Digitalization is leading us towards a future where people, processes, data and things are not only interacting with each other, but might start forming societies on their own. In these dynamic systems enhanced by artificial intelligence, trust management on the level of human-to-machine as well as machine-to-machine interaction becomes an essential ingredient to supervise safe and secure progress of our digitalized future.

In the tutorial, we will go through the understanding of the essential elements of trust management in complex digital ecosystems. We explain how trust-building can be leveraged to support people in safe interaction with other (possibly autonomous) digital agents, as trust governance allows the ecosystem to trigger auto-immune response towards untrusted digital agents, protecting human safety.

We will discuss the understanding of trust in traditional domains, such as psychology, sociology or economy, leading us to the emerging debates on how trust could be understood in the context of the Internet of Everything. We will go through the individual components of trust management, including trust assessment and its influencing factors (e.g., feeling vulnerable), trust propagation (e.g., via reputation), and trust updates (e.g., via dynamic certification schemes). We will give an overview of the current open discussions about the centralized/global vs decentralized/local trust management strategies and discuss their risks and related trust attacks (e.g, self-promotion or whitewashing).

As the topic of trust governance in the context of dynamic autonomous ecosystems involving human-machine interplay is very recent, the interactive part of the tutorial will be organized as a working session around the most pressing research questions on the topic, possibly touching also the topics of ethical guarantees, privacy concerns and human-inherent subjectivity of trust.

About the Speaker: Barbora Buhnova is an Associate Professor and Vice-Dean at Masaryk University (MU), Faculty of Informatics (FI MU) in Brno. Following her research career in Germany and Australia, she now leads multiple research teams at Faculty of Informatics MU (software architecture) and Czech CyberCrime Centre of Excellence C4e (critical infrastructures), with special emphasis on trust management in autonomous ecosystems. She is the Steering Committee chair of the International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA) and has been involved in organization of numerous leading conferences (e.g. in OC of ICSE, ESEC-FSE, ASE). She acts as a reviewer and (guest) editor in multiple journals (e.g. IEEE TSE, Springer EMSE, Elsevier SCP, Elsevier JSS, Springer SoSyM, Wiley SME), and is member of the IEEE TSE Review Board. Next to her academic activities, she is the chair of the Association of Industrial Partners at FI MU (with 30+ companies), and is a Co-Founding and Governing Board member of Czechitas, a non-profit organisation aiming at making IT skills more accessible to youth and women (with 30,000+ graduates).

Bara Buhnova is an Associate Professor and Vice-Dean at Masaryk University (MU), Faculty of Informatics (FI MU) in Brno. Following her research career in Germany and Australia, she now leads multiple research teams at Faculty of Informatics MU (software architecture) and Czech CyberCrime Centre of Excellence C4e (critical infrastructures). She is the Steering Committee chair of the International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA) and has been involved in organization of numerous leading conferences (e.g. in OC of ICSE, ESEC-FSE, ASE). She acts as a reviewer and (guest) editor in multiple journals (e.g. IEEE TSE, Springer EMSE, Elsevier SCP, Elsevier JSS, Springer SoSyM, Wiley SME), and is member of the IEEE TSE Review Board. Next to her academic activities, she is the chair of the Association of Industrial Partners at FI MU (with 30+ companies), and is a Co-Founding and Governing Board member of Czechitas, a non-profit organisation aiming at making IT skills more accessible to youth and women (with 30,000+ graduates).