In a social network, people receive information about the world from people they are "friends" with. These friends are in turn influenced by their friends, and so on. Furthermore we trust some friends more than others with regard to certain topics, e.g., I might have one friend who I trust regarding financial matters, but not regarding medical matters. This project will be about taking an exisiting java program that simulates propagation of information in a social network, and augmenting it to take trust into account. By conducting experiments, it will then be possible to explore questions such as: "can one person force their own beliefs to pervade the network?" and "how might the trust that one person has in another evolve?"

As well as the programming component, the project will involve reading-up on several scientific articles from the field.