Towards the Intimate Trust Advisor

In an increasingly automated and networked world humans are facing new problems stemming from the introduction of machine-intensive communication. The natural human ability to asses, accumulate and evaluate trust in other humans through direct interpersonal communications is significantly impaired when humans interact with systems alone. The development of applications that rely on trust, like electronic commerce, is significantly affected by this fact. This paper outlines a joint project that Nokia and Hewlett-Packard have just begun which analyses a) the ability of technology to replace the traditional notion of human-evaluated trust with a measure of trust that can be evaluated for the human by automated systems, and b) how this measurement can be communicated to the human by a personal appliance that we call an Intimate Trust Advisor (ITA).