In this project we propose a new approach to provide accountability in self-organizing Web communities, while providing high level of privacy. First, we present a framework for electronic communities, that supports dynamic grouping and collaborations. The system is controlled by competition among communities. The security protocols we developed for the system, build upon a semi-trusted computing base and community-based trust. We propose a two-layered privacy protection architecture, that allows enforcement of internal- (web community) and external (real world organizations) accountability. The two layered architecture limits the exposure of the users' confidential information, such as the mappings between real users and their virtual identities, as well as mappings among the virtual users.(In Proc. Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, in association with the 9th ACM CCS Conference, 2002)

This work is tightly related to our efforts to improve the efficiency of Web crawlers and to observe a fleet of crawlers as self-organizing community with needs for sharing and security. Our current efforts focus on the improvement of learning algorithms used by web crawlers. Our future work addresses the security protocols needed for these communities.

Publications:

1. C. Farkas, G. Ziegler, A. Meretei, and A. Lorincz. "Anonymity and Accountability in Self-Organizing Electronic Communities," Proc. Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, in association with the 9th ACM CCS Conference, 81-90, 2002 (Acceptance Ratio 27%) (PDF file)
2. G.Ziegler, C. Farkas, A. Lorincz, "A Framework for Anonymous but Accountable Self-Organizing Communities" Journal of Information and Software Technologies. Accepted (under revision) (PDF File)
3. Zs. Palotai, C. Farkas, A. Lorincz, "Selection in Scale-Free Small World," submitted to IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, January 2005.
4. Zs. Palotai, C. Farkas, A. Lorincz, "Selection in Scale-Free Small World," accepted as a short paper for the 4th International Central and Eastern European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (CEEMAS'05), 2005, to appear. (Acceptance Ratio 57%) (PDF File)
5. Zs. Palotai, C. Farkas, and A. Lorincz, "Is selection optimal for scale-free small worlds?," accepted for European Conference for Complex Systems, 2005, to appear.