The workshop ’Trust: Foundations, Measurements and Significance’ was held within the CTRUST project in cooperation with HPC Serbia, on 22 and 23 December at the Institute of Physics Belgrade. It brought together researchers in the fields of physics, computing, social sciences, psychology and artificial intelligence who met to study collective trust in online and social systems through a multidisciplinary approach.
This two-day hybrid event aimed to understand the manner in which trust is born, develops and can be measured in complex social settings, particularly in digital and online communities. A central topic of the workshop was the integration of computational modelling, natural language processing, network science and agent-based simulations with empirical social data.
The workshop highlighted the importance of interdisciplinary cooperation and methods based on high-performance computing in the advancement of scholarly understanding of trust as a complex social phenomenon. It additionally spurred the exchange among theoretical, methodological and applied perspectives, strengthening the research community gathered around the CTRUST project.
Lectures included a wide range of topics, including language technologies and vector representations of Serbian language texts, the analysis of AI-generated narratives and disinformation, simulations of large-scale social systems, as well as the use of synthetic agents and large language models in the study of societal behaviour. Several lectures featured new data sets, modelling frameworks and validation methodologies for analysing the dynamics of trust on a large scale.
In addition, the workshop addressed psychological and behavioural aspects of online interaction, such as the role of personality traits, emotions and non-verbal communication, as well as advanced mathematical and network-theoretical approaches to modelling collective cognition and higher order social structures.
