Agents-supported adaptive group awareness: Smart distance and WWWaware

In this paper, we study how agents can facilitate and mediate interaction, communication, and cooperation among people. We propose the concepts of a smart distance and an awareness network in a distributed collaborative environment. We illustrate the architecture of an agent- mediated collaborative system - the agent-buddy system that can create a sense of group presence and, at the same time, preserve the privacy of each user. Virtual springs systems are used to model the awareness degrees among team members. Each agent makes decisions by considering multiple factors. The goal of the multiagent team is to minimize the global awareness frustrations with respect to different kinds of tasks. Empirical studies have been conducted to analyze the influence of individual behavior on global performance for various kinds of tasks.