Building effective online game websites with knowledge-based trust

Knowledge-based trust is trust that is grounded in knowledge about another party developed through repeated interaction. Knowledge-based trust is especially important for online business environments where there are repeated transactions between fixed pairs of consumers and merchants. Building on previous studies of trust, this paper examines the proposition that players’ knowledge about website characteristics (i.e., security and interface design) and about website outputs (i.e., online game quality and service quality) has an effect on the development of trust in the context of online game websites. The impact of trust on building an effective online game website is also investigated. A conceptual model of knowledge-based trust is tested with questionnaire responses of 253 online game players. Overall, the results indicate that all of these four classes of knowledge engender trust and that trust helps develop effective online game websites.

Trust management towards service-oriented applications

In service-oriented computing (SOC) environments, service clients interact with service providers for services or transactions. From the point view of service clients, the trust status of a service provider is a critical issue to consider, particularly when the service provider is unknown to them. Typically, the trust evaluation is based on the feedback on the service quality provided by service clients. In this paper, we first present a trust management framework that is event-driven and rule-based. In this framework, trust computation is based on formulae. But rules are defined to determine which formula to use and what arguments to use, according to the event occurred during the transaction or service. In addition, we propose some trust evaluation metrics and a formula for trust computation. The formula is designed to be adaptable to different application domains by setting suitable arguments. Particularly, the proposed model addresses the incremental characteristics of trust establishment process. Furthermore, we propose a fuzzy logic based approach for determining reputation ranks that particularly differentiates new service providers and old (long-existing) ones. This is further incentive to new service providers and penalize poor quality services from service providers. Finally, a set of empirical studies has been conducted to study the properties of the proposed approaches, and the method to control the trust changes in both trust increment and decrement cases. The proposed framework is adaptable for different domains and complex trust evaluation systems.

Using trust assumptions with security requirements

Assumptions are frequently made during requirements analysis of a system about the trustworthiness of its various components (including human components). These trust assumptions, whether implicit or explicit, affect the scope of the analysis, derivation of security requirements, and in some cases how functionality is realized. This paper presents trust assumptions in the context of analysis of security requirements. A running example shows how trust assumptions can be used by a requirements engineer to help define and limit the scope of analysis and to document the decisions made during the process. The paper concludes with a case study examining the impact of trust assumptions on software that uses the secure electronic transaction specification.

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An integrative model of trust on IT outsourcing: Examining a bilateral perspective

Trust has been considered a central aspect of successful IT outsourcing. Although a great deal of interest in trust has been described, there are very few theoretical models in the IT outsourcing literature to explain mutual trust, its role, and its impact in IT outsourcing. This study proposes a trust-based relationship research model to assess the perceived IT outsourcing success in terms of (1) mutual trust with its temporal dimension of initial trust and initial distrust, and (2) knowledge sharing with the moderating effect of mutual dependency. This model was then validated and applied in a study involving organizations in Korea. The data was collected and analyzed to understand initial trust, initial distrust, knowledge sharing, and mutual dependency as contributing factors to success in IT outsourcing. The results show that mutual trust between the service receiver and provider is very important for knowledge sharing and outsourcing success, and is affected by the initial perception to each other’s partner at the beginning of the outsourcing process. Interestingly, this study also shows that initial trust is considered a significant factor in the perception of mutual trust from the service receiver’s perspective, but not from the service provider’s viewpoint. The results help extend our understanding of critical success factors in outsourcing success and of different standpoints between the service receiver and provider.

Reputation based friend-to-friend networks

Friend-to-Friend networks are a form of Peer-to-Peer networks that provide anonymity of the users who share data. Turtle is an example of such a network, where a peer only connects to real life friends. In this paper we propose an extension of Turtle for connecting to other nodes based on their reputation. Furthermore, we use trust management to dynamically adjust this reputation based on the honest or malicious behaviour of all connected peers. Using these techniques, a node is able to create links to other nodes and identify possible misbehaving friends. Finally, we present simulation results of a reputation based Turtle Friend-to-Friend network.

Design and implementation of a workflow-based resource broker with information system on computational grids

The grid is a promising infrastructure that can allow scientists and engineers to access resources among geographically distributed environments. Grid computing is a new technology which focuses on aggregating resources (e.g., processor cycles, disk storage, and contents) from a large-scale computing platform. Making grid computing a reality requires a resource broker to manage and monitor available resources. This paper presents a workflow-based resource broker whose main functions are matching available resources with user requests and considering network information statuses during matchmaking in computational grids. The resource broker provides a graphic user interface for accessing available and the appropriate resources via user credentials. This broker uses the Ganglia and NWS tools to monitor resource status and network-related information, respectively. Then we propose a history-based execution time estimation model to predict the execution time of parallel applications, according to previous execution results. The experimental results show that our model can accurately predict the execution time of embarrassingly parallel applications. We also report on using the Globus Toolkit to construct a grid platform called the TIGER project that integrates resources distributed across five universities in Taichung city, Taiwan, where the resource broker was developed.

Interacting with mobile services: an evaluation of camera-phones and visual tags

We present a study of using camera-phones and visual-tags to access mobile services. Firstly, a user-experience study is described in which participants were both observed learning to interact with a prototype mobile service and interviewed about their experiences. Secondly, a pointing-device task is presented in which quantitative data was gathered regarding the speed and accuracy with which participants aimed and clicked on visual-tags using camera-phones. We found that participants’ attitudes to visual-tag-based applications were broadly positive, although they had several important reservations about camera-phone technology more generally. Data from our pointing-device task demonstrated that novice users were able to aim and click on visual-tags quickly (well under 3 s per pointing-device trial on average) and accurately (almost all meeting our defined speed/accuracy tradeoff of 6% error-rate). Based on our findings, design lessons for camera-phone and visual-tag applications are presented.

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Sharing information and building trust through value congruence

This study explores how value congruence contributes to the formation of trust in e-businesses, and how trust and value congruence influence consumers to share personal information. It is hypothesized that the perceived values of organizations regarding moral, social, environmental and political causes can have an effect on the trusting beliefs of e-commerce consumers and their willingness to disclose private personal information. A total of 775 subjects rated their perceived value congruence with organizations, their trusting beliefs, and the types of information they would be willing to disclose. This study finds that value congruence not only plays a role in mediating the trust of consumers for the organizations, but it also has a strong effect on determining their willingness to disclose personal information. In some cases, the influence of value congruence is greater than that of trust, even though trust has been touted in the literature as one of the most important factors in e-commerce. This research expands prior work by using structural equation modeling to test the relative strength of the effect of value congruence on each dimension of trust and the overall trust level, as well as its direct effect on behavioral intentions in terms of information sharing for non-profit and for-profit organizations.

Next generation networking: distributed multimedia information for healthcare

This paper is derived from a keynote address given that the DMS-03 meeting. It chronicles the need and development of next generation networks (NGN) in the United States. Specific organizational examples are derived from the Internet2-Abilene Network. The technical characteristics of a next generation network versus the Internet are discussed. Examples are given from the point of view of the need for a quality of service based network to deliver distributed multimedia healthcare information to the point of need. The concepts of network trust and of a network based scalable information infrastructure for the reliable delivery of distributed multimedia information is also introduced.

The effects of transparency on trust in and acceptance of a content-based art recommender

The increasing availability of (digital) cultural heritage artefacts offers great potential for increased access to art content, but also necessitates tools to help users deal with such abundance of information. User-adaptive art recommender systems aim to present their users with art content tailored to their interests. These systems try to adapt to the user based on feedback from the user on which artworks he or she finds interesting. Users need to be able to depend on the system to competently adapt to their feedback and find the artworks that are most interesting to them. This paper investigates the influence of transparency on user trust in and acceptance of content-based recommender systems. A between-subject experiment (N = 60) evaluated interaction with three versions of a content-based art recommender in the cultural heritage domain. This recommender system provides users with artworks that are of interest to them, based on their ratings of other artworks. Version 1 was not transparent, version 2 explained to the user why a recommendation had been made and version 3 showed a rating of how certain the system was that a recommendation would be of interest to the user. Results show that explaining to the user why a recommendation was made increased acceptance of the recommendations. Trust in the system itself was not improved by transparency. Showing how certain the system was of a recommendation did not influence trust and acceptance. A number of guidelines for design of recommender systems in the cultural heritage domain have been derived from the study’s results.

An interoperable context sensitive model of trust

Although the notion of trust is widely used in secure information systems, very few works attempt to formally define it or reason about it. Moreover, in most works, trust is defined as a binary concept—either an entity is completely trusted or not at all. Absolute trust on an entity requires one to have complete knowledge about the entity. This is rarely the case in real-world applications. Not trusting an entity, on the other hand, prohibits all communications with the entity rendering it useless. In short, treating trust as a binary concept is not acceptable in practice. Consequently, a model is needed that incorporates the notion of different degrees of trust. We propose a model that allows us to formalize trust relationships. The trust relationship between a truster and a trustee is associated with a context and depends on the experience, knowledge, and recommendation that the truster has with respect to the trustee in the given context. We show how our model can measure trust and compare two trust relationships in a given context. Sometimes enough information is not available about a given context to evaluate trust. Towards this end we show how the relationships between different contexts can be captured using a context graph. Formalizing the relationships between contexts allows us to extrapolate values from related contexts to approximate the trust of an entity even when all the information needed to calculate the trust is not available. Finally, we show how the semantic mismatch that arises because of different sources using different context graphs can be resolved and the trust of information obtained from these different sources compared.

The 2007 IEEE CEC simulated car racing competition

This paper describes the simulated car racing competition that was arranged as part of the 2007 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation. Both the game that was used as the domain for the competition, the controllers submitted as entries to the competition and its results are presented. With this paper, we hope to provide some insight into the efficacy of various computational intelligence methods on a well-defined game task, as well as an example of one way of running a competition. In the process, we provide a set of reference results for those who wish to use the simplerace game to benchmark their own algorithms. The paper is co-authored by the organizers and participants of the competition.

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Formalising theories of trust for authentication protocols

This paper discusses a formal approach for establishing theories of trust for authentication systems which can be used to reason about how agent beliefs evolve through time. The goal of an authentication system is to verify and authorise users in order to protect restricted data and information, so trust is a critical issue for authentication systems. After authentication, two principals (people, computers, services) should be entitled to believe that they are communicating with each other and not with intruders. So, it is important to express such beliefs precisely and to capture the reasoning that leads to them. In this paper, we focus on analysis of agent beliefs in dynamic environments using a temporalised belief logic, obtained by adding a temporal logic onto a belief logic. Working through a well-known authentication protocol, namely Kerberos, we discuss how to express principal beliefs involved in authentication protocols and the evolution of those beliefs based on a series of observations of agents as a consequence of communication. Our approach could be used for designing, verifying and implementing authentication protocols.

Multimodal support to group dynamics

The complexity of group dynamics occurring in small group interactions often hinders the performance of teams. The availability of rich multimodal information about what is going on during the meeting makes it possible to explore the possibility of providing support to dysfunctional teams from facilitation to training sessions addressing both the individuals and the group as a whole. A necessary step in this direction is that of capturing and understanding group dynamics. In this paper, we discuss a particular scenario, in which meeting participants receive multimedia feedback on their relational behaviour, as a first step towards increasing self-awareness. We describe the background and the motivation for a coding scheme for annotating meeting recordings partially inspired by the Bales’ Interaction Process Analysis. This coding scheme was aimed at identifying suitable observable behavioural sequences. The study is complemented with an experimental investigation on the acceptability of such a service.

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A resource broker with an efficient network information model on grid environments

This paper describes a resource broker whose main function is to match available resources to user needs. The resource broker provides a uniform interface for accessing available and appropriate resources via user credentials. We also focus on providing approximate measurement models for network-related information using NWS for future scheduling and benchmarking. We first propose a network measurement model for gathering network-related information (including bandwidth, latency, forecasting, error rates, etc.) without generating excessive system overhead. Second, we constructed a grid platform using Globus Toolkit that integrates the resources of five schools in Taichung integrated grid environment resources (TIGER). The resource broker runs on top of TIGER. Therefore, it provides security and current information about available resources and serves as a link to the diverse systems available in the Grid.

Supporting ordering and consistency in a distributed Event Heap for Ubiquitous Computing

The Stanford Event Heap has been shown to provide appropriate support for constructing interactive workspace applications. Given this success it is natural to consider the Event Heap as a platform to support other classes of Ubiquitous Computing applications. In this paper we argue that the distributed, spontaneous nature of these applications places additional demands on the Event Heap that require extensions to both the engineering and API. Suitable extensions are described and their use to support a typical Ubicomp application is discussed.

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An exploratory study for analyzing interactional processes of group discussion: the case of a focus group interview

The purposes of this study are (a) to establish a measurement for evaluating conversational impressions of group discussions, and (b) to make an exploratory investigation on their interactional processes which may affect to form those impressions. The impression rating and factor analysis undertaken first give us four factors concerning conversational impressions of “focus group interviews (FGIs)”: conversational activeness, conversational sequencing, the attitudes of participants and the relationships of participants. In relation to the factors of conversational activeness and conversational sequencing in particular, the microanalysis of four selected topical scenes from our database further shows that the behavior of the moderator and the interviewees is organized not independently but with reference to each other. The study thus emphasizes the importance of the integration of quantitative and qualitative approaches towards human interactions.

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CellTrust: a reputation model for C2C commerce

The improvement of wireless technologies and the increasing spread of mobile phones open new possibilities to perform mobile Customer-to-Customer commercial activities. In this new scenario, where users cannot rely on stable connections, it assumes a great relevance how to trust the counterpart in a transaction and how to avoid that a disconnection, possible in wireless connections, can encourage users to cheat. To tackle these issues we propose a feedback-based reputation mechanism able to detect malicious users better than other state-of-the-art techniques, as shown by the large number of experiments run to measure the accuracy of the compared methods in the most common situations.

Methods for quantitative usability requirements: a case study on the development of the user interface of a mobile phone

Quantitative usability requirements are a critical but challenging, and hence an often neglected aspect of a usability engineering process. A case study is described where quantitative usability requirements played a key role in the development of a new user interface of a mobile phone. Within the practical constraints of the project, existing methods for determining usability requirements and evaluating the extent to which these are met, could not be applied as such, therefore tailored methods had to be developed. These methods and their applications are discussed.

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Protecting business intelligence and customer privacy while outsourcing data mining tasks

Nowadays data mining plays an important role in decision making. Since many organizations do not possess the in-house expertise of data mining, it is beneficial to outsource data mining tasks to external service providers. However, most organizations hesitate to do so due to the concern of loss of business intelligence and customer privacy. In this paper, we present a Bloom filter based solution to enable organizations to outsource their tasks of mining association rules, at the same time, protect their business intelligence and customer privacy. Our approach can achieve high precision in data mining by trading-off the storage requirement. This research was supported by the USA National Science Foundation Grants CCR-0310974 and IIS-0546027.

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