Joseph Li

First Name: 
Joseph
Last Name: 
Li
Mentor: 
Dr. Ram Dantu
Abstract: 
Online reviewing has been suffering from fake, inaccurate, and biased reviews for a long time, and this problem has only been getting worse. UK’s Competition & Market Authority in 2019 estimates that “fake reviews potentially influence £23 billion of customer spending each year, as millions of shoppers consult reviews before making buying decisions”. In the present, large online retailers such as Amazon, eBay or expedia generally don’t have a reliable way of testing if reviews are honest or not. Most of these organizations employ a “certified reviewer” tag to flag them as real buyers. The problem with this is that “certified reviewers” can still leave inaccurate reviews and they do! This is a huge problem as these reviews could falsely influence the decision of customers, who in return lose trust of the online retailer and its platform, which can lead to the break-down of the overall health of the online channel. With my research I strived to find a suitable block-chain platform to work with and make modification of such platform to align with our theoretical Proof of Review consensus protocol. In doing this, I hope to create a commercially viable system that would be able to detect and punish biased, fake, or inaccurate reviews while leveraging the unique traits and advantages of a standard block-chain system
Poster: 
A Novel Solution for Identifying Fake Online Reviews Using a New Block-Chain Consensus Protocol