Trust-Aware Elastic Social Compute Units

摘要

With the advance of research in human computation, applications and software systems are increasingly being designed to include the human aspect of computation. We work with Social Compute Units (SCUs) that are computational constructs with people as their core resources who use software services to organize and conduct their work. SCUs are collaborative units, and have a cloud-like behavior in the sense that they are elastically provisioned and adapted at runtime. Systems that utilize the concept of SCUs bring challenges that are associated with the highly dynamic and unpredictable human-centric behavior. Thus, trust in human based services is of paramount importance. While there is related work on social trust in the social networking and crowdsourcing areas, trust in highly coordinated constructs such as SCUs remains a significant challenge. In this paper we provide a trust model that considers merging social trust with performance-based trust of human based services into an integrated trust model for SCUs. We illustrate the models' application in concrete strategies, such as for elastic management of SCUs and incentives for SCU members.