Wu, Weili2020-08-282020-08-282020-052020-05May 2020https://hdl.handle.net/10735.1/8836Online social networks have been developing and prosperous during the last two decades, my dissertation focus on the study of social influence. Several practical problems about social influence are formulated as optimization problems. First, users of online social networks such as Twitter, Instagram have a nature of expanding social relationships. Thus, one important social network service is to provide potential friends to a user that he or she might be interested in, which is called friend recommendation. Different from friend recommendation, which is a passive way for an user to connect with a potential friend, in my work, I tackle a different problem named active friending as an optimization problem about how to friend a person in social networks taking advantage of social influence to increase the acceptance probability by maximizing mutual friends influence. Second, the influence maximization problem has been studied extensively with the development of online social networks. Most of the existing works focus on the maximization of influence spread under the assumption that the number of influenced users determines the success of product promotion. However, the profit of some products such as online game depends on the interactions among users besides the number of users. We take both the number of active users and the user-to-user interactions into account and propose the interaction-aware influence maximization problem. Furthermore, due to the uncertainty in edge probability estimates in social networks, we propose the robust profit maximization problem to have the best solution in the worst case of probability settings.application/pdfen©2020 Shuyang Gu. All rights reserved.Social networksInfluence (Psychology)Online social networksDissertation2020-08-28