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

在过去的几年里，了解社会和经济网络中信息传播的影响和后果越来越受到关注。最初的调查集中在结构网络属性，然而，代理行为和语义的信息流在网络中的重要性，现在正在考虑的研究问题进行调查。对这种网络的研究在广泛的领域中具有相当重要的意义;例如，生物信息学、系统生物学、社会科学和电子商务。 这项研究涉及动态的社会和经济网络;即，拓扑和信息流随时间变化的网络。具体来说，我们感兴趣的是构建基于代理的模型，在该模型中，代理与他们的近邻进行交互，并根据他们的交互选择添加或删除邻居。 在考虑这些模型时，自然会出现几个问题。首先，我们如何选择新的代理人与之互动？第二，在什么情况下我们停止与代理人互动？第三，网络中特定代理的影响力如何，以及需要什么样的代理来确保网络中的意见或代理状态收敛到特定值？最后，如何使用代理的社交网络来回答问题或提出建议？这些问题只是例子，代表了我们整体研究愿景的一部分。我们研究的一个目标是在分布式或基于社会的搜索算法领域做出贡献。通过理解社交网络中影响的本质，我们期望能够设计出改进的推荐系统，例如在电子商务中具有重要应用。

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.