Michel Deriaz
 |
Michel Deriaz, PhD |
After an engineer degree in telecommunications and a master in computer science, Michel Deriaz did a PhD in economic and social sciences. He spent then three years in the industry before coming back at University where he grounded the TaM group. Later he was promoted Professor at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland as well as vice-president of GeoIT, an association bringing together the main actors in geomatics in Switzerland, Germany and Austria.
Media coverage
Previous projects
List of some projects done before I have created TaM.
- GeTag (2009-2010) An adaptation of the FoxyTour project for the city of Geneva.
- FoxyTour (2009-2010) A city and museum guide that adapts automatically to the users' preferences.
- FoxyTag (2006-2013) A free, legal and collaborative system to signal speed cameras on mobile phones.
- FoxyNav (2006-2007) Locating and managing rescue boats during the Bol d'Or nautical contest.
- EDOS (2004-2005) EDOS stands for Environment for the Distribution of Open Source software. This project aimed to develop technologies and tools that improved the production of Linux distributions.
- RegexSR (2004) A very easy-to-use and powerful tool to test and create complex regular expressions.
- ECash (2003) An implementation of the e-cash algorithm, allowing users to make anonymous electronic payments over the Internet.
- Mindstorms Contest (2002) A Lego Mindstorms RCX robot programmed with the Java micro edition language.
- JRobot (2002) A friendly Java interface that interacts with a Mitsubishi RVM1 robot.
Previous publications
List of some publications done before I have created TaM. My PhD is available here.
The Uncertainty of the Truth, Michel Deriaz. In Sixth Annual Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust, PST2008, Canada, 2008.
Abstract. How to trust without knowing the truth? This is probably the key question that arises while designing applications using virtual tags. A virtual tag is a geo-referenced note that is visible for all the people that are in a specific place. But what if you see a tag about an event or an object that is not here? How to know if you are facing a spam attack, or if the tag is simply outdated? And, how to update the trust values of the author and the other people that confirmed the tag, since you do not know if they are honest? To answer these questions, we designed and implemented FoxyTag, a free and collaborative system which consist in posting virtual tags over speed cameras in order to warn the other drivers. We used it to test our new generic trust engine and got very promising results.
Trust without Truth, Michel Deriaz. In IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, Volume 238, Trust Management, eds. Etalle, s., Marsch, S., (Boston: Springer), pp. 31-45, Canada, 2007.
Abstract. Can we trust without any reliable truth information? Most trust architectures work in a similar way: a trustor makes some observations, rates the trustee, and makes recommendations to his friends. When he faces a new case, he checks his trust table and uses recommendations given by trustworthy friends to decide whether he will undertake a given action. But what if the observations that are used to update the trust tables are wrong? How to deal with what we call the “uncertainty of the truth”? This paper presents how people that publish and remove virtual tags are able to create trust relations between them. A simulator as well as a concrete and widely deployed application have been used to validate our model. We observed good and encouraging results in general, but also some weaknesses, brought out through specific scenarios.
Trust and Security in Spatial Messaging: FoxyTag, the Speed Camera Case Study, Michel Deriaz, Jean-Marc Seigneur. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust, ACM, 2006.
Abstract. Current speed cameras alerting systems heavily rely on humans to check the trustworthiness of information sent by their users. Hence, these systems are often either expensive or suffer from drawbacks, such as incomplete information, for example, concerning mobile speed cameras. We propose an application called FoxyTag to address most of the previous issues by using a computational trust engine instead of human checks. FoxyTag lets any driver equipped with a Java/GPS enabled mobile phone post a virtual tag about a speed camera to notify other equipped drivers who can confirm or deny the (short-lived) presence of the (mobile) camera. The novel aspect of our trust engine is that it must be location and time aware to automatically compute the trustworthiness of the given tag. We have validated FoxyTag both in real-life settings and with a simulator for large-scale scenarios. The validation showed that our novel time-patterned trust metrics are appropriate.
Towards Trustworthy Spatial Messaging, Michel Deriaz, Jean-Marc Seigneur. In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Security and Trust Management, ERCIM, ENTCS, 2006.
Abstract. Spatial messaging is a term that defines the virtual publication of data in physical places. Generally, anyone in the neighborhood of such a publication point gets the message. Frameworks allowing the users to publish freely spatial messages already exist. However, the experiences realized with volunteers showed that there is only little interest in posting such notes. To our view, the main reason is that there are currently no trust and security mechanisms that inform about the trustworthiness of the messages, thus preventing any serious application. Filling this gap will promote the success of spatial messaging and the growing success of localization and mobile techniques will provide a good support for this concept. This paper describes the spatial messaging services that we are in the process to deploy with our new spatial messaging framework, which includes trust and security mechanisms.
A Social Semantic Infrastructure for Decentralised Systems Based on Specification-Carrying Code and Trust, Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo, Michel Deriaz. In Proceedings of the Socially-Inspired Computing Workshop, pp. 143-152, D. Hales and B. Edmonds (Eds), Invited paper, 2005.
Abstract. Decentralised systems made of autonomous devices and software are gaining more and more interest. These autonomous elements usually do not know each other in advance and act without any central control. They thus form a society of devices and software, and as such need: basic interaction mechanisms for understanding each other, and a social infrastructure supporting interactions taking place in an uncertain environment. In an effort to go beyond pre-established communication schema and to cope with uncertainty, this paper proposes an interaction mechanism based exclusively: on semantic information expressed using specifications, and on a social infrastructure relying on trust and reputation.
Specification-Carrying Code for Self-Managed Systems, Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo, Michel Deriaz. In IFIP/IEEE International Workshop on Self-Managed Systems and Services, 2005.
Abstract. This paper proposes the notion of Specification-Carrying Code as an interaction mechanism for self-assembly of autonomous decentralised software components. Each autonomous software entity incorporates more information than its operational behaviour, and publishes more data than its signature. The idea is to provide separately, for each entity, a functional part implementing its behaviour - the traditional program code; and an abstract description of the entity's functional behaviour and necessary parameters - a semantic behavioural description under the form of a formal specification. Interactions are exclusively based on the specifications and occur among entities with corresponding specifications. In the case of autonomic computing systems, in addition to functional aspects, the specification may carry a semantic description of non-functional information related to self-management. This paper presents the principles of the Specification-Carrying Code paradigm, the associated Service-Oriented Architecture, and it explains how self-managed systems can benefit from this paradigm.