Social Computing: User Networks and Information Dissemination

Social networks reflect the complex society constituted between people and can be simply described as a collection composed of individuals and organizations as subjects and the connections between these subjects. The connections in social networks can be the embodiment of real social relationships in real society, such as friendships, colleague relationships, family relationships, etc., or virtual relationships generated by interactions in the network, such as fan relationships, following relationships, sharing relationships, fun relationships, etc. Social network is a typical self-media network, where users publish, share and communicate information and are both producers and consumers of information.In order to analyze social networks effectively, a common approach is to extract important features from the network, that is, to convert a large network into a smaller one, while the latter is an effective summary of the former and maintains the important features of the original network. In social networks, this approach can be implemented in two ways, one is to identify groups of users and represent the relationships between them, which is often referred to as community discovery.