As online social networks (OSNs) become more prevalent, a new paradigm for problem-solving through crowd-sourcing has emerged. By leveraging the OSN platforms, users can post a problem to be solved and then form a team to collaborate and solve the problem. A common concern in OSNs is how to form effective collaborative teams, as various tasks are completed through online collaborative networks. A team’s diversity in expertise has received high attention to producing high team performance in developing team formation (TF) algorithms. However, the effect of team diversity on performance under different types of tasks has not been extensively studied. Another important issue is how to balance the need to preserve individuals’ privacy with the need to maximize performance through active collaboration, as these two goals may conflict with each other. This research has not been actively studied in the literature. In this work, we develop a team formation (TF) algorithm in the context of OSNs that can maximize team performance and preserve team members’ privacy under different types of tasks. Our proposedPRivAcy-Diversity-AwareTeamFormation framework, calledPRADA-TF, is based on trust relationships between users in OSNs where trust is measured based on a user’s expertise and privacy preference levels. The PRADA-TF algorithm considers the team members’ domain expertise, privacy preferences, and the team’s expertise diversity in the process of team formation. Our approach employs game-theoretic principlesMechanism Designto motivate self-interested individuals within a team formation context, positioning the mechanism designer as the pivotal team leader responsible for assembling the team. We use two real-world datasets (i.e., Netscience and IMDb) to generate different semi-synthetic datasets for constructing trust networks using a belief model (i.e., Subjective Logic) and identifying trustworthy users as candidate team members. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposedPRADA-TFscheme in four variants against three baseline methods in the literature. Our analysis focuses on three performance metrics for studying OSNs: social welfare, privacy loss, and team diversity.
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Diversity, networks, and innovation: A text analytic approach to measuring expertise diversity
Abstract Despite the importance of diverse expertise in helping solve difficult interdisciplinary problems, measuring it is challenging and often relies on proxy measures and presumptive correlates of actual knowledge and experience. To address this challenge, we propose a text-based measure that uses researcher’s prior work to estimate their substantive expertise. These expertise estimates are then used to measure team-level expertise diversity by determining similarity or dissimilarity in members’ prior knowledge and skills. Using this measure on 2.8 million team invented patents granted by the US Patent Office, we show evidence of trends in expertise diversity over time and across team sizes, as well as its relationship with the quality and impact of a team’s innovation output.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1856090
- PAR ID:
- 10471460
- Editor(s):
- Dmitry Zaytsev
- Publisher / Repository:
- Cambridge University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Network Science
- Volume:
- 11
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2050-1242
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 36 to 64
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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