Agents for Expertise Location

The problem of finding someone who might be able to help with a particular task or knowledge area exists everywhere, be it in groups of students or corporate settings. Time and effort are spent looking for relevant information when another person in the community could easily provide assistance. We have chosen to tackle this problem. Our approach to addressing the problem of finding people who can help is to use software agents to assist the search for expertise and mediate the information exchange process. Issues of availability, user profiling, privacy and incentives are involved. We chose the Java Programming domain for initial implementation and testing of the system. Other researchers have taken stabs at this problem, most without the use of agent technology. We are building agents, called Expert Finders, to help people find help.