When people need help with their day-to-day activities, they turn to family, friends or neighbours. But despite an increasingly networked world, technology falls short in finding suitable volunteers. In this paper, we propose uHelp, a platform for building a community of helpful people and supporting community members find the appropriate help within their social network. Lately, applications that focus on finding volunteers have started to appear, such as Helpin or Facebook's Community Help. However, what distinguishes uHelp from existing applications is its trust-based intelligent search for volunteers. Although trust is crucial to these innovative social applications, none of them have seriously achieved yet a trust-building solution such as that of uHelp. uHelp's intelligent search for volunteers is based on a number of AI technologies: (1) a novel trust-based flooding algorithm that navigates one's social network looking for appropriate trustworthy volunteers; (2) a novel trust model that maintains the trustworthiness of peers by learning from their similar past experiences; and (3) a semantic similarity model that assesses the similarity of experiences. This article presents the uHelp application, describes the underlying AI technologies that allow uHelp find trustworthy volunteers efficiently, and illustrates the implementation details. uHelp's initial prototype has been tested with a community of single parents in Barcelona, and the app is available online at both Apple Store and Google Play.

翻译：当人们需要在日常活动中寻求帮助时，通常会向家人、朋友或邻居求助。然而，尽管世界日益网络化，技术手段在寻找合适志愿者方面仍存在不足。本文提出uHelp平台，旨在构建互助社群，并支持社区成员在其社交网络中寻找恰当的帮助。近年来，诸如Helpin或Facebook的Community Help等专注于志愿者查找的应用开始涌现。但uHelp区别于现有应用的核心在于其基于信任的智能搜索机制。尽管信任对于这些创新型社交应用至关重要，但尚无应用能像uHelp一样实现可靠的信任构建方案。uHelp的智能志愿者搜索基于多项人工智能技术：（1）一种新颖的基于信任的洪泛算法，可在用户社交网络中导航以寻找可信赖的志愿者；（2）一种创新的信任模型，通过学习用户相似历史经验来维护对等节点的可信度；（3）一种评估经验相似度的语义相似性模型。本文展示uHelp应用，阐述使其高效找到可信志愿者的底层AI技术，并说明实现细节。uHelp初始原型已在巴塞罗那单亲家庭社区完成测试，该应用已在Apple Store和Google Play上线。