Forming Teams of Homeless Youth To Combat HIV Spread

Homeless youth are prone to HIV due to their engagement in high risk behavior. Many agencies conduct interventions to educate/train a select group of homeless youth about HIV prevention practices. These trained youth form a team whose goal is to maximize spread of HIV based information in their social network. This team of humans usually relies on word-of-mouth information spread to maximize the reach of the HIV based information. Previous work in strategic selection of this team of intervention participants does not handle uncertainties in the social network’s structure and in the evolving network state, potentially causing significant shortcomings in spread of information. Thus, we developed PSINET, a decision support system to aid the agencies in this task. PSINET includes the following key novelties: (i) it handles uncertainties in network structure and evolving network state; (ii) it addresses these uncertainties by using POMDPs in influence maximization; (iii) it provides algorithmic advances to allow high quality approximate solutions for such POMDPs. Simulations show that PSINET achieves ∼60% more information spread over the current state-of-the-art. PSINET was developed in collaboration with My Friend’s Place (a drop-in agency serving homeless youth in Los Angeles) and is currently being reviewed by their officials.