Web Of Trust Research Articles

Matrix Factorization with Explicit Trust and Distrust Side Information for Improved Social Recommendation

With the advent of online social networks, recommender systems have became crucial for the success of many online applications/services due to their significance role in tailoring these applications to user-specific needs or preferences. Despite their increasing popularity, in general, recommender systems suffer from data sparsity and cold-start problems. To alleviate these issues, in recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest in exploiting social information such as trust relations among users along with the rating data to improve the performance of recommender systems. The main motivation for exploiting trust information in the recommendation process stems from the observation that the ideas we are exposed to and the choices we make are significantly influenced by our social context. However, in large user communities, in addition to trust relations, distrust relations also exist between users. For instance, in Epinions, the concepts of personal “web of trust” and personal “block list” allow users to categorize their friends based on the quality of reviews into trusted and distrusted friends, respectively. Hence, it will be interesting to incorporate this new source of information in recommendation as well. In contrast to the incorporation of trust information in recommendation which is thriving, the potential of explicitly incorporating distrust relations is almost unexplored. In this article, we propose a matrix factorization-based model for recommendation in social rating networks that properly incorporates both trust and distrust relationships aiming to improve the quality of recommendations and mitigate the data sparsity and cold-start users issues. Through experiments on the Epinions dataset, we show that our new algorithm outperforms its standard trust-enhanced or distrust-enhanced counterparts with respect to accuracy, thereby demonstrating the positive effect that incorporation of explicit distrust information can have on recommender systems.

Approaches for Web Spam Detection

Spam is a major threat to web security. The web of trust is being abused by the spammers through their ever evolving new tactics for their personal gains. In fact, there is a long chain of spammers who are running huge business campaigns under the web. Spam causes underutilization of search engine resources and creates dissatisfaction among web community. Web Security being a prime challenge for search engines has motivated the researchers in academia and industry to devise new techniques for web spam detection. In this paper we present a comprehensive survey of techniques for detection of web spam and discuss their applicability and performance in various scenarios where they outperformed the others. We have categorized web spam detection with the primary focus on the approaches used for spam detection. The paper also gives the possible directions for future work.

Trusting the Trusted: An Empirical Analysis

INTRODUCTION The approach used for solving the cold start problem in a trust-aware recommender system is to ask a cold start user to select few existing users in the system that they trust. Using the ratings of the items rated by the selected trusted users, recommendations are generated for the cold start user. An implicit assumption made in this solution is that cold start users or users new to the system have knowledge of the existing users in the system. Moreover, even if the cold start user has knowledge of the existing users, it is assumed that he is aware of the ratings given by the existing users to different items. To overcome the shortcomings of the proposed approach, recent research have started focusing on the problem: to whom should the new users connect to? (Victor, Cornelis, De Cock, & Teredesai, 2008). The suggested approach is to identify key figures in the trust network based on their impact on coverage and accuracy of recommendations made and then ask the cold start user to choose few of these users presented before them as trusted users. In this paper, we analyze the trust connections of the cold start users in the dataset from Massa and Avesani (2006b), a real life recommender system dataset, to examine What are the characteristics of those users that cold start users actually trust? The objective of our work is to provide insights on the type of users that should be preferred while creating a list of prospective trusted users to be presented before a cold start user. Our paper first discusses the existing parameters that form the basis of selecting prospective trusted users and the reasoning behind it. We then analyze the set of users trusted by cold start users using four parameters: number of outgoing links, number of incoming links, number of items rated, and a hybrid parameter defined as preference score. Using rank correlation coefficient as the metric we show that in the Epinions dataset (Massa & Avesani, 2006a), users with higher number of incoming links are preferred as trusted users as compared to other three parameters. We also examine which parameter gives the best predictive accuracy when selected as trusted user. Our results show that those cold start users that trust users with high preference scores have the benefit of getting more accurate recommendations. TRUST IN WEB BASED SOCIAL NETWORKS Web based social networks (Boyd & Ellison, 2007; Golbeck, 2005) can be defined as follows: Services that are accessible over the web and allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semipublic profile within a system designed specifically to support social network connections, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) browse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The study of web based social networks (WBSN) primarily focuses on connections between people. Scholars have examined the behavior of people in social network, how connections are formed and their evolution. WBSNs are a source of rich behavioral data. Data in WBSNs is extracted from user profiles and explicitly made connections between users. In WBSNs, much of the products, services, and features are based around social connections. Social connections are based on trust. Trust-aware recommender systems exploit these social connections or trust data as well profile data of users to create intelligent applications that provide personalized recommendations to users in WBSNs that are relevant and trustworthy. Trust is a social phenomenon. As a social concept, the many facets and influences of social trust has been extensively addressed in sociology and social psychology literature. It is a complex notion as a result it has many subtly different definitions. In Luhmann (1979), trust has been described as a tool for complexity reduction. Mayer, Davis and Schoorman (1995), proposed a trust model that is designed to focus on trust in an organizational setting. …

Behavioral Intention Towards E-Government in Malaysia

This study examines an amplified unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) in the context of eGovernment to get a better understanding of users' behaviour towards eGovernment. Two hundred and six respondents (206) participated in the study and the data was analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM). The study revealed that Performance Expectancy, Risk Taking Propensity, Attitude towards Computer and Web Trust dimensions are essential precursor of behavioural intention of Malaysians towards eGovernment. The study further suggests that policy-makers can increase eGovernment usage by creating applications that meets expected demands and needs of the people with provision of trust facilitating environment and security conditioned systems.

InChI – the worldwide chemical structure standard

Progress of the IUPAC InChI/InChIKey project continues to move ahead with many new features and support. A collection of four short videos explaining the InChI project have been produced and are available via the InChI Trust web site. Use of the algorithm has increased over the past year to the point that numerous publications use and refer to InChI. Publicity for the project is good and has resulted in considerable increase in the usage of the InChI algorithm. The Trust web site is now available to the public and is updated regularly. Even CAS now allows for an InChI string to be used as input for a SciFinder search and the Sigma-Aldrich catalogue is InChI searchable. Extensions to the project’s current capabilities, such as InChI for chemical reactions, are being developed by a number of expert, experienced individuals and groups from various areas of chemistry. This poster presentation will describe the current technical state of the InChI algorithm and how the InChI Trust is working to assure the continued support and delivery of the InChI algorithm.

A trust-based architectural framework for collaborative filtering recommender system

Recommender systems have been used to suggest the interesting items such as movies, books and songs according to the choice of users. These systems compute a user similarity among users and use it as a weight for the users’ ratings. However, they have many weaknesses, such as sparseness, cold start and vulnerability to attacks. The traditional recommender system techniques are often ineffective and are not able to compute a user similarity weight for many of the users. The trust among two or more users in the web of trust increases the quality of recommendation in two ways. Firstly, the trust metrics reduce the computability of similarity assessment of users or items. Secondly, the reputation of users may be computed using trust propagation. In this paper, architecture of trust-based recommender systems is proposed. In which trust metrics and rating matrix are taken as input and neighbours are generated using trust metrics and user similarity respectively and importance of trust over collaborative filtering is described. In the proposed approach, trust-based issues are discussed to solve the problem of traditional recommender system such as, data sparsity, cold-start users, malicious attacks on recommender systems and centralised architectures.

Green Cooperative Web of Trust for Securityin Cognitive Radio Networks

Spectrum is a scarce and very essential resource for the ever growing mobile communication applications. Radio networks (CRN) is the best evolved solution towards spectrum scarcity. Cooperative spectrum sensing is a well-known and proven mechanism in the CRNs. As compared to other traditional wireless networks, CRNs are more delicate and open to the wireless environments due to their heterogeneous nature. Therefore, the CRNs have more security threats than the conventional wireless networks. The spectrum sensing and sharing mechanisms are inherently vulnerable to the malicious behaviors in the wireless networks due to its openness. This paper proposes an energy efficient lightweight cryptographic Cooperative web of trust (CWoT) for the spectrum sensing in CRNs which is proved to be appropriate for the resource constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Development of trust based authentication and authorization mechanism for the opportunistic large array (OLA) structured CRNs is the main objective of this paper. Received signal strength (RSS) values obtained can be utilized to avoid Primary user emulation attacks (PUEA) in CRNs.

The Web: Testing Impact on Individual Productivity of Users

The web is continually changing how individuals function. With the increased popularity of web use for every aspect of life, the impact on individual productivity should be studied. This article develops and tests a model of web impact for the individual user. The proposed model indicates that disposition to trust and experience impact web trust; web trust and satisfaction affect web use; and web use affects the individual productivity impact of the web. After the collection of survey data, partial least squares data analysis is conducted. The findings indicate that disposition to trust affects one's web trust; one's satisfaction affects web use; and web use affects the productivity impact the web has on the individual. Future research directions are provided.

Formal Modeling of Trust Web Service Composition Using Pi-calculus

To enhance the credibility of Web service composition, Pi-calculus based formal modeling of trust Web service composition is proposed. Trust Web service composition is firstly defined abstractly; then Pi-calculus is used to depict structure and internal interaction of Trust Web service composition, the mapping relation between trust entity and Pi-calculus is provided. Automatic reasoner MWB is adopted to analyze and reason the Trust Web service composition system, which is aimed at finding and correcting the faults before the implementation of trust authentication of Web service composition. It thus meets the users’ demands on trust quality effectively. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/telkomnika.v11i8.3039

Exploiting two-faceted web of trust for enhanced-quality recommendations

Traditional collaborative filtering (CF) based recommender systems on the basis of user similarity often suffer from low accuracy because of the difficulty in finding similar users. Incorporating trust network into CF-based recommender system is an attractive approach to resolve the neighbor selection problem. Most existing trust-based CF methods assume that underlying relationships (whether inferred or pre-existing) can be described and reasoned in a web of trust. However, in online sharing communities or e-commerce sites, a web of trust is not always available and is typically sparse. The limited and sparse web of trust strongly affects the quality of recommendation. In this paper, we propose a novel method that establishes and exploits a two-faceted web of trust on the basis of users’ personal activities and relationship networks in online sharing communities or e-commerce sites, to provide enhanced-quality recommendations. The developed web of trust consists of interest similarity graphs and directed trust graphs and mitigates the sparsity of web of trust. Moreover, the proposed method captures the temporal nature of trust and interest by dynamically updating the two-faceted web of trust. Furthermore, this method adapts to the differences in user rating scales by using a modified Resnick’s prediction formula. As enabled by the Pareto principle and graph theory, new users highly benefit from the aggregated global interest similarity (popularity) in interest similarity graph and the global trust (reputation) in the directed trust graph. The experiments on two datasets with different sparsity levels (i.e., Jester and MovieLens datasets) show that the proposed approach can significantly improve the predictive accuracy and decision-support accuracy of the trust-based CF recommender system.

A new strategy for global climate protection

This essay proposes an innovative institutional strategy for global climate protection, quite distinct from but ultimately complementary to the UNFCCC climate treaty negotiations. Our “building block” strategy relies on a variety of smaller-scale transnational cooperative arrangements, involving not only states, but also subnational jurisdictions, firms, and civil society organizations, to undertake activities whose primary goal is not climate mitigation but which will achieve greenhouse gas reductions as a byproduct. This strategy avoids the problems inherent in developing an enforceable, comprehensive treaty regime by mobilizing other incentives—including economic self-interest, energy security, cleaner air, and furtherance of international development— to motivate a range of actors to cooperate on actions that will also produce climate benefits. The strategy uses three specific models of regime formation (club, linkage, and dominant actor models) which emerge from economics, international relations, and organizational behavior, to develop a variety of transnational regimes that are generally self-enforcing and sustainable, avoiding the free rider and compliance problems endemic in collective action to provide public goods. These regimes will contribute to global climate action not only by achieving emissions reductions in the short term, but also by creating global webs of cooperation and trust, and by linking the building block regimes to the UNFCCC system through greenhouse gas monitoring and reporting systems. We argue that the building blocks regimes would thereby help secure eventual agreement on a comprehensive climate treaty.

From a Pinch to an Open Hand: Appeals to the Evolution of Cooperation in Contemporary Political Thought

This article considers the political significance of game theoretical notions of cooperation by responding theologically to the writings of David Willetts, a minister in the UK government. The argument is that the forms of cooperative institutional life which societies require can be neither explained nor planned for solely by mathematical modelling of rational self-interest. What altruistic, civic cooperation depends upon is a complex web of affective trust, often theologically formed by open-handed faith rather than a self-protective pinch, so that wise risks may be taken for the sake of future generations.

Secure Communication with Secret Sharing for the S-Network Using a Large Set of Mistrust-Parties

This article presents a solution to ensure secure communication in computer networks by using secret sharing and multiple parties mistrusting each other instead of relying on a “trusted party” or a “web of trust”. In contrast to other solutions requiring asymmetric encryption, this concept can provide security even after any possible advance in cryptanalysis and even if unlimited calculation power was available to attack it. But this solution requires the computer network to have special properties. The S Network, a trustworthy repository, is presented as a potential application. A multi-partition-routing protocol is introduced to optimize the concept for secure communication with secret sharing in the context of the S Network.

Building Blocks for Global Climate Protection

The paper presents an innovative institutional strategy for global climate protection, quite distinct from, but ultimately complementary to the stalled UNFCCC climate treaty negotiations. The building blocks strategy relies on a variety of smaller-scale transnational cooperative arrangements, involving not only states but sub-national jurisdictions, firms, and NGOs, to undertake activities whose primary goal is not climate mitigation but which will achieve greenhouse gas reductions as an inherent byproduct. This strategy avoids the inherent problems in securing an enforceable treaty to secure the global public good of climate protection by mobilizing other incentives — including economic self-interest, energy security, cleaner air, and furtherance of international development — to motivate such actors to cooperate on actions that will also benefit the climate. The paper outlines three specific models of regime formation (club, linkage and dominant actor models) which draws on economics, international relations, and organizational behavior to create transnational regimes that are generally self-enforcing and sustainable, avoiding the free rider and compliance problems that are endemic in a climate treaty. These regimes will contribute to global climate action not only by achieving emissions reductions in the short-term, but also by creating global webs of cooperation and trust, and by linking the building block regimes to the UNFCCC system through greenhouse gas monitoring and reporting systems. In these ways, the building blocks regimes will help secure eventual agreement on a global climate treaty.

Trust, distrust and lack of confidence of users in online social media-sharing communities

With the proliferation of online communities, the deployment of knowledge, skills, experiences and user generated content are generally facilitated among participant users. In online social media-sharing communities, the success of social interactions for content sharing and dissemination among completely unknown users depends on ‘trust’. Therefore, providing a satisfactory trust model to evaluate the quality of content and to recommend personalized trustworthy content providers is vital for a successful online social media-sharing community. Current research on trust prediction strongly relies on a web of trust, which is directly collected from users. However, the web of trust is not always available in online communities and, even when it is available, it is often too sparse to accurately predict the trust value between two unacquainted people. Moreover, most of the extant trust research studies have not paid attention to the importance of distrust, even though distrust is a distinct concept from trust with different impacts on behavior. In this paper, we adopt the concepts of ‘trust’, ‘distrust’, and ‘lack of confidence’ in social relationships and propose a novel unifying framework to predict trust and distrust as well as to distinguish the confidently-made decisions (trust or distrust) from lack of confidence without a web of trust. This approach uses interaction histories among users including rating data that is available and much denser than explicit trust/distrust statements (i.e. a web of trust).

Popularity versus similarity in growing networks

The principle that 'popularity is attractive' underlies preferential attachment, which is a common explanation for the emergence of scaling in growing networks. If new connections are made preferentially to more popular nodes, then the resulting distribution of the number of connections possessed by nodes follows power laws, as observed in many real networks. Preferential attachment has been directly validated for some real networks (including the Internet), and can be a consequence of different underlying processes based on node fitness, ranking, optimization, random walks or duplication. Here we show that popularity is just one dimension of attractiveness; another dimension is similarity. We develop a framework in which new connections optimize certain trade-offs between popularity and similarity, instead of simply preferring popular nodes. The framework has a geometric interpretation in which popularity preference emerges from local optimization. As opposed to preferential attachment, our optimization framework accurately describes the large-scale evolution of technological (the Internet), social (trust relationships between people) and biological (Escherichia coli metabolic) networks, predicting the probability of new links with high precision. The framework that we have developed can thus be used for predicting new links in evolving networks, and provides a different perspective on preferential attachment as an emergent phenomenon.

The impact of online customer satisfaction on the yahoo auction in Taiwan

In this article, the authors develop a conceptual model that links website quality, trust, merchandising, customer service, and online satisfaction for yahoo auction in Taiwan. The research objective is to provide initial evidence for the determinants of e-satisfaction (online satisfaction). We examine the role of web quality, trust, merchandising, and customer service in consumer online satisfaction assessments. This conceptual model is empirically tested from 350 consumers across a broader group of online shoppers on yahoo auction by means of internet surveys and structural equation analysis. The results show that the determinants of online trust are website quality, merchandising, and customer service. Website quality, trust, merchandising, and customer service have positive effects on online satisfaction for auction sites. The research findings were reported by discussing the implications of the findings and directions for future research.

Developing an Instrument for E-Public Services’ Acceptance Using Confirmatory Factor Analysis

Governments worldwide spend billions from their allocated IT budgets to deliver convenient electronic services to their citizens. As a result, it is important to encourage citizens to use these services to avoid potential failures. Yet, few empirical studies exist that cover the relevant issues of adoption from the perspective of citizens in developing countries. Moreover, the need for a well-validated instrument to capture citizen adoption of such services is vital, given the vast investment in technology and the potential cost-saving implications. This study integrates elements from the most popular theories, including adoption technology acceptance model (TAM), innovation diffusion theory (IDT), and theory of planned behavior (TPB), in conjunction with web trust models. It develops an instrument to measure citizens’ acceptance of electronic public services by utilizing confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) within the structural equation modeling technique. Findings of a large scale data sampling of citizens in Saudi Arabia indicate that the proposed measurement model is an acceptable fit with the data. Overall, the findings supply a rigorous instrument for measuring citizens’ acceptance of e-public services, providing further insights for researchers and offering policy makers a suitable tool with which to study proposed strategies.

Computer-aided decision-making with trust relations and trust domains (cryptographic applications)

We propose generic declarative definitions of individual and collective trust relations between interacting agents and agent collections, and trust domains of trust-related agents in distributed systems. Our definitions yield (1) (in)compatibility, implicational, and transitivity results for trust relationships, including a Datalog-implementability result for their logical structure; (2) computational complexity results for deciding potential and actual trust relationships and membership in trust domains; (3) a positive (negative) compositionality result for strong (weak) trust domains; (4) a computational design pattern for building up strong trust domains; and (5) a negative scalability result for trust domains in general. We instantiate our generic trust concepts in five major cryptographic applications of trust, namely: Access Control, Trusted Third Parties, the Web of Trust, Public-Key Infrastructures, and Identity-Based Cryptography. We also show that accountability induces trust. Our defining principle for weak and strong trust (domains) is (common) belief in and (common) knowledge of agent correctness, respectively.

Status of the InChI algorithm and InChI trust

Progress of the IUPAC InChI/InChIKey project continues to move ahead quote well. Use of the algorithm has increased over the past year to the point that numerous publications use and refer to InChI. The Markush and Polymer/Mixtures IUPAC InChI working groups have completed their initial work and/or are moving ahead at a good pace. Publicity for the project is good and has resulted in considerable increase in the usage of the InChI algorithm. The Trust web site is now available to the public and is updated regularly. Even CAS now allows for an InChI string to be used as input for a SciFinder search. Extensions to the project’ sc urrent capabilities are being developed by a number of expert, experienced individuals and groups from various areas of chemistry. This presentation will describe the current technical state of the InChI algorithm and how the InChI Trust is working to assure the continued support and delivery of the InChI algorithm.