From the Periphery to the Core: Information Brokerage in an Evolving Network

From the Periphery to the Core: Information Brokerage in an Evolving Network

Bo Yan, Yiping Liu, Jiamou Liu, Yijin Cai, Hongyi Su, Hong Zheng

Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 3912-3918. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2018/544

Interpersonal ties are pivotal to individual efficacy, status and performance in an agent society.This paper explores three important and interrelated themes in social network theory: the center/periphery partition of the network; network dynamics; and social integration of newcomers. We tackle the question: How would a newcomer harness information brokerage to integrate into a dynamic network going from periphery to center? We model integration as the interplay between the newcomer and the dynamics network and capture information brokerage using a process of relationship building. We analyze theoretical guarantees for the newcomer to reach the center through tactics; proving that a winning tactic always exists for certain types of network dynamics. We then propose three tactics and show their superior performance over alternative methods on four real-world datasets and four network models. In general, our tactics place the newcomer to the center by adding very few new edges on dynamic networks with ~14000 nodes.
Keywords:
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Action, Change and Causality
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Agent-Based Simulation and Emergence
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Coordination and Cooperation
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Social Sciences
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: AI and the Web