Conceptualizing Trustworthiness and Trust in Communications

Abstract

Trustworthiness and trust are fundamental factors in societies that enable us to interact and enjoy mingling in crowds without fear. As robotic devices start permeating our daily lives, they must behave as completely trustworthy objects so that people will accept them just as they would trust other people when interacting with them in their daily lives. As trust and trustworthiness have been researched in social sciences for many years, this opens the question: How can we learn from system models and findings from social sciences to translate such learnings into requirements for future technical solutions? This is of particular importance now, as 5G and 6G cellular communications open the door for the Tactile Internet --- connected robotics interacting with humans. We present a novel holistic approach on how to tackle trustworthiness systematically in the context of communications. We propose a first attempt to incorporate objective system properties and subjective beliefs to establish trustworthiness-based trust.