On Event-Participant Arrangement over Event-Based Social Networks

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering


PhD Thesis Defence


Title: "On Event-Participant Arrangement over Event-Based Social Networks"

By

Miss Jieying SHE


Abstract

With the rapid development of Web 2.0 and Online to Offline (O2O) marketing 
model, various event-based social networks (EBSNs), such as Meetup, Plancast, 
and Eventbrite, are getting popular. On EBSN platforms, event organizers 
organize a variety of offline social events and online users register for and 
participate in such offline events. An important task of EBSNs is to facilitate 
a satisfactory event-participant arrangement for both sides, i.e. events enroll 
suitable participants and participants are arranged with personally interesting 
events. Existing approaches usually focus on arranging to a set of potential 
users one single event and do not consider spatio-temporal information or 
conflicts among different events, which can lead to infeasible arrangements. 
Also, no existing work considers online scenarios of event arrangement, where 
users arrive at the platform one by one and only partial information is 
available during the decision making process. In addition, existing works 
measure the satisfaction of an arrangement by a linear combination of few 
factors, weights of which are predefined and fixed, and do not allow users to 
provide feedbacks on whether accepting the arrangement or not. In this thesis, 
to address the shortcomings of existing approaches, we identify more general 
and useful event-participant arrangement problems and propose efficient and 
effective solutions to address different scenarios of event-participant 
arrangement over EBSNs. To summarize, our study addresses the following four 
problems:

1. We identify an event-participant arrangement problem, called the Global 
Event-participant Arrangement with Conflict and Capacity (GEACC) problem, that 
focuses on resolving conflicts of different events and making event-participant 
arrangements in a global view. We prove that the GEACC problem is NP-hard and 
design quality-guaranteed approximate algorithms to address this problem.

2. We further address the online scenario of GEACC and design an online 
algorithm with provable performance guarantee.

3. We study another event-participant arrangement problem that further 
considers location information of events and users. We present a greedy-based 
heuristic algorithm and a two-step approximation framework with guaranteed 
approximation ratio and a series of optimization techniques.

4. We study another online scenario of event-participant arrangement where 
users who arrive in an online way can choose to accept or reject the arranged 
events and the satisfaction of an arrangement is learned adaptively. We model 
the problem as a contextual combinatorial bandit problem and present efficient 
and effective algorithms to solve the problem.

We verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed solutions with 
extensive experiments and discuss interesting future work on event-participant 
arrangement over EBSNs.


Date:			Monday, 5 December 2016

Time:			3:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:			Room 5506
  			Lifts 25/26

Chairman:		Prof. Vincent Lau (ECE)

Committee Members:	Prof. Lei Chen (Supervisor)
  			Prof. Huamin Qu
  			Prof. Ke Yi
  			Prof. Xiaowei Zhang (IELM)
  			Prof. Feifei Li (U of Utah)


**** ALL are Welcome ****