• Calendar

March 30, Wednesday
12:00 – 13:30

The Internet has enabled the creation of virtual worlds and communities, where user interactions imitate and, to some extent, even replace the more traditional "real-life" equivalents on a larger scale. The existence of easily accessible virtual communities makes it both possible and legitimate to communicate with total strangers. We can now anonymously interact with other virtual community members whom we do not really know in ways that break the boundaries and limitations of the real world. Trust and reputation systems are considered key enablers of virtual communities, especially communities of strangers, where users are not required to reveal their real identities and use nicknames or pseudonyms instead. These systems support the accumulation of member reputation information and leverage this information to increase the likelihood of successful member interactions and to better protect the community from fraudulent members. Reputation information is a valuable resource both for the users and for the communities. We developed the Cross-Community Reputation (CCR) model for the sharing of reputation knowledge across virtual communities. The CCR model defines the major stages required to compute the cross-community reputation of a community member based on the reputation of that member in other communities. We addressed major privacy concerns that are not present or that are less significant in single community domains. In this talk we provide a brief introduction to trust and reputation systems. We outline our major research directions, and focus on the CCR model and its related privacy concerns.