A referral system is a multiagent system whose member agents are capable of giving and following referrals. The specific cases of interest arise where each agent has a user. The agents cooperate by giving and taking referrals so each can better help its user locate relevant information. This use of referrals mimics human interactions and can potentially lead to greater effectiveness and efficiency than in single-agent systems.Existing approaches consider what referrals may be given and treat the referring process simply as path search in a static graph. By contrast, the present approach understands referrals as arising in and influencing dynamic social networks, where the agents act autonomously based on local knowledge. This paper studies strategies using which agents may search dynamic social networks. It evaluates the proposed approach empirically for a community of AI scientists (partially derived from bibliographic data). Further, it presents a prototype system that assists users in finding other users in practical social networks.

@inproceedings{yu2003searching, author = {Yu, Bin and Singh, Munindar P.}, title = {Searching social networks}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems}, publisher = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, year = {2003}, pages = {65--72}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/860575.860587}, doi = {10.1145/860575.860587}, isbn = {1-58113-683-8}, keywords = {agent, collaborative, network, search, social, web}, abstract = {A referral system is a multiagent system whose member agents are capable of giving and following referrals. The specific cases of interest arise where each agent has a user. The agents cooperate by giving and taking referrals so each can better help its user locate relevant information. This use of referrals mimics human interactions and can potentially lead to greater effectiveness and efficiency than in single-agent systems.Existing approaches consider what referrals may be given and treat the referring process simply as path search in a static graph. By contrast, the present approach understands referrals as arising in and influencing dynamic social networks, where the agents act autonomously based on local knowledge. This paper studies strategies using which agents may search dynamic social networks. It evaluates the proposed approach empirically for a community of AI scientists (partially derived from bibliographic data). Further, it presents a prototype system that assists users in finding other users in practical social networks.} }

%0 = inproceedings %A = Yu, Bin and Singh, Munindar P. %B = Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems %C = New York, NY, USA %D = 2003 %I = ACM %T = Searching social networks %U = http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/860575.860587