Amulya Yadav, Ece Kamar, Barbara Grosz, and Milind Tambe. 2016. “
HEALER: POMDP Planning for Scheduling Interventions among Homeless Youth (Demonstration).” In International conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.
AbstractAdaptive software agents like HEALER have been proposed in the literature recently to recommend intervention plans to homeless shelter officials. However, generating networks for HEALER’s input is challenging. Moreover, HEALER’s solutions are often counter-intuitive to people. This demo paper makes two contributions. First, we demonstrate HEALER’s Facebook application, which parses the Facebook contact lists in order to construct an approximate social network for HEALER. Second, we present a software interface to run human subject experiments (HSE) to understand human biases in recommendation of intervention plans. We plan to use data collected from these HSEs to build an explanation system for HEALER’s solutions.
2016_24_teamcore_aamasdemo_amulya.pdf Amulya Yadav, Hau Chan, Albert Jiang, Eric Rice, Ece Kamar, Barbara Grosz, and Milind Tambe. 2016. “
POMDPs for Assisting Homeless Shelters - Computational and Deployment Challenges.” In AAMAS 2016 IDEAS Workshop.
AbstractThis paper looks at challenges faced during the ongoing deployment of HEALER, a POMDP based software agent that recommends sequential intervention plans for use by homeless shelters, who organize these interventions to raise awareness about HIV among homeless youth. HEALER’s sequential plans (built using knowledge of social networks of homeless youth) choose intervention participants strategically to maximize influence spread, while reasoning about uncertainties in the network. In order to compute its plans, HEALER (i) casts this influence maximization problem as a POMDP and solves it using a novel planner which scales up to previously unsolvable real-world sizes; (ii) and constructs social networks of homeless youth at low cost, using a Facebook application. HEALER is currently being deployed in the real world in collaboration with a homeless shelter. Initial feedback from the shelter officials has been positive but they were surprised by the solutions generated by HEALER as these solutions are very counterintuitive. Therefore, there is a need to justify HEALER’s solutions in a way that mirrors the officials’ intuition. In this paper, we report on progress made towards HEALER’s deployment and detail first steps taken to tackle the issue of explaining HEALER’s solutions.
2016_23_teamcore_ideas_amulya.pdf Leandro Soriano Marcolino, Aravind Lakshminarayanan, Amulya Yadav, and Milind Tambe. 2016. “
Simultaneous Influencing and Mapping Social Networks (Extended Abstract).” In International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS).
AbstractInfluencing 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.
2016_14_teamcore_aamas2016_i.pdf Amulya Yadav, Hau Chan, Albert Xin Jiang, Haifeng Xu, Eric Rice, and Milind Tambe. 2016. “
Using Social Networks to Aid Homeless Shelters: Dynamic Influence Maximization under Uncertainty.” In International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) 2016.
AbstractThis paper presents HEALER, a software agent that recommends sequential intervention plans for use by homeless shelters, who organize these interventions to raise awareness about HIV among homeless youth. HEALER’s sequential plans (built using knowledge of social networks of homeless youth) choose intervention participants strategically to maximize influence spread, while reasoning about uncertainties in the network. While previous work presents influence maximizing techniques to choose intervention participants, they do not address three real-world issues: (i) they completely fail to scale up to real-world sizes; (ii) they do not handle deviations in execution of intervention plans; (iii) constructing real-world social networks is an expensive process. HEALER handles these issues via four major contributions: (i) HEALER casts this influence maximization problem as a POMDP and solves it using a novel planner which scales up to previously unsolvable realworld sizes; (ii) HEALER allows shelter officials to modify its recommendations, and updates its future plans in a deviation-tolerant manner; (iii) HEALER constructs social networks of homeless youth at low cost, using a Facebook application. Finally, (iv) we show hardness results for the problem that HEALER solves. HEALER will be deployed in the real world in early Spring 2016 and is currently undergoing testing at a homeless shelter.
2016_10_teamcore_amulya_aamas16.pdf