International Workshop on
Regulated Agent-Based Social Systems:
Theories and Applications (RASTA'02)

Abstract for

16:00 - 16:30
Search in Referral Networks
Bin Yu, Munindar P. Singh

Referral systems have been proposed to assist people in finding potential experts in person-to-person social networks, in which each user is assigned a software agent and software agents help automate the process through a series of referrals. However, most of the existing referral systems have focused on the referral information generation, and simply consider referrals through path search in a static graph. An important question is how to efficiently search the social networks with the help of software agents, while agents only rely on their local knowledge. In this paper referral networks are proposed to model the social structure emerging among software agents. We study the referral networks empirically for the community of AI scientists (as defined on bibliographic data), and show how to control the searching process by adaptively choosing the referrals.
Daniel Moldt
Last modified: Fri Jun 21 15:56:21 CEST 2002