I uploaded another paper of mine in the papers section. This is still under review for the Web Intelligence 2005 conference and is titled “Page-reRank: using trusted links to re-rank authority” (pdf). Let me know what you think of it, if you like.

Abstract The basis of much of the intelligence on the Web is the hyperlink structure which represents an organising principle based on the human facility to be able to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant material. Second generation search engines like Google make use of this structure to infer the authority of particular web pages. However, the linking mechanism provided by HTML does not allow the author to express different types of links such as positive or negative endorsements of page content. Consequently, algorithms like PageRank produce rankings that do not capture the different intentions of web authors. In this paper, we review some of the initiatives for adding simple semantic extensions to the link mechanism. Using a large real world data set, we demonstrate the different page rankings produced by considering extra semantic information in page links. We conclude that Web intelligence would benefit in adoption of languages that allow authors easily encode simple semantic extensions to their hyperlinks.

Do you know RoboCup? In the software version, you can program your own football players and then have them competing against the players of someone else. You can use whatever technique and the goal is to score more goals that the competitor. “It is an attempt to foster AI and intelligent robotics research by providing a standard problem where wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined.”.
With a similar goal, some researchers are working on a trust competition testbed. The idea? You program your player in the “social game”, have it playing against (or with?) the other players and at the end evaluate in some way her performances (how well she reasoned about trusting other players and information in order to reach her objectives). And we can also evaluate how the “society”, intended as the ecology of players, evolves (or not) based on the different, local behaviours. Anyway, if you are interested, check the Trust competition Rules (longer pdf version) and Trust competition FAQ. Want to play with the Java code? Unluckly, not yet possible but I guess you might obtain the code if you email them. Release of the testbed distribution is being withheld until July, 2005. At that time, the testbed will be publicly available for experimentation and competition practice.