Team formation in social networks based on collective intelligence – an evolutionary approach

The tremendous growth of the social web has inspired research communities to discover social intelligence, which encompasses a wide spectrum of knowledge characterized by human interaction, communication and collaboration, thereby exploiting collective intelligence (CI) to support the successful existence of social communities on the Web. In this work, we address the team formation problem for generalized tasks where a set of experts is to be discovered from an expertise social network that can collaborate effectively to accomplish a given task. The concept of CI that emerges from these collaborations attempts to maximize the potential of the team of experts, rather than only aggregating individual potentials. Because the team formation problem is NP-hard, a genetic algorithm-based approach is applied to optimize computational collective intelligence in web-based social networks. To capture the essence of CI, a novel quantitative measure Collective Intelligence Index (CII) is proposed that takes two factors into account –the “enhanced expertise score” and the “trust-based collaboration score”. This measure relates to the social interactions among experts, reflecting various affiliations that form a network of experts that help to drive creativity by deepening engagements through collaboration and the exchange of ideas and expertise, thereby enriching and enhancing the knowledge base of experts. The presented model also captures the teams’ dynamics by considering trust, which is essential to effective interactions between the experts. The computational experiments are performed on a synthetic dataset that bears close resemblance to real-world expertise networks, and the results clearly establish the effectiveness of our proposed model.