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Community Formation via a Distributed, Privacy-Protecting Matchmaking System

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Book cover Community Computing and Support Systems

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1519))

Abstract

Shared interests often serve as the basis for the formation of community. Yet it is often difficult to find others on the net who share one’s interests, due to the large size of the network, the difficulty of finding newsgroups, mailing lists, and discussion groups that reflect possibly unusual interests, and because most people do not often post.

To address these issues, I have designed and am implementing Yenta, a system that safely and securely introduces people on the Internet who share some similar interests, and that enables the automatic formation of interest groups based on these shared interests. Yenta is a system of distributed, individual agents, each instantiation of which is run by an individual user. Each user’s Yenta discovers its user’s interests by direct examination of the user’s personal files. It then finds groups of similar users without divulging sensitive information.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MIT Media Lab, Software Agents Group, 20 Ames St, E15-305, Cambridge, MA, 02139

    Leonard N. Foner

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  1. Leonard N. Foner
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University, 606-8501, Kyoto, Japan

    Toru Ishida

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© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Foner, L.N. (1998). Community Formation via a Distributed, Privacy-Protecting Matchmaking System. In: Ishida, T. (eds) Community Computing and Support Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1519. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49247-X_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49247-X_24

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-65475-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49247-4

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