Connections Between Communications and Social Networks using ELICIT

摘要

Our goal is to find relationships between social/cognitive networks and communications networks to devise strategies to maximize various performance metrics within these networks. We consider the case of a group of users that are performing a particular decision-making objective by passing information through a social network that uses a communication network with errors and delays in the transmission of information. The quality of service of the communication network will adversely affect overall user performance and trust relationships within the users by changing the dynamics of information- sharing within the network. However, if the affected users are able to adapt to these network errors, they may be able to maintain the same level of performance when compared to their performance in an optimally performing network. We are interested in characterizing the effects of these errors and determining if these dynamics can be compared to properties of traditional communication networks. We are currently exploring the use of ELICIT to examine the effect of communications errors and delays on user performance. We use existing capabilities within ELICIT by altering the sense-making agent parameters to mimic communication errors (failure to share factoids) and delays (delay in sharing factoids). Further, we are interested in the effect of connectivity within the organization structure for the ELICIT experiments. This is a study using ELICIT from a perspective that concentrates on the relationship of the communication network with the social network.