Helping Groups Become Teams: Techniques for Acquiring and Maintaining Group Models

People are small group beings. Interacting with group members provides us with the opportunity to receive feedback, to discuss different ideas, and to get support for our endeavours. Groups generally learn faster, make fewer errors, recall better, make better decisions and are more productive than individuals working on their own. However, not all groups achieve high performance. Typically, groups start off as being traditional groups and in some cases evolve to teams, where the group performance is outstanding. In order to assist their groups in the process of evolving to teams, collaborative/cooperative systems need to keep a model of their group. In this work we present a review of different AI techniques and tools that implement them, presenting their benefits and difficulties regarding the user and group modelling tasks. The aim is to point out open questions related to choosing which technique use to model the group in different circumstances in order to help groups become teams.