USN: An optimization framework for user-centric social networks

Abstract

Social network portals, such as Facebook and Twitter, often discover and deliver relevant social data to a user's query, considering only system-oriented conflicting objectives (e.g., time, energy, recall) and frequently ignoring the satisfaction of the individual "needs" of the query user w.r.t. its perceptual preference characteristics (e.g., data comprehensibility, working memory). In this paper, we introduce the User-centric Social Network (USN), a novel framework that deals with the conflicting system-oriented objectives of the social network in the context of Multi-Objective Optimization and utilizes user-oriented objectives in the query dissemination/acquisition process to facilitate decision making. We present the initial design of the USN framework and its major components as well as a preliminary evaluation of our framework. Our trace-driven experimentation with real datasets show that USN enhances the usability and satisfaction of the user while at the same time provides optimal system-choices for the performance of the network. © 2012 IEEE.