Yuhong Liu (University of Rhode Island), “Security and Applications of Digital Trust and Reputation” (2012), Advisor: Prof. Yan Lindsay Sun

Digital Trust borrows the trust concept in sociology to indicate that, in distributed computing and communication systems, one party evaluates whether other parties are trusted to perform a certain action or having a certain property. When the digital trust value is published to the entire network or general users, it is called digital reputation. This dissertation investigates the security issues in digital trust and reputation systems in the context of online social networks and also explores a new application direction: biomedical sensor systems. Specifically, the study consists of three parts. The first part focuses on detecting dishonest ratings in online rating systems (e.g. product ratings at Amazon, restaurant ratings at Yelp, and hotel ratings at Expedia). The second part focuses on defending against reputation boosting companies, which manipulate online ratings aiming to boost reputation scores of their customers. In the third part, the concept of trust is used to improve reliability of EMG-based user intent recognition for nueral-controlled artificial legs.

Full thesis is available at:
http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dissertations/AAI3509755/