Guest Editorial Introduction to the Special Section on Artificial Intelligence For Social Networks

The articles in this special section focus on artificial intelligence for social networks. Such networks Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have become very popular in recent years and are extensively used by users to connect and communicate with their friends. Due to the increasing number of social network users and the various use cases that the applications are created for, huge volume of data are being generated, for example, Facebook has over 1.23 billion monthly active users and Twitter generates 500 million tweets per day and around 200 billion tweets per year. The huge amount of available data on social platforms can help improve people’s life quality and benefit various interest groups like public agencies, companies, advertisers, application developers, and data-mining researchers. Therefore, researchers in academia and industry have been advancing the theory, operation, and applications of social networks. Luckily for swamped social media researchers, new technology enables brands to extract useful knowledge using artificial intelligence. The rapid developments in AI technology encounter great opportunities as well as challenges for social networks. AI approaches are considered as a good candidate, as they have already been proven to be successful in other information-intensive and knowledge-critical domains.