Composing activity groups in social networks

One important function of current social networking services is allowing users to initialize different kinds of activity groups (e.g. study group, cocktail party, and group buying) and invite friends to attend in either manual or collaborative manners. However, such process of group formation is tedious, and could either include inappropriate group members or miss relevant ones. This work proposes to automatically compose the activity groups in a social network according to user-specified activity information. Given the activity host, a set of labels representing the activity's subjects, the desired group size, and a set of must-inclusive persons, we aim to find a set of individuals as the activity group, in which members are required to not only be familiar with the host but also have great communications with each other. We devise an approximation algorithm to greedily solve the group composing problem. Experiments on a real social network show the promising effectiveness of the proposed approach as well as the satisfactory human subjective study.