Network Science of Teams: Characterization, Prediction, and Optimization

Abstract

Teams are increasingly indispensable to achievements in any organization. Despite the organizations' substantial dependency on teams, fundamental knowledge about the conduct of team-enabled operations is lacking, especially at the social, cognitive and information level in relation to team performance and network dynamics. Generally speaking, the team performance can be viewed as the composite of its users, the tasks that the team performs and the networks that the team is embedded in or operates on. The goal of this tutorial is to (1) provide a comprehensive review of the recent advances in optimizing teams' performance in the context of networks; and (2) identify the open challenges and future trends. We believe this is an emerging and high-impact topic in computational social science, which will attract both researchers and practitioners in the data mining as well as social science research communities. Our emphasis will be on (1) the recent emerging techniques on addressing team performance optimization problem; and (2) the open challenges/future trends, with a careful balance between the theories, algorithms and applications.