ABSTRACT RIEDL, MARK OWEN. A Computational Model of Navigation in Social Environments. (Under the

It has long been recognized that humans are fundamentally social animals. Virtually all activities that we engage in involve interaction with others or are influenced by the presence and opinions of others in the social setting. Navigation, while studied extensively as an individualistic activity, is no exception. Social navigation is a term coined to refer to the process of seeking social interaction as source for navigational support. The purpose of this research is to investigate how allowing a navigating agent to interact with other agents in a social collaboration affects navigation. A computational model of social navigation has been developed which models navigation as planning where task-related knowledge can be acquired from three possible sources: the environment, the agent’s memory, or other agents ’ memories. The model is based on several conceptual models of human cognition for navigation and group decision-making and made computational by adapting it to decision theoretic planning. Two applications of the computational model are discussed: the creation of new social navigation tools and the evaluation of virtual environments where social navigation might be used. TRAILGUIDE is a system developed to aide social navigation on the World Wide Web and was designed using principals developed from the computation model of social navigation. MUNE is a Multi-User Navigation Environment, similar to a MUD, which can simulate a wide variety of spatial and semantic navigation environments. Software agents that are built on social navigation principals or more traditional models of navigation can be developed to navigate through MUNE in order to observe their performances. Finally, a simulation of social navigation in arbitrary environments was designed and implemented to test the reasonability of the computational model. The results are analyzed for interesting patterns and implications are enumerated. i