Title page for ETD etd-05112007-112917

Type of Document

Master's Thesis

Author

Batalagundu Viswanathan, Arvind , Mr

URN

etd-05112007-112917

Title

Bootstrapping Referral Systems With Social Network Information

Degree

Master of Science

Graduate Program

Computer Science

Advisory Committee

Advisor Name	Title
Dr. Munindar P. Singh	Committee Chair
Dr. Edward Gehringer	Committee Member
Dr. Laurie Williams	Committee Member

Keywords

social networking sites
referral systems
bootstrapping

Date of Defense

2007-05-04

Availability

unrestricted

Abstract

This thesis addresses the challenge of facilitating human interactions in solving
problems. To this end, it assigns an agent to each user, and models a social network as a
multiagent system. A user's agent helps them by sending out and responding to queries
on their behalf. Each agent makes its decisions based on its models of the expertise and
trustworthiness of other agents. However, such models are not trivial to construct and
maintain. This thesis develops an approach wherein the models are seeded based upon
information extracted from the user's emails and from existing social networking sites. The
main contribution of this thesis is in the specification of heuristics by which expertise and
trustworthiness can be computed. It also provides a general schema and methodology by
which additional sources of social information can be incorporated.

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