Authority-based Team Discovery in Social Networks

Given a network of experts, we tackle the problem of finding a team of experts that covers a set of required skills in order to complete a project. Previous work ranks different teams based on the communication cost among the team members. However, it does not consider the effect of the authority of the experts. The authority of an expert is application dependent and might be related to the expertise of the team members. In addition to the authority of the skill holders, in a big social network, the authorities of the experts connecting the skill holders are also important. In this work, we introduce and analyze the effect of the authority of both skill holders and middle experts on the quality of a team of experts for performing a project. Since the proposed problems are NP-hard, we propose greedy algorithms to solve them. We verify effectiveness of our approach on a real dataset.