The major objective of UtiForo is to assess how best to facilitate remote participation in physically located auctions and what hardware and software infrastructure might be needed to allow auctions to be conducted in an ad-hoc fashion, such as at car boot sales and antiques market faires. Our partners in the project (Sussex University, Southampton University, and Kings College London) will undertake a detailed ethnographic study of the functioning of exemplar markets, and create appropriate theories and technologies based on this understanding. However, it is already known that a key factor in any market transaction is the functioning of trust, and we believe that ensuring that we build technology embodying trust is the most likely route to success. To show itself worthy of trust, the systems must work within the current processes by which people construct trust, providing transparency and appropriate feedback to the various users based on their level of engagement

The Software Systems Engineering Group contributions to Utiforo will include a variety of trust-based systems-oriented research, ­ architecting, building and deploying appropriate middleware solutions, addressing issues of the support of novel trust models together with a set of non-functional requirements of information timeliness and system reliability and security.

Dr. Steve Hailes
Dr. Licia Capra (co-I)

• Sussex University
• Southampton University
• King's College

The UCL research is funded to the extent of approximately GBP 350,000 by the EPSRC WINES II call (Sponsor reference: EP/D07696X/1)