Researching Trust and Distrust

Allison Druin, Associate Dean for Research, iSchool

This past week, Assistant Professor and HCIL Director, Jen Golbeck, received a best paper award from the 2011 IEEEInternational Conference on Social Computing (#socialcom).  Her award-winning paper was co-authored with ThomasDuBois, University of Maryland computer science alumni and now a post-doc at  Virginia Tech, and Aravind Srinivasan, a Professor in Computer Science and UMIACS.  Their work focused on some important questions surrounding trust and distrust by examining social networks.

 Assistant Professor and HCIL Director, Jen Golbeck,

Recently, I sat down with Jen for a “virtual interview” to better understand this important research area:

[Allison] When you study “trust” are you looking at how people trust each other on social networks or if they trust the social network?

[Jen] I'm looking at trust between people. There is work on people trusting systems (sometimes called trust in automation), but I'm more interested in finding ways to compute how much one person trusts another person.

[Allison] How can you make predictions about people from how much they trust each other?

[Jen] There are a lot of ways. Some of my earlier work looked at paths that connected people through the social network and the trust that their intermediate friends had for one another. More recently, I have been working on analyzing traits of each individual in the relationship and using that, along with structural social network features, to predict trust relationships. It's more exciting because it's more realistic - we don't often know how much all the intermediate friends trust each other, so working from more commonly available data is important.

[Allison] What’s the most surprising result you’ve found from your most recent work?

[Jen] Lately we have been trying to predict people's personality traits by analyzing their Facebook and Twitter profiles. It turns out we can do that quite accurately, even with very limited information from the users. We hope this is something we can eventually use to help understand people's relationships.

[Allison] Should people be concerned with what they put out on the web?

[Jen] Of course, always. A lot of that is independent of the work I'm doing. There is some very sophisticated data mining taking place on the web. That can be used to improve users' online experience, which is good, but we don't get to control who uses it and for what. If the idea of people analyzing you is bothersome, it is best to really turn up privacy settings. However, that doesn't necessarily protect your data. For example, on Facebook, if your friends install an app, that app can access some of your data, even if you don't consent to it. Thus, it's safe to assume that anything you share online is accessible to companies with any variety of intentions. If you don't want them to know something, it's better to keep it off the web.

[Allison] What’s next for you in this area of research?

[Jen] I'm going to be pushing in the direction of understanding users. The personality research has been very fruitful, but we are in the very early stages of that work. I hope to find more individual features to profile and new techniques to predict them.

[Allison] If doctoral students or new faculty are trying to get into this area of research what advice do you have for them?

[Jen] The most important thing is to try to find a problem in a space that is untouched. There is so much that can be done in studying social networks, analyzing users, and improving systems with that information. If you do the next steps on existing research, all of your results will be incremental and boring. Find a problem that has hardly been touched but where you see great potential. That sets you up to be the thought leader on an important problem, and it means you will have an exciting time discovering new things.

[Allison] Thanks, Jen.

Recognizing Records Management Research

Allison Druin, Associate Dean for Research, iSchool

 “… whether the government remains stuck in a print to paper paradigm for purposes of official record-keeping, or chooses to spend millions in adopting electronic record-keeping software that highly depends on end-users performing manual record keeping functions – those approaches are all a legacy of late 20th century thinking that we need to shake off and move away from. I am calling for workers of the world to unite (especially in the public sector), in opposing efforts to enslave them in record-keeping responsibilities when there are new and better automated ways to perform this vitally important function. Especially in a time of fiscal scarcity, it is all the more important that we be lean, smart and agile on the record-keeping front. We need to understand that there are the technological means to accomplish record-keeping in 2011, if institutions have the will to convert to them.”

These are the words of Mr. Jason R. Baron, Emmett Leahy Award Winner.

His call to action was shared just a few weeks ago at the Awards Ceremony in the Archivist's Reception Room in the Washington D.C. building of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). There is no higher honor in records management than to receive the Emmet Leahy Award, considered to be the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes of the profession.  To understand how important Jason’s call to action is and the importance of his work, you need only to hear the words of John Phillips, the recipient of the 2001 Emmett Leahy Award and an Emmett Leahy Award Committee Member: 

“The Profession of Records Management, or Records and Information Management as we often call it today, is in turmoil. Records Managers, their customers, IT professionals, legal counsels, and executive management are all overwhelmed with the volume and variety of information management dilemmas facing us today. Business models change daily. E-mail, Office documents, Web pages, digital images and incentives to use remotely hosted cloud based architectures can put business records, evidence for court proceedings and historical treasures at grave risk. Records Management is becoming a challenge for everyone…  [for the complete awards presentations see: http://www.emmettleahyaward.org/uploads/Proceedings_2011.pdf ] 

Given these challenging times, the Archivist of the United States,David S. Ferriero explained, “Jason R. Baron, an Adjunct faculty member at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies, Maryland’s iSchool, has been named the 2011 recipient of the prestigious international Emmett Leahy Award for Outstanding Contributions and Accomplishments in the Records and Information Management Profession.  Mr. Baron, who serves as Director of Litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, is the first federal lawyer to receive the award.  Established in 1967, the Emmett Leahy Award honors the spirit of innovation, dedication, and excellence in records and information management of Emmett Leahy, an icon in the development of the life cycle approach to managing records and information.

The award was presented to Mr. Baron based on his many outstanding achievements in the area of information law over three decades of public service, including his groundbreaking work on White House email litigation (Armstrong v Executive Office of thePresident) and his professional service as editor of various commentaries issued by The Sedona Conference®, a leading legal think tank.  Notably, the Emmett Leahy Award committee specifically singled out two ongoing scholarly activities in which Mr. Baron has collaborated with Maryland iSchool Professor Douglas Oard founding the Legal Track of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Text Retrieval Conference, and creating a series of international workshops on the Discovery of Electronically Stored Information(DESI).  Both efforts bring together researchers and practitioners from academia, industry and government to help lawyers apply the most effective search and categorization techniques when seeking evidence in a litigation context…”

At the iSchool, we are always proud of the work our faculty and students do.  And of course we are excited when this work is recognized at the highest levels of the profession.  But what makes this honor so wonderful is that it recognizes the collaborative work of diverse professionals to bring about important and profound impact on some very difficult problems. As Jason himself noted in his acceptance speech, “…we all need to be more creative and interdisciplinary in our professional lives. My life and career has consisted of rowing between islands of excellence, including bringing “good news” from the world of information retrieval and artificial intelligence to the world of lawyers. I strongly believe that the legal community has been too insular in its approach to e-discovery, and needs to partner with academia and industry – including in insisting on optimization in e-discovery searches through the adoption of best practice standards, some of which may yet end up as recognized international standards…”

What is fascinating to consider is Jason’s first academic work, “I confess I couldn’t really have imagined what my professional career would consist of when in 1977 I wrote an honors thesis in college on the privacy implications of a vast electronic database maintained by the FBI and accessible by the international organization Interpol…”  It is from those beginning academic experiences that brought Jason to the important work he does now.  That is why it is so important to have him a part of the very fabric of our college.  As Dean Preece has pointed out, “Mr. Baron's dynamic contributions to the intellectual life of our college have significantly enhanced both the education of our students and the breadth and depth of our research."  

Perhaps someday there may be another Emmett Leahy Award Winner in our midst.  Perhaps the future may show it to be a student of this year’s award winner.