Social Event Scheduling

• Published in: 2018 IEEE 34th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) pp. 1272 - 1275
• Main Authors: Bikakis, Nikos, Kalogeraki, Vana, Gunopulos, Dimitrios
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-04-2018
• Subjects: Assignment Problems; Attendance Maximization; Companies; Conferences; Event based Social Networks; Event Organizers; Event Participants; Schedules; Scheduling; Social Event Arrangement; Social Event Mining; Social Event Planning; Social network services
• ISSN: 2375-026X
• DOI: 10.1109/ICDE.2018.00128

A major challenge for social event organizers (e.g., event planning and marketing companies, venues) is attracting the maximum number of participants, since it has great impact on the success of the event, and, consequently, the expected gains (e.g., revenue, artist/brand publicity). In this paper, we introduce the Social Event Scheduling (SES) problem, which schedules a set of social events considering user preferences and behavior, events' spatiotemporal conflicts, and competing events, in order to maximize the overall number of attendees. We show that SES is strongly NP-hard, even in highly restricted instances. To cope with the hardness of the SES problem we design a greedy approximation algorithm. Finally, we evaluate our method experimentally using a dataset from the Meetup event-based social network.