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HELP-EXCHANGE: An Arbitrated System for a Help Network
Background
Paul Losleben
Stanford University
CIS-110, MC-4070
Stanford, CA 94305
415/725-3620
plosleben@stanford.edu
Alice S. Tull
Escondido Village
Apt 36D
Stanford, CA 94305
tull@cs.stanford.edu
Erming Zhou
P.O. Box 3804
Stanford, CA 94305
zhou@cs.stanford.edu
Abstract: The problem of obtaining help over the Internet continues to be a perplexing
challenge, especially as the Internet grows. Most existing systems do not scale well as the
number of users increase. The Help-Exchange system has been developed in an attempt to
facilitate person-to-person connections, especially across disciplines in a way that improves
as the number of users increases. The system is based on a taxonomy of disciplines and
arbitrates a dialog between users by matching questions to experts. The paper describes the
features of the system and the results of early testing.
About five years ago, a set of activities were spawned from the Microelectronics Systems Education Conference
[Borriello 91] aimed at improving the effectiveness of microelectronics education. One fledgling idea which
happened to not be funded at the time sought to build a network of educators and researchers who could assist
each other through an email-based system designed to connect individuals with questions to other individuals
who might have an answer. This idea was suggested by an attendee of the conference and sought to solve
problems of scaling in existing systems.
The rapid growth of the VLSI community in the early 1980s was largely due to extensive interaction between
researchers and educators in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments at a relatively small
number of universities. The sharing of knowledge, tools and designs was impressive, but the well-known
individuals in the community quickly became overburdened with requests for information. In a much broader
sense, newsgroups [Kantor & Lapsley 86, Horton & Adams 87] have been enormously popular and successful, but
the traffic volume is often too high to be useful, even with partitioning by topic into hundreds of separate
newsgroups. There are also many systems now in use to connect individuals with questions or problems to
experts who are either paid to provide advice or are volunteers in formal organizations of one form or another.
These generally go by the name of "HelpDesk" and are familiar to those of us who have tried to get customer
support on a product we have just purchased. None of these approaches scale well.
These "person-to-person" approaches to providing information are quite different from and complement the
enormous body of work that has been underway for at least two decades to locate static information over
electronic networks. Valuable information often exists only in the minds of experienced individuals and even
if the information is available in machine form, human reasoning is often very valuable in identifying and
utilizing context in searching for information.