Participants:

• Oluwabunmi Adewoyin, PhD student (started September/2011)
• Thomas Largillier, Post Doctorate fellow (2011-2012)
• Yao Wang, Ph.D. Student(2004-2010)
• Julita Vassileva, supervisor

Decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) networks can benefit from forming interest-based communities that can provide peers with information about the resources shared in the community and collectively computed rating of their quality as well as about the agents in the community and their reputation. We propose a mechanism for forming communities in a P2P system for sharing academic papers. The mechanism requires each agent to compute its trust in the agents with whom it interacts. A simulation shows that such communities can benefit peers.

• Wang Y., Vassileva J. (2004) Trust-Based Community Formation in Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Networks, in Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Web Intelligence, WI'2004, Beijing, China, October, full paper.

Group formation is a diffcult task that arises in many different contexts. It is either done manually or using methods based on individual users’ criteria. Users may not be willing to fill a profile or
their profile may evolve with time without users updating it. A collaboration may also fail for personal reasons between users with compatible
profiles as it may be a success between antagonist users that may start a productive conflict inside a team. Existing methods do not take into
account previous successful or unsuccessful collaborations to forge new ones. We introduce a new model of collaborative trust to help
select the “best” fitted group for a task. We also developed one heuristic to find the best possible group since in practice considering all
the possibilities is hardly an option.

• Largillier T., Vassileva J. (2012) Using Collective Trust for Group Formation. Proc. Collaboration and Groupware CRIWG’2012, Duisburg, Germany, Sept. 17-29, 2012, Springer Verlag LNCS 7493, pp. 137-144.

Existing online mentorship systems typically match mentors and mentees manually. Some of these existing mentorship systems, face-to-face inclusive, do one-to-one pairing and triad mentoring, which involve a senior mentor, a junior mentor and a mentee. However, research has shown that triangulated mentoring, also known as group mentoring, saves resources and performs better than the one-to-one pairing and triad mentoring. This research, therefore, proposes a group online mentorship system which will make use of recommender system, trust and reputation mechanisms. Recommender systems can be used to match-make mentors and mentees and trust and reputation mechanisms can be used to improve the decision process. At the moment, a five-stage process has been proposed and work is still ongoing on the perfect algorithm to use.

• Adewoyin, O. F. and Vassileva, J. (2012) Recommendation, Trust and Reputation Management in Group Online Mentorship System. In: M. Kravcik, O.C. Santos, J.G. Boticario, D. Perez-Marin (Eds.) Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Personalization Approaches in Learning Environments (PALE), held in conjunction with the 20th International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization (UMAP2012), Montreal, Canada, July 17th, 2012. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073, pages 53-58.