Context
Advancement in mobile and ubiquitous communication have made computer-mediated collaboration an integral part of both our professional and personal lives. The rise of remote working has further increased reliance on these tools for work, education, and entertainment. This dependence is expected to grow with ongoing digitalization and the need to reduce travel due to global warming.
While existing tools effectively support small groups collaborating in an orderly fashion on simple tasks, they fall short when handling large-scale, heterogeneous groups engaged in complex, long-term projects. In such contexts, issues arise concerning: trust among stakeholders, the platform, and produced artifacts; security for the involved organizations; scalability and resilience of the collaborative system.
Challenges
Most of the platforms hosting collaboration services rely on centralized authorities, which introduces several limitations. One of the primary concerns is privacy, as users must relinquish control over their data and trust service providers to handle their information securely. In many cases, terms of service allow these providers to access and analyze user data, reducing privacy assurances.
Another significant limitation is scalability. Centralized systems often struggle to efficiently support a large number of simultaneous modifications, leading to performance bottlenecks and degraded user experience. They generally rely on costly infrastructures and do not allow sharing of infrastructure and administration costs.
Additionally, data sovereignty is a crucial issue, particularly in contexts such as crisis management or federated organizations, where stakeholders may be unwilling to store sensitive information on third-party servers. Organizations and institutions often need to maintain full control over their data, making centralized solutions less desirable for applications that require strict confidentiality and autonomy.
Our vision: decentralized, trustworthy peer-to-peer collaboration
We aim to move away from centralised authority-based collaboration towards large scale trustworthy peer-to-peer collaboration where control over the data is given to users who can share it directly only with the users they trust and without having to store it at a central authority.
Data Replication in peer-to-peer collaborative systems
We aim to design replication algorithms that are reliable (i.e. after the reception of all modifications the replicas have to converge), secure (the communication has to be end-to-end encrypted and only the receiver should decrypt the data) and explainable (i.e., the decision taken by these algorithms has to be understood by users and their intentions have to be respected). These algorithms have to be suitable for a large community of users that produces high frequency modifications.
Integrating Human-Agent Collaboration
Collaboration can also be seen as human-agent collaboration where human and agents complete joint activities. This human-agent collaboration requires building trust between humans and autonomous agents, ensuring seamless interaction and task completion.
Building and Evaluating Trust
We are interested in studying trust on collaborative platforms and services, trust between humans and trust between humans and agents in the large scale collaboration.
Security in Fully Distributed Environments
We aim to design access control and group key management mechanisms without a central authority suitable for mutable data that can be changed at any moment by a group of users, as well as developing mitigations against Sybil attacks.
