Statement Chung - Wei Hang November 2011

My research studies trust-based coordination among agents in dynamic, open systems. Such systems arise. Modern systems (e.g., service-oriented systems) embrace a distributed setting where a system consists of multiple autonomous parties. These individual parties have their own goals and achieve them by interacting with each other. Trust provides a basis for effective interaction, helping agents decide which parties to rely upon for taking a particular action. My research aims to (1) build trust models that enable agents to estimate trustworthiness of parties (learning), and (2) develop approaches for agents to make effective predictions and decisions based on trust information (mining). My goal is to establish “soft” security among agents to facilitate decentralized coordination in multiagent systems. Applications of my research include service-oriented computing, social networks, cloud computing, sensor networks, robotic control, etc.