Computational Social Networks: Tools, Perspectives, and Challenges

Computational social science is a new emerging field that has overlapping regions from mathematics, psychology, computer sciences, sociology, and management. Social computing is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It supports any sort of social behavior in or through computational systems. It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and technology. Thus, blogs, email, instant messaging, social network services, wikis, social bookmarking, and other instances of what is often called social software illustrate ideas from social computing. Social network analysis is the study of relationships among social entities. It is becoming an important tool for investigators. However all the necessary information is often distributed over a number of websites. Interest in this field is blossoming as traditional practitioners in the social and behavioral sciences are being joined by researchers from statistics, graph theory, machine learning, and data mining. In this chapter, we illustrate the concept of social networks from a computational point of view, with a focus on practical services, tools, and applications and open avenues for further research. Challenges to be addressed and future directions of research are presented and an extensive bibliography is also included.