Yadav, Amulya and Soriano Marcolino, Leandro and Rice, Eric and Petering, R. and Winetrobe, H. and Rhoades, H. and Tambe, Milind and Carmichael, H. (2015) Preventing HIV spread in homeless populations using PSINET : emerging application case study. In: Proceedings of the 27th Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI 2015) :. IAAI, pp. 4006-4011. ISBN 9781577357049
Abstract
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 around 60% more information spread over the current state-of-the-art. PSINET was developed in collaboration with My Friend's Place (a drop-in agency serving homeless youth in Los Angeles) and is currently being reviewed by their officials.