Finding Effective Geo-Social Group for Impromptu Activity with Multiple Demands

Abstract

Geo-social group search aims to find a group of people proximate to a location while socially related. One of the driven applications for geo-social group search is organizing an impromptu activity. This is because the social cohesiveness of a found geo-social group ensures a good communication atmosphere and the spatial closeness of the geo-social group reduces the preparation time for the activity. Most existing works treat geo-social group search as a problem that finds a group satisfying a single social constraint while optimizing the spatial proximity. However, when an impromptu activity has additional demands on attendees, e.g., the activity requires that the attendees have certain set of skills, the existing works cannot find an effective geo-social group efficiently. In this paper, we study how to find a group that is most proximate to a query location while satisfying multiple constraints. Specifically, the multiple constraints on which we focus include social constraint, size constraint and keyword constraint. We propose a novel search framework which first effectively narrows down the search space with theoretical guarantees and then efficiently finds the optimum result. Although our model considers multiple constraints, novel techniques devised in this paper ensure that search cost is equivalent to parameterized constant times of one time social constraint checking on a vastly restricted search space. We conduct extensive experiments on both real and semi-synthetic datasets for demonstrating the efficiency of the proposed search algorithm. To evaluate the effectiveness, we conduct two case studies on real datasets, demonstrating the superiority of our proposed model.