THE WINCHESTER CENTRE FOR GLOBAL FUTURES IN ART DESIGN & MEDIA

The Winchester Centre for Global Futures in Art Design and Media highlights historical, contemporary and future roles for art, design and media within globalization. Its members build sustained collaborations with international partners in public service, the creative industries and civil society. Critically concerned with art and design practices of making, thinking and representation, the Winchester Centre actively engages in education and enterprise, exploring the contribution of media, materials and technologies to the improvement of human societies globally. Led by professors Jonathan Harris, Sean Cubitt, and Ryan Bishop, the Winchester Centre will make a decisive contribution to the work of the School and the University in future years. The Centre's inaugural professors would like to invite you now to suggest future research themes and activities. In the coming weeks details regarding the programme and prospective membership of the Winchester Centre will be made available.

Justified assessments of service provider reputation

Abstract Reputation, influenced by ratings from past clients, is crucial for providers competing for custom. For new providers with less track record, a few negative ratings can harm their chances of growing. In the JASPR project, we aim to look at how to ensure automated reputation assessments are justified and informative. Even an honest balanced review of a service provision may still be an unreliable predictor of future performance if the circumstances differ. For example, a service may have previously relied on different sub-providers to now, or been affected by season-specific weather events. A common way to ameliorate the ratings that may not reflect future performance is by weighting by recency. We argue that better results are obtained by querying provenance records on how services are provided for the circumstances of provision, to determine the significance of past interactions. Informed by case studies in global logistics, taxi hire, and courtesy car leasing, we are going on to explore the generation of explanations for reputation assessments, which can be valuable both for clients and for providers wishing to improve their match to the market, and applying machine learning to predict aspects of service provision which may influence decisions on the appropriateness of a provider. In this talk, I will give an overview of the research conducted and planned on JASPR. Speaker Biography Dr Simon Miles Simon Miles is a Reader in Computer Science at King's College London, UK, and head of the Agents and Intelligent Systems group. He conducts research in the areas of normative systems, data provenance, and medical informatics at King's, and has published widely and manages a number of research projects in these areas. He was previously a researcher at the University of Southampton after graduating from his PhD at Warwick. He has twice been an organising committee member for the Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems conference series, and was a member of the W3C working group which published standards on interoperable provenance data in 2013.