Agent Amplified Communication

Abstract

We propose an agent-based framework for assisting and simplifying person-to-person communication for information gathering tasks. As an example, we focus on expertise location within a large organization. In our approach, the informal person-to-person networks that exist within an organization are used to "referral chain" requests for expertise. User-agents are employed to automate the referral chaining process. We also present simulation results demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Introduction There are basically two ways of finding something out by using a computer: "ask a program" and "ask a person". The first covers all ways of accessing information stored online, including the use of traditional database programs; file indexing and retrieval programs such as glimpse (Manber and Wu 1994) or Apple's AppleSearch; news filtering programs such as Hoover (SandPoint Corp.); and even more simply, the use of tools such as ftp, awk, and text editors to retrieve and view files....