Social networks often demonstrate hierarchical community structure with communities embedded in other ones. Most existing hierarchical community detection methods need one or more tunable parameters to control the resolution levels, and the obtained dendrograms, a tree describing the hierarchical community structure, are extremely complex to understand and analyze. In the paper, we propose a parameter-free hierarchical community detection method based on micro-community and minimum spanning tree. The proposed method first identifies micro-communities based on link strength between adjacent vertices, and then, it constructs minimum spanning tree by successively linking these micro-communities one by one. The hierarchical community structure of social networks can be intuitively revealed from the merging order of these micro-communities. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world networks show that our proposed method exhibits good accuracy and efficiency performance and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. In addition, our proposed method does not require any pre-defined parameters, and the output dendrogram is simple and meaningful for understanding and analyzing the hierarchical community structure of social networks.

Socially aware networking is an emerging research field that aims to improve the current networking technologies and realize novel network services by applying social network analysis (SNA) techniques. Conducting socially aware networking studies requires knowledge of both SNA and communication networking, but it is not easy for communication networking researchers who are unfamiliar with SNA to obtain comprehensive knowledge of SNA due to its interdisciplinary nature. This paper therefore aims to fill the knowledge gap for networking researchers who are interested in socially aware networking but are not familiar with SNA. This paper surveys three types of important SNA techniques for socially aware networking: identification of influential nodes, link prediction, and community detection. Then, this paper introduces how SNA techniques are used in socially aware networking and discusses research trends in socially aware networking.

In recent years, with the rapid development of the Internet and cloud computing, an enormous amount of information is exchanged on various social networking services. In order to handle and maintain such a mountain of information properly by limited resources in the network, it is very important to comprehend the dynamics for propagation of information or activity on the social network. One of many indices used by social network analysis which investigates the network structure is “node centrality”. A common characteristic of conventional node centralities is that it depends on the topological structure of network and the value of node centrality does not change unless the topology changes. The network dynamics is generated by interaction between users whose strength is asymmetric in general. Network structure reflecting the asymmetric interaction between users is modeled by a directed graph, and it is described by an asymmetric matrix in matrix-based network model. In this paper, we showed an oscillation model for describing dynamics on networks generated from a certain kind of asymmetric interaction between nodes by using a symmetric matrix. Moreover, we propose a new extended index of well-known two node centralities based on the oscillation model. In addition, we show that the proposed index can describe various aspect of node centrality that considers not only the topological structure of the network, but also asymmetry of links, the distribution of source node of activity, and temporal evolution of activity propagation by properly assigning the weight of each link. The proposed model is regarded as the fundamental framework for different node centralities.

Software peer review is regarded as one of the most important approaches to preserving software quality. Due to the distributed collaborations in Open Source Software (OSS) development, the review techniques and processes conducted in OSS environment differ from the traditional review method that based on formal face-to-face meetings. Unlike other related works, this study investigates peer review processes of OSS projects from the social perspective: communication and interaction in peer review by using social network analysis (SNA). Moreover, the relationship between peer review contributors and their activities is studied. We propose an approach to evaluating contributors' activeness and social relationship using SNA named Peer Review Social Network (PeRSoN). We evaluate our approach by empirical case study, 326,286 review comments and 1,745 contributors from three representative industrial OSS projects have been extracted and analyzed. The results indicate that the social network structure influences the realistic activeness of contributors significantly. Based on the results, we suggest our approach can support project leaders in assigning review tasks, appointing reviewers and other activities to improve current software processes.

Link prediction is the task of inferring the existence or absence of certain relationships among data objects such as identity, interaction, and collaboration. Link prediction is found in various applications in the fields of information integration, recommender systems, bioinformatics, and social network analysis. The increasing interest in dynamically changing networks has led to growing interest in a more general link prediction problem called temporal link prediction in the data mining and machine learning communities. However, only links among nodes at the same time point are considered in temporal link prediction. We propose a new link prediction problem called cross-temporal link prediction in which the links among nodes at different time points are inferred. A typical example of cross-temporal link prediction is cross-temporal entity resolution to determine the identity of real entities represented by data objects observed in different time periods. In dynamic environments, the features of data change over time, making it difficult to identify cross-temporal links by directly comparing observed data. Other examples of cross-temporal links are asynchronous communications in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, where a message is posted in reply to a previous message. We adopt a dimension reduction approach to cross-temporal link prediction; that is, data objects in different time frames are mapped into a common low-dimensional latent feature space, and the links are identified on the basis of the distance between the data objects. The proposed method uses different low-dimensional feature projections in different time frames, enabling it to adapt to changes in the latent features over time. Using multi-task learning, it jointly learns a set of feature projection matrices from the training data, given the assumption of temporal smoothness of the projections. The optimal solutions are obtained by solving a single generalized eigenvalue problem. Experiments using a real-world set of bibliographic data for cross-temporal entity resolution and a real-world set of emails for unobserved asynchronous communication inference showed that introducing time-dependent feature projections improved the accuracy of link prediction.

Question and Answering (Q&A) sites are recently gaining popularity on the Web. People using such sites are like a community-anyone can ask, anyone can answer, and everyone can share, since all of the questions and answers are public and searchable immediately. This mechanism can reduce the time and effort to find the most relevant answer. Unfortunately, the users suffer from answer quality problem due to several reasons including limited knowledge about the question domain, bad intentions (e.g. spam, making fun of others), limited time to prepare good answers, etc. In order to identify the credible users to help people find relevant answer, in this paper, we propose a ranking algorithm, InfluenceRank, which is basis of analyzing relationship in terms of users' activities and their mutual trusts. Our experimental studies show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the baseline algorithms.