NSF Career: Theories and Algorithms for Identifying Influential Entities in

Online Social Networks

Proposal Summary
Overview. A type of data network is online social network (OSN). With huge number of users and intensive interactions between them, OSNs such as FaceBook and Twitter have become a significant medium
for the widespread distribution of information. On the one hand, OSN users often reveal their comments
and opinions about products or applications to their friends within their social networks. On the other hand,
customers tend to accept recommendations from friends that they trust, rather than from the automated recommendation systems in e-commerce websites. These observations motivate intense research on popularity
boosting through OSNs in viral marketing areas.
Fundamental Research Problem. One of the fundamental problems is, influence maximization, which
is, if we could convince a small group of users to adopt a new product or innovation, and the goal is to
trigger the maximizing of further adoptions, which set of users should we target? Essentially it comes down
to the problem of finding influential entities and emerging structures in OSNs. Diffusion models provide
good opportunities to address this problem, because they connect a huge number of people and collect a
huge amount of information about the social network structures and communication dynamics.
Applications. Solutions to this problem have a wide range of applications in practical fields, such as
political elections where candidates seek to propagate efficiently their popularity or political ideas among
voters, and emergency situations during which the news of a sudden earth quake needs to be spread out
quickly to every residents in communities within a limited time. In addition to those, the proposed research
is also applicable in cyber defense where malicious information which has already propagated dynamically
needs to be blocked through OSNs.
Goal of Project. The goal of this research is to develop a comprehensive theoretical and practical solution to identify influential entities in online social networks. In this project, we focus on two key problems
in social network analysis influence maximization and community detection. Solutions to community
detection will contribute to solving influence maximization. Currently there exist many heuristics in the
literature to solve these two problems. Usually, heuristics are algorithms without theoretical analysis of
performance. Therefore, research issues and challenges exist in theoretically analyzing algorithms and designing new algorithms with guaranteed performance. This proposal aims to design efficient algorithms for
solving the problems of influence maximization and community detection in various influence models stem
from viral marketing in the real world.
Intellectual merit. This research will integrate concepts and methods in approximation algorithms,
network models, data mining and statistics to construct analytical models and address some of the challenges in identifying Influential entities in OSNs. We will propose new diffusion models by incorporating
practical factors such as budget control, marketings profit, users interests and engagement, the negative or
positive impacts between users etc. Moreover, we will design approximation algorithms with guaranteed
performance for influence maximization and community detection in those diffusion models. Especially, we
intend to develop new techniques in analyzing those approximation algorithms, including analysis of greedy
approximations for non-submodular function maximization and semidefinite programming approximations
for nonlinear combinatorial optimization.
Broader impact. Advances in the proposed research will provide corporations and individuals with
effective tools to boost popularity based on social influence diffusion in online social networks. Results from
this research will be published in appropriate forums, including scientific journals and edited book chapters,
and will be presented broadly in professional conferences and workshops such as ICDM and INFOCOM,
and in the form of survey papers and lecture notes for graduate students and broader readers. Software
developed in this project will be distributed to the research community. The PI will recruit underrepresented
and female students to conduct the top-tier computing research through this project.

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