On the Fairness of Time-Critical Influence Maximization in Social Networks (Extended Abstract)

Influence maximization has found applications in a wide range of real-world problems, for instance, viral marketing of products in an online social network, and propagation of valuable information such as job vacancy advertisements. While existing algorithmic techniques usually aim at maximizing the total number of people influenced, the population often comprises several socially salient groups, e.g., based on gender or race. As a result, these techniques could lead to disparity across different groups in receiving important information. Furthermore, in many applications, the spread of influence is time-critical, i.e., it is only beneficial to be influenced before a deadline. As we show in this paper, such time-criticality of information could further exacerbate the disparity of influence across groups. This dis-parity could have far-reaching consequences, impacting people's prosperity and putting minority groups at a big disadvantage. In this work, we propose a notion of group fairness in time-critical influence maximization. We introduce surrogate objective functions to solve the influence maximization problem under fair-ness considerations. By exploiting the submodularity structure of our objectives, we provide computationally efficient algorithms with guarantees that are effective in enforcing fairness during the propagation process. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our proposal.