iTrust Conference in Pisa
by Jen Golbeck
Last week I attended the iTrust Conference in Pisa. The conference brings together researchers from many fields who are looking at issues of trust. While the majority of people there were looking at computational aspects of trust, there were also sociologists, philosophers, and economists.
We discussed how to model trust, how trust worked in networks, and applications of trust. Applications included security, improving anonymous interactions, and creating trustworthy interfaces.
In addition to paper presentations, there were interesting panel discussions, including one that focused on how trust can be defined for our uses (”The Facets of Trust”). There were some disagreements about what was included as trust (e.g. does belief that a rule will be followed constitute trust in the person who would follow the rule - I say no), and general agreement that there was no specific definition of the concept suitable for use in our applications.
This conference is interesting because, on one hand, trust researchers are not a coherent community. While trust is the core of our work, that does not mean we are working on even remotely related problems. In that sense, this is the complement of a normal conference where the core problems tie researchers together, but the specific applications are different. At the same time, it is very useful to see how trust is being defined, studied, and applied to other problems. It helps broaden how we look at trust for each problem, and hopefully provide some new insights into borrowing techniques from one body of work to improve another.
