (and HospitalityClub) interesting for?
From a global point of view, I really envision (or dream) a world where everyone is free to move everywhere (no more borders) and, as a first step, a place where everyone that want to travel the world and visit countries would be able to do it hosted by local people and at almost-zero cost. In this way, more and more people will come to know different people (white, black, green, red, muslims, hindis, old, young, ...[add yours]..., just different people, the one we usually fear simply because we don't know them, yes maybe we will able to just laugh when the media or the politicians try to push in our brain the idea that everyone else is a potential terrorist and we should fear her). And moving aroung the world will be possible for everyone and not just rich people as it is now. Surely it is very hard, for example, for people from African Univeristies to participates in International Conferences. And in general for people from not-rich countries to move around the world. That would produce a better world, I'm sure. A world of open houses, open cars, trains and transportation vehicles and .... of open minds.

And from a research point of view? Before hosting Anna, I asked myself questions such as "why should I host this girl I don't know? Will she steal everything I have? Will my house be safe?" (you can complete with the classic paranoid bla bla questions). Why I'm happy to host someone she asks hospitality on the web and not someone that simply stops me on the road saying she has no place to sleep for this night and asking to take advantage of my roof and warm house? Why it is different?
Well, it is just the same question such as: Why I'm happy to buy from someone on ebay and not from someone that stops me on the road saying "i'll ship you a wonderful guitar, just give me now 50 euros"?
Yes I'm going there
What makes people happy to use ebay for sending money to people they DON'T know is the fact that ebay gives "identity" to people, you can see the homepage of someone and you can see her history as a buyer and as a seller, and based on this information you can build and grow trust on her. Yes, Trust was the word I wanted to arrive to.
Basically Couchsurfing (and ebay) gives you additional informatiion based on which you can make decisions. In the real world, would you be happy to host a friend of your father? I think so, and why? Because you father trusts her and you trust your father. As simple as that. So technologies can be used to automate this process (the term "social software" is about this enabling power of ICTs). CouchSurfing collects and shows a lot of "social" information: who surfed with who, who certified who, who referenced who, ...
This goes in the same direction as enabling hitchhiking or car pooling through some trust-facilitator ICTs mechanisms as was writing some time ago in Using social software for good: car pooling. Here the same arguments apply: I might be scared to open my car to a total stranger but, if my mobile tells me that she was already hitchhiked by 1000 other people and nothing bad happened, maybe I will be a little bit more open(minded). And the same if my mobile can tell me that this total stranger was picked up already 3 times by my friend Mary and she was happy with the lift and the conversation.
Actually, some months ago I asked to Couchsurfing founder Casey Fenton if I could get access to the data collected by CS and shown on the site for my research on Trust-aware decentralized recommender systems (PDF). But after a positive reply, I didn't hear from him any news. The social data are very very interesting. I copy and paste from my email to him:

In general, if possible, i would like to also have this information
about an user:
#login name (or id if you want to anonimize the dataset).
#country (with longitude and latitute)
#State/Province
#City
#Spoken languages (with levels)
#gender
#age
#Occupation:
#Ethnicity:
#Interests:
#Music, Movies, Books: (particularly important since recommender
systems recommend items such as these ones!)
#Places I have visited: (important for developping a system that
recommends countries to be visited)
#Places I have lived:
#Places I want to go to:
#groups an user belongs to (again good for recommending which group
you might find interesting)
#Couch Available (yes/no/maybe)
#Preferred Gender of surfer:
#Max Surfers Per Night:
#how many photos did the user upload.
#some degree of activity of the user such as (total number of logins,
registration date, logins in the last 30 days, in the last 90 days, ...
a more verbose output would be to log all the dates when an user login
in the system). this information can be useful to conduct studies
considering for example only active users.
# is the user verified? at which level?
# is the user vouched for? (of course i can derive this information
from previous logs)
# is the user ambassador?
# is the user certified? (this means "did he contribute financially?")

I was also asking about detected attempts to spam the network, sybil attacks and the like:

one more question, if i may
what is your experience with SP_ A MM ?
there are people that send spiam (remove the "i") messages to other users?
that write spiam profiles or link to spiam sites?
any fake profile (such as bill gates profile of john kerry profile...)?
any other abuse did you happen to see on couchsurfing?
i'm curious because the other side of social software systems is ...
trying to abuse of them and use them for your "malicious" (depending
on your point of view) interests
(such as selling your book on amazon or attracting visitors to your
spiam page or ...)

Actually I think I'm going to copy also the rest of my email to Casey, maybe you find something interesting in it as well:

Some suggestions:
#have you considered exporting personal and "friends" data of every
user in FOAF format (more info at
http://www.foaf-project.org/ or i can tell you something about it if
you like)?
#it would be great being able to "export" your profile to your blog.
the idea is that you provide some html an user can copy and paste in
her blog and this html "writes" some information from couchsurfing
about her profile such as username, place visited or location or
"Couchsurf in my house" or "surf my couch", the couchsurgging logo and
of course all this information link to couchsurfing.com (it can be
good to spread the existence of your fantastic site!)
this is something similar to "flickr" (see for example caterina blog at
http://caterina.net/ and the photos exported from flickr on her blog
on the right), or allconsuming.net (on the right of my blog
http://moloko.itc.it/paoloblog/ you can see "books i'm reading", they
are "written" by allconsuming using the html i copied there and pasted
it in my blog) and tribe.net. all these services allow you to show
your presence on these communities in your blog/site. [was i clear? if
not, sorry. i can try to be more clear, just let me know]
#there was something about geotagging user pages and let geo-aware
browser and application to see the map of users and browse it but the
main site about it geourl.org just went offline so i'm not sure it is
a meaningful project right now...
#you can even think some integration with flickr, every city can
become a "group photo set" on flickr or couchsurfing users can be
allowed to posts their photos on flickr...just an embryonic idea.
#you can show in the homepage the list of currently logged in users
(such as phpnuke/postnuke-powered portals often do). this could
possibly foster the sense of community.

Last words: Couchsurf the world!

Categories (tags):

Folksonomy	folksonomy
Metadata	metadata
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

What is "Tag Spam"? Or better, Tag Spam exists?

Leigh asks So any signs that "tag spam" has started yet? (found because he uses "trust metrics" a keyword to which I'm subscribed in a number of service). Here I ask the same question. It seems very unlikely that web spammers (they called themselves "search engine optimizer") cannot see in seconds the value of getting the wanted URL (of the to-be-busted book, movie, ...) or photo (of to-be-busted movie, product, ...) under my eyes. Afterwards, we are in the attention economy, aren't we? Getting attention of some humans (or aggregators and, as a consequence, of many humans) on your item is the first step towards you getting reputation (and possibly money). [by the way, the same is true for this blog post].
However, if you look it from a biodiversity point of view, spam is good because forces you to evolve, to differentiate, to invent new solutions.

So, any signs of "tag spam"? If you find something, write it on wikipedia pages Spam or Spamdexing (there is nothing at the moment about this) or ask Britannica to insert it in the next version (hope you get the difference...).

But first, how to define "tag spam"? A bot is always a spammer? If you genuinely think that microsoft.com could be tagged as crap, then this is not spam? But if you tag something just in order to capture attention of other people, then this is spam? If I tag on del.icio.us this post as "folksonomy", is this spam? If I tag my papers on CiteULike as "Cool" is this tag spam?
Rebecca pointed out that someone tagged on flickr an antisemite protest sign as "MLK" (Martin Luther King). Is this tag spam? She says "community standards" do not, indeed, can not defend against abuse of the system--only design can do that. Off the top of my head, there are several simple things Technorati could do to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future:
And in fact, Rebecca is already starting to provide anti-spam techniques:
* Technorati could design their system not to publish any photo Flickr users have tagged "Might be offensive".
* Technorati could create their own tagging system, and not publish any photo Technorati users tagged "Might be offensive".
* Technorati could provide an email address so that users could alert staff if a photo was offensive or inappropriate, and then the staff could go in and tag the inappropriate photo so that it would not appear on Technorati's site--or hand-select an appropriate one.

And in fact David Weinberger's (implicitly) also suggesting to use a trust metric when he says
"Tags work because they're so simple and because they are so connected to the human semantic context, but having billions of tags won't work because they're so simple and connected to the human semantic context. Will we be able to triangulate tags with other data - especially social data - so that we can get more out of them than we put in? It doesn't seem impossible to me - simply knowing who created a tag lets you get more out of the tag than the person put in - but it's not up to me to invent the stuff."

Let me make a strong point here: "Tag Spam does not exist. What does exist are different ways of viewing stuff in the world (and I hope there will always be!). What does exist are also incentives to get attention of other people". How can we take the most out of decentralized tagging? I think that using trust metrics we can choose to consider only tags provided by sources we deem trustworthy and exclude all the rest. There is the risk of DailyMe here: that is you will see only world classifications of people you already agree with and you will never ever get exposed to different way of thinking. I was speculating about it some time ago and leave this topic for next time.
Ok, I started with "trust metrics" and, having closed the circle, here I stop.

UPDATE: you can never stop. While I was writing 2 posts on Corante appeared that are very relevant.
In "issues of culture in ethnoclassification/folksonomy" danah argues that tagging is culture dependent. The great example about the book "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things" tells us that if someone (of a the culture described in the book) tags a picture of a woman under "danger", this is not at all tag spam but simply a different point of view on world, a different culture (not a better or worst one).
And in Folksonomy is better for cultural values Clay replies that the same problems applies to ontologies but exacerbated and that "The aggregate good of tags is not that they create consensus or accuracy; they observably don’t, and this is very observability is much of their value." He also reports that "But the relativity can also be interesting when crossed-tabbed with the identity of the tagger; I don’t want ‘toread’ or ‘funny’ generally, but I do want Liz’s ‘toread’ tags, and Matt Webb’s ‘funny’ links." In my Jargon, he is here expressing a trust statement (I trust as 1/1 Liz in the context of "toberead" tag). What I propose is to use this information to automatically discover the identities trusted by Liz in the context of "toberead" context and automatically suggest them to Clay. The balance between "i keep a small and direct and controllable social network of people i really know" or" i use also automated tools that can infer, based on the global social network, how much i could trust unknown users" should be an user option in my opinion. The first is more controllable, the second is more prone to serendipity, exposure to something new and new persons but also less controllable and under risk of social attacks.

Since I'm here, there are other interesting posts I found later on navigating some of the links. They are here below:
Cheap Eats at the Semantic Web Café
Folksonomy Notes: Considering the Downsides, Behavioral Trends, and Adaptation
The Politically Correct Police (PCP) are making lots of noise about how "This isn't right and SOMETHING SHOULD BE DONE".
Technorati Tags Set for Abuse who is tagged as "Nude Celebrities" just to prouve the concept
Shapes of knowledge, word for poodles
Making use of tags and tagsonomies
Controlled Vocabularies and Folksonomies: Why Change is Good.
Social consequences of social tagging
and i guess you will find all of them on del.icio.us's "folksonomy" tag

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Trust in Games

Over at Terranova, nathan is thinking about trust in games. One of the reasoning lines goes along "more powerful characters can be less trusting of the world around them than the weaker". Interesting, it seems that the weak is obliged to risk by trusting other unknown users while the strong can rely on herself, at least in part.
Anyway, I think virtual worlds are definetely a good playground for studying how social relationships evolve over time. Do you know of any MMORPG that is making available (possibly anonimized) data about characters' interactions? Or do you know of a powerful and open-source framework for quickly creating an appealing online environment in which it would be possible to study those dynamics?

Categories (tags):

Copyright	copyright
PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Controversial books: patenting the obvious?

Interesting NYTimes's article (if you don't want to register, use BugMeNot where you can find shared login and password pairs). Mikhail Gronas discovers that "reviewers gave more five-star reviews than two-star reviews, creating an upward sloping curve". (...) "But the most telling variable is the one star rating. Professor Gronas found that books high on what he called the "controversiality index" are given almost as many one-star as five-star ratings, creating a horseshoe-shaped curve. As it turns out, these books also tend to have high sales."
I've found these patterns analyzing Epinions.com ratings and trust statements (chech the graphs' on the paper (pdf)) but actually I don't think they are that surprising: they seem pretty obvious and I just reported them passing by.
What is really depressing is that Dartmouth is now in the process of patenting software that will be used to determine the "controversiality index".
I'm happy that in Europe we are still fighting against a so-stupid-policy of being able to patent everything, no matter how trivial it is. In this case the controversiality level of a book is something like "if a book received as much 5 ratings as 1 and if the 5 and 1 ratings together are the vast majority of ratings and if the number of received ratings is over a threshold (probably depending on release time), then the book is controversial" (putting it in formula that produces a controversiality value would require 10 minutes at most).
By the way, I'm currently working on the concept of controversiality of users and hopefully a paper is on the way. Controversial users are users who are trusted by many and distrusted by many. (Bush is a good example, but this can happen to highly visible persons in general). The idea is that Local Trust Metrics make sense expecially for highly controversial users (for example, users who are trusted by more than 200 users and DIStrusted by more than 200 users in the community). For those users, it does not make sense to predict a trust value of 0.5 saying that you should trust this user as 0.5 but, instead, to predict you should trust this controversial user as 1 if, for example, all your friends trust her and 0 if all your friends distrust her.

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

School and Workshop on Structure and Function of Complex Networks

School and Workshop on Structure and Function of Complex Networks. 16 - 28 May 2005 at Abdus Salam ICTP - Trieste - Italy.
Even if the dealine for the application is already passed, it seems there are still some places. Check the poster (pdf): the invited speakers are just great! Note that "Although the main purpose of the Centre is to help research workers from developing countries, a limited number of students and post-doctoral scientists from developed countries are also welcome to attend." and "There is no registration fee to be paid" (via an email on SOCNET mailinglist of INSNA).

Main Topics:
- Characterization and modeling of complex networks;
- Socio-economic networks;
- Technological and communication networks;
- Biological and ecological networks.

Lecturers and Keynote Speakers:
L. Adamic (HP Labs., U.S.A.) R. Albert (Penn. State Univ., U.S.A.) A.-L. Barabasi (Notre Dame, U.S.A.) K. Borner (Indiana Univ., U.S.A.) G. Caldarelli (La Sapienza, Italy) S. Goyal (Essex, U.K.) *M. Granovetter (Stanford Univ., U.S.A.) S. Havlin (Bar-Ilan Univ., Israel) M. O. Jackson (Caltech, U.S.A.) M. Marsili (ICTP, Trieste, Italy) J. Mendes (Porto, Portugal) *M.J.E. Newman (Michigan Uni., U.S.A.) R. Pastor-Satorras (Catalunga, Spain) F. Vega-Redondo (Alicante, Spain) A. Vespignani (Indiana Univ., U.S.A.) * S. Wasserman (Harvard, U.S.A.) R. Zecchina (ICTP, Trieste, Italy)

List of Invited Speakers:
(updated as of January 2005) A. Barrat (Paris-Sud, France) B. Bollobas (Memphis Univ., U.S.A.) S. Bornholdt (Bremen, Germany) R. Burioni (Parma, Italy) A. Calvó (U. Aut. de Barcelona,Spain) R. Cowan (MERIT, Maastricht)) P. De Los Rios (EPFL, Switzerland) A. Diaz-Guilera (Barcelona, Spain) S. Dorogovtsev (Aveiro, Portugal) B. Dutta (Warwick, U.K.) M. Greiner (Siemens, Germany) * B. Huberman (HP Labs., U.S.A.) * S. Jain (University of Delhi, Delhi)) J. Kertesz (Budapest, Hungary) * A. Kirman (CNRS, France) B. Khang (Seoul, Korea) * S. Kirkpatrick (Jerusalem, Israel) * M. Lassig (Cologne, Germany) * S. Leibler (Rockefeller, U.S.A.) * S.S. Manna (Kolkata, India) N. Martinez (Berkeley, U.S.A.) S. Maslov (BNL, U.S.A.) * F. Menczer (Indiana Univ., U.S.A.) * R. Monasson (CNRS, France) * Z. Oltvai (Northwestern Univ., U.S.A.) * K. Sneppen (Niels Bohr Inst., Denmark) T. Snijders (Groningen) Z. Toroczkai (LANL, U.S.A.) * U. Upfal (Brown Univ., U.S.A.) A. Vazquez (Notre Dame, U.S.A.) T. Vicsek (ELTE, Hungary) M. Weigt (Gottingen, Germany) (* to be confirmed )

The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) is organizing a School and Workshop on Structure and Function of Complex Networks, to be held from 16 - 28 May 2005 in Trieste, Italy.
The Organizing Committee will be: A.-L. BARABASI (Notre Dame, U.S.A.), M. MARSILI (ICTP, Trieste, Italy), F. VEGA-REDONDO (Alicante, Spain), A. VESPIGNANI (Indiana University, U.S.A.) and R. ZECCHINA (ICTP, Trieste, Italy).
The Local Organizer will be G. BIANCONI (ICTP, Trieste, Italy).
The finding that many complex systems, from the man-made Internet to the evolutionshaped cell and to the network of social and economical interactions, can be studied and compared on the common ground of network theory, has propelled the field into the attention of the larger scientific community and turned network research into a truly interdisciplinary enterprise.
Measurements performed on a vast number of complex systems have indicated that the networks that underlie them are not random, but have common or specific features that make them suitable for their function. The rapid growth in interest in networks has created the need both for authoritative and pedagogical introductions, lowering the barriers for newcomers and for an exchange of new results and ideas.

Main Topics:
- Characterization and modeling of complex networks;
- Socio-economic networks;
- Technological and communication networks;
- Biological and ecological networks.

This activity is divided into two parts, the first week being a School in which established results in networks will be presented by the Lecturers and the second week, a Workshop to discuss present problems in economical, biological and technological networks. The Organizing Committee promote a call for contributed talks: please send applications, with title and abstract of the proposed talk, only by email to G. Bianconi: gbiancon@ictp.trieste.it no later than 28 February 2005.

Categories (tags):

Blogging	blogging
Metadata	metadata
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

HTML tag A gets a new attribute: nofollow

I read on News.com that Google is promoting a new attribute for the html tag A for preventing comment spam.
Example: Visit my <a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">discount pharmaceuticals</a> site.
Google will not follow such a link (because of the nofollow attribute) and hence the linked site will not get Pagerank. This should give less incentives to blogspammers in automatically commenting your blog with spam messagges. I think it will not work but this is just a try for tacking spam and hence worthwhile.
What is more interesting is the "decentralized" evolution of (HTML) language. The new attribute is just a proposal from Google to extend a standard language but Google has a so high reputation that many people will follow this suggestion and this means Google has the power to change HTML language. Technorati did something similar proposing rel="tag" just few days ago. Technorati proposed also VoteLink with rel="vote-for" and rel="vote-against" and XFN with rel="friend met" and others relationships-related tags.
Actually everyone can propose a change in HTML language (or whatever language/protocol) but it is of course difficult to have it accepted by a significant number of players/content creators.
It will also be interesting to see if this language evolution will produce different linking behaviours.

Categories (tags):

Copyright	copyright
PhD	phd
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Reputation and Trust class

I would love to attend the Reputation and Trust class of Understanding Online Interaction course by david wiley! It seems he always writes down a short funny story for introducing the weekly topic (and the assignment...). I might borrow the idea if I'll ever teach a class. Unluckly, from Italy, Utah is a bit too far away.
And since he releases the content of his blog under a Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike license and i do the same for content of this blog, I happily and legally post here all his post, of course giving credit.

Reputation and Trust

B. Have you ever bought anything from Amazon.com?
A. Sure.
B. And you felt comfortable giving them your credit card information because...
A. [incredulously] Because they're Amazon.com!
B. But what about before they were "Amazon.com"?
A. Are you going to talk about walking uphill both ways through deep snow?
B. No, no. That would take us in the wrong direction. [thinking] How about Ebay? Ever buy anything from Ebay?
A. Sure.
B. [with delight] A ha! Caught you in my little trap! You've actually never bought anything *from* Ebay. You've bought things from sellers who used Ebay as a front for their goods.
A. [unimpressed] Fair enough.

B. I understand that you feel comfortable giving your money to Amazon.com, but why are you comfortable giving it to jimbob-roadkill-03?

A. Ok. I'm off to think.

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Using social software for good: car pooling

Paul Resnick is researching on "ride sharing services that dynamically match riders with rides". Read the very interesting and clear SocioTechnical Support for Ride Sharing scenario document. The idea is to make car pooling easier using ICT. If your interests contain trust, recommender systems and making the earth a better place, you should definitely read the paper. Maybe I'll try to put up a project and submit to the local government, there was a car pooling project in Trento but it seems dead. Contact me if you are interested! [My impression is that often research does not produce useful and real benefit for society, this is a case in which we can put our brain activity for creating something useful and that can make a difference].

Excerpt from SocioTechnical Support for Ride Sharing by Paul Resnick, Associate Professor University of Michigan, School of Information

I. Intro/Overview
In America, there is tremendous unused transportation capacity in the form of unoccupied seats in private vehicles. Not only would filling some of those seats reduce smog, congestion, and fuel consumption, but it also could create opportunities for increasing local social capital. The major barriers to ride sharing include coordination of routes and schedules, safety risks, social discomfort with sharing what are currently private spaces, and an imbalance of costs and benefits among the affected parties. Despite these barriers, ride sharing does occur, both in the form of recurring carpools and van pools. According to one estimate, more than twice as many people in America share a ride to work in a private vehicle as use public transportation to get there [ref.] In a few cities, there is even instant ride sharing among strangers. Emerging changes in the technology infrastructure of our society may soon make it possible to reduce some of the barriers that have limited the appeal of instant ride sharing. The first change is the widespread deployment of cell phones and other mobile communication devices, with the prospect that they soon be integrated with a position-sensing infrastructure. The second is advances in computational power that may allow for dynamic route matching of drivers and riders. The third is the development of reputation systems on the Internet for maintaining trust among strangers. Research is need on how to leverage these developments to create a SocioTechnical infrastructure for instant ride sharing.

II. Scenario
Janine is new to instant ride-sharing. She is twenty-five and single. She s trying to save money and besides, it s such a hassle to park at the hospital where she works as a research assistant administering clinical trials. She sometimes stays late at work, so she never joined a carpool, but she s decided to try the new Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti instant carpool system. She was a little worried about taking rides with strange men, so she set her profile to only accept rides from women, or from men who had a history of giving at least 10 previous rides without any complaints from riders. She logs onto the website and enters her address and her destination address. She finds that if she walks only to the corner of her current block, she ll have to wait an average of 15 minutes to get a ride, and sometimes much longer, but if she walks two blocks further, to a main street, she can usually get a ride within 3 minutes. She decides to walk the two blocks. This first morning, she s kind of curious about what kind of person picks up riders, so she checks off the box that indicates she s willing to converse the driver.
She s still a little nervous, so she doesn t allow any of her personal information (name, address, or interests) to be revealed to the driver. She s talked to other people who found people to play music with or got a ride all the way home by revealing some information, but she s decided to wait and see how the whole system works first. As she walks out the door, she calls the number she had pre-programmed into her cell phone. The system tracks her progress as she walks to the main street and tells her that a blue Toyota Matrix is just three blocks away and that she should hold up her instant ride-share sign. It gives her a code that she s supposed to say to the driver, and a code that the driver is supposed to say to her. Sure enough, the car pulls up. The driver is a forty-something woman, smartly dressed with a white lab coat on the passenger seat. They exchange codes and Janine jumps in the back. The driver asks Janine what she does at the hospital and soon they discover that the driver and Janine s boss are good friends from way back, and tells a humorous story about her boss when he was first getting started in medical research. As they pull into a choice parking space at the hospital parking lot, reserved for multiple occupant vehicles, the driver smiles and says, You saved me 5 minutes driving around and around in this lot. Thanks. Maybe I ll take you again some time, but my schedule s very irregular so I m not sure when. Thank you! says Janine as they walk off in different directions. As she walks away, she calls the ride sharing system again from her cell phone and presses a button to indicate that she arrived safely, that she would be happy to ride with that driver again, and that she recommends her to other passengers.

[/end of Excerpt]

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

CiteULike: A free online service to organize your academic papers

[I'll write something about my trip in Israel later on, as time permits]
I just found on HubLog an online service I was really waiting for: CiteULike (a prototype service to manage your personal library of academic papers). When you are logged in and visiting a page related to a paper, you can post that paper to your online library using a bookmarklet. In doing so, you can also specify tags, a list of keywords you'd like to associate with this article (a la del.icio.us and flickr) and optional notes. The service is very similar to del.icio.us (simple, tag-powered and social), but precisely tailored for academic papers. You can also see all the papers tagged under a certain tag (for example networks). Cool!

You can see your library (see mine), and see which other users are reading the papers you find interesting. The about page tells you what is coming soon. I think that "exporting those data in semantic web formats" and "opening the API" can be interesting additions to the list. This would be great for creating Trust-aware Recommender System tailored for researchers.
The big problem I see is that only papers in (PubMed, HubMed, JSTOR, arxiv, IngentaConnect) can be added for now. Most of the papers I'm interested in are not stored on those online repositories.
I wish it would be possible to add Citeseer (I'm involved in a project whose goal is to relaunch citeseer), eprints archives and Springler (see my last paper page on Springler for a typical paper page).
I'd like also to be able to keep some blog posts (not published) in my online library and papers that researchers keep in their homepages: using the URL as key for the "paper" could do the work but this will make the site just as del.icio.us is now and I think this is not the goal of the online service. Maybe it would make sense to introduce two levels of papers: certified (by some recognized authority such as PubMed) and uncertified (such as my papers I keep on my blog) but I'm not sure this is a good idea.

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Travelling to Cyprus and Israel

I'm at Coopis 2004 right now (in Agia Napa, Cyprus) and next week I'll move to Jerusalem in order to meet Zvi and other people of the Multiagent Systems Research Group of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I'll be back in my office on November 9.
I was hoping to do a lot of work during the coopis conference but the wireless network is not working very well and so expect few or no blogging at all.
I almost forgot to say that I'm presenting "Trust-aware Collaborative Filtering for Recommender Systems" (find it under papers section). Check it out if you are interested in Recommender Systems and Trust.

Categories (tags):

Trust and Reputation

trust_and_reputation

Past week in Fribourg

I've spent the past week (21-24/10/2004) in Fribourg (Switzerland) working and discussing with Hassan Masum. I was guest of the Theoretical Physics Department of the University of Fribourg, precisely of the Interdisciplinary group leaded by Prof. Zhang. They apply methods and tools of Theoretical Physics (Statistical Mechanics, Probability Calculus ecc.) to other fields of research, namely economics, game theory, sociology or biology.
Hassan and Prof. Zhang are writing a book on Reputation Society. To get an idea of the topics you might want to have a look at their Manifesto for the Reputation Society.
We had 4 days of very interesting discussions. Perhaps they were not very focused (this is typical of me, I must admit) but we were free to jump from future economics systems to copyright and intellectual property issues, from emergent democracy to computation trust systems, from collaborative filtering to religion, from recommender systems to privacy, from ... We were annotating issues in this wiki page and from it you can have an idea of the scope of our discussions.

Besides from research, I had excellent dinners (fundue [swiss melted cheese] and rosti') and excellent chocolate. Moreover, in those days, there were 3 PhD defenses and following parties and this means I definitely ate too much.
I hope to meet Hassan and the other guys soon and in the meantime I suggest you to be prepared for the their forthcoming book: Reputation Society (yes, I suggested to Hassam to release it under a Creative Commons licence; Developing Nations CC might be an interesting option).

Categories (tags):

FOAF	foaf
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

FOAF file updated

I updated my FOAF file based on the new <foaf:knows> relationships I collected at the FOAF workshop. I took as an example the perfect Morten's FOAF file.
Want to know if you are one of my friends? Check my FOAF file or analyze it via Semaview applet or via Foafspace (Foafspace graph applet does not work in my Firefox) or via FoafExplorer or via eikeon web view. Are there other tools that render a FOAF file?
I have encoded in it also some trust relationships and submitted to Trust and Reputation in Web Based Social Networks project. Why don't you do the same?

Categories (tags):

FOAF	foaf
PhD	phd
Semantic web	semantic_web
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

(Late) report on FOAF workshop

The FOAF workshop in Galway was almost 20 days ago, so the following report is a little bit late. Hope it can be useful at least as an historical memory.
It was fantastic to meet in flesh many people I just learnt to appreciate through their blogs. Many of the papers were very interesting. I especially like the idea of "Semantic cookies" (you keep your profile [as FOAF file] in a cookie and, with some trick, you give access to every site to it, sites can read it and give you a personalized experience) and "Bootstrapping the FOAF-Web: An Experiment in Social Network Mining" by Peter Mika (the idea is to use Google to infer social relationships among people). And there was also my paper of course. The presentation was so and so, I think I try to put too many concepts for a 15 minutes presentation. The only stuff I liked was the subtitle I wrote at the last second on the first slide: "Moleskiing: Climbing the peaks of FOAF".
Almost half of the workshop was devoted to very interesting Breakout sessions.

They were self-organized sessions where everyone was free to propose a topic (writing it on a paper on the wall) and everyone was free to join any of the sessions. Then based on numbers of interested people and topics, organizers were trying to suggest putting together different sections, if needed. I guess the FOAF and Trust session should have interested me but I was busy creating the presentation I gave the day after and I miss almost all of it (remind for myself: always prepare slides before conference!)
Something very thrilling was also the use of a backchannel on IRC. Many of us were connected to the Internet via WiFI during the talks and we were discussing, adding links, writing down talks. It was the first time I was using such a parallel real-time discussion space and I seldom use IRC so it was a strange and new experience for me, a kind of "augmented" conference. And it was strange to read the IRC log of what was said on the IRC channel #foaf during my presentation.
I met very interesting people. In the picture you can see Marc Canter moving around data, as he said). Marc is really as you could imagine him from his blog, he really says "coolio" and the lesson he gave us about how to deal with venture capitalists in front of a Guinness (picture) was very insightful, or maybe it was just the Guinness I don't remember... his foafnet effort is really worthwhile, check it and contribute to it as you can.
Meeting who began all this "I want my data back" movement was ipercool as well: Libby Miller and Dan Brickley (creator of the first version of FOAF format) are our real FOAF queen and king. You can check my pictures of the workshop or find more of them tagged as #foaf-galway on del.icio.us.
Moreover, now that I have some real <foaf:knows> relations I promise I'll update very soon my FOAF file.
I also got 2 t-shirts so the goal I chose for the workshop was partially accomplished
Last thing I want to mention is: "never go to a restaurant in Galway!". I spent 35 + 42 +65 euros for the dinner. Every time (but the second dinner in the castle) it was kind of self-organized. Of course the goal of a workshop is to stay with other people and discuss, share ideas so going back to the hostel or eat something alone in some very cheap place was not an option but next time I'll be more reactive and suggest to everyone to go to cheaper places. The problem was that I was paying the workshop with my money and so almost 150 euros for 3 dinners were really too much for me! However I should mention that lunches were kindly offered by the DERI institute and that the hostel I found (sleepzone) was cheap enough (15 euros per night) and with free internet connection (8 computer with RedHat!) and free wireless connection to Internet as well.
All considered, it was a great workshop and I had fantastic time.

Categories (tags):

FOAF	foaf
PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Paper accepted for Coopis --> looking for cheap place in Cyprus (through 2 degrees of separation)

Good news: my paper "Trust-aware Collaborative Filtering for Recommender Systems" got accepted for Coopis2004.
Bad news: the conference is hyper-expensive.
So I'm looking for hyper-cheap (possibly free) hospitality in Larnaca, Cyprus, from 25 Oct to 29 Oct 2004. I checked on couchsurfing (a site where people offers ospitality in their houses and a super-cool YASN [yes, you can express your friends list]) but I found none in Cyprus.
If we take for true the six degree of separation theorem, I should be connected to everyone in Cyprus by only six degrees of separation. So I guess there should be at least some cypriots in my friends of friends set, now i only need to find one of the connecting friends. So if you know someone in Cyprus, please become my friend and close the circuit (and don't forget to write down the path from me to the cypriot host in the comments below). Thanks.

Categories (tags):

Emergent Democracy	emergent_democracy
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Manifesto for the Reputation Society

I trust enough Hassan Masum that I'm recommending his new article Manifesto for the Reputation Society (written with Yi–Cheng Zhang) even if I didn't have time yet to read it. It is published on FirstMonday, a very interesting online journal. I'm recommending it also because it cites a paper of mine, so I guess I get back some reputation as well
Too bad the content on FirstMonday is not released under a Creative Commons licence.

The paper got cited online on BoingBoing, SmartMobs, Many2Many, CommonCraft, MemeStreams and, I guess, much more sites.

Categories (tags):

FOAF	foaf
PhD	phd
Semantic web	semantic_web
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Workshops Committees

I'm writing a paper for Coopis2004 and have not too much time to blog. By the way, I'm in committee of 2 very interesting workshops:
- Trust, Security, and Reputation on the Semantic Web (held at the 3rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) from 7-11 November, 2004 in Hiroshima, Japan.)
Deadline for Submissions: July 16, 2004
- Trust, Recommendations, Evidence and other Collaboration Know-how (TRECK) Track (track of the 20th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Santa Fe, New Mexico, March 13 -17, 2005)
Deadline for Submissions: Sept. 3, 2004

You are of course invited to submit challenging and innovative ideas!
I guess I should also update our wiki list of trust related conferences. In the meantime I ping http://topicexchange.com/t/calls_for_papers/

Categories (tags):

Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

KnoBot

KnoBot [UPDATE: the link is often broken. the knobot page on Sourceforge is always up (thanks Zbigniew)]- An agent for decentralised knowledge exchange :KnoBot combines semantic web technology with a P2P design to build a trust based decentralised system for information selection and discovery.
I should check it better but looks a lot like what I want to do for my PhD.
On KnoBot news I found a similar and interesting project: the Matrix Public Network project.
Both ot the project have running code, so we can try them out.

Categories (tags):

Free software	free_software
PhD	phd
Programming	programming
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Jung (Java Universal Network/Graph Framework)

For my studies on trust metrics, I need to code trust metrics. I was looking for a Java package for modeling, analysis, and visualization of graphs (possibly weighted and directed). I tried many of them (see below) but I found a wonderful one!
Java Universal Network/Graph Framework hosted on SourceForge so open source under a BSD licence (javadoc).
JUNG — the Java Universal Network/Graph Framework--is a software library that provides a common and extendible language for the modeling, analysis, and visualization of data that can be represented as a graph or network. It is written in Java, which allows JUNG-based applications to make use of the extensive built-in capabilities of the Java API, as well as those of other existing third-party Java libraries.
The current distribution of JUNG includes implementations of a number of algorithms from graph theory, data mining, and social network analysis, such as routines for clustering, decomposition, optimization, random graph generation, statistical analysis, and calculation of network distances (Dijkstra Shortest Path), flows, and importance measures (centrality, PageRank, HITS, Random Walk, etc.).
JUNG also provides a visualization framework that makes it easy to construct tools for the interactive exploration of network data. Users can use one of the layout algorithms provided, or use the framework to create their own custom layouts. In addition, filtering mechanisms are provided which allow users to focus their attention, or their algorithms, on specific portions of the graph.

If you don't trust me, you can try the Ranking Demo or the other demos.

It is of course an evolving project, I already wrote some code to draw arrows and to label edges with weights and I'm trying to integrate it. I plan to code some of these trust metrics. JUNG is maintained by some great PhD students.

Other packages I tried and didn't fit my needs: JGraphT (visualizable with Jgraph), JGraph, jdigraph, The Data Structures Library in Java.

Other packages I quickly analyzed without downloading them and trying them and not meeting my needs either (especially because focusing only on graph visualization): Graph Foundation Classes for Java (It is by IBM but it is retired and no longer available), OpenJGraph - Java Graph and Graph Drawing Project, Touchgraph (wonderful for visual interaction with drawn graphs), Grappa (A Java GRAPh PAckage), JGraphEd, Graph Editing Framework, GVF - The Graph Visualization Framework, Graph Mapper, VGJ, Visualizing Graphs with Java

Many of these packages (and some more) can be found searching graph on java-channel.org

Categories (tags):

Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Cai Ziegler

During the past week I was in Oxford for the 2nd Trust Management Conference. The presentation (pdf) (sxi) of my paper went well.
Most of the participants were concerned with privacy and the problem of setting up a secure environment for virtual organizations (business basically). I am not too much interested in this topic that is basically agreeing with Microsoft, IBM and HP (that were present with some representatives) about standards for the trust management processes, often reduced to simple access control lists.

Instead I was very happy to meet Cai Ziegler. Cai is working on topics very similar to my interests. But it is doing more (his scope on semantic web recommender systems is broader, since he also takes into account taxonomies), better (its English is simply wonderful) and faster (he is still in his first year of PhD). Can I at least say I'm humble?

Check his publications:
Analyzing Correlation Between Trust and User Similarity in Online Communities,
Spreading Activation Models for Trust Propagation,
Semantic Web Recommender Systems,
Trust Models for Expertise Discovery in Social Networks.
I will try to convince him to start blogging. It would be a great injection of inspiring thoughts for all the blogosphere!

Categories (tags):

Trust and Reputation

trust_and_reputation

Soft Trust and Hard Trust

In the academic world there is often confusion about the concept of trust. Or better the same world "trust" has two different meanings. From now on, I'll try to use (and push) these 2 different words for the 2 different concepts: Soft Trust and Hard Trust.

Hard trust refers to authentication of resources and has to do with digital signature and public key cryptography.
Soft Trust refers to interpersonal relationships.

Hard Trust is involved in "I trust the person who phoned/mailed me was Alice". It means I'm certain about her identity.
Soft Trust is involved in "I trust Alice to help me when I'm in trouble" or "I trust the judgements of Alice about movies". It involves a much more human sense.

Ok, these definitions are not very precise I agree. You can help me by editing them on the Trust metrics Wiki: Soft Trust, Hard Trust.

I think this concept are well explained in the introduction of Trust Networks on the Semantic.
"Trust" is a word that has come to have several very specific definitions on the Semantic Web. Much research has focused on authentication of resources, including work on digital signatures and public keys. Confidence in the source or author of a document is important, but trust, in this sense, ignores many important points. Just because a person can confirm the source of documents does not have any explicit implication about trusting the content of those documents. This project addresses trust as credibility or reliability in a much more human sense. It opens up the door for questions like how much credence should I give to what this person says about a given topic, and based on what my friends say, how much should I trust this new person?"

Categories (tags):

Blogging	blogging
FOAF	foaf
Peer to peer	peer_to_peer
PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

PhD Research Proposal: Trust-aware Decentralized Recommender Systems

I realised today I didn't write yet an entry about my PhD Research Proposal "Trust-aware Decentralized Recommender Systems" (TaDRS).
So here it is the PDF file. If you have any comment or criticism, I'll be happy to hear from you.
The PhD research proposal is a little bit outdated (29th May 2003) but I didn't have a blog at that time. Enjoy and let me know what you think.

UPDATE:
Abstract
This PhD thesis addresses the following problem: exploiting of trust information in order to enhance the accuracy and the user acceptance of current Recommender Systems (RS). RSs suggest to users items they will probably like. Up to now, current RSs mainly generate recommendations based on users' opinions on items. Nowadays, with the growth of online communities, e-marketplaces, weblogs and peer-to-peer networks, a new kind of information is available: rating expressed by an user on another user (trust). We analyze current RS weaknesses and show how use of trust can overcome them. We proposed a solution about exploiting of trust into RSs and underline what experiments we will run in order to test our solution.

Categories (tags):

Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Reviewr

Reviewr "ties into the API exposed by Ludicorp's [...] new social software application, Flickr and hooks it up to the API exposed by Amazon. The point is that using Reviewr allows you to search for reviews of products by people you know and trust." (via Hublog)
Interestingly, as I was proposing in a previous post, Friendr limits the number of contacts an user can have. It was not a totally dumb idea after all...
Check the services already created using the API and the services documentation (1, 2)

Categories (tags):

Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Best social software? Orkut? No, Epinions.

I tend to agree with Danah about Orkut. In particular, I think Orkut does not model the real social network of an user. I speak of Orkut because is the buzz of the moment and its being in affiliation with google makes it the big expectation. But the same arguments could be used against many of the social network applications listed on socialsoftwareweblog.

The question is: "Why should I not accept an invitation from a totally unknown user that pretends to be my friend?" There is no negative consequence in adding someone as friend.

For instance, I pretended to be friend of Joi and Marc and Danah and Dina. And, even if they don't know me, they added me to their friends list. I could be the worst spammer on earth but they didn't care.
I did the same with people asking for an invitation in these comments. Because adding someone as friend does not have nay negative consequence.

Compare this with Epinions.com. In Epinions you can express your web of trust, a network of reviewers whose reviews and ratings you have consistently found to be valuable (from Epinions FAQ).
First of all, trust relationship is not symmetric. If I state that I trust Richard Stallman, this does not mean that he should trust me or needs to approve this. I'm only saying to the system that I'd like to see the items that Richard Stallman likes. [As a side point, it is worth note that trust relationship should have context. For instance, I can trust Richard for philosophy and free software projects but not for fashion or hair cut. This is not true, I'd love to have all his hair ]
Moreover, your experience on Epinions.com is influenced by your web of trust. If you add "terrorist_user" to your web of trust, you will probably receive recommendations about bombs and flight simulator software but this is totally possible and acceptable. In this sense, you have incentives in keeping your friend list under control (this could also mean short) and in adding only really trusted and like-minded friends.

In the end of friendster, Dick reported how two guys in a shower room were competing about who had a larger social network on Friendster ("I'm now connected to 31,000 people", at which point the second guy chuckled and said "Dude, you think that's cool? I'm connected to 420,000 people"). Dick notes how the all point of becoming friends has become having as many "friends" as possible (or simply, more friends than you, that is the same). But being connected to everyone means being connected to noone!

So what are the possible solutions?
1) first define well if in your "community site" the relationship you want to model is symmetric (A states that B is her friend and B has to accept and confirm (or not) the invitation of A) or not symmetric (A can be friend of B while B is not friend of A; in this case the term "friend" is probably not semantically correct).
2) (especially if you want to model a symmetric social relationship) introduce some (possibly) negative consequences for adding someone in your friend list so that an user has the incentive to not add just every perfect unknown user and keeping her friend list under control.
3) limit the maximum number of friends you can have in your friend lists. I know this is kind of strange ("Who are you for telling me how many friends I could have?") but, introducing scarcity, you are giving a value to friend acceptations. Instead, if the number of friends you can add is infinite, then there is no incentive in denying a perfect unknown the rank of friend. This has a lot to do with the economy of links and reputation economies (whuffie).
Maybe this number can be increased very slowly as long as an user keeps using the site but I'm not satisfact with this idea because I can create a bot that "uses the site" for me and lets me gain additional undeserved priviledges.
4) friendship could become a fine-grained relationship, i.e. you can add a value to your relationship, so that I can be friend of my mom as 1 and friend of my uncle as 0.6. In this case you can limit the total amount of friend currency you can spend, a sort of FriendShares (as in BlogShares.com?)
5) I think metaster () is something we really need to think about.
Perhaps we just need a web service for managing relationships on the social networking sites. A meta Friendster; Micrsoft Passport for social networking. We could call it, oh, I don't know, Metaster...or Sterster. Sign in to all the sites with one username and password. Invite metafriends to all the sites with a single click. Manage a single profile across all the sites.
6) [what about you adding the 6th possible solution in the comments, my friend? ]
n+1) [of course there is always space for one more comment ... and one more friend ...]

I know it seems that I propose to monetize friendship but I only want to introduce incentives in having your friend list corresponding to reality.
Basically we need to break the assumption that having a large social network (even if not real) is better that having a small social network (but real). And also that having Joi Ito (or many power-bloggers) in your social network means you are more a blogroll-link deserver, i.e. a more interesting person. Summaryzing, if my relationship with Joi Ito is not real, Joi Ito should have some incentives in not adding me in his friend list.
Then you could ask: "what real means in our digital world?"
I have a perfect answer to this question but it doesn't fit in the margin of this page.

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Other papers analyzing Epinions.com web of trust

Since Seb ha cited my paper as epinions empirical analysis paper, I'd like to mention other 2 papers that analyze epinions web of trust:

the already commented Trust Management for the Semantic Web and the new Propagation of Trust and Distrust.
As a side point, note that we collected datasets of different dimensions. I collected only 49.290 Epinions users because I was following only "this user trusts X" links. Richardons et al. collected 75.000 users (but used only 5.000 of them); I think they followed also "this user is trusted by" links. Guha et al. had access to the real dataset of Epinions which consists of 130.000 users. Note also that Guha et al. had access also to the web of distrust (a sort of black list) while this information is not available on Epinions.com and hence not downloadable.

This post also appears on channel social software

Categories (tags):

Copyright	copyright
FOAF	foaf
Social Software	social_software
Songs	songs
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

SongBuddy and Decentralized Music

Yes, YASN (Yet Another Social Network). Have you noticed that Add as a friend is the most common link in websites created these days?
Anyway, this time we have SongBuddy. Social software + online music: an explosive pair!
SongBuddy is a new way to find music that's already available on the Internet. By finding songs on bands' and labels' sites and sharing the address of those songs with your friends, you can explore music you'll love that you wouldn't hear anywhere else. So sign up, make some friends and list some music. You won't even need to install any software, SongBuddy works with your current media player.
Here my profile.
SongBuddy also produces a FOAF file representing your friends and uses the MusicBrainz RDF namespace.
The term of service is also very good!
Unless otherwise specified, all content on this site is copyright SongBuddy LLC. You may use the data on this site under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0 Creative Commons license.

Another similar site worth mentioning is Webjay by Lucas Gonze but I haven't had time to try it yet.

This post also appears on the open channel playlistlogging

Categories (tags):

Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Trust related conferences wiki

I collected some conferences related to Trust and Reputation, Social Networks and Recommender systems.
The wiki page is at http://moloko.itc.it/trustmetricswiki/moin.cgi/TrustRelatedConferences and of course you are invited to edit it adding new conferences or moving old conferences.

Categories (tags):

Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Paper accepted! Oxford I'm coming...

The paper I wrote got accepted! WOW!
It seems I'll be in St. Anne's College, Oxford City from 29 March to 1 April 2004 for the Second International Conference on Trust Management.
Next time I must submit to a conference to be held in Hawaii or Virgin Islands. I deserve some sea and beach.

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Paper submitted to iTrust2004

I submitted my paper Using Trust in Recommender Systems: an Experimental Analysis to the Second International Conference on Trust Management 2004.
You can read the PDF file or the HTML version (by latex2html).

Abstract:
Recommender systems (RS) have been used for suggesting items (movies, books, songs, etc.) that users might like. RSs compute a user similarity between users and use this as a weight for the users' ratings. However they have many weaknesses, such as sparseness, cold start and vulnerability to attacks. We assert that these weaknesses can be alleviated using a Trust-aware system that takes into account the ``web of trust'' provided by every user.
Specifically, we analyze data from the popular Internet web site epinions.com. The dataset consists of 49290 users who expressed reviews (with rating) on items and explicitly specified their web of trust, i.e. users whose reviews they have consistently found to be valuable.
We show that users have usually few items rated in commons. For this reason, the classic RS technique is often ineffective and is not able to compute a user similarity weight for many of the users. Instead exploiting the webs of trust, it is possible to propagate trust and infer an additional weight for other users. We show how this quantity can be computed against a larger number of users.

Categories (tags):

Trust and Reputation

trust_and_reputation

Corante: Social Capital as Credit

Very interesting article about Many-to-Many: Social Capital as Credit

But the point is you can’t monetize social capital in aggregate, because it operates at a micro-scale. (...) The value of social capital is local, but its impact is global.

Categories (tags):

Blogging	blogging
CoCoA	cocoa
Movable Type	movable_type
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Semantic web	semantic_web
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

blam! rocks

I've just used blam! in this review of Revolution OS.
Basically blam! add some semantic information to your blog entry when this is a review. The semantic information can be understood by a computer program so that it will be possible to, for example, aggregating all the reviews about a certain book or movie.
Read about OpenReviews and their possible uses from Accordion Guy.
I'm planning to do something similar for my project CoCoA.

The semantic format for reviews is RVW (Review Module for RSS 2.0), created by Alf Eaton. Read an explanation of RVW from Corante.

The RVW specification is a module extension to the RSS 2.0 syndication format. RVW is intended to allow machine-readable reviews to be integrated into an RSS feed, thus allowing reviews to be automatically compiled from distributed sources. In other words, you can write book, restaurant, movie, product, etc. reviews inside your own website, while allowing them to be used by Amazon or other review aggregators.

There should be more than enough RVW metadata out there floating around at this point. The next step is for someone to build a decent aggregator that collates reviews of a particular topic or two. Because of RVS, creating aggregate rating scores and summarizing opinions should be very straightforward. It's really not in the best interests of Amazon, epinions and the like to lose control of their review content, but RVW makes controlling review content impossible in the long term. Anyone got some pull at the Google skunkworks?

Blogware supports the new format and there is also a RVW plugin for Movable Type but I don't understand how it works.

Seb likes RVW and also point out how this semantic information could be used to generate personalized recommendations.

In the case of item types that describe reviews, overall average ratings on any particular product are easy to look up. However, if you choose to provide a description of your personal web of trust to those interfaces (think of blogrolls as a proto-example), you can efficiently get a sense of what your tribe of like-minded individuals thinks of that product. It's the microblogosphere idea again - look up Recommender systems and the microblogosphere for more.

This is essentially what my PhD Research Proposal: Trust-aware Decentralized Recommender Systems is about.

Categories (tags):

Peer to peer	peer_to_peer
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Trust Management for the Semantic Web

I've just finished reading a very interesting paper Trust Management for the Semantic Web by Matthew Richardson, Rakesh Agrawal, and Pedro Domingos.

There are a lot of interesting ideas and theoretical analysis about trust and propagation (it defines or explains some concepts such as path algebra, generalized transitive closure algorithms, well-formed decomposable path problems, global invariance, cycle-indifferent combination function, ...).

Among the many interesting ideas, I liked a lot the following simple idea partially inspired by pagerank (I think).
Let me give you first a short explanation of how pagerank (one of the algorythms behind google.com) works.
PageRank ideally performs a random walk from webpage to webpage following a link at random and remembering how many times it passed in a web page; this number is the pagerank of the web page. Of course a random surfer will pass in Yahoo.com more often than in my homepage and in fact yahoo.com will have a high pagerank while my homepage will have a lower one.
At every step there is a (small) probability to jump to a random web page, so that the random surfer does not get stuck in a clique of highly connected web pages and every webpage has some chance to be taken into account.
It is proven that the random surfer can start in whatever webpage and the final pageranks will be the same; only the time needed to converge will be different.
If the description was not clear, you can read the the explanation given by Google or by Webworkshop.net or by Ian Rogers. Otherwise you can read the original paper or you can even construct a web graph and try pagerank.

So the authors of Trust Management for the Semantic Web, similarly, propose:
Imagine a random knowledge-surfer hopping from user to user in search of beliefs. At each step, the surfer probabilistically selects a neighbor to jump to according to the current user's distribution of trusts. (...) Further, choosing which user to jump to, the random surfer will, with probability delta (in [0,1]) ignore the trusts and instead jump directly back to the original user, i.

So here the very simple idea:
the random surfer starts in i (the user who want to predict how much she should trust other unknown peers), then it jumps to other users depending on the trust distribution (following with higher probability, higher trust links).
But (and here there is the difference!) with probability delta it will not follow a trust link but instead jump directly to i (our starting point user).
In this way you can choose how much you want the opinion of i taken into account and basically how much the random surfer is allowed to go far away from i!!!

As in the paper about pagerank, there is also the probabilistic interpretation and the interpretation as operations on matrixes.
Actually on pagerank, doing the random walk is equivalent to compute the first eigenvector of the link matrix.

Ok, if you trust me, you should read it!

Categories (tags):

Blogging	blogging
FOAF	foaf
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

The Technology of the Year: Social Network Applications

There is a very interesting article on Business, Business 2.0. The Technology of the Year: Social Network Applications

Social networking applies the power of the network to one of the most fundamental problems in all of business: finding the person who has the critical information you need, right when you need it.

There are all the cool companies playing the game: SixDegrees, Spoke, VisiblePath, Friendster, RyzeIn, ZeroDegrees. There is a mention about CIA interested in using these ideas and the article finishes with an important concern about privacy.

Categories (tags):

FOAF	foaf
Peer to peer	peer_to_peer
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

My Erdos Number

My Erdös Number is 5.

Erdös numbers have been a part of the folklore of mathematicians throughout the world for many years.
Essentially, the Erdos Number Project studies research collaboration among mathematicians.

If you are curious about your Erdos number, you can compute it.

If you have written a paper with Paul Erdös, you have Erdos Number 1. If you are a coauthor of a coauthor, you have Erdös number 2. And so on.

Here is the mail I receive when I asked to compute my Erdos Number.

Erdos number
Your Erdos number is at most 5, via this path of length 4 to Aguzzoli:

S. Aguzzoli, P.Avesani, P.Massa
"Collaborative Case-Based Recommendation Systems"
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence
Volume 2416, 2002.

Categories (tags):

Maryland	maryland
Peer to peer	peer_to_peer
PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

University of Maryland

As part of my PhD program, I'll spend the next 3 months at the University of Maryland. I'll stay here until January 17, 2003.

I also opened up a photo gallery in which I'll post photos taken here.

Categories (tags):

Trust and Reputation

trust_and_reputation

Conference Trust2004

The Second International Conference on Trust Management will take place in the historic city of Oxford, UK, from the 29th March to the 1st of April 2004.
I must send a paper. Deadline: 1 December 2003