When Trust Does Not Compute - The Role of Trust in Ubiquitous Computing 

Marc Langheinrich, Institute for Pervasive Computing Swiss Federal Institute 
of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland 

Trust has long been an important concept in network security. With the 
human-centric vision of ubiquitous computing, a concept like trust seems to 
gain additional importance as it already forms the basic building block of 
societies and thus should play an important role in any computer-mediated 
social network. However, the way the concept of trust is currently introduced 
into ubiquitous computing systems often seems either too simplistic, or overly 
complex. This paper argues for a renewed evaluation of the benefits from 
introducing the concept of trust into computational frameworks and proposes to 
leave trust assessment in ubiquitous computing environments up to humans.