Recommending targeted strangers from whom to solicit information on social media

We present an intelligent, crowd-powered information collection system that automatically identifies and asks targeted strangers on Twitter for desired information (e.g., current wait time at a nightclub). Our work includes three parts. First, we identify a set of features that characterize one's willingness and readiness to respond based on their exhibited social behavior, including the content of their tweets and social interaction patterns. Second, we use the identified features to build a statistical model that predicts one's likelihood to respond to information solicitations. Third, we develop a recommendation algorithm that selects a set of targeted strangers using the probabilities computed by our statistical model with the goal to maximize the overall response rate. Our experiments, including several in the real world, demonstrate the effectiveness of our work. Copyright © 2013 ACM.