News Key Takeaways - Harvard SEAS researchers and a multi-university team that includes information theorists and experts in wireless communications, optimization theory, machine learning, and robotics, introduce “cy-trust” as a quantitative measure of how much a robot or vehicle in a networked system should trust information from another agent before acting. - Their paper argues for cy-trust to be embedded in system designs for ride-share fleets, truck platoons and other automated cyber-physical systems. From birds flying in formation to students working on a group project, the functioning of a group requires not only coordination and communication but also trust — each member must be confident in the others. The same is true for networks of connected machines, which are rapidly gaining momentum in our modern world – from self-driving rideshare fleets, to smart power grids. Harvard computer scientists, together with a multi-university team that includes information theorists and experts in wireless communications, optimization theory, machine learning, and robotics, are presenting their vision for incorporating the concept of trust into emerging cyber-physical systems. A new paper led by Stephanie Gil, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and associate faculty member in the Kempner Institute, proposes a foundational framework to help multi-agent, connected systems decide what information they can trust before they act. “Cyber-physical systems are going to become very pervasive,” said Gil, who co-authored the paper in Proceedings of the IEEE. “The question is, how do we secure these systems? How do we make sure they are going to be resilient as they go into the real world? This is something we had to learn from making internet systems secure.” Cy-trust as a measure of trustworthiness The paper introduces the concept of “cy-trust:”