Dedication

and Expertise Models. (Under the direction of Dr. Munindar P. Singh). This thesis addresses the challenge of assisting people to solve a problem by helping locate other people who might have the expertise required to solve that problem. To this end, the proposed system assigns an agent to each user. Further, it models a social network as a multiagent system based on the user’s existing online identity. It provides heuristics by which an agent can estimate the expertise and trust to be placed in a user with whom the agent’s user interactis. Our approach seeks to reduce the problem of finding an answer to a query to the problem of finding a path to a trustworthy expert who can answer the query. To accomplish this, our system uses referrals from one agent to another in the same fashion that word-of-mouth is used when people are looking for an expert. Our models of trust help establish the authenticity and veracity of the referrals and replies. This thesis describes the architecture and implementation of such a system