Jeannette Wing, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Research

Tuesday, May 20, 2014 18:00
Amphi 25, Sorbonne University - Faculté des Sciences

Toward a Theory of Trust in Networks of Humans and Computers

Jeannette M. Wing is Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Research. She is on leave from Carnegie Mellon University, where she is President's Professor of Computer Science and twice served as the Head of the Computer Science Department. From 2007-2010 she was the Assistant Director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. She received her S.B. and S.M. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering in 1979 and her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1983, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Professor Wing's general research interests are in the areas of trustworthy computing, specification and verification, concurrent and distributed systems, programming languages, and software engineering. Her current interests are in the foundations of security and privacy. She was or is on the editorial board of twelve journals, including the Journal of the ACM and Communications of the ACM.
She is, among others, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).

We argue that a general theory of trust in networks of humans and computers must be built not only on a theory of computational trust but also on a theory of behavioral trust. Behavioral trust captures participant preferences (i.e., risk and betrayal aversion) and beliefs in the trustworthiness of other protocol participants. This more comprehensive view of trust would allow us to establish new trust relations where none were possible before. It would help create new economic opportunities by increasing the pool of usable services and removing cooperation barriers among users. It would also help focus security research in areas that promote trust-enhancement infrastructures in human and computer networks.
This work is joint with Virgil Gligor.

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