Harnessing Teamwork in Networks: Prediction, Optimization, and Explanation

Teams are increasingly indispensable to achievements in any organizations. Despite the organizations' substantial dependency on teams, fundamental knowledge about the conduct of team-enabled operations is lacking, especially at the {\it social, cognitive} and {\it information} level in relation to team performance and network dynamics. The goal of this dissertation is to create new instruments to {\it predict}, {\it optimize} and {\it explain} teams' performance in the context of composite networks (i.e., social-cognitive-information networks).

Understanding the dynamic mechanisms that drive the success of high-performing teams can provide the key insights into building the best teams and hence lift the productivity and profitability of the organizations. For this purpose, novel predictive models to forecast the long-term performance of teams ({\it point prediction}) as well as the pathway to impact ({\it trajectory prediction}) have been developed. A joint predictive model by exploring the relationship between team level and individual level performances has also been proposed.

For an existing team, it is often desirable to optimize its performance through expanding the team by bringing a new team member with certain expertise, or finding a new candidate to replace an existing under-performing member. I have developed graph kernel based performance optimization algorithms by considering both the structural matching and skill matching to solve the above enhancement scenarios. I have also worked towards real time team optimization by leveraging reinforcement learning techniques.

With the increased complexity of the machine learning models for predicting and optimizing teams, it is critical to acquire a deeper understanding of model behavior. For this purpose, I have investigated {\em explainable prediction} -- to provide explanation behind a performance prediction and {\em explainable optimization} -- to give reasons why the model recommendations are good candidates for certain enhancement scenarios.