Agents to assist in finding help
Name
44877267-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
7.21 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
ebc27f260ba76c215451e9c01bd87afd
Author(s)
Vivacqua, Adriana Santarosa, 1970-
Advisor(s)
Patricia Maes.
Date Issued
1999
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
The problem of finding someone who might be able to help with a particular task or knowledge area exists everywhere, be it in groups of students or corporate settings. Time and effort are spent looking for relevant information when another person in the community could easily provide assistance. Our approach to addressing this problem is to use software agents to assist the search for expertise. Previous research on this topic has been mostly in the areas of information marketplaces, referral systems or information repositories. We built a system, called Expert Finder, which provides a testbed for ideas and techniques developed in the context of this thesis. Expert Finder analyzes previous work of both the novice and the expert to automatically categorize expertise and match it with the user's problem while providing a community-based incentive mechanism. We present alternative profiling and incentive mechanisms to those that had been presented in previous work. We chose the Java Programming domain for our initial implementation and testing of the system. Expert Finder uses each user's Java source files to determine their expertise and uses a Java domain model to match questions and experts. It keeps track of users' willingness to help out as a measure of the social capital in the community. We ran some tests using the prototype system to assess how well these ideas worked, and results are also reported in this thesis.
Description
Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 1999.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-105).
Subjects
Architecture. Program In Media Arts and Sciences.
MIT Department
Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Terms of Use
M.I.T. theses are protected by
copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but
reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written
permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but
reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written
permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
Persistent DSpace Link
