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SUMMARY:Trust and Mistrust on the Internet - Pranav Dandekar\, Stanford Un
 iversity
DTSTART:20130321T100000Z
DTEND:20130321T110000Z
UID:TALK43996@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Microsoft Research Cambridge Talks Admins
DESCRIPTION:The rise of Internet-based markets and social networks has cre
 ated an unprecedented opportunity to engineer socio-economic interactions 
 at a large scale. In this talk\, I will discuss my work on addressing the 
 issues of trust and mistrust in designing these socio-economic systems. \n
 \nI will first describe a model of networked trust that is an alternative 
 to centralized reputation/virtual currency systems on the Internet. Inform
 ally\, every node in the network acts as a bank and prints its own currenc
 y\, which is then used to purchase services within the network. Transactio
 ns between untrusting agents proceed through exchange of IOUs along a chai
 n of trust. Such "trust networks" are robust to infiltration\, since any n
 ode only accepts currency printed by other nodes that it directly trusts. 
 We will analyze the liquidity of this model\, i.e.\, the number of transac
 tions that such a network can support. We will show that in many interesti
 ng cases\, the liquidity of these trust networks is comparable to centrali
 zed currency systems. We will also present results on the formation of cre
 dit networks by self-interested agents. \n\nWhile social networks and the 
 Internet have made it much easier to communicate\, there is considerable a
 necdotal and research evidence that we are getting more polarized as a soc
 iety. I will present an analysis of the dynamics of opinion polarization i
 n a social network\, and discuss its implications for the design of recomm
 endation algorithms\, as well as social systems that enable large scale co
 llective decision making.
LOCATION:Auditorium\, Microsoft Research Ltd\, 21 Station Road\, Cambridge
 \, CB1 2FB
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