Tanja Ažderska graduated System Engineering and Automation at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies, University Ss. Cyril and Methodius – Skopje, Macedonia. She currently works in the Laboratory for Open Systems and Networks at Jožef Stefan Institute as a young researcher in the field of Internet trust, security and privacy. She is a doctoral student at Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School in Ljubljana.

EDUCATION

• B. Sc., University Ss. Cyril and Methodius – Skopje, Macedonia, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies, 2004 – 2008
• Ph. D., Institute Jožef Stefan, Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School, 2009 – >>> (expected: 2013)

PROFFESIONAL EXPERIENCES

Prior to the PhD studies:

• HMI programming of a touch screen terminal for a brick conveying plant in the factory for brick production “Džumajlija” – Lozovo, Macedonia;

• Wonderware InTouch SCADA programming for the whole technological process for cement production in the factory “Usje” – TITAN in Skopje, Macedonia (a snapshot of it is shown here);
• Temporal task-scheduling using Petri Nets;

During the PhD studies:

1. Talks and presentations:

• IPSCS 2010, 2^nd Jozef Stefan International Postgraduate School Conference (poster presentation)
• Nineteenth International Electrotechnical and Computer Science Conference ERK 2010, 20-22 September 2010, Portorož, Slovenia
• FIA PPP Architecture Workshop, 9 June 2010, Madrid (position paper)
• 1st unite doctoral symposium, 27th – 29th June 2011, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania (paper presentation)
• 4th European Conference, ServiceWave 2011, Poznan, Poland, October 26-28, 2011
• CEPOL counters cyber-crime, European police college conference, 10 November 2011, Brdo pri Kranju (talk)
• …and several Institute seminars

2. Attended events:

• First ACTIVE Summer School on advanced technologies for a knowledge discovery in databases – Bled, 04-06 September 2009
• The Future Internet Assembly 2010, 15-16 April 2010, Valencia, Spain
• IPICS Summer School on Information and Communication Security, 19-30 July 2010, Samos, Greece
• ICT 2010, 27-29 September 2010, Brussels Expo, Brussels
• ServiceWave’10, 13-15 December 2010, Ghent
• IFIP WG 11.11 Summer School on Trust Management, Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen, June 19 – 25, 2011

PROFESSIONAL SKILLS

• Cybernetics, Control Theory, Cellular Automata and General Systems Theory
• System Automation ( SCADA system design, PLC process automation)
• Trust and Reputation Management
• Probabilistic Reasoning and Information Fusion
• Languages: Advanced English and Basic Spanish, all the Balkan languages

COMPUTER SKILLS

• Programming (C, C++, Matlab, NetLogo(Lisp-based))
• HMI Programming, PLC Programming
• Machine Learning
• System Analysis

HONORS AND AWARDS

• Member of the Macedonian HST (High Speed Telegraphy) Representation
• 4 times setting a World record in High Speed Telegraphy, numerous World and European Championship medals, Absolute National Champion
• Winner of regional and national competitions in Math, Physics and Scientific Writing

HOBBIES

• High Speed Telegraphy (HST) – Morse Code
• Handball, Gymnastics, Music instruments (mandolin and guitar)
• Math, Physics, Literature (reading and writing), Music (listening and playing)

RESEARCH INTERESTS

The major part of my research is analysing the micro and macro-behavioural phenomena in computational trust and reputation systems, in particular their causal relationship to user bias . In that regard, my research interests include:

• Trust: socio-cognitive aspects, computational analogue of trust, its applicability and non-applicability in a virtual setting (“artificial trust”), contextual trust-reasoning;
• Reputation systems: the impact of scale, context, dynamics, privacy, risk;
• Cybernetic principles of trust systems design;
• Trust as an emergent systemic property: micro-incentives (of the system entities) and macro-behaviour (of the system)

Useful directions of my thoughts, however, are given by the work done in:

• History and Philosophy of Science
• Principles of self-sustainability
• Complexity and Chaos Theory
• Probability Theory –  foundations and generalisations