@conference {1501295, title = {Simultaneous Influencing and Mapping Social Networks (Extended Abstract)}, booktitle = {International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS)}, year = {2016}, abstract = {Influencing a social network is an important technique, with potential to positively impact society, as we can modify the behavior of a community. For example, we can increase the overall health of a population; Yadav et al. (2015) [4], for instance, spread information about HIV prevention in homeless populations. However, although influence maximization has been extensively studied [2, 1], their main motivation is viral marketing, and hence they assume that the social network graph is fully known, generally taken from some social media network. However, the graphs recorded in social media do not really represent all the people and all the connections of a population. Most critically, when performing interventions in real life, we deal with large degrees of lack of knowledge. Normally the social agencies have to perform several interviews in order to learn the social network graph [3]. These highly unknown networks, however, are exactly the ones we need to influence in order to have a positive impact in the real world, beyond product advertisement. Additionally, learning a social network graph is very valuable per se. Agencies need data about a population, in order to perform future actions to enhance their well-being, and better actuate in their practices [3]. As mentioned, however, the works in influence maximization are currently ignoring this problem. Each person in a social network actually knows other people, including the ones she cannot directly influence. When we select someone for an intervention (to spread influence), we also have an opportunity to obtain knowledge. Therefore, in this work we present for the first time the problem of simultaneously influencing and mapping a social network. We study the performance of the classical influence maximization algorithm in this context, and show that it can be arbitrarily low. Hence, we study a class of algorithms for this problem, performing an experimentation using four real life networks of homeless populations. We show that our algorithm is competitive with previous approaches in terms of influence, and is significantly better in terms of mapping.}, author = {Marcolino, Leandro Soriano and Lakshminarayanan, Aravind and Amulya Yadav and Tambe, Milind} }