A System for Social Harvesting of Community Knowledge (SHOCK)

An important problem facing large, distributed organizations is the efficient management and distribution of information, knowledge, and expertise. Shock is designed as low-cost, extensible, flexible, and dynamic peer-to-peer knowledge network that helps address this problem. The system is designed to protect the privacy of user's personal information, such as email, web browsing habits, etc., while making that information available for knowledge management applications. It reduces participation costs for such applications as expert-finding, allows highly targeted messaging, and enables novel kinds of ad hoc conversation and anonymous messaging. The system is tightly integrated with users' email clients, taking advantage of email as habitat.

Click to view larger version of the traditional solution.		Traditional solutions, such as those illustrated in the figure below, have numerous problems. These include the lack of privacy for user profiles and anonymity for questions, as well as cumbersome interfaces for describing and maintaining expertise.

We believe that it is possible to automatically construct user profiles by analyzing a user's every day interactions with their digital environment. Web pages, e-mails, documents... all these reflect a user's expertise and interests and can be used to filter incoming questions. The Shock client seeks to construct such a profile which is maintained locally on the user's PC. Because the information is constructed and maintained locally, it is never released to a central server and is as secure as any information on that user's computer.

Click to view larger version of The Shock solution.		Shock clients are connected through a peer-to-peer network (as illustrated below). As questions arrive at a Shock client a user will only be shown the question if the Shock client believes they are the right person to contact. Users may then chose to answer questions (anonymously, if they wish) or participate in conversations. The Shock solution maximizes user control of their data while at the same time connecting those who need to know with the right answers.

Additional information

Lukose, R., E. Adar, J. Tyler, and C. Sengupta, "SHOCK: Computational Messaging with Automatic Private Profiles," submitted for publication, pdf

Adar, E., R. Lukose, C. Sengupta, J. Tyler, and N. Good, "Shock: Aggregating Information While Preserving Privacy," to appear in Information System Frontiers 5(1):15-28, 2003, pdf

Additional information can be found in a presentation on Shock given by Eytan Adar at the Internet2 P2P workshop: HTML

The Shock team: Eytan Adar, Rajan Lukose, Josh Tyler, Caesar Sengupta, and Nathan Good