USN: An Optimization Framework for User-centric Social Networks

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.