On Event-Participant Arrangement over Event-Based Social Networks

PhD Thesis Proposal 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. In 
addition, 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 
this thesis proposal, 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 three 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.

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:			Thursday, 2 June 2016

Time:                  	3:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:                  Room 5504
                         (lifts 25/26)

Committee Members:	Dr. Lei Chen (Supervisor)
  			Dr. Wei Wang (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Qiong Luo
  			Dr. Ke Yi


**** ALL are Welcome ****