Trust, Collaboration and Fairness in Virtual Social Environments

Speakers

• Sonja Buchegger
  Sonja Buchegger is an associate professor of Computer Science at KTH, Stockholm, Sweden. From 2007 to 2009 she was a senior research scientist at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Berlin, Germany. In 2005 and 2006, she was a post-doctoral scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, School of Information. She received her Ph.D. in Communication Systems from EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2004, a graduate degree in Computer Science in 1999, and undergraduate degrees in Computer Science in 1996 and in Business Administration in 1995 from the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. In 2003 and 2004 she was a research and teaching assistant at EPFL and from 1999 to 2003 she worked at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory in the Network Technologies Group. Her current research interests are in security, privacy, and economics of self-organizing, peer-to-peer, ad-hoc, and social networks.
  



• Dario Taraborelli
  Dario Taraborelli is a research fellow at the Centre for Research in Social Simulation (CRESS), University of Surrey. He trained in cognitive science and philosophy of science in Italy (University of Pisa; Scuola Normale Superiore) and France (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales). Before joining CRESS he was a Marie Curie Fellow at University College London. His current research is in the field of social computing and focuses on the dynamics of online collaboration, the production and consumption of reputation indicators and collaborative scientific annotation. He is editor-in-chief of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology, a peer-reviewed journal published quarterly by Springer focusing on foundational and philosophical issues in current cognitive science.
  



• Alastair Gill
  Alastair Gill is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Social Simulation, University of Surrey, working with Nigel Gilbert. His research focuses on social aspects of computer-mediated communication and the related areas of human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, computational linguistics and cognitive science. He has previously held positions at the Center for Technology and Social Behavior, Northwestern University, and LEAD-CNRS, University of Burgundy, France. Alastair received his Ph.D. in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh in 2004 (supervised by Jon Oberlander), which he took following the M.Sc. program in Cognitive Science and Natural Language. His B.A. was in English Language and Literature.
  



• Thanasis G. Papaioannou
  Thanasis G. Papaioannou is a postdoctoral fellow at the Distributed Information Systems Laboratory of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He received his B.Sc. (1998) and M.Sc. (2000) in Networks and in Parallel/Distributed Systems from the Department of Computer Science, University of Crete, Greece, and his Ph.D. (2007) from the Department of Computer Science, Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB). From spring 2007 to spring 2008, he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Computer Science of Athens University of Economics and Business, teaching i) Distributed Systems and ii) Networks – Network Security. From 1998, he has worked for 11 European projects, including MONTAGE, M3I, MMAPPS, GridEcon and Hydrosys. He also has a significant publication record to high quality journals and conferences including Computer Networks Journal, IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE ICDE, ACM SOCC, IEEE CCGRID etc. He has been TPC member in many conferences and more recently in SocInfo 2010, AP2PS 2010-2009, ICCGI 2010-2009, Intl. Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC) 2009, AP2PC 2009, Valuetools 2008, CompuP2P 2008, etc. He has reviewed articles for various journals and conferences including IEEE Network Magazine, Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, Transactions on Networking, COMNET, COMCOM, PERFEVAL, IEEE Infocom, IFIP Networking, etc. His research interests are in trust and reputation, mechanism design for online environments, network economics, data stream processing, sensor networks, and QoS.
  



• Adam Wierzbicki
  Adam Wierzbicki received his B.S. in mathematics and M.S. in informatics from the University of Warsaw, in 1997 and 1998. In June 2003, he received a Ph.D. degree from the Institute of Telecommunications of the Warsaw University of Technology. His Ph.D. thesis titled “Content Distribution and Streaming Media Communication on the Internet” concerned design of content delivery networks for improved quality and performance of streaming media communication.
  Adam Wierzbicki is an expert in Peer-to-Peer computing. He has published several research papers on this subject and is a member of the Steering Committee of the International IEEE Peer-to-Peer Conference. He has acted as co-editor of several journal issues on this subject (including Elsevier “Computer Communications” and Springer “P2P Networking and Applications”). Dr Wierzbicki has collaborated with professor Henning Schulzrinne’s team on the development of the emerging standard of the P2P Protocol (P2PP). The team of dr Wierzbicki at PJIIT is preparing a P2P middleware for mobile devices, based on P2PP.
  Apart from Peer-to-Peer computing, dr Wierzbicki is a specialist in the field of social informatics. His current research interests focus on trust management and fairness in distributed systems. Dr Wierzbicki heads the project mTeam (Mobile Team), financed by a research grant of the Polish-Singaporian research program. See mTeam for further details. Dr Wierzbicki also heads the project uTrust (Universal Trust), financed by a research grant of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. See uTrust for further details. Dr Wierzbicki has published several papers on applications of the theory of equity to providing fairness in open distributed systems, and is the author of a Springer book titled “Trust and Fairness in Open, Distributed Systems”. He is also interested in knowledge management and e-learning.
  His professional experience includes a research contract with Philips, Natlab and a two-year employment as a systems designer for Suntech, Ltd, a software company that specializes in telecom management. He was also a team member of the European 6th Framework Research project “eGov-Bus”. Adam Wierzbicki is currently employed at the Polish-Japanese Institute for Information Technology, where he has the position of Vice-Dean of the Department of Informatics. At PJIIT, he has started a new major in Social Informatics for graduates of the social sciences.