Using Location-Based Social Networks for Time-Constrained Information Dissemination

Location-based social networks have evolved into powerful tools in recent years. The ability to embed location information in Social Networks such as Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter creates exciting opportunities for users to disseminate and exchange geolocation information in a variety of domains. The problem of exploiting the social ties between the users for maximizing information reach has become a topic of great interest, and many challenges have to be met. In this work we study the problem of efficient information dissemination in location-based social networks under time constraints. The objective is to identify a subset of individuals to propagate the information and make intelligent route selection that can result in maximizing the reach within a time window. Our detailed experimental results illustrate the feasibility and performance of our approach.