ARO Workshop on Trustworthy Social Computing: Research Challenges and Roadmap of Trustworthy Social Computing

Social computing concerns the study of social behavior and context based on communication and computing systems. Unparalleled amounts of information are exchanged, among devices or a community of human users, in order to support social-based communication activities. The results from these activities have dramatically changed both the value of the communication and the social relationships among the communicating parties. As an example, online social network services like Facebook with 350+ millions users offer a convenient platform for interactions,friendship formation, and other unprecedented social activities. While numerous online social computing applications/systems are being developed in an unparalleled pace, many issues related to trust management, social computing, trust assessment, and their relationships remain unexplored and unanswered. In particular, the information being shared and exchanged, in asocial context explicitly or implicitly, forms the basis of the notion of social soft trust. Socialsoft trust can be valuable in detecting anomalous/malicious activities and enhancing the level of situation awareness under critical military missions when the traditional harder trust is either compromised or unavailable. In this document, we will discuss challenges and roadmaps regarding both how to assess and protect the value of social computing systems and how to leverage such systems to support the notion of soft trust.