Welcome to my homepage! My name is Georgia Kastidou and I am a PhD student at the D.R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. During the five first terms (September 2005-April 2007) of my PhD I worked on the area of Ubiquitous Computing and in particular on Context Aware Systems.
In May 2007 I switched research areas and since then I am a member of the Artificial Intelligence Lab and my research focuses on the area of Multiagent Systems and in particular on Incentive Mechanisms, Information Exchange and Trust Modeling. I am really happy to work under the supervision of Prof. Robin Cohen and Prof. Kate Larson.
My PhD thesis aims to improve the performance of e-communities in which the offered services are provided by
or are related to the contributions of their members. Examples of such
communities include systems in e-commerce, recommendation systems, wikis
etc.
We aim to achieve this goal by
encouraging the communities to collaborate through the exchange
of information about the behavior (i.e. trust or reputation) of their members. To the best
of our knowledge this is a new perspective in improving the services their members
enjoy.
Some of the challenges that arise in this problem are:
- How can we design a mechanism that will provide incentives to self-interested communities which have strong incentives to lie to truthfully exchange information.
- Which are the principles a computational trust mechanism should satisfy in order to provide a meaningful representation of the behavior of an agent in settings where the agents have to declare their anticipated contribution.
My current work includes:
- An incentive-based mechanism for exchanging trust/reputation information between communities or agents. [Click Here for a preliminary version of our proposed model. A refined version is ready for submission]
- A trust model for communities in which the knowledge of the exact contribution their members offer is crucial. [Ready for submission]
- A scoring rule that considers the subjectivity of the evaluated information. [Click Here for our proposed model]
Past Work:
Prior starting my PhD, I graduated with a Master's degree (2004) in Computer Science from the Computer Science Department of the University of Ioannina, Greece. From the same department, I also received my Bachelor degree (2002)
My Master's research was focused on Graph Theory and in particular I worked on identifying the forbidden subgraphs for P4 Simplicial graphs. I was happy to work under the supervision of Prof. Leonidas Palios. Although we have not published my Master's thesis results yet, we have found some interesting forbidden subgraphs that contradict the conjectures made regarding the characteristics of this class of graphs.
My Bachelor thesis was focused on the area of Mobile and Distributed Computing and was supervised by Prof. Evaggelia Pitoura. Part of the results appeared in the MDC@ICDCS2003 with the title "A Scalable Hash-based Mobile Agent Location Mechanism".