Dynamic Group Formation with Suitability Constraints in large Social Networks

For people seeking to form a team for a specific purpose, like a side project or study group, challenges quickly arise once they have exhausted their social circle in the search for teammates. In the wake of the current pandemic, meeting new people that are right for a specific team is even more difficult than before due to the lack of in-person events. On social media platforms, users often have large networks of friends but have very few close personal relationships in them. So, posting on those to look for people that are compatible, share the same goal and are interested in the niche group, is being hopeful at best. We present a scalable framework for establishing small online groups that balances two objectives, making the best group recommendations to users and guiding group hosts to the best users for their group. We illustrate this framework using three use cases and evaluate a server-less implementation using a large social media dataset to simulate a production environment.