A Tool for Recommending Teams of Experts

Commanders of all branches of the US military are often confronted with a varying array of situations for which they need expert assistance outside of their immediate staff. In the era of network-centric operations, connectivity and bandwidth are increasingly available to the commander so that groups of outside experts can be reached for consultation when a specific situation arises. When putting together such a team of experts, there are at least two important factors for commanders (or other team builders) to consider. First, they need to make sure that the team members are highly competent in the areas needed for their role on the team. Second, the team must work well together. This is a combination of having team members that are familiar with and comfortable with each other and having members of the team that work well in a team environment. We propose to design and explore the feasibility of T-REX (Tool for Recommending teams of EXperts), a team-recommendation system capable of learning user profiles and social connections in order to recommend effective teams of distributed experts.