Large scale trustworthy distributed collaborative systems
Channel: Claudia Ignat
Date: 2021-04-27

Most existing collaborative systems rely on a central authority and
place personal information in the hands of a single large corporation
which is a perceived privacy threat. Moreover, these systems do not
scale well in terms of the number of users and their modifications. My
research work aims to move away from centralized authority-based
collaboration towards a large scale trust-based peer-to-peer
collaboration where control over data is given to users who can decide
with whom to share their data. The main advantages of peer-to-peer
collaborative systems are high scalability and resilience to faults and
attacks.

First, I describe my contributions to the design and evaluation of
optimistic data replication algorithms. I also present my work on group
awareness specifically on what information should be provided to users
to prevent conflicting changes and to understand divergence when
conflicts cannot be avoided.

Secondly, I describe my contributions on large scale trustworthy
collaboration. I present a contract-based collaboration model where
contracts are specified by the data owners when they share the data and
user trust is assessed according to the observation of adherence to or
violation of contracts. For testing the proposed trust-based
collaboration model, I designed a user experiment employing trust game
and relying on a computational trust metric according to user exchanges
in this game.

Finally, I present my future research directions on secure and
trustworthy collaborative data management.

Keywords: distributed collaborative systems, operational transformation,
CRDT, group awareness, trust, contract-based collaboration,
authenticated logs, trust game, user studies