Preventing HIV Spread in Homeless Populations Using PSINET

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 and rely on word-of-mouth spread of information through their social network. Previous work in strategic selection 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...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Amulya Yadav, Leandro Soriano Marcolino, Eric Rice, Robin Petering, Hailey Winetrobe, Harmony Rhoades, Milind Tambe, Heather Carmichael
• Keywords: AAAI 2015, Intelligent Agents