Tag Archives: 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!
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Travelling to Cyprus and Israel

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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.

Past week in Fribourg

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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.
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FOAF file updated

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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?

(Late) report on FOAF workshop

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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.
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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.

Manifesto for the Reputation Society

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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.
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Workshops Committees

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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/

KnoBot

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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.

Jung (Java Universal Network/Graph Framework)

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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.
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