"The Application and Analysis of Social Structures in Trust, Influence and Search Problems in Agent Societies"

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Understanding the effects and consequences of information diffusion in social and economic networks has attracted increasing attention over the last few years. Initial investigations focused on structural network properties; however, the importance of agent behavior and the semantics of information flowing in the network is now being considered in the research problems investigated. The study of such networks is of considerable importance in a wide range of fields; e.g., bioinformatics, systems biology, social science and electronic commerce. The research proposed concerns itself with dynamic social and economic networks; i.e., networks in which the topology and information flows change with time. Specifically, we are interested in constructing agent-based models in which agents interact with their immediate neighbors and choose to add or remove neighbors based upon their interactions. Several questions naturally arise when considering such models. First, how do we select new agents with which to interact? Second, under what conditions do we cease to interact with an agent? Third, how influential is a particular agent in the network and what set of agents would be required to ensure opinion, or agent state, in the network converges to a specific value? Finally, how can an agent's social network be used to answer questions or make recommendations? These questions are examples only and represent a part of our overall research vision. A goal of our research would be to make contributions in the area of distributed, or socially-based, search algorithms. By understanding the nature of influence in social networks we would expect to be able to design improved recommender systems which have important applications in e-commerce, for example.