Identifying Emergent Thought Leaders

Determining the emergent thought leader of an ad hoc organization would have enormous benefit in a variety of domains including emergency response. To determine if such leaders could be identified automatically, we compared an observer-based assessment to an automated approach for detecting leaders of 3-person ad hoc teams performing a logistics planning task. The automated coding used a combination of indicator phrases indicative of reasoning and uncertainty. The member of the team with the most reasoning and least uncertainty matched the observer-based leader in two thirds of the teams. This determination could be combined with other analyses of the topics of discussion to determine emergent thought leaders in different domains. As an example, a real-time user interface providing this information is shown which highlights communications by others that are relevant to the automatically detected, topic-specific, emergent thought leader.